Since there was some news, and the old thread is >100 pages. Here's a new thread to discuss unions.
So what's so great about unions. Well, pretty much no mater how big of a fuck up you are. You get to keep your Job.
In my personal experience with it, say you are a shitty library worker a a local community college. You regularly go on hour lunches, leaving your coworkers in the lurch. Go wander around the campus talking to friends for 40 minutes on trips to the mail room that is 5 min away. Come in late, leave early. Hide in your office rather than help students. You don't know how to check out materials to students despite working there for 13 years, refuse to follow basic procedures, and are generally so worthless that your 2 co-workers, also union employers, complain about you to management and keep logs of your various absence. If you keep this up for 6 months, a note is attached to your file. Which you can then appeal.
But lets go a bit bigger.
Say you are a cop looking for an armed 6ft+ 300lb black male in a gray Nissan Titian. And because your a god damn idiot, you shoot 103 rounds into a blue Toyota Tacoma with two Hispanic women inside(or ram and shoot a Black Honda Ridgeline with a white guy in it). Now if you or I did this we'd go to jail for 2 counts of attempted murder, or assault with a deadly weapon, or some other such charge. But if you are an LAPD cop, you not only are free from jail. You get to keep your job, driving around a city with a gun on the tax payers dime.
http://www.thewire.com/national/2014/02/police-officers-who-shot-two-innocent-women-103-times-wont-be-fired/357771/
Say you are a teacher in NYPS, and you start sexually harassing your female students. Man that's gonna get you fired for sure, right? Nope, instead of being fired, you are sent to a 'reassignment room' where you can do pretty much whatever you feel like, and still get pay/healthcare/pension benefits.
http://nypost.com/2013/01/27/one-year-on-the-job-13-years-in-rubber-room-earns-perv-teacher-1m/
Why is this? Because here is the process to fire a teacher.
Anyways on to the news.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/us/california-teacher-tenure-laws-ruled-unconstitutional.html?_r=0
LOS ANGELES — A California judge ruled Tuesday that teacher tenure laws deprive students of their right to an education under the state Constitution. The decision hands teachers’ unions a major defeat in a landmark case, one that could radically alter how California teachers are hired and fired and prompt challenges to tenure laws in other states.
“Substantial evidence presented makes it clear to this court that the challenged statutes disproportionately affect poor and/or minority students,” Judge Rolf M. Treu of Los Angeles Superior Court wrote in the ruling. “The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience.”
...
In the ruling, Judge Treu agreed with the plaintiffs’ argument that California’s current laws make it impossible to get rid of the system’s numerous low-performing and incompetent teachers; that seniority rules requiring the newest teachers to be laid off first were harmful; and that granting tenure to teachers after only two years on the job was farcical, offering far too little time for a fair assessment of their skills.
Further, Judge Treu said, the least effective teachers are disproportionately assigned to schools filled with low-income and minority students. The situation violates those students’ constitutional right to an equal education, he determined.
“All sides to this litigation agree that competent teachers are a critical, if not the most important, component of success of a child’s in-school educational experience,” Judge Treu wrote in his ruling. “There is also no dispute that there are a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California classrooms.” ...
ruling
http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/local/court-decision-in-vergara-v-california/1031/
It's a pretty interesting ruling.
The ruling was that in essence that the laws requiring: Tenure after 18 months, The exhaustive firing procedure, and Last In First Out layoff rules, create a mass of ineffective teachers that prevent students from receiving their education, and these teachers are more likely to be in minority districts.
It's pretty novel framing the argument in the Brown/Butt language. And while there will certainly be appeals, I don't know what exactly they can be. You'd essentially have to argue that either:
These grossly ineffective teachers don't exist.
The laws don't contribute to their retention.
They aren't disproportionately in minority districts.
All 3 of which seem like pretty hard positions to back up.
Posts
In addition, you could point out that the way teaching as a profession is treated in the US is absolutely reprehensible, and only survived for as long as it did thanks to having half the population limited to teaching as the best possible profession available to them.
Every job I've ever worked has had those terrible bare minimum employees who skate by. Some of them even completely unfireable, not because of a union but because they won at office politics. Being able to fire employees willy-nilly doesn't do anything to guarantee employee quality. That takes competent management and generous compensation.
You want better teachers? Pay them and their administrators more money.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
However
The fact remains that for every 1 headline-grabbing story about a bad teacher that the union protects, there are also 10 good teachers working silently in the background whose jobs the union protects. Teachers are paid a pittance in proportion to the work and stress they are asked to take on, and removing union protection would be a mistake.
But then you hear about those instances where unions don't protect people, or use their membership fees toward political parties, and it's like... my dreams... they are dead.
Unions being political is a necessity for them to achieve their stated functions. The aristocracy spends hundreds of millions on buying politicians in order to legislate against the interest of the workers. Why should the unions be barred doing the same thing?
Well in that respect it's like unions are being forced to do something in order to do what they're meant to.
the act of workers banding together to advance their interests is inherently political. The idea that it isn't or shouldn't be is exactly the message spread by elites bent on union busting.
No one can be forced to join a union.
No one has to be in a union to be hired.
Unions are advocacy organizations. You pay them to represent your interests, right or wrong. Like a lawyer.
Well, they don't print articles about the times when things run smoothly. It's only when something breaks down does it make the news.
Speaking of news, the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, announced that he would be taking $2.4 billion from the state's pension fund to pay for a $2.7 billion budget shortfall. The people whose pensions are being taken are suing him, including the Professional Firefighters Association of New Jersey and the Fraternal Order of Police. A hearing on the lawsuits will be held on June 25th.
