Are Public Unions Necessary?

[a_new_machine]

Wisconsin is raising hell in its attempts to balance a budget that's heavily weighed down by union-bargained benefits for public employees. Of course, they're taking the "nuke it from orbit" approach and removing collective bargaining rights from public employees

Comments

[kitlizzy]

I work at a large university, and in my experiences with the union re: admin personnel, etc is that the union is needed not so much for the pay, as it to prevent bad supervisors/management/etc from abusing and/or firing staff for no good reason.

The unions don't only protect your pay, they protect you from power-tripping assholes. :P

[a_new_machine]

But, of course, they *do* also protect your pay. And your job security from legitimate concerns. In New Hampshire, our budget was seriously unbalanced, and we needed to cut public services. The unions refused to take job cuts, preferring instead to foist the additional costs off on local government (cities/towns). So we had more employees doing less work. Public services were worse-impacted because the Governor was forced to institute furlough days, rather than simply leaving everything open but with fewer staff members. In the meantime, our court system was forced to cut so deep they had to suspend trials for a month, and they're not even open normal business hours anymore. As a result, the courts are facing constitutional challenges for failure to provide speedy trials.

[kitlizzy]

That's the kind of thing that makes me be embarrassed to be part of a union, honestly. Our U just had a furlough as well and the union was outraged about it - but I'd rather lose those days of my pay than have other people lose their jobs. (Neverminding the union's constant goings-on about the need to "chop from the top" by cutting the salaries of the people making more than $200K. You get what you pay for when you hire Deans, I'm just saying.)

I did not have a choice about being a union or not - if I want this job, I *have* to pay the dues. I would agree with the concept of letting people decide whether or not they want to be union or not except then you start running into intimidation issues and a weakening of the union's leverage to get things done, and then things are even more of a mess.

Perhaps if we made adequately funding education and public services a priority, we wouldn't need the unions around to get up on their soapboxes and yell about the problems we have.

[a_new_machine]

I did not have a choice about being a union or not - if I want this job, I *have* to pay the dues.

Another issue I have with unions in general is that compulsory element. If I'm OK with going it alone on my benefits package, why should I join the union? Why should the other employees get to dictate what I get paid? Why can't I keep my job if I'm willing to take less than they are?

[kitlizzy]

I was pretty pissed about not having a choice when I was hired, myself....but then, if I'd opted out, I would have gotten canned 3 months in because I unknowingly walked into a totally batshit department with a psycho supervisor. Almost everyone else I worked with there has either gotten "reorganized" or found a position somewhere else as swell. So...*shrugs*

I do think it's really important to protect teacher's pay and jobs, because they get so little and the whole education system is so messed up already. Cutting teachers and cutting their pay is not good for anyone.

[kitlizzy]

I should add that re: the idea of "if I want to accept less pay, why can't I" ultimately creates a bad precedent where if you're willing to take $15/hour instead of $17, then no one will pay employees more than $15/hour, and then the next round of layoffs or whatever, and it drops to $12/hour and so on. So you're not really dropping just your pay, you're basically dropping everyone else's too. And if you're only making $10/hour to start, going down to $8/hour could really screw you over.

It's not always going to do this, but if employers know they can hire people for cheaper, they will, and then we start running into the same problems that required instituting a minimum wage.

[gunslnger]

And then we have the opposite problem where we have to outsource all the jobs because the labor rates here aren't lined up with reality.

[rasilio]

"Perhaps if we made adequately funding education and public services a priority, we wouldn't need the unions around to get up on their soapboxes and yell about the problems we have. "

ROTFL what a joke

We spend too much on education. FAR too much.

Also there is no need for a union to protect employees from bad bosses. Simple marketplace economics will handle that for you.

Simply put bad bosses who fire good employees for no good reason pretty quickly find themselves in a position where no good employees will work for them and the performance of their department begins to fall. When that happens Bad Boss is replaced by his Boss.

In fact that Union only makes things worse by protecting that bad boss from himself and handing him a rigid bureaucratic framework in which to play his power games and with the antagonistic relationship unions take towards Management an excuse for why nothing is getting done.

[kitlizzy]

Simply put bad bosses who fire good employees for no good reason pretty quickly find themselves in a position where no good employees will work for them and the performance of their department begins to fall. When that happens Bad Boss is replaced by his Boss.

That's assuming of course that the Boss chain isn't rotten all the way to the top. ;)

I have a lot of freinds and relatives who teach in public schools and it is pretty miserable out there. The pay is very low for the teachers, and there are too many kids per teacher, and there isn't money for supplies or materials - if we're going to make education mandatory, it needs to be more than a 12 year long subsidized daycare service.

And there is also the social and economic benefit to a country of having a educated and skilled population.

[dv8nation]

Are you drunk? Have you seen what a poor public school is like? We're getting stomped by kids in second world countries on test scores so clearly the answer is pumping less into education? That makes no damn sense at all.

[rasilio]

Education Spending at the national level has increased at about twice the rate of inflation for more than 30 years.

Nationwide school enrollment has fallen steadily for the last 20 years as the Boomer and Gen X Generations left school and the Much smaller Gen Y and Millenial generations came along.

More Money + Fewer Students and yet educational performance has at best stagnated and more likely fallen back significantly.

Further it is now cheaper to send a child to private school in most cities than it is to send them to the public schools. A mere 10 years ago that was not the case and yet private schools still continually outperform public schools.

No, the issue is not that we do not spend enough money.

Clearly the issue is we spend TOO MUCH money in all the wrong places.

[nevermind6794]

Health care spending has increased at more than twice the rate of inflation for more than 30 years, and that's a substantial part of "education" spending. Salaries for college graduates have also outpaced inflation, as have most service-based industries (as opposed to manufacturing).

In Houston, private schools are certainly not cheaper. From what I know of other cities, almost no private schools are cheaper.

While the educational system could certainly be better in lots of ways, poverty explains nearly the entire problem:

To justify their campaign, ed reformers repeat, mantra-like, that U.S. students are trailing far behind their peers in other nations, that U.S. public schools are failing. The claims are specious. Two of the three major international tests-the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Trends in International Math and Science Study-break down student scores according to the poverty rate in each school. The tests are given every five years. The most recent results (2006) showed the following:

[policraticus]

It's just like Keynseian stimulus. Enough is never enough. A little more is always the answer. This is why my town of less than 2000 people and no crime has 6 police sgts. making more than $100K a year.

[nevermind6794]

Your town has 6 police sergeants making $100k a year because of Keynesian stimulus? I would have guessed it was due to incompetent local government.