Did they find that the over-emphasis on SOLs was the cause?

"SOLs"? The only reading of that acronym I know is Shit Out of Luck.

That's my reading of SOL as well.

"Standards of learning?"

Standards of Learning, perhaps? (Tests like in NCLB)

Stupid Ogged Laughing.

Standards of learning.

Teachers teach to the test. Forget creativity. Just memorize the information.

the endless refrain that everything that's wrong with American schools is the fault of the overly powerful teachers' unions

I do not think I have ever heard anyone say that everything that is wrong with schools is the fault of teacher's unions. I have heard people refer to union work rules and other things as a contributing cause in some instances, but not that they were the whole cause. Who are you hanging out with that you hear this endless refrain?

I've heard it from random people on airplanes. People seem to have acquired a ridiculous degree of hatred for teachers unions.

Is it as annoying as the "well parents are the most important thing, so nothing else matters, and let's not do anything to help parents do their job better" cop-out?

To be fair--there are some shitty teachers out there--my wife works with a few. That being said, the kids who are really fucked are the ones with shitty parents.

"Teachers unions" is code for liberals.

Generally it's the only thing I hear as a specific problem with the public schools, Idealist, and it's the only thing I've ever seen anyone actually propose changing about the public schools. The usual refrain is "These days the parents don't care if their kids learn, and the kids are spoiled, lazy and ill-mannered, and the public schools teach nonsense instead of the fundamentals. And the damn teachers have jobs for life, so no wonder they don't bother anymore. At least that last one can be fixed."

11:
Yes, crappy parents hurt their children. I love the blame the parents so we can avoid doing the difficult work when parents do not do it.

If we do not, it will come back to haunt us.

There is a similar saying: If you do not visit the slum, it will visit you.

8: Steve Jobs in the last couple of days, and lots of other people. If you're just nitpicking on whether people actually say that 'all' education problems can be attributed to teachers unions, and chiding me for having written hyperbolically, your nitpick is noted.

Who are you hanging out with that you hear this endless refrain?

Bush's former Secretary of Education.

15: Sorry, I don't know why I thought that Jobs quote was from the last few days -- it's 2003. Did he just recently say something similar on the topic?

8- The original post was inspired by Mickey Kaus, who certainly believes this.

Who are you hanging out with that you hear this endless refrain?

James B. Shearer.

15: Never mind, the Jobs thing is recent -- I got confused by a different date on the first hit.

Did he just recently say something similar on the topic?

He did.

Link.

But it does tend to support the conclusion that teachers' unions aren't the only, or the most important, source of problems in our educational system.

The concluding refrain that X is not the only or the most important source of problems for Y is usually just a dodge for refusing to acknowledge problems that are inconvenient for interest groups one favours. Almost the only interesting question is are teacher's unions and the practices they encourage a problem at the margin?

I hope we can all reject the the claim that the only thing wrong with the US education is teachers unions. Indeed, the point is put nicely here by a former teacher of a right-of-center bent.

That said, it would be a mistake to conclude from the natural experiment that inflexibility, to which a unionized labor force contributes, is no part of the problems facing American education. It is hard for to imagine that the ability to fire poor performers, the ability to give merit pay, and a dissociation of compensation from simple seniority would be harmful in education. These are all very standard management practices in most successful institutions, and my sense is that these are practices that most teachers unions oppose.

As for Steve Jobs, he's right. What you need to go through to fire a non-performer in most schools is "off -the-charts crazy." Whether removing this off-the-chart craziness would suffice to drastically improve US education is doubtful, I agree. But it wouldn't be a terrible start, would it?

14: Will, I'm not sure what you're saying here. I hope you agree that parental neglect, abuse, and wrongheadedness (unwilling to make school a priority for their kids, etc.) is a problem. There are potential societal remedies that can alleviate some of the issues, that could be delivered through the schools (all-day kindergarten, Head Start, greater funding to special needs programs, reduced class-room size, longer scholl years, etc.) that are great first steps.

But teachers only get kids a few hours a day, 9 months a year. They aren't the magic bullet to fix the damage that bad parenting causes--and after all the stories I've heard from my wife, both when she worked in a high-poverty urban school and when she worked in the richest, best-test-score school in the city, I can assure you that there are lots and lots of bad parents out there, setting their kids up for failure for the rest of their lives.

It's a self perpetuating cycle of problems now with no single cause.

I get a lot of education majors in my classes, and its disheartening how often the best of them end up switching majors. And there's a high burnout rate in those who stick with it.

The system is so disfunctional that I think it's to the point where it tends to scare off the very people who might be able to fix it.

I should quantify my "lots and lots" -- it seems like every year, I hear about one or two awful parents. So, 5-10%.

24: Given the data linked by Kleiman, showing some research indicating a positive correlation between strong unions and good outcomes for students (hey, I know it's crazy, but maybe job security is attractive enough to attract better teachers overall? I mean, I know rational people prefer jobs where they can be fired on a whim, but maybe teachers are different somehow.) I would say no, there's no good reason to think that teachers unions are a significant cause of the problems with American education.

28 is also intended to respond to 23.

In my (Texas) experience, these "eager, highly qualified people" also have to be so gung-ho crazy about teaching that they're willing to work for slave wages. Is it wrong to want to fix that first?

there's no good reason to think that teachers unions are a significant cause of the problems with American education

Just to note: that can be true even if we think the unions could behave differently/be constrained in some way. The main problem with the teachers union talk is that in the real world we don't have infinite attention to solve problems, and even if we grant that the teachers unions are a problem, there doesn't seem to be any reason to think that they're a major or significant problem, so time spent trying to "fix" them is time not spent solving the larger problem.

Chopper:
I just meant that parental failures shouldnt be used as an excuse to write-off kids. More of a rant than an actual point.

Yes, gods forbid there be a teachers' union to give educators some sense of security so that they can more confidently perform their job. Nothing helps a teacher do better than worrying that another budget cut is going to leave them out of a job or - better yet - cost of living increases coupled with flat pay will price them out of being able to keep their current job. Or that students who don't do well enough on standardized testing will get their school penalized financially. Or that an angry and/or politically important parent can get them fired simply by agitating hard enough. Or, or, or.

Shit I think I just repackaged the James B. Shearer joke.

Every teacher I've met has said that the biggest problem in schools is that the teachers are required to parent as much as they are to teach. Kids get sent without having eaten, wearing dirty clothes, without having been given time to do homework, without time or access for outside research for projects, without supplies, without discipline, without sleep, etc. I'm not a parent and never will be so I can't speak for that side of the aisle but my experience was always that a kid with real problems had problems that started sometime earlier in the day than when they arrived on campus. The schools and teachers are left with the fun choice of soaking up a bunch of resources trying to deal with those or trying to muddle through with huge distractions in play. Neither is a great idea and either can poison the well for everyone else.

Yeah; the annoying thing about blaming problems at home for educational problems is that it's true but not useful -- a kid with a stable homelife supportive of learning is probably going to do okay even in a lousyish school, while a kid without that is likely to have problems even in an excellent school. But the schools still need to address those problems during the schoolday, because that's when they have access. Saying the problems begin at home shouldn't be an excuse for giving up.

Great post, LB. And as for the "endless refrain" questioned above, here's one example of a metric shitload of such sentiment that you'll find by searching for "teachers union" on Volokh's site.

This: there's no good reason to think that teachers unions are a significant cause of the problems with American education.

is answered by:

It's a self perpetuating cycle of problems now with no single cause.

People aren't analyzing which of the many factors are a "significant cause." They're responding to what seems most fixable about a system that seems wildly dysfunctional.