I support the unions in their fight (robbing Peter to pay Paul is nuts) but I have a bad feeling about the hearing. Mr. Christie has not been known to shy away from strong-arm tactics, and despite his being currently under investigation I wouldn't put it past him to twist some arms.
I agree but what I mean is money being donated to the political parties / funding politicians. This is starting to slant into another topic though.
Edit - As opposed to "employees vs. employers."
As much as it's easy to stew about the assholes you work with, it's far better to have some defense against management.
How is that different? Employers do the exact same thing through their advocacy groups. (PACs, trade orginizations, &c.)
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
I had to join the Teamsters when I worked for UPS this past Christmas. It wasn't an option. It was "sign up or leave and good luck."
well no, I think directly funding politicians or parties is essential to any union in America since money the only way to gain influence in our political system.
There can be no separation between the economic arena of "employees vs employers" and the political arena
No you didn't.
I mean, you had to pay them regardless, but you didn't have to join the union itself.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
I thought this differed from state to state?
Well I'm not against hearing why, so can you explain this more? For the moment I disagree. I do think it's possible for unions to take action against wrongdoing or unfair treatment by the employer, the easiest example being strikes, without involving any level of government.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ9myHhpS9s
Skip to 2:32
Sure, in some states you don't even have to pay the union if you don't join. That's the infamous "right to work" which is more of a "right for unions to slowly wither and die".
But not being forced to join the union (de jure anyway) is federal law.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
... If I'm not joining why would I owe them any money?
Because otherwise it's impossible for unions to exist. See: "right to work" states.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Nope, you in fact did not.
http://www.nrtw.org/a/a_1_p.htm
... Fuck my fucking life man, I swear to god.
I liked the response from the union lawyer-
I agree! Everyone should have those sorts of protections; the way to fix things isn't to drag union members down, it's to pull everyone else up.
To take the example of strikes, the government has been extensively involved in breaking strikes often very violently
many unionized groups are also government employees and so political action is the obvious way to improve their situation.
the best example in recent times is probably what Scott Walker and the Republicans have done in Wisconsin. Laws were passed denying the right of many workers to even unionize in the first place.
Sure, she was free not to join. But they got theirs regardless.
They explained it was needed for them to keep advocating for her pay and benefits. She was making minimum wage, and no benefits.
Almost feels like there need to be some caps on dues as a function of pay, and such. It really felt like a scam to fleece temporary workers and short term employees. It didn't make me hate unions entirely or anything, but it definitely eliminated the rosey tint from my glasses.
Edit: oh, and when she wanted to talk to her rep about it, that rep was on a multi week paid vacation. Vacation my wife did not earn.
really pissed me off at the time but I think it is really the result of a union that has been pretty much Busted. Between government regulating at the behest of the rich and strikebreaking, Unions like that are really more of a Guild. They exist to protect the interests of the more senior employees against the interests of the newer employees. Which is fine by the company because they like nothing better than division among their workforce.
Do you live in a right-to-work state? If not, it doesn't really matter anyway.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
it is really hard to get across to someone making minimum wage what it would really mean for someone to earn several million dollars a year. But if the person working the other shift gets $0.25 an hour more and has a better health plan then FUCK THEM the lazy entitled bastard!
and to the slightly better off employees who have some benefits of seniority the message to them is always "fuck you, got mine". Keep reminding them of the hordes of young people / immigrants / robots coming to take their jerbs.
So, you know, tenure isn't really a bad thing a lot of the time.
This right here.
Unions in the US are busted, by and large. They have to constantly fight for basic shit like time off because none of those protections ever made it into law. All we have is a laughably low minimum wage and OT for some, but not all, types of workers.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Here is the whole thing if you haven't read it. (But you should join a union tho. Totally worth it.)
No employee in the United States can legally be required to be a full-dues-paying, formal union member. But in many states, an employee can be forced to pay certain union dues or be fired from his or her job.
Union members have the right to resign from formal membership at any time. However, dues deduction authorizations may limit when they can be revoked.
Employees covered by state Right to Work laws can not lawfully be required to pay any union fees to keep their jobs. But state Right to Work laws do not protect railway and airline employees and employees of private-sector contractors on some federal properties.
Because they enjoy the special privilege of exclusive representation, unions have a legal duty to represent fairly all employees in their bargaining units. (And in right to work states this means people who don't pay anything in also :Rock)
Unions are legally required to represent nonmember employees the same as members, but unfortunately this duty is often breached.
If a law or bargaining agreement permits it, employees can be forced to pay certain union fees. If you don’t join the union, or resign from membership, and notify the union that you don’t want to pay full dues, the required fee must be limited to the union's proven costs of collective bargaining activities. This fee may not lawfully include things like political expenses.
Nonmembers with religious objections to supporting a union have the right to ask the union to redirect the forced dues amount to charity. Religious objectors do not have to belong to a specific church to claim this right.
A union member who wants to work during a strike should resign from union membership BEFORE going to work. If the resignation is mailed, the employee should not work until the day after the resignation is postmarked. Otherwise, the employee could be fined by the union. If you are already a nonmember, you can work at will during a strike and not be lawfully fined.
Yes.
Honestly I don't even think unions are a very good solution. There should be statutory protections for workers. Unions are just about the only way to achieve that though. Can you imagine congress writing, say, a bill to add mandatory paid leave without any outside influence. Just the goodness of their hearts?
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
ha ha ha ha ha