Paycheck Showdown

A topic near and dear to my heart, my Paycheck.

I was flipping through the (very limited) TV channels available on “hotel cable” and came across an interesting show on TLC about a kid who was getting “paycheck negotiation” coaching in exchange for recording his entire experience for television.

The summary of the episode is this boy moved out to New York to be a line-cook for a friend’s restaurant.  He’s passionate about cooking, but when he and his friend/boss first negotiated he was told he was going to be making something in the $32k per year range after he got a little experience under his belt.  Nine months later, he’s making $10 an hour (less than $21k per year base salary) and he’s improved his cooking skills dramatically.  Unfortunately, his negotiation skills haven’t increased in proportion to his cooking skills.

So the hosts of the TV series set off to give the subject of the episode the experiences he needs to both see that he could make more money, and that he does have options other than sitting down and sucking up how he’s being treated.

He goes in to the negotiation asking for $15 an hour (which he is certainly not going to get, especially with the national average for him being $13 an hour) and ends up getting $13, or $27k per year.   That’s a $500 paycheck increase per week (assuming bi-weekly paychecks), and that doesn’t count the overtime already works.

The show ends with a 1 month later view of how well he’s doing and a status report from his boss.  The subject had taken to the new responsibilities (he had to get promoted to get the $13 per hour).