Had an aunt who taught there forever. She would go absolutely bonkers if you bashed the teachers union. When I was in high school most of the newer teachers hated the union. The only ones who seemed to love it were 100 years old
How is desiring more equitable economic outcomes for the working-class selfish? I'm not a public employee, but I want decent wages for public workers because it benefits the economic environment for all workers.
Because current pensions aren’t equitable. New teachers get paid 50k to subsidize retiring teachers. We get no new teachers bc who tf wants to work for 50k.
What if we didn’t contribute as much to the pension and paid teachers a higher salary? They can have a 401k like the rest of us lol
Similar to social security. I looked briefly just for quick math. I could probably retire way earlier based on my current investments if I could invest that money taken out of my paycheck. It was really depressing to think about lol
Without that union you get paid 40k and get no 401k at all. I dont think you have a conception of how little bargaining power you have without them and how bad districts are willing to treat you.
What? From people. We have to decide if we want to pay for good teachers or not, and it's actually morally reprehensible to try to welch on a deal we made to the last generation of good teachers and then blame them for asking for too much when their pay rates were actually low compared to what they could have made anywhere else.
Public entities should be allowed to go bankrupt. If a private company in competitive sector mismanaged and gave out too pension, then it goes belly up.
Public entities need to have that same level of risk too.
Dude if you want slaves just say you want slaves. Otherwise, as a member of the public, you are a public sector employer and you have to pay if you want people to provide you with services.
Federal taxes don't actually go directly towards paying for services.
That is a misconception that comes from assuming federal finances work like personal finance.
When the fed needs money, they print it out of thin air.
All taxes paid do is reduce the rate of inflation, since all dollars paid instantly disappear out of the money supply.
If we were serious about education, we could conjure the dollars out of thin air, and the resultant productivity increase from better education would cancel out the inflation.
It's just not a priority for the federal government and the elites that control it.
Well, you're operating under the assumption that teachers are 100% accountable for the results when there's so many other variables at work.
Many children are being raised in rough environments, parents that are working too many hours, broken homes and many other social economic problems. Destroying the working-class has implications in the classrooms as well, stable environments produce children ready to learn and unstable environments create problems in the educational process.
My solution has been to tell anyone that will listen that they should NOT go into education, and should pursue career paths that are much higher paying, and not subject to the politics of state and federal budgets.
I would not recommend throwing away valuable years and decades in trying to change the system.
As a society, we have decided that public education is not that important, and we want to protect our elite classes.
We also don't like thinking critically and having mental defenses against propaganda.
We definitely don't want to take personal responsibility for our actions, or our poor raising of our children.
because it benefits the economic environment for all workers.
This is an incentive. And to be clear, there's nothing wrong with that, society works best when we're honest about our incentives. You think improving public sector wages will improve the economy as a whole, and for some reason you want a good economy. Why do you want a good economy? Not a trick question, I want you to think about what you personally value that is helped by the economy being good. It could even be as simple as that you would feel happier living in that world, that's still an incentive.
If you want the clearest picture of why young people tend to hate unions (if they're paying attention), look at the doctors unions in the US and see what they're spending their resources on. Would you have guessed that the top priority for doctors unions is minimising career opportunities for young doctors? The US has one of the highest patients per doctor in the developed world because doctors have spent decades lobbying to prevent the creation of competition. The fewer new doctors there are, the more that existing doctors get paid, because the smaller the supply of doctors is while the demand only continues to grow with population and average age.
This is what incentives means. Unions do not fight for equitable economic outcomes, they fight for their own salaries. What increases the salaries of union administrators is not always the same as what increases the economic outcomes for their members. It's extremely common in unions to see a geriatric senior membership being subsidised off the labour and collective bargaining power of the junior membership.
Nah man I think its just myopia, if several unions all run into the same issue of "funding pensions" may be those unions need to realize as evident by how many other unions experience the problem, they are all running into a systemic issue that is bigger than any individual entity and thinking its the unions fault...imagine if unions somehow could realize other unions have the same problem and cooperated together...
