Boortz: GOVERNMENT SCHOOL TEACHER GETS SCHOOLED

Unions piss me off.

I liked the part in the video where she says, "teachers do it because they love it."

Then why are you bitching, bitch? She really couldn't have come off any worse, she even wagged her entitlement finger at the guy!

The best quote came right at the end: "Unlike the United States of America, New Jersey cannot print money."

I wonder how this guy is on guns? If he's pro-gun, he can come to TN and be our governor.

That's what I'm waiting to find out.

Going by what I've heard from him so far, I like him a lot.

Sounds like she was righteously pwned, as the kids used to say. Still and all, Neal's column has its flaws.

Average and median aren't the same.

And salary presumably is based on both education and experience. No clue if she's earning more than the average based on that.

Any idea why he spelled "wonderful" "wunnerful"? A Lawrence Welk tribute?

Anywho, just because she was wrong and apparently -- to be generous -- stretching the truth about how little she gets paid doesn't mean that she's not good at her job.

You could talk all of the "good" public school teachers and MAYBE fill 1 class room. A lot of them are an arrogant,union-loving breed, who are in it for the "what's in it for me," aspects of being a gubmint employee, rather than really trying to help educate America's youth. And 9 times outta 10, the ones that are trying to educate, are spouting liberal talking points and teaching children that America is an evil place that hasn't paid for its past sins and deny the truths of how we have made this planet more prosperous than at any time in human history.

Governor Christie, will you be my president?

Guess I'll say it again:

Unions exist to command greater salary/benefits for their members than those members would ever be able to get in a free market.

When you also add the fact that these are public employees--and thus pandered to by every politician wanting to garner their support--these people are compensated far beyond what they would get for similar work in the private sector.

Also, note that salary expectations are based on credentialism, not accomplishment. "I have a master's degree therefore I'm entitled to..." not "My students average test scores are in the top 10% therefore I'm worth..."

$86,000 and working only 9 months a year? Yeah, that's sheer exploitation...

Unions are a double-edged sword.

But...it's not just about money and benefits with some jobs.

There are times that the Union has been instrumental in intervening in attempts by the company to force people to work in extremely unsafe working conditions or circumventing certain laws and standards.

As much as I don't like the Union, I would be even more nervous about Zel if his particular workplace didn't have one.

I guess I feel some jobs have more need of unionizing than others.

Don't know about you, but I pay taxes to fund government agencies called Cal-OSHA (at the state level) and OSHA (at the federal level) that are supposed to be responsible for workplace safety.

If unions were only about safety, I'd have little beef with them. But teachers and other public employees are not faced with many safety hazards. They're not 19th century coalminers.

In some cases, that's pretty objectively true that unions inflate wages beyond what the employees might have gotten otherwise.

In some cases, it's hard to tell because there's not really an equivalent free market, particularly when the government is the sole or primary employer.

I find it hard to believe we could predict where the free market would pay police, for instance. (Security guards and the like are not a very good point of comparison because of the differential in responsibility and skill between that and being a cop). But generally, I'd suspect most police officers are currently underpaid despite being in a union.

Same with soldiers. There's somewhat of an equivalent in private military contractors, who I believe earn more than

Government lawyers start off making $70k or less. The average or median salary for first year lawyers in private practice was like $160k. And I think it's safe to say the differential isn't simply "Well, those private lawyers are better than the government lawyers." Certainly not almost $100k better.

Moreover, people often do make the switch from government lawyer to private sector lawyer because they can see a huge salary jump. There are various factors to this (the private firms wanting to exploit government connections, presumably, as an example). But clearly, it involves the individual lawyers getting less than what they could command on the open market despite the union.

There is also the flipside in terms of private-employer unions. Some employers pay their non-union employees more than they otherwise would in order to disincentivize them from joining a union.

There's no way to know for sure, but I suspect that for all the people who are getting more than they deserve because they are union, there's at least some people who are getting less than they would (either because the employee doesn't think to argue or can't convince the employer to pay him above scale given the existence of a scale, for example.)

Credentials serve to upgrade salaries in non-union contexts, as far as I know. The only difference is that it's perhaps not a set amount.

And in most fields and contexts, people seem to get a base pay regardless of what level of job you do, and then maybe a bonus based on accomplishment.

That part I'll agree with.

I think my statement is doubly true with public employees for two reasons: first, the organization employing them does not operate under the constraint that it has to be profitable (or even productive) and therefore faces little pressure to keep salaries down (indeed, the management is in the same union as the employee so has NO motivation to do so); second, there are no competitive forces on the job--no teacher/bureaucrat is ever going to get fired because some other school/agency performs better because they are ALL in employ of the state.

Depends. Being a police officer in, say, the city I live is not really all that dangerous; can't recall the last time an officer was killed in the line of duty. Even in a fairly big city like San Jose or Oakland, a cop being killed is a BIG deal in our local news. So, discounting the safety aspect, and it's really no different than any other job.

I would say police aren't underpaid if there are more qualified applicants than there are positions to fill. And that seems to be the case.

See, "under-" or "over-" paid isn't a function of the job difficulty, safety, etc. It's a function of how many people are willing to do it for the positions available. If you need 50,000 soldiers and you offer salary X and get 100,000 qualified applicants, then X is probably too much. If you offer Y and get 25,000 qualified applicants, then Y is too low.

Was Michael Jordan really 160 times as good as the lowest paid player in the NBA? According to the fans--customers--yes, he really was. They'd pay the costs of supporting his salary to watch him play.

I have no knowledge of how the legal industry works, but my guess would be that government lawyers and private practice lawyers (1) practice different areas of law, (2) work under very different conditions, and (3) have very different qualifications for employment. If the going rate for a private practice lawyer is $160K, so be it. If the government lawyer feel underpaid at $70K, she can either continue in the job or seek another. If she is truly underpaid, her job can't be re-filled at $70K and the government will have to raise the pay in order to attract qualified applicants.

Be careful: the two jobs are not necessarily equivalent for the reasons I mentioned. Yes, a $70K government lawyer may be able to jump to a $160K private practice gig, but that doesn't mean that every government lawyer can. And it certainly doesn't mean the jobs are identical.

It's still a distortion of the free market. The job should pay what it's worth...that is, the amount for which another qualified applicant will accept it.

Either way, it's a distortion. It's as wrong to pay the more productive people the "union rate" when they've earned more as it is to pay the "union rate" to those who've earned less.

They do and, often, its worth it. However, it must always be borne in mind that one does not receive a higher salary for attaining a higher degree, but in performing the more responsible, challenging work that goes with it.

But I like our governor. I admit I don't know anything about his policies, but everywhere I go in Tennessee I hear mostly praise for the guy. There's no big shenanigans, no outrageous scandals. Some issues with taxes but that's about all I've heard.

No matter what the government agency does, the budget has a ceiling, and there is only so much that can be spent on salaries. Plus there generally aren't bonuses.

As an aside, I'm fairly sure management (at least the level that controls salaries) in most government agencies is non-union. Even if I were wrong, they have essentially the same motive to keep salaries down as any other manager -- they only have so much to spend.

Moreover a private non-unionized company can decide to recruit employees by paying them above market rate or more than they'd ordinarily get. A manager at a government agency can't do really do that with their unionized employees even if they might otherwise want to.

The state, in this case, is not monolithic. Even if one were to work as a public school teacher, say, there are various other public school districts within driving distance, let alone elsewhere inside or outside the state that might pay more.

And for some of these, there are private schools (or other employers) that would provide competition.

Even assuming the lack of competitive forces for argument's sake, that too works both ways. The lack of competition could mean that teachers aren't going to get fired. But it also means that an employer can set salaries where it wants and not have to worry about matching the salary that a competitor might offer.

Being killed in the line of duty isn't the only/best measure of how safe a cop's job is. There's also the actuality of being injured while on duty. And aside from that there's the potential of both these things happening. None of which is IMO compensated fairly or fully in most cases.

Moreover coverage of these things does not fully represent how dangerous a cop's worklife is. Coverage of police deaths is obviously done on a one-to-one basis of incidents, but the other injuries are pretty much never covered by the news media except in extremely unusual or extreme circumstances.

Even discounting the safety aspect for argument's sake, it still is fairly different from most other jobs. Few jobs require the amount of training and have invested the amount of responsibility that being a cop does.

I would say that's a bad measure of whether an industry is underpaid or not.

In many, if not most industries, one could probably find a surplus of qualified people than there are positions even if one paid subsistence wages if that was the prevailing wage.

By this measure, it's almost a given that no one is underpaid (or for that matter, overpaid, by the use of a corresponding measure. If a worker can find a willing person to pay whatever salary, then he isn't overpaid.)

How many people are willing to do it per position available is in part a function of the job difficulty and so forth. It's also a function of perks and various intangibles. More people are willing to be soldiers, cops, teachers, etc. because they feel rewarded to do public service in a way that goes beyond just salary. One of those rewards is the job security of working a union job. Take that away, and you very well might have to offer a higher salary to entice them to stay.

The fans didn't directly pay MJ's salary. The Bulls did. And he was worth it to the Bulls because in addition to the increase in customers that he brought about, he increased revenue and value of the franchise a great deal. Not sure what that has to do with much of anything here though.

Not really. Government lawyers can be found in just about any kind of law.

Sure, but that doesn't have much to do with their qualifications or skills.

And when we're comparing first-year lawyers making that above-quoted $160k, they almost objectively have to be considered to have fewer skills than a seasoned government attorney with years of experience and yet get paid substantially less.

The point I'm making here is this contradicts the notion that the union helps this kind of government employee get more than they would be worth in the free market.

Yes and no.

Again, I disagree with that definition of telling whether someone is underpaid.

No one said the jobs are identical.

What I'm saying is this phenomenon -- and it's not limited to the unusually skilled government lawyer. It happens fairly frequently -- shows that their union doesn't result in them getting paid more than they are worth on the free market.

Going from the public sector to the private and doubling one's salary suggests that they were not getting paid what they were worth in public practice.

One minor quibble: In a public school setting, at least, management is typically not part of the same union.

In the district where I live, the superintendent, chief financial officer and human resources director are all freely contracted individual employees. The principals have a union, but it's separate from the teachers union and really doesn't do much.

On the question of whether people are underpaid or overpaid based on private-sector equivalents, my experience with school systems suggests a breakdown like this:

Upper-level management: Often underpaid. The superintendents in my area make between $90,000 and $165,000 (for a full year's work), which is a nice salary, but the hours are brutal, they've all had extensive training and education, and the skills they need to have are not dissimilar to the skills needed to be a corporate CEO, who would probably make a lot more. There are also some very smart, skilled chief financial officers making much less than an MBA in a similar position with a private company could probably command.

Teachers: Hard to tell, because there isn't much of a private-sector equivalent. (There are private schools, of course, but those are also nonprofit sector, with the crappy wages that implies.)

Support staff: Often overpaid. Our local district, until it forced concessions under threat of privatization, had custodians who were making upward of $16 an hour and were eligible for more than 10 weeks of paid time off per year, plus pension eligibility. Try finding a private-sector job doing the same thing that will pay that kind of wage.

I don't disagree with this statement in practice, especially in the case of unions involving government employees, but I do disagree with it as a general, theoretical principle. There is no fundamental contradiction between the concept of unions and the concept of the free market. If the market were truly free, then unions would simply be one aspect of that market, since the whole idea of a free market is that each party is free to use whatever bargaining points they can muster to get them the deal they find most favorable. The problem is not with unions, but with the privileged position unions enjoy in many areas related to negotiations, because of government regulations. It is those regulations that are in contradiction with the whole concept of the free market, not the mere existence unions themselves.

I remember when there was talk that Bredesen was among those being considered for VP - and i thought to myself at the time "I hope he doesn't consort with his inferiors"

I dont know enough to be a Bredesen fan but what I've seen from next door is enough I'd put him on the short list of Dems I generally think well of.

as for Christie - NJ is entitled to reap the benefits of electing him but after that, sign me up for the "Draft Christie for President" bandwagon

Damn. I need to switch careers. I miss having my summers off.

The only way I would be a teacher is if corporate punishment were allowed, and adults started to realize that the goal of education is to raise well adjusted adults, not to control kids into seeming like they're well adjusted in comparison to each other.

Does that involve taking away the students' keys to the executive washroom?

My experience with unions (pretty much watching what happened to my dad) is not so good. In the Chicago area (go figure!) you had to be in the construction union or you might have "an accident."

And the higher wages were offset by constantly being on strike, and NOT WORKING while negotiations ensued.

The classic was when my dad quit the union and moved away, they only finally sent him a check for half what they owed him for some settlement....the other half was taken for "book-keeping fees."

Once when I was working construction in Phoenix some dude from another company came around during our break and gave us union pamphlets. My boss asked him how he had the time to do this.....he said he was currently layed off.

That, I think, is the biggest problem with unionism and union contracts.

Everyone's value is either raised or lowered to the mutually agreed-upon average value of the members of the collective. If you're a brilliant teacher with 10 years of experience and a master's degree who puts in countless hours working to change students' lives for the better, you're paid exactly the same as the lazy teacher with 10 years of experience and a master's degree who just puts in her 7.5 hours and goes home.

And after you have enough seniority to be safe from layoff, unless you're looking to advance into a different position, there's no financial incentive to put forth anything other than the bare minimum amount of effort necessary to avoid getting fired.

Well, there's some chance that the red-hot teacher will get paid above scale, right? At least, the last time when I was at a union job, some people were paid above scale. That was a private employer though. Maybe public employees only stick to scale for whatever reason.

Public school teachers can get paid more if they serve as yearbook advisers, direct the school play, coach softball, or whatever. But there's typically no extra pay associated with going above and beyond to help your students. You can be a clock-punching drudge or the most talented, caring, inspiring teacher on the face of the planet, and make the same amount either way. That amount will be determined by what step of the wage scale you're on -- and that, in turn, is determined solely by your education level and years of experience.

That's in Michigan, anyway. There could be other places where merit pay is a factor.

that teacher got owned so fucking hard. and she deserved it too.

If you read the article, she says she WOULD be paied 86 000 if she was paid only 3 dollars a head for the children she teaches. I'm a Canadian teacher (we get paid more than American teachers at both the elementary and secondary level). American teachers are woefully underpaid.

That said, MOST teachers teach because they love it. Even at my salary, with my education in the private sector, I'd probably make more. In Canada, the benefit issue is not as big an issue as in the US, but teachers do have EXCELLENT extended health care.

My salary is per year, so I get, depending on my education and senoirity, a set salary, divided into 10 months (where do you get 9 months from? We have July/August off) with the remainder of our salary given at the end of June to carry us though the summer months. Its not enough, as a single parent family, for me to live off, so I teach summer school too (for an hourly wage).

So no, I'm not bitching. I love my job. But I DO understand that my American counterparts do not make as much as I do for the same work.

Ironic, this...

Why? I read it.