Why should public sector workers earn more than private sector ones? See productivity has nothing to do with it, I don’t think they even measure government productivity. I think its unfair that an accountant for a private firm has to pay higher taxes for higher wages for a government accountant. Essentially you are saying that good public sector jobs should be funded by “bad” private sector ones. Well, people are no longer willing to take it. Unions have always been about fairness, well now its unfair that they earn more than the people who pay their wages.
Yea, whoops.
In another forum, I have a debate going on with an American “libertarian”. He is seriously advocating abolition of the minimum wage, licensing laws in ANY profession (including medical ones), working age laws and age of consent laws (!) to “protect people from the state”. With examples of someone being sexually harassed and a fifteen year old kid being beaten by her parents. He blames the state.
bonk
Strollen - The Australian one is best. When Kevin Rudd, the PM of the time, ducked out of question time, his opponents produced a cardboard cutout of him to mock.
Snowblue - There’s a term for what you’re advocating - “Race to the bottom”. And of course productivity is measured for government workers, and “higher taxes”, riiight - if they’re both /employed/ no. You’re saying that wages are too high, when in reality they’ve been crushed by capital pushing out wages - an effect seen less in the public sector that the private one. Changing that, paying people properly for work done should be the priority of government…it will fix a LOT of issues which require corporate welfare (and yes, subsidizing the low-paid so they can afford to do those jobs is corporate welfare).
State and local public agencies (including public schools) all seem to be having money troubles for the last 20 years or so–I don’t remember things being nearly this bad in the 70’s and ‘80’s except in the poorest urban and rural districts with no property tax base to speak of (and back then most schools had such “luxuries” as PE classes and recess, and didn’t have to whore out their cafeterias to junk food and sugar-water purveyors–much to the detriment of our kids’ fitness and future health).
The Righties hold to the dogma that it’s all the greedy unionized public employees that are at fault. But there were unions then too. What’s happened since the 80’s is that a good portion of private sector worker’s wages have mostly stayed stagnant and those people haven’t shared in the economic growth, whose benefits have mostly gone to the fortunate top fifth at best. Then you get Rush on the radio for three hours every day saying it’s the liberals’, unions’ and poor people’s fault that your pay hasn’t budged for years, and “voilà, the big lie, she is accomplished.”
It seems that the WaPo editorial board has gone “bonkers” as well.
Unions need to reorganize after Wisconsin
Unfortunately, for many years prior to Mr. Walker’s election in 2010, politicians of both parties approved unsustainable pay, pensions and health benefits for public employees, knowing that the full bill would not come due until long after they had left office.
Wisconsin is far from the only state whose politicians and government unions played such a game — certain jurisdictions in our own area come to mind — and the Badger State was not one of the worst offenders. The situation is especially dire in California and Illinois. But Wisconsin’s structural budget deficit was bad enough to give Mr. Walker his opening, and he took it.
History will judge both the way he went about reining in the unions and the results he got. So far, his opponents’ predictions of disaster have not materialized. The state has balanced its two-year budget without tax increases, and local school districts have used their new bargaining power to save money without layoffs or significant increases in class size. Higher tax revenues, the fruit of an improving national economy, have helped. But those who voted for Mr. Walker to show approval for his policies, and not just disapproval for the recall itself, had plausible reasons for doing so.
For public-employee unions, the lesson could not be clearer. Their instinct to punish Mr. Walker, so as to deter imitators, was understandable, but it led them down a blind alley. Public concern about the cost of state and local government is real, justified and spreading. Voters are not content with policy menus that include only service cuts and tax increases, without significant, permanent reductions in personnel costs that make up the lion’s share of budgets. Even as Wisconsinites were voting for Mr. Walker, voters in two of California’s biggest cities, San Diego and San Jose, were approving ballot measures to trim their public-employee pension burdens.
Public-employee union leaders are pledging to fight those new laws in court, just as their counterparts in Wisconsin and elsewhere are dismissing Mr. Walker’s victory as the product of out-of-state campaign donations. They would do better to engage governments in a good-faith effort to restructure and preserve public services for the long term. States and localities face genuine financial problems, and the unions share responsibility for them.
I am not aware of all the teachers arguments in Wisconsin but I do know here in California that while I think most people think teachers individually have a difficult job and are probably underpaid for it, they also have one of the more powerful and obnoxious unions in the state. When the union runs ads on major radio stations daily telling you how much better they could run the state it does tend to rub you the wrong way.
I think in general several classes of California employee has divorced themselves from the reality of working in the private sector. When it comes to paid leave, the cost of health insurance and pensions the state/county/city employees have made out like bandits. And it is not just their fault, the government entities have agreed to these terms.
I don’t remember the exact figures, but the cities of San Diego and San Jose both had 27% =/- of their annual budgets devoted to only pension payments. That figure was up from around 10% in the last ten years.
I missed that. You can’t be an Architect in most states without a degree. Or at least, you can’t become one today. You used to be able to take exams and become licensed even without an architecture degree by having so many years of experience, but I think most (all?) states are phasing that out. To get licensed in DC, for example, I had to have a degree from an accredited school, complete an internship working under a licensed architect, and then take exams. That’s what everybody is moving towards, as far as checking a handful of states randomly on the NCARB website tells me.
As that article points out, anybody can say “I’m an architect” and “practice” architecture. It’s illegal, but okay sure, go ahead and hope you don’t get caught. But even that is getting harder to pull off. Again using DC as an example, to get any work permitted–including most things you might do to your own home outside of putting up a fence or other minor alterations–you need a stamp and a signature from a licensed architect. I think most places are moving towards that model as well.
But then the school placed my wife (and the classroom teacher) on administrative leave WITHOUT PAY until the court stuff worked itself out.
We had a teacher here suspended WITH PAY for several weeks after he was busted for child porn. Eventually the with pay turned into without pay but only after it went through the proper channels.
You keep repeating this and it simply isn’t true (across the board - there are some public sector jobs that pay more than their private counterparts, if there are any). That said, I’m glad you picked accountants:
When looking at total pay for private vs public employees, you have to separate the data out by job or education level or something because the government isn’t paying waitresses or people taking tickets at movie theaters or any other jobs like that that would bring their average down. Doing so by education level (which I linked to in the last few pages here) is probably the easiest way to get a general idea of how the jobs compare, but if you can break the data down by actual job type - as above - that’s even better.
Seems like jail is the proper solution there. Child porn is flat out wrong.
It’s hard to get around that whole “due process” thing. I’m sure Republicans are somewhere working on it right now, but until they succeed, we still have it.
Yes, so…what’s the issue? Teachers are accused of things, thanks to their profession, on a VERY regular basis. There needs to be a process to handle this, you can’t afford to throw a teacher away every time an accusation is made especially given the rise in malicious claims. Yes, it’d going to cause edge effects, but the point is there was a procedure, and it was properly followed. That’s how you avoid, among other things, far more expensive lawsuits.
(Also, remember Julie Amero? Yea. End result, she plead guilty to a misdemeanor to end the case, but the multiple felonies she was charged with? Yea, not guilty…but that didn’t stop much of the right calling her very abusive names)
charmtrap - Well, depends if you’re using an armed drone or not these days…
You apparently didn’t the post I was responding to. His wife had been suspended without pay for a classroom incident. I was comparing the seriousness of the two and the way they were handled. His wife was hosed and needed the union to help her. Union’s are not all bad, or all good.
The market for public sector jobs in the United States is not outsourceable. You should lay off the Friedman.
JeffL is absolutely correct that it was the left-leaning judges.
Right. But we don’t even know what the union did or didn’t do in the cp case.
America in many ways allows Unions powers which amount to closed shops, which is shitty for everyone. But that doesn’t mean unions per-se need to be exterminated, as many of the American “libertarian” right call for. The teacher’s disciplinary system is based around the /assumption/ that the Union will intervene, basically, though…
Jason McCullough - No? The UK government is outsourcing call centers to India these days, just like any bad business concern.
The amount of public sector jobs that can be cost-effectively done outside the state is tiny and uninfluential. The bulk of public sector employment is stuff like teachers, for example, who are not going to be educating anyone from India for the foreseeable future.
Oregon example at the state level. Federal is mostly postal workers and the military.
I was suggesting your analysis was a bit simplistic. Moreover, even if it’s only a minority of jobs (and in some areas, that’s true), don’t you see a public interest in NOT outsourcing them to other countries?
I also think that Oregon example is somewhat misleading in that it’s using absolute values and not a percentage of the population. It does explain the lag behind the private sector quite well though, and why that’s a major concern for you at this point. (It’s not the major concern /here/, since we’re back in an recession, and confidence… (consumer confidence: UK -28, US 63; business confidence: UK -8, US 60))
Even if they are outsourced note that it’ll only drive down public sector wages in the US if jobs remain here that directly compete with foreign production; otherwise the jobs will just disappear outright, with no effect on the remaining non-compete wages.
Erm, you’re saying that removing jobs from the economy (and hence having a higher unemployment rate) doesn’t exert downwards pressure on wages?