A teacher who needs to be fired and can't be, because of union rules, is a horrendous problem. More to the point, it's a highly visible problem, around which it is easy to fixate.

You can argue that killing unions would create more problems than it would solve, but it's hard to argue that in Specific Case X, that teacher does not need to be fired, and that the union is not preventing it from happening.

But you can argue that in Broader Case Reality, that there's no reason to think that the union nets out to be a negative. In fact, I do.

This: A teacher who needs to be fired and can't be, because of union rules, is a horrendous problem.

is a bit of a fantasy, in that while firing for cause can be cumbersome under a union contract, it's never going to be literally impossible. If someone really needs to be fired, they can be, and if they aren't it's a management failure.

Sadly, I think I'm on (what I suspect is) baa's side. Unions aren't the main problem; the goal is.

It's great how quickly this thread has moved from rejecting one ill-founded, extreme claim to enthusiastically endorsing another. From rejecting "teachers unions = the problem" to another "no good reason to think unionization can be part of the problem."

Look, it's not the case that absent unions all workers are thrown to howling wolves. All this talk of firing at a whim is, frankly, silly. Is that what happens in non-union Georgia? Is that what happens in non-unionized private schools? These questions answer themselves. Just as many teachers will say the big problems are parental support and ill-designed curricula, so too many schools administrators will say the big problems are inability to manage effectively due to union constraints. I doubt either of these viewpoints are decisive. It's a mistake to assume that the interests of the costumers of an institution perfectly map on to that institutions employees or managers.

34: It may be useful emphasizing that the state of mind needed for effective teaching isn't the same as needed to deal with disruptive and inattentive kids. Risking an analogy, it's like expecting effective Marines to be good cops and vice-versa, people simply don't switch gears or personalities that easily. It might very well be that the schools just aren't capable of substituting for parenting and a half-way reasonable living environment.

So, Baa, if it's an 'ill-founded, extreme claim' to say that there is no good reason to think that unions are a significant cause of the problems with American education, you must know that there is a good reason to think that unions are a significant cause of the problems with American education. Got a link to the data you're relying on?

Thesis: most anger directed at teacher's unions results because most parental contact with teacher's unions is the inevitable strike whenever there are contract negotiations.

But you can argue that in Broader Case Reality, that there's no reason to think that the union nets out to be a negative.

Well, sure. But if the person you're talking to is fixated on a specific case, that argument is unlikely to gain traction. I'm talking tactics for discussing this issue.

bit of a fantasy, in that while firing for cause can be cumbersome under a union contract, it's never going to be literally impossible.

In my (limited) experience, it's easy enough for something to be practically impossible even if it's not literally impossible.

At any rate, this says it well:

The main problem with the teachers union talk is that in the real world we don't have infinite attention to solve problems, and even if we grant that the teachers unions are a problem, there doesn't seem to be any reason to think that they're a major or significant problem, so time spent trying to "fix" them is time not spent solving the larger problem.

35: And we should thank our unionized teachers for teaching us the metric system! Otherwise, we'd have to measure anti-union sentiment at the Volokh Conspiracy in imperial shitloads.

In NC, where there are no unions and teachers trying to organize was illegal last I knew (it's been a few years since I changed my major away from Education), firing a bad teacher is next to impossible after the first two or three years of service. That said, even my podunk high school in my podunk town had very few bad teachers. I can think of maybe one or two that really should have been given the boot for sheer incompetence out of a faculty of forty or fifty. There were more who were so personally vile and embittered that being locked in a room with them for an hour was all the incentive necessary for a kid to stare out the window and pretend they were somewhere else but they also tended to be skilled at the most basic functions of lecturing and assessing as a counterbalance to their own psychic stink.

re: 36

This is a common complaint, but short of abusing the children, I just don't really see that any teacher can be "bad" enough to cause the kinds of problems you're claiming. I just don't think that's a relevant issue much.

It's a system problem rather than a "few bad apples" problem.

Here's a bone to the "unions are problem" side though. I DO think they are a problem in one particular way, which is that they have consistently opposed making sensible changes to the ways in which teacher training is done at the college level.

It's great how quickly this thread has moved from rejecting one ill-founded, extreme claim to enthusiastically endorsing another.

Who is this "this thread" person you're referring to?

firing a bad teacher is next to impossible after the first two or three years of service.

Again, management failure, not a result of union contracts. (Not contradicting you, Pants, just highlighting the point).

Look, it's not the case that absent unions all workers are thrown to howling wolves.

Well, not all, but there's been a pretty clear trend in this country of reduced union membership in the private sector that just happens to correlate with things like stagnant wages, increasing income gaps between rich and poor, etc.

Surely the management failure and the union contracts aren't unrelated, LB. It's probably not an essential problem with union contracts, but it's hard to believe that the management isn't subjec to any of the pressures of the union.

Generally employees in non-unionised workplaces and industries tend to be treated more shittily than workers in unionised ones. That's not a universal law and there are people in a load of professions who do well and are non-unionised. But as a general rule, as gswift says, it's a pretty good one.

Not only that, but non-unionised employees often only have the working conditions they do because other unions have fought to get legislation in place that they benefit from.

Also, I think we might get better results if we paid teachers in money rather than in nebulous gratitude.

50: Sure, but as Pants says, similar problems can exist in the absence of union contracts. I'm sure there are individual instances where bad teachers are not fired because the contract makes it too cumbersome, and would have been fired in the absence of that contract, but the existence of such individual cases doesn't constitute a global problem.

Boston Public Schools wanted to remove limits on class size, so that teachers can't veto exceeding the cap, which ranges from 21 for early grades through 30 for high school.

Teachers were called a vote on a strike, though it is illegal for Massachusetts state employees to strike. Massachusetts Labor Relations Commission has asked a Suffolk Superior Court judge to find the union in contempt, exposing union leaders to penalties that could range from fines to imprisonment, for failing to call off the strike vote. BPS has since rescinded the proposal to raise the limit on class size.

Here's how the BPS defended its proposal: The district has proposed an expansion of an existing contract provision so that in the rare instance that a class happens to be one or two students over the class size maximum (due to a student having to repeat a grade, for example), the school would not have to open a new class and hire an additional teacher to teach only 1 or 2 students, which would be fiscally irresponsible and present an unreasonable financial burden to the taxpayers of Boston.

But I went to Catholic school, so I'm all smart, and I bet that when a class goes over the limit, instead of giving the new teacher two students, they could split the class in half, so that you could have two classes of fifteen or sixteen students each! Where they might actually learn something!

Probably this is too good for public school students, who would ideally be drugged and stacked on palettes in warehouses, requiring only a nightwatchman. Think how fiscally responsible that would be.

Again, management failure, not a result of union contracts.

This seems curiously parallel to what I think was the industry line about not needing automatic seatbelts: if people belted themselves in and drove more carefully, there would be fewer accident deaths. Probably true. Who cares?

48: You're quite right that it's not a result of union contracts (since we have no unions); it's a result of how our tenuring system is set up. I don't even think it's a management failure if you mean it's a failure of the principals or the superintendents. Their hands are pretty tied (or were, again, when I last had a current understanding of how the system worked).

I don't think there's anything wrong with saying that it should be possible to identify the small percentage of teachers who are genuinely awful at their jobs, ill-suited to it and will never be brought up to wherever the bar is set for base requirements. I just don't think it's very practical and if it were solved tomorrow it would address a tiny fraction of the overall problem. It would be far better to find a way to engage the teachers who are quite capable but too constricted and overburdened in their curricula to do anything more than try to ram the standardized testing down the kids' throats. I would think they're a much larger part of the problem.

55: I would if comparisons showed either no difference in safety between cars with manual and automatic seatbelts (and other benefits of the manual seatbelts, like higher salaries and better working conditions) or a difference in favor of the cars with the manual belts. Isn't that the world we're in with respect to the teachers unions?

55: Aren't analogies, particularly bad ones like yours, banned here Tim?

Since you seemed to be asking me:

short of abusing the children, I just don't really see that any teacher can be "bad" enough to cause the kinds of problems you're claiming. I just don't think that's a relevant issue much.

That's exactly what I was talking about. Screaming verbal abuse and insults, etc. No, you can't create a world in which that never happens, but it was far, far more relevant in the schools I was working in than I would ever want for any kid I cared about.

On the scale of "problems within our public school system" it's not the first or the eighth thing I would fixate on (which is LB's point, right? Why focus on X instead of all the other issues?). But in terms of "actual problems I have seen with my own eyes" it exists.

And my larger point, which I promise to stop beating into the ground any hour now, is that if you want to have a conversation about fixing schools, and the person you are talking with wants to tell you about how their child is being treated by a particular teacher, that person will not be able to hear you. Picture a school board meeting. Heck, picture the regulatory hearings Megan wrote about a few weeks back.

Why do public school teachers need tenure? It's nice to have, but if tenure is meant to protect academic freedom to research on the college level, what's the equivalent thing being protected on the, say, elementary school level?

were

I would guess that tenure for elementary and middle school teachers would give good teachers the flexibility to try out curricula that haven't been approved by every middle manager in the school district.

I don't think there's anything wrong with saying that it should be possible to identify the small percentage of teachers who are genuinely awful at their jobs, ill-suited to it and will never be brought up to wherever the bar is set for base requirements. I just don't think it's very practical and if it were solved tomorrow it would address a tiny fraction of the overall problem.

Right -- the underlying assumption beneath the claim that teachers' unions are the problem is that the real problem is the existence of egregiously incompetent teachers (and that making the job more attractive by, oh, raising salaries or improving working conditions wouldn't help attract more competent teachers). If we just cleared out all the deadwood we'd be fine. I don't see any good reason to think that this is the case.

People aren't analyzing which of the many factors are a "significant cause." They're responding to what seems most fixable about a system that seems wildly dysfunctional.

No, they're usually venting in accordance with an agenda that gives them a buzz. They may want publicly-financed religious education, or they may want lower taxes, or they may believe that public schooling is unconstitutional, or they may oppose unions in principle, or they may hate liberal college graduates, or they may have free-floating anxieties which they blame on the public schools.

I think that the disfunctions of American education are greatly exaggerated. In most cases, motivated kids with reasonably supportive parents can get an adequate education.

This is an issue that I am reluctant to debate, because so few on the other side are straightforward about their motives. It's mostly a political footbal, and if that's the case, I'll play on the liberal Democratic team.

In some other context I would have a few things to say about the way schools are administered, the college education major, credentialing, and even unions.

During my time in the schools and during my son's school career, I saw a lot of wonderful teachers and a moderate number of burnouts. I also decided that teaching school was too much of a pain in the butt to go one with, and one aspect of that was realizing that teachers are a public whipping boy for rightwing ideologues.

57: Except that I think everyone's conceded the large point--teachers' unions are not a major factor in any of the various education policy problems of the day--and moved on (AFAICT) to the smaller issue of whether or not (a) union contracts may make it harder to fire an incompetent teacher, and (b) it would be a good thing to be able to fire incompetent teachers. I'm not sure what people are actually arguing about. For this, I blame baa.

I would guess that tenure for elementary and middle school teachers would give good teachers the flexibility to try out curricula that haven't been approved by every middle manager in the school district.

I wish. All to often though it's an excuse to get lazy.

And my larger point, which I promise to stop beating into the ground any hour now, is that if you want to have a conversation about fixing schools, and the person you are talking with wants to tell you about how their child is being treated by a particular teacher, that person will not be able to hear you.

This is a fair point, but only with respect to an individual with a horror story, who needs a certain amount of sympathy for the specifics of their situation before they can address global issues. Steve Jobs is not such an individual, nor are most of the people who drone on about the horrors of the teachers unions.

62: Of the two districts I have significant experience with, curriculum is the most locked-down setup you can imagine. The principals and the regional superintendents can do almost nothing, much less a classroom teacher.

No, they're usually venting in accordance with an agenda that gives them a buzz.

Yeah, I think that's right. I have a feeling that some of the anti-teachers union talk is actually anti-black; a species of welfare hatred.

That's what my impression was: the curriculum was mostly fixed.

65: Well, everyone here except baa. On the smaller issue, I'd say that given the agreed-upon absence of the larger issue -- teachers' unions aren't a significant net negative to students -- their flaws stop being interesting as a matter of educational policy, and move into the category of public policy issues that are about as important as how to speed up lines at the DMV.

On the curriculum issue, I'm just talking rather than purporting to have any particular knowledge, but is there any good reason for much creativity in curriculum design from one classroom to the next? I've got a certain amount of sympathy for the idea that at least the material covered (although not necessarily the classroom methods) should be as standard as possible from school to school.

Is the claim now that there is *no connection* between unionization and a) lifetime tenure, and b) lack of merit pay? Sure, they aren't logically connected, but in the world in which we live teachers unions tend to be strong advocates for both.

Is there any evidence that these policies are undesireable. Well, I don't know that there's a randomized study. You can get testimony of school adminstrators and former teachers that it is very demoralizing to work with and be unable to discipline non-performers, at the click of a mouse. Certainly there is some evidence that compression of wages resulting from unionization has had a negative effect on teacher quality.

But I think the more reasonable way to look at this is the common sense way. Do you generally believe that lifetime tenure and absence of merit pay are optimal compensation strategies? These seem like bad policies, in general, and all the more so when customers face something like a monopoly service provider. Now. Maybe people don't think these policies are bad. Fine. But for those who do, and still think unions can't be part of the problem, I wonder why these policies which have bad effects generally, won't have bad effects on the provision of education.

62 gets it right. Functionally, back when I was an Ed major, it meant that until you were officially tenured you had a mentor who was tenured and would help you learn the various ropes. Once you're "tenured" in NC public schools you're officially trusted to do your job without as much supervision. It also serves as some degree of insulation against antagonistic parents, administrators, colleagues, etc.

I fully agree that teaching would be much better if we paid them with actual money but I also think it's good that, in the absence of said money we can pay them with some limited degree of assurance of their job. In the case of the rare waste-of-space teacher it's a hindrance but for the rest of them it's a plus.

Anti-black? Not seeing that. Anti-sitting-on-one's-ass-while-making-more-money-than-the-community-average-and-still-going-on-strike certainly. An easily-propped up target (as Witt argues.) Unless by "black" we mean "old white teachers."

Well, everyone here except baa.

Even baa: What you need to go through to fire a non-performer in most schools is "off -the-charts crazy." Whether removing this off-the-chart craziness would suffice to drastically improve US education is doubtful, I agree.

. I have a feeling that some of the anti-teachers union talk is actually anti-black; a species of welfare hatred.

Normally, I just assume this is further proof of your insanity, but (IIRC) your mom's a teacher.

But I think the more reasonable way to look at this is the common sense way. Do you generally believe that lifetime tenure and absence of merit pay are optimal compensation strategies?

Well, we could union bust, and then watch the pay, along with quality, go down even further.

unions can't be part of the problem

Baa, you'd be more fun to argue with if you'd watch your restatements of other people's positions. There's a big difference between the claim you've referred to a couple of times, that unions can't be part of the problem, and the only claim I've made or seen made in this thread, that there's no good evidence that unions are a significant part of the problem.

re: 75

Why shouldn't people who earn more than the community average be able to go on strike? Why shouldn't workers in general be able to go on strike?

