Ten Thousand, All in Advance

I got a couple new posts up at the GTFF Bargaining Blog.

For some reason I'm on delayed reaction and only today am I getting more and more pissed-off about their offers. Yesterday I was more grooving on making sure we didn't fire back with all the things we wanted to, mostly because I don't want to get sucked into arguing their very lame rationals for their offers. I mean, they make them lame so that we spend time destroying them. Has nothing to do with their offers. In fact, they want us destroying their arguments, so that we can "win" another 2% on raises and $25 off of fees and feel like we got away with something.

As I say, I'm grooving on realizing all of this, but also thinking that this is what I should have known in the first place and I would/should have learned this in the first half-hour of a bargaining seminar somewhere.

So, the trick is to balance destroying their arguments, which the members will demand we do, without getting sucked down the path of thinking "victory" has anything to do with knocking down their rhetoric and everything to do with eliminating fees. I guess that's what they pay me for.