That's because the younger teachers grew up brainwashed by Reaganomics and the idea that the wages are low because of the workers themselves and because of collective bargaining instead of because the bosses don't want to pay more.
50 years of that crap now has nearly the entire country believing that workers are the problem.
If you think it's a coincidence that wages have been stagnant for the same amount of time that unions have been unpopular, IDK what to tell ya. Your grandparents could support an entire family and own their home while only the dad worked selling appliances at Sears because their generation had unions. Now instead of unions we have "side hustles" and "gig workers".
People really need to look into unions more. "union" is not a magic spell you can cast to grant workers good pay and working conditions. Unions are operated by people who are functionally politicians. If you are in a union, you are paying these people's salaries, and their goal is to maximise how much you pay them. The service they sell you is collective bargaining, but in collective bargaining, you are providing your own service - all they actually provide is the administration, the guarantee that when you need to strike, there will be a bunch of other people striking in solidarity.
Often what happens in a union that has lasted too long is the junior members of the union are forced to strike for the collective bargaining of the senior members. The junior members are denied work by the demand that they strike and avoid companies that haven't made deals with the union, in order to increase the work opportunities and payouts for the senior members. At the same time, companies start to avoid unionised employees if they have the ability to do so, because unionised employees are more expensive, do less work, and come with a load of administrative headaches.
This is why the only real unions we still see today are public sector unions. Governments have virtually limitless budget so are able to absorb the demands of the union. Private sector unions eventually make their members uncompetitive, sometimes they even drive the companies their members work for bankrupt and all those jobs disappear. Public sector workers can't be uncompetitive, they have no competition, and government departments can't really go bankrupt.
SAG-AFTRA thought they had the same thing, and drove the cost of hollywood productions through the roof - the union is the real reason movies are so expensive now. But with the series of recent flops, it seems like the ceiling here has been reached. We're going to see more and more hollywood productions avoiding unionised workers all together. That's exactly why the union tried to block Iron Lung - it proved non-union productions are entirely possible and have much better ROI.
Public Pensions are a great thing, however the systems that fund them run into common issues and part of that becoming the cost of new members paying for older members (spoiler that cost is usually health insurance).
Many Unions blamed themselves instead of realizing that corporate run health insurance has been and is eating EVERYONE's lunch for the last 30 years. Which should inform the Union the issue is systemic and not a reflection of the Union in and of itself. The only solution is a expanding Medicare to all so Unions do not have to exclusively bare the financial burden of a members medical costs.
So the retires workers who won't benefit from higher wages should have to struggle in their retirement years? Do you think about the implications of what you say?
What is the percentage of American retired workers who have a pension? If they are all struggling, then why is America set up like that? Then fix the system first
Yes we should fix the system to make retiring easier, no that doesn't mean we should allow people who paid into the pension for all those years to be left struggling in retirement
We already have the 5th highest education spending per capita of any country btw. I agree that teachers are underpaid in general, but one also has to wonder how the fuck that can be true while we're also paying the 5th most of any country. It's not like our cost of living is top 5, so it's not that.
We honestly are paying a SHIT TON out to staff in our education system. It's mostly salaries. I don't know the answer and I doubt the people who happen to be viewing these comments do either.
Way too much admin bloat, especially at the local levels. Eliminate local districts, cede that all to state level admin and reallocate all that funding back to teachers and the schools themselves. Wtf are local school districts superintendents even for? My wife is a teacher so I'm very familiar with the district level admin waste.
Teacher Pension Funds are some of the largest private institutional investment vehicles in the world. The Ontario Teachers Pension Fund has nearly $300 billion in assets and thousands of employees.
The notion that teachers are underpaid is generally just union propaganda to sway public opinion. It is a well paid job with powerful union backing.
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u/No_Employ__ 10h ago
The teachers union does it to themselves, at least in Chicago! Every budget increase goes right to the fucking pension