Do you generally believe that lifetime tenure and absence of merit pay are optimal compensation strategies?

Despite all the hype, I don't think that's been disproven. It sucks if you don't identify talent well, but it can help from the perspective of developing and preserving skills within an organization. Japan, anybody?

77: This is entirely peripheral, but I'm not convinced that union-busting would result in lower teacher pay.

Unions enable management to make credible promises about job security, and if you can make a credible promise about job security, you don't have to offer higher wages to attract workers. (I owe this insight to Prof. Bainbridge.)

In other words, if teaching switches to "at-will" employment, you're going to have to pay more to get highly-educated people to teach.

Why shouldn't people who earn more than the community average be able to go on strike?

In my observation, all teacher strikes get branded as strikes over salary. Regardless of the specific issue. That tends to lead to gripes of the "For God's sake, don't they get enough of my tax money already?" variety. Again, regardless of the ostensible issue for the strike.

Right, given circumstances in which merit is difficult to objectively establish like teaching (you can't do it on pure results for the students taught, or all the teachers with the easy job of teaching comfortably middleclass students with supportive parents are going to look like geniuses next to the teachers doing the harder job of teaching students with difficulties), there are reasonable arguments that it would be more demoralizing than helpful.

Given that in most circumstances, people overestimate their level of competence, you'd think that teachers generally would think that merit pay was a good idea if they thought it was likely that merit would be accurately assessed. The fact that merit pay is not popular among teachers suggests that they do not have faith in this proposition.

In NC, where there are no unions and teachers trying to organize was illegal

Not strictly true. My mother has been a member of NCAE for over 30 years. They aren't allowed to strike, though.

what's the equivalent thing being protected on the, say, elementary school level

Evolution, Heather Has Two Mommies in the library, teacher attends a non-Christian church, etc.

75: How often do teacher's unions actually strike?

My impression has also been that teaching is a one-way career track. Unless you do a Teach for America gig for a couple of years, the pervasive stereotype is that you get a teacher's certificate and you're stuck in the profession FOR EVER.

Profession? I meant vocation. Of course.

Here in the UK some of the most militant unions are some of the best paid -- fire fighters, for example. There may be a possible connection ...

This is entirely peripheral, but I'm not convinced that union-busting would result in lower teacher pay.

Unions enable management to make credible promises about job security, and if you can make a credible promise about job security, you don't have to offer higher wages to attract workers.

But isn't that job security primarily due to the unions?

86: This is just an anecdote, but I know a federal judge who used to be a high-school physics teacher.

At least at the high-school level, I wouldn't expect teaching to be any more of a career trap than, say, law.

88: Yes, in that the union makes it possible for management's promise of job security to be credible.

85: In my hometown, every time the contract was up. It became sort of a joke. Everyone knew school wouldn't start till October that year because by law, teacher's strikes could last only 30 days at once.

And yes, of course, you can strike if you make more than the community average. But you're also not terribly sympathetic if you do so and since we were trying to diagnose why teacher's unions catch more flack than they deserve I submit that it's because most contact with them in the average town is negative, apparently about wages, and in the context of a strike, not because of anti-black sentiment.

88: Well, yeah, that's the point. The idea is that in the absence of unions, employers only have one credible bargaining chip: salary, because they don't have an effective means of promising job security. With unions, employers can promise job security, so they can make up a more desirable but lower salaried total compensation package.

Is there good evidence to believe that unions impose costs? Evidence includes:

1. Testimony from administrators and teachers that a masure of inflexibility derives from union rules, and that schools are thereby prevented from: firing non-performers, offering differential pay for hard-to-find expertise like math and science, offering differential pay to 'star' teachers, bending accreditation rules when a teacher has other relevant experience.
2. The point that lifetime tenure and absence of merit pay are terrible, terrible compensation strategies generally, and can be expected to have bad results.
3. The Hoxby paper which finds that compression of wages resulting from unionization has (entirely predictable) negative effects on measures of teacher quality.

Of course, we are still left with the question of what is meant by 'significant part' of the problems with american education, and indeed, what 'the problems' are.

Maybe I have been mistating your position, and there is no disagreement here at all. If so, my apologies. But I very much suspect that you believe that unions impose very little or minimal costs on the public school system. I doubt that, and suspect instead that unions do impose substantial costs. For example, you seem to suggest above when school districts are unabile to fire bad teachers is a 'management problem' *unrelated* to the strength of teachers unions. That seems to me to be an unrealistic perception of how unions operate. Of course they make it hard to fire people; that's a union's job. The question is whether the gain (job security, not being 'fired on a whim') is worth the cost (inability to fire/discipline). But it's hard to weigh costs and benefits if the costs aren't acknowledged.

Ack, I didn't read that closely enough.

But still, is there somewhere where we can see this trend of no union = higher pay?

bending accreditation rules when a teacher has other relevant experience.

Sort of tangential, but it's mind-boggling to me that a friend, a teacher with fifteen years of experience in tony private schools, and a master's degree, but no teaching experience, would be unqualified to teach at a public high school. That really shouldn't be something we have to bend the rules for; it should just be in the rules.

You don't seem to acknowledge that 'merit pay' is not a simple or easily administered program in the the context of teaching, nor that making it more difficult to fire teachers without good cause as demonstrated through following procedures may net out as protecting as many good teachers who might have been improperly fired (surely you don't think that never happens, right?) as it does bad teachers.

And that study on wage compression looks unlikely. It dismisses the changes in opportuntities for female teachers as less important than the rise of unionization as a factor in reducing the number of 'high aptitude' teachers in the profession. While I can't follow the math without taking an hour or two to puzzle it out, this seems really unlikely -- teaching went from almost the highest status job in which there were mass opportunities for educated women, to a very low status job for an educated person. That had to have been an absolutely colossal effect.

I agree with Emerson re: I think that the disfunctions of American education are greatly exaggerated. But it's hard to get political power delivering that message, so no one does.

And this:

But it's hard to weigh costs and benefits if the costs aren't acknowledged.

Acknowledge the costs all you like, but in the absence of any good reason to think that the costs and benefits net out to damage students overall, the focus on teachers unions as a significant source of what's wrong in American education seems terribly misplaced.

"the focus on teachers unions as a significant source of what's wrong in American education seems terribly misplaced."

Not if you're generally anti-union which many/most/all of the people generally making this claim seem to be.

97: You know, I'm kind of sympathetic to this position, but kind of not. I went to an absolutely top of the line, very very prestigious, selective high school. And we'd get European exchange students that would uniformly laugh at how easy and lame the classwork was -- not necessarily smarter than we were, but consistently unimpressed with what we were doing.

At the top end, at least, there's something weirdly dumb about American high schools.

99 gets it.

99: Yeah, unions have been really effectively demonized in the US; they're unpopular even among most nominal moderate liberals.

re: 102

That's because -- my impression, at least -- most 'liberals' are centre-right and generally anti-labour in their politics.

they're unpopular even among most nominal moderate liberals.

People take the benefits that unions are responsible for for granted, and now what's salient is the corruption and distorting market effects--unions are still great, but it's not like those drawbacks don't exist.

re: 100

The 'folk' wisdom here about US education is along those lines. The same for the undergraduate college degree. That impression might be bigoted and false, though. I have no direct experience to compare.

104: exactly. There's a bumper sticker along the lines of "The Labor Movement: The People Who Brought You the Weekend." I can count on one finger the number of contemporaries I have who could give even a one-paragraph summary of the gains brought by the last 100 years of the labor movement.

99: Ding ding ding!

what's the equivalent thing being protected on the, say, elementary school level

Evolution, Heather Has Two Mommies in the library, teacher attends a non-Christian church, etc.

Also defense against the "how dare you give my son/daughter an A minus! Don't you know he/she is applying to Harvard?" pressure.

105: Admittedly, that's not what people are generally talking about when they talk about problems in the schools -- that's a problem at the top end, rather than the sort of broken-down failure to educate at all that gets more attention. I'd agree that the extent of the latter type of problem is exaggerated.

100: Sure, it seems like we could be doing things a lot better. But I'd expect to see large follow-on effects from this; technical innovation happening elsewhere, etc etc. I clearly run in very nonrepresentative circles, so I'm sure my mileage varies, but...

102: Unions are also unambiguously about enriching/benefiting their members at the expense of everyone else; if most people are either in one or know someone who is "their members" seems more relevant than "everyone else"; when unions have much less worker share they will become less popular due to "everyone else" being the representative group.

Wow. That is horribly punctuated and totally lacking in subject/verb number agreement. I blame the public schools.

Unions are also unambiguously about enriching/benefiting their members at the expense of everyone else

Not really. They're about enriching labor at the expense of capital; not about pitting one group of laborers against each other. My understanding of the data (and I'm doing this off the top of my head, rather than doing the work of looking it up) is that unionization in a market sector drives up wages of non-union workplaces in that sector. Makes sense, right? If the non-union workplaces weren't offering comparable wages to the union workplaces, how would they get employees?

My father-in-law had a good non-union job in a factory half of which was organized (I'm not sure how the breakdown worked) and apparently used to laugh himself sick at the suckers paying union dues when he was getting the same pay without the dues. Of course, then he got fired when he hit his mid-fifties: they transferred him to a job involving heavy lifting that he couldn't do anymore, and then fired him for non-performance.

To clarify, I'm not saying that non-union jobs pay as well as comparable union jobs as a rule -- just that non-union jobs pay better than they would in the absence of competition for workers from unionized workplaces.

Re: 112

I think your position is untenable if you really are trying to argue that unions in all ways make life better for everyone. Obviously they do not. The comments above about how even liberals do not support unions like they used to are completely true when you define support to mean the blind bleief that unionization and the things unions do are always good, or are even always a net good.

Sometimes they are. Sometimes they are not. Like most other things in life, it depends.

That said, I would agree with the proposition that even people who self-identify as liberals are much less aware of the benefits to workers of unionization than people used to be. There is no doubt that unions have done a lot of good, even net good.

As I mentioned in comment 54 above, it's illegal for BPS teachers to strike. In calling a strike vote over class size, they were accepting the possibility of considerable penalties in order to maintain a reasonable learning environment. This was not about money--teachers were to be paid a $3500 stipend for each student over the limit. I wonder what those classrooms would be like without the limited influence of the union.

Dunno about that, LB. One argument that's floating around is that unions agitated for health benefits packages for their particular shop, for their particular sector, instead of supporting the broader push for universal coverage. The labor movement in the US was already feeling the heat in the 70s and 80s, and I think negotiators may have just panicked and tried to get whatever they could for their people, at a time when European labor parties were locking in much more general gains. I don't know much about this history, but every time a contract expires and all hell breaks loose, I keep wishing health care weren't so vulnerable.

My mother has been a member of NCAE for over 30 years.

My impression was that NCAE, given that it couldn't strike, is less union and more professional development & support organization + lobby, though now that I type it out I think that's a really dumb differentiation on my part. Still, no striking makes it hard to demand change.

I think your position is untenable if you really are trying to argue that unions in all ways make life better for everyone.

Funny, I could have sworn that 112 was a limited claim about the effect of unionization in a market sector on the wages of non-union workplaces in that same sector. I'll have to work on the quality of my writing.

Or, to be less sarcastic, what made you think that I was trying to argue that "unions in all ways make life better for everyone"? Because that would be a very silly thing to argue, like almost anything with absolutes in it. I think that unions are generally a net good thing, and in areas where I'm not yet familiar with all the facts I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt, but that's very different.

100, 105, 109: My son has just been accepted to all of the selective high schools he applied to. We've interviewed and compared. The choice is between the school my daughter attends, which has been a very happy place for her, and an international baccalaureate program. The IB is clearly very rigorous and demanding, and the history/social studies in particular seemed very impressive. On the other hand, four years of chemistry? That's odd, to say the least.

Our general impression is that the IB is rigorous but also rigid. Very rigid. Arts instruction, art as a humanity—my daughter's four years of theater have involved more cultural history and literary interpretation by themselves than many kids get altogether—are afterthoughts in this version of IB.

In both schools his classmates will be very talented, and that fact alone, and the level it permits, are probably the biggest determinates of how high the cirriculum is pitched.

We're going to go with the school my daughter attends, which is what he wants to do.

re: 118.

Actually, your 112 appeared to be a claim that unions are about enriching labor at the expense of capital; not about pitting one group of laborers against each other. But as long as we agree that that is an untenable claim made generally, my work here is done.

116: I don't really see a good argument for putting the link between employment and health care primarily at labor's door rather than at the door of the designers of tax policy that made health insurance deductible so it was a cheap benefit to give out. American labor has been less powerful than European labor for a long time, and so has been less effective in making societal changes that benefit everyone, but that's different from saying that the benefits that accrue to union members come at the expense of other workers, rather than at the expense of those who own the workplaces.

Still, no striking makes it hard to demand change.

True enough. My mother never forgave Jim Hunt for freezing teacher salaries for five straight years during his first go-round as governor.

120: Except that you've made no argument that unions are about pitting one group of workers against another, making my statement a perfectly reasonable one (particularly in the context of 110, which I was responding to).

112: The examples that I had in mind were cross-sector (I write software, the longshoreman's union struck to prevent the installation of computerized label-scanning devices in ports) or public-sector (San Francisco has more firehouses than it needs, fireman's union prevented the closure of any).

My thinking this way may be due to the lack of unionization in the software development field (except in cases where management has been well and truly screwing their employees: e.g. EA, but then again everyone wants to write video games, so what do you expect?).

121.--I agree that the primary cause for the failure of universal health coverage in the US is elsewhere. However, the labor movement didn't make a big political push for it until recently, which is understandable but too bad.

125: Sure, but that's still a claim that organized labor didn't do as much good as it might have done, not that organized labor's gains are 'unambiguously' at the expense of everyone else.

Unions are about addressing a particular bargaining imbalance between employers and labour. Through their collective bargaining unions have often but not always improved conditions for all.

It's hardly a criticism of unions that they failed to make things better for everyone, everywhere, ffs.

I mostly agree with 127. Part of the point I was trying to make in 114, though, is that by standards of 20 or 30 years ago, the claim in 127 would be scorned as insufficiently pro-union.

This is the hoxby paper baa mentioned:
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/hoxby/papers/teachersunion_oct2000.pdf

Here is general overview of studys of the effects of teacher unionization:
http://epsl.asu.edu/epru/documents/EPRU%202002-101/Chapter%2010-Carini-Final.pdf

I'm not sure if that's true. Or at least, I'm not sure if it's true in the British context -- which is the one I'm familiar with.

There may have been a greater emotional attachment to the labour movement in the 70s and through the early 80s, but it's not as if people were wide eyed innocents in thrall to the mighty union. People were perfectly aware of the failings of unions as much as their successes.

So, okay, 20 or 30 years ago, you encountered some people who you believed to be pro-union to the point of irrationality.

Fascinating.

So, okay, 20 or 30 years ago, you encountered some people who you believed to be pro-union to the point of irrationality.

What is more interesting that some of them still appear to exist today.

Other than bickering, what's your point with relation to anything actually said by me or anyone else in this thread today?

Fascinating

It is, actually. I always want to know the history of people's feelings and allegiances, the stories and the memories. I love them because they complicate things. Remember the doubletakes last week when Idealist remembered some hippyish ascpects of his youth in the seventies? That's what I like; how we got here.

re: 134 and those stories and allegiances ...

I suspect that nostalgia for the days of 'big' labour and strong unions and the association of the Labour Party with it has helped our (British) current shower of bastards to act in ways that are more illiberal and reationary than their Tory opponents.

what's your point with relation to anything actually said by me or anyone else in this thread today?

Go read my comments, I have made several.

You comment mostly seems to be an exercise in being nasty because I disagreed with you. If it was seriously meant, I think if you read my comments, their points are evident. I will--assuming that your question was seriously meant--point out that I think your claim that unions are about enriching labor at the expense of capital might be true in the trivial sense that they might explain the motivations of some union members or supporters, but it really misses the mark in the real world. Obviously, to the extent that the purpose of the union is to capture more of the economic pie for workers, it will increase the cost of production and--potentially (and usually) it will increase the costs of good to their ultimate consumers. Not all (and in today's world, as was pointed out above--not even most in the country) workers are unionized, do not get the benefit of increased wages/benefits, and thus to some extent the unionized workers have taken their share of the pie both from "capital" and from other consumers. Indeed, to the extent unionization drives up labor costs, it also can result in less employment, or alternative forms of employment--outsourcing, sub-contracting, etc. to avoid those higher costs. All of those practices affect other workers and consumers in general.

Does this prove that unions are always (or ever) net bad? Of course not. But the idea that the equation is all about labor taking more of the pie from capital is simply wrong.

So, okay, 20 or 30 years ago, you encountered some people who you believed to be pro-union to the point of irrationality.

I haven't been following this thread closely but this seems unfair. Given your affection for Which Side Are You On, I would think you would be more sympathetic to the claim that Labor used to be more of a cultural force than it is now and, more importantly, that there used to be more political/tribal identification with unions that there is no and that this change is related to the loss of power of unions.

One of the thing that this thread reminds me is how endearing I find LB's pro-union blogging, so I'm surprised to hear sound like you're mocking the idea of people having a tribal identification with unions that ignores cost/benefit analysis. Regardless of whether that's a good thing, I'm surprised that it doesn't strike a chord.

From Thomas Geohegan:

"The subversive thing about labor is not the strike, but the idea of solidarity. The whole thrust of organized labor is to ... well, not socialism but something. What does labor want? We want ... we don't know what we want."

"Even liberals, even progressives do not seem to need us. At least, organized labor, I think, is incomprehensible to them. In some ways American liberals, even American radicals have more in common with the Reagan right than with us. All of them, the whole bunch, are middle class Emersonian individualists. Emerson, Thoreau, all of these guys are scabs. Lane Kirkland is outside the American consensus in a way that even Abbie Hoffman never was."

Doesn't this evoke a very different spirit than all of the comments in this thread?

That actually has enough substance to talk about, which your prior comments didn't. Note that I was responding to a claim that unions were 'unambiguously about enriching/benefiting their members at the expense of everyone else'; I was taking issue at that 'unambiguously' and the 'everyone else'. It's my understanding that there's pretty good evidence for the union threat effect as a means of raising wages for unorganized workers in the same sector; it is certainly true that the political activity of organized labor is behind plenty of the laws that protect all workers, organized or not, in the US. The statement I was responding to was just wrong in its claim that there were no beneficial spillover effects from organized labor to unorganized workers.

Certainly, the negative externalities you allude to (higher wages leading to higher costs of goods; possible lowered demand for labor) are possible, and may happen depending on the industry, but the fact that the effects of organization are mixed is not equivalent to saying that the existence of organized labor is unambiguously negative for anyone not a union member (which is the claim that I understood 110 to be making).

I don't have the time to read all of these comments, but I want to make a couple of points:

1) Tenure, at least in California, does not mean that a teacher is "permanent," or that s/he can't be fired. What it means is that there are certain procedural hoops that you have to go through to terminate a teacher. It makes termination more than just a casual process, but it's far from impossible -- or even, really all that difficult -- to terminate a bad teacher. A teacher can be removed from the classroom immediately, upon a days' notice, in California, although s/he will remain on payroll until officially terminated.

2) Teachers do need protection, although perhaps not for the same reasons as university professors. Classrooms are difficult and disputatious environments. The students, parents and administrators are all competing "bosses," who get to tell a teacher, in a sense, how to do her/his job. It is sometimes to the advantage of a student or an administrator to discredit a teacher; and because the field of childhood education is so touchy and sensitive, people are quick to lay blame on the only adult in the room whenever something goes wrong.

3) Back to point (1), above. Teachers unions -- at least, the ones I've worked with -- are pretty practical when it comes to whether or not they believe a district has reason to terminate a tenured teacher. Unions don't want to expend resources on a losing case. Sometimes it is clear to all that a given teacher should not be in the classroom. It is not hard to then cut a deal to get the teacher out in a speedy way that still avoids humiliating the teacher.

137: Dude, I was reacting to snark. Sure, it's possible to have a tribal identification with labor. I do, and I sympathize with anyone else who does. That doesn't make me irrational or unreliable on the subject, as Ideal was implying, anymore than his military career and resulting tribal identification makes him presumptively irrational or unreliable on anything having to do with the military.

In some ways American liberals, even American radicals have more in common with the Reagan right than with us. All of them, the whole bunch, are middle class Emersonian individualists. Emerson, Thoreau, all of these guys are scabs

That's a nice quote. That's something of what I was getting at above when I said that "most 'liberals' are centre-right and generally anti-labour in their politics."

The European left is different, and, to som extent still retains some of that connection with organised labour [apart, I think, from the 'greens'].

My "unambiguous" was clearly wrong. I should have said "largely".

I see I've missed some action here, but if LB is acknowledging that unions may have costs and that the inability to fire a bad teacher might have *some relationship* to union rules as opposed to being a exclusively a 'management problem' I'll consider that a win. I completely agree that merit-based systems are more difficult to administer tha just paying everyone the same, and that there is always a danger of wrongful firing. That other industries, and indeed, other *schools*, seem to manage these problems without disasterous results seems relevant to me.

Joeo's references are good ones, and I'd add this less technical Hoxby as a start at answering the question of whether public, unionized schools have a decisive advantage in teacher quality over non-unionized private counterparts.

I'd still have been arguing with you over the 'largely'. While the negative externalities Ideal points out are real, they aren't necessarily that big: labor isn't the largest part of the cost of goods, so a rise in wages is going to be reflected by a smaller percentage rise in prices; and the effects on the demand for labor aren't necessarily going to be large. And the positive externalities appear to me to be more significant.

This is down to an empirical matter now, and one that needs serious study rather than off-the-cuff analysis; without that, I don't think you can defensibly say that unions are a net evil to all those not union members (which is what you still seem to be committed to if you substitute 'largely' into your prior post.)

144 to 142.

To 143: If that's the limit of the position you're now arguing, I think we can both chalk it up as a win.

My best friend from high school teaches disabled kids in Minneapolis Public Schools, and had a post just the other day related to this topic.

Dude, I was reacting to snark.

That's fine, I just wanted to provide a small dose of labor romanticism which I felt was missing from the thread.

Which makes me wish I had more time to look at baa's citations about flattened salary scales having a negative impact. The more I think about it the more I think that, if true, I find that disturbing (FWIW I work for a small company which, matching trends, doesn't have salaries or benefits that are as good as those at larger companies but I appreciaite the fact that everyone is in the same boat and that the salary range between the highest paid owner and the lowest paid employee is not large)

other *schools*

I wonder how schools have managed to make merit pay work. Is it based on test score improvement? College placement? Evaluations from parents, or from administrators? It'd be interesting to see the specifics.

137 and 141 are very close to the way I experience this issue in a way that 12, "teachers unions = code for liberals", is very far away. Some of the most excruciating conversations I've had are with impeccably credentialed white liberals of a certain age and professional-managerial-class status who, when the subject matter turns to unions, go apeshit about how if it weren't for the teachers' unions they'd be able to improve the lot of the wee brown babies in the schools. It's absolutely baffling except for that Geoghan quote, which lays it out neatly.

The persistence of this discussion among liberals speaks to just how uncomfortable American liberals are with solidarity as a virtue and the contributions of radicals. Liberal discourse accepts that a market system, with some softening around the edges, is fundamentally meritocratic and that's a good thing. But social-economic life is dominated by huge social forces, and the healthy expression of individuality that liberals value (myself certainly included) depends on countervailing forces like unions and government in interdependent action. That individualism depends on some expression of collective action has just never sunk in for a lot of otherwise right-thinking liberals.

Of course, within a single school, the problems of a non-homogenous student body are pretty small. From one school to another within a school system encompassing hundreds of thousands of students, not so much.

149: Yep. I'm sitting here at my desk humming Billy Bragg's Which Side Are You On? to myself.

Also, paragraphs like my second one in 149 above are the reason that people like me have no friends. Anyone want to say that better?

Apropos of 151, for my 16th birthday, my mom bought me a CD of Billy Bragg's protest songs as a birthday present, but I traded it for a friend's cassette of his love songs. (The Internationale for Worker's Playtime, to be specific.) This dynamic tends to play out a lot for me. Plus I never could get anywhere with activist girls.

"American liberals are hesitant to whole-heartedly support collectivism because they don't want to come across as a bunch of Communists."

Sing it:

Now the lessons of the past were all learned with workers' blood
The mistakes of the bosses we must pay for
From the cities and the farmlands to trenches full of mud
War has always been the bosses' way, sir

The Union forever defending our rights
Down with the blackleg, all workers unite
With our brothers and out sisters from many far off lands
There is power in a Union

152: Nope, but I'll join you in a rousing chorus of Solidarity Forever if you like (it's to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, if you don't know):

When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,
There will be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun,
But no force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
For the Union makes us strong!

19

For the record I do not believe that everything that is wrong with American schools is the fault of the teacher's union. I also agree with 64 and 97 that the amount wrong is exaggerated. A belief that American schools are lousy is convenient for many groups. It gives anti-union people an excuse to bash the teachers union. It gives libertarians, with their mystical belief in markets, an excuse to push vouchers. It gives liberals, with their mystical belief in academic education for everybody, an excuse to push greater pay and status for teachers.

Hah. Pre-empted.

The union needs better, updated songs to speak to Generation Awesome. Maybe that can be Britney's comeback.

better, updated songs

Hrmph. Take it back or I'll type in all the verses to Joe Hill.

Take it back, or you get to do pointless typing? Oh, this is going to be a hard decision.

Yeah, I realized that I'd set myself up a bit there. It's a great song, though: "and standing there, as big as life, and smiling with his eyes, says Joe 'What they forgot to kill, went on to oooor-ganize, went on, to ooor-ganize."

Coming very late to the party, and only scanning the comments I wanted to point out some of the animosity towards teacher's unions is because "capital" in this case is not a plutocrat such as myself, but you, the taxpayer. Any gain to the worker is at the expense of the taxpayer in a very direct way, and Joe Bogodonuts knows that the school district can't go out of business, like what happened to him when GM closed the plant.

God we need new songs. One more round of "We Shall Not Be Moved" could make me an Objectivist.

112

"Not really. They're about enriching labor at the expense of capital; not about pitting one group of laborers against each other. My understanding of the data (and I'm doing this off the top of my head, rather than doing the work of looking it up) is that unionization in a market sector drives up wages of non-union workplaces in that sector. Makes sense, right? If the non-union workplaces weren't offering comparable wages to the union workplaces, how would they get employees?"

Actually it doesn't make sense at least according to Econ 101. Higher wages in unionized workplaces will reduce their demand for labor. The displaced workers will increase the supply of workers competing for jobs in non-union workplaces reducing wages there.

A friend of mine once pointed out that you can sing Stevie Wonder's Penisquite well to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Verse Melody:

Stevie Wonder's penis is erect because he's blind.
It's erect because he's blind.
It's erect because he's blind.
Stevie Wonder's penis is erect because he's blind.
ERECT BECAUSE HE'S BLIND!

Then you have backup singers hum the chorus melody while the singer intones:

I got high last night on LSD
My mind was beautiful, and I was free
Warts loved my nipples because they are pink
Vomit on me, baby
Yeah Yeah Yeah.

Let's make love under the stars and watch for UFOs
And if little baby Martians come out of the UFOs
You can fuck them
Yeah Yeah Yeah.

The zebra spilled its plastinia on bemis
And the gelatin fingers oozed electric marbles
Ramona's titties died in hell
And the Nazis want to kill everyone.

As an aside, when I was an undergrad there was a short-lived project at UNC to create a dial-up BBS to serve as a light-duty ISP for teachers who couldn't afford internet access. The original name for the project was Schools On-Line and I got the joyous task of explaining to the prof in charge why it wasn't the best idea in the universe to give the name "S.O.L.," which was how she wanted it referred to in all materials, to a project meant to help financially disadvantaged teachers in rural areas.

The other reason "people" hate the teacher's unions is because the are too reliably for the Democrats. The prison guards have a lot more clout, esp. here in CA, because they spread the wealth around. They got a little to blatant with the quid pro quo, which led to the Davis recall.

163: Yes, that's true, certainly for people like Kaus, but it's not identical to the typical right-wing resentment towards public employees. It's both resentful and high-minded. I think it comes from people who don't want to look at the advantages they had in the classroom as students (being well off, being smart, being "good at school"); also, from liberal technocrats who see education as a benign factory system that they should be able to perfect in the design.

165: And the countervailing 'union threat' effect doesn't work at all because? (Nice use of 'Econ 101', btw.)

163: I've never seen anyone else except my dad refer to that pillar of the ethnic working class Joey Bagadonuts.

102: Part of the problem is that some unions (Teamsters, UAW) have done a pretty effective job of demonizing themselves. I recognize a right to bargain collectively and strike. I don't recognize a right to effectively commandeer other people's property and livelihoods (by vandalism, harassment or violence vs. management or strike breakers). And unions are often willing, even eager, to throw the least senior workers under the bus in negotiations with employers in financial trouble, demonstrating that the "I've got mine, jack" philosophy is not confined to self-styled libertarian bloggers.

Unions are obviously necessary as a threat, and often necessary and helpful in practice. But you can't deny there have been some hideous examples of misbehavior, examples that rival the misbehavior of corporate managers. In general, I'm not convinced that power in the hands of big unions is any more guaranteed to be benign than power concentrated in the hands of the government or big business. In all three cases, it's mostly used for reasonable ends, but fairly often perverted.

In general, I'm not convinced that power in the hands of big unions is any more guaranteed to be benign than power concentrated in the hands of the government or big business.

Sure. Power corrupts and so forth. But Enron isn't an indictment of markets generally, while Jimmy Hoffa gets treated as an indictment of labor generally.

171- Yes, he's an old friend of mine. I remember his wedding to Mary Jane Rottencrotch. (Forgive the outdated misogyny.)

The reason people hate teacher's unions is simple. Competition for scarce resources. The parents at PK's school are all pissed off because the teachers are going to go to a "banking minutes" plan where the kids will get out early one day a week in order to give the teachers work time to do things like--gasp--talk about pedagogy, coordinate curricular responses to the constant stream of new political requirements, and probably do some of the goddamn prep work they're constantly drowning in. If we gave a rat's ass about a collective social obligation towards kids (the usual response to pointing out school funding problems in my neck of the woods is "that's what the lottery money is for" as if that means that there's plenty of funding), we wouldn't make teachers and parents fight tooth and nail over who gets precious time to do the parts of their jobs that don't involve face time with the kids.

I think that the disfunctions of American education are greatly exaggerated. In most cases, motivated kids with reasonably supportive parents can get an adequate education.

Emerson, I love you man. But please (and this goes for everyone who agreed with this statement) read some fucking Jonathan Kozol. Education is fine in the white suburbs. It is not fine in places that are not white suburbs. If we're all okay with the situation, then cool. I'm not okay with it.

144: But you're a lawyer, and like to argue. And I just like to argue, but have no excuse. So we'd probably be arguing anyway.

But the main thrust of organized labor is "pay us more, because we've cornered the market on what you need" (in this case, auto assembly line workers), which is precisely the use of market power that pisses people off about the cable companies, or about Cisco (in the computer networking field), or about Microsoft.

There may be positive externalities, but the smaller the fraction of the populace that is part of organized labor, the less claim the movement has to representing the masses, and the less popular it will be.

172 we should break down a little bit. Vandalism, harrassment and violence are all illegal. I will take the strong position that they should remain so. Questions about seniority are political and strategic ones internal to unions, and if you're saying that senior employees should feel layoffs first, I will disagree. (If you're saying that unions shouldn't negotiate two-tiered systems that disadvantage new hires, I will agree -- but again, for strategic reasons regarding overall strength.)

As for the question of whether "power in the hands of big unions is guaranteed to be benign" -- I won't take the bait and say there are no guarantees, but I will say I believe that in every case, having a strong union is preferable to not.

Also: the awesome power of the teachers' unions is perfectly encapsulated by the bloated paychecks teachers take home each month.

177: I think you've got to distinguish between envy and injury there. Union jobs are good jobs, generally, and in a world where most people don't have them, that breeds resentment. That fact doesn't make people without union jobs literally worse off for the existence of union jobs. Again, while the negative externalities exist, they aren't huge.

(If you're saying that unions shouldn't negotiate two-tiered systems that disadvantage new hires, I will agree -- but again, for strategic reasons regarding overall strength.)

And unions are generally really on top of this -- that was what last winter's NYC transit strike was; resistance to a management attempt to set up a two tiered retirement (or was it health benefits?) system disadvantaging new hires. Management pushes these systems because they're a spectacularly effective way of breaking solidarity.

180: I thought the discussion was about popularity/demonization of unions, not their net (beneficial) effect on society. Resentment and envy will most likely have negative effects on popularity, that would be lessened if more people knew someone who had a cushy union job, yes?

pay us more, because we've cornered the market on what you need

This makes it sound like labor has some huge, monopolistic advantage over management/capital, but it's really just a slightly more level playing field than there otherwise would be. Employers still have the bulk of the power.

I was thinking of the conversation as being about whether the demonization was justified, rather than explainable. Explainable I'll give you; justified I won't.

I think it makes sense to consider cost-benefit analyses of union contracts or to try to measure the net effect teachers' unions have had on school districts. But my belief that workers should be able to participate in decisions about their work environment is quite separate from my assessment of the outcome they achieve. Even if I disagreed with union members' choices or was presented with empirical evidence of a negative "net effect" from certain union contract choices, I would still defend every worker's right to participate in decision-making about wages and conditions of work.

For the individual worker, the outcome of union bargaining is the goal. But it is the participation itself, rather than the outcome, that I believe is beneficial for society--when people have some degree of agency in the workplace they are more likely to be engaged and participate outside of the workplace. (Obviously, this is "beneficial" only if you want to live in a participatory democracy.) I think this aspect of the labor movement is more threatening to powerful anti-union interests than teacher contract clauses prohibiting termination except for cause.

My assertion is that the decreased reputation is not soley due to demonization, but is also the result of decreased unionization causing the benefits to be less widely spread.

And unions are generally really on top of this

The SoCal grocery strike of 2003-4 was a sad example where they ended up conceding that point. Fortunately, they've made some headway in recent negotiations and may be able to eliminate the crap tier.

Oh, they don't always win, but I think you'd have to look pretty hard for a union accepting a two-tier setup without fighting it. It's not that they jump to sell out new hires, it's that they sometimes lack the leverage to protect them.

Re 180-182-184: do more Americans know a union member, or someone who is openly gay?

If you like Trader Joe's, and live East of the Mississippi you can thank the SoCal grocery strike for their expansion.

It seems likely that more Americans know a union member; I'd guess that more people here (and probably more of the "Right On!" liberals that are anti-union about whom you were speaking) know an openly gay person.

189: Hmm. I know a large number of openly gay people, and one first-grade teacher (who I assume is in the teacher's union). I also know some people who are struggling actors (in a music video here or there, auditioning all the time) who I assume must be in the SAG.

37

"is a bit of a fantasy, in that while firing for cause can be cumbersome under a union contract, it's never going to be literally impossible. If someone really needs to be fired, they can be, and if they aren't it's a management failure."

I think this is a bit disingenuous. The union contract makes it very difficult to fire teachers like this guy . But as long as it is not literally impossible it is managements fault if they aren't fired. Should we apply this principle to applying for government benefits, as long as it is not literally impossible to negotiate the process any failure to succeed is the fault of the applicant and not worth worrying about?

You can argue is not that important, New York City has 40000 teachers so if it has to pay 400 of them to do nothing because they can't be fired but are a menace in the classroom this only increases salarly costs by 1%. However as pointed out in 36 it is a public relations disaster. Also I find it hard to believe that the fact that it is almost impossible to be fired doesn't encourage lots of minor misconduct which adds up.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to side with people who claim that it's also really hard to be fired for sucking in the private sector, as watching Office Space will clearly illustrate.

Also I find it hard to believe that the fact that it is almost impossible to be fired doesn't encourage lots of minor misconduct which adds up.

Hey, just because you're so inclined doesn't mean everyone is.

That's a case where a hearing officer made a bad decision that took a long time to rectify. Being able to identify individual bad outcomes is not necessarily a sign of a global problem.

194: No, Jake. The private sector is a perpetual struggle of all against all. Every day, the weak are culled. Only those with ungainly and preposterous testicles (and who know how to use them) are invited back for another week on the island. Gazelles are not advised to work in the private sector. They will be eaten.

180 184

Is demonization of overpaid corporate executives also unjustified? The situations seem similar to me. When one group is getting more than its share everyone else is getting a bit less.

The differences in magnitude are worth noting, no?

Is demonization of overpaid corporate executives also unjustified?

Yes.

I'd agree that executives at large corporations are, as a class, overpaid, and would deny that union members are. That doesn't justify demonizing either, but the process by which CEO compensation is set has very little to do with anything that looks like a market, and is extraordinarily messed up.

Sure. Power corrupts and so forth. But Enron isn't an indictment of markets generally, while Jimmy Hoffa gets treated as an indictment of labor generally.

Clearly Enron *shouldn't* be considered an indictment of markets generally, but it's not clear to me that it isn't treated as such by many people. There's probably a lot more anti-union laundry hanging out to dry in the public sphere, but that has a lot to do with the right wing noise machine (IMO). In terms of actual sentiment of people generally, I'd guess that anti-corporatism (and various kinds of illiberal economic populism) is about as prevalent as anti-unionism.

So yeah, if you want to argue that the rightwingpunditