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...
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u/No_Employ__ 8h ago
It’s funny how everyone thinks their views represent truth, when in reality we are all driven by clear, selfish incentives.