Negotiation

Today I got my official offer for my new half-time job: $15/hour (no benefits) for four months. Since they had previously paid me me $25/hour (no benefits), this was a surprise and a disappointment. To put this in more context, my first half-time job of this kind paid $17.50/hour, which I thought was low, but I took it because it was more than I was going to get doing no work, and no work is what I was in the mood for at the time. (Though that job sounded fun enough.) Then I continued not feeling too bad about it because they were the catalyst for my other jobs. My other half-time job paid $20.19/hour (+ benefits).

So $15 feels like a low-ball offer. And because I don't really need work (though I want it), I decided that it's too low.

So this means I had to negotiate. Yuck, yuck, yuck! But everyone expects it, part of why women's salaries are lower than men's is that they are less likely to negotiate, yadda, yadda, yadda.

This also means I had to decide what's not too low. Hard! I originally had decided to start negotiations by asking for $25/hour (+ benefits) for these consulting jobs. But $15/hour (no benefits) is so much less. I know I don't want to take anything below $17.50 for this kind of work. But I'm not sure I even want to take just $17.50, either.

My first idea was to say that I am not interested at that rate. Imply it's laughably low. Make them come back with another number. But I don't like that. It seems rude. I actually don't want to laugh at them and I do want to help them out. And I would be sad if they never made a counter-offer. And very sad if they made another crappy counter-offer.

I prefer the rules of restaurant negotiation in groups--if you're going to veto someone else's suggestion, you have to make a counter-suggestion; you can't just say no, no, no. I can be assertive without being rude, right?

But I didn't want to come back with a reasonable increase (even $17.50 is 16.67% higher) and have them cut that increase in half with a counter-offer, because I wouldn't want to accept that either. I wanted an unreasonable increase.

Feeling in a quandary, I did some additional research. Here are some seemingly related facts:

* The median salary is $19.71/hour (+ benefits) at the office in question
* My prospective boss makes $29.33/hour (+ benefits)
* The office in question is richer than most of the university including the office where I originally learned the skills I am being hired for.
* My prospective boss did recently say that the magical "Dean's discretionary fund" where the money comes from for this sort of hire sometimes runs out of money. So maybe that really is all they can afford.

I calculated that if that's all the money they have available, then if they spend it all on 3 months of work, that would come out to $20/hour, a much more reasonable amount. So I countered with $20/hour and, if that's not affordable for them, $20/hour for 3 months.

Do you want to guess how the ensuing negotiations went? See the comments for the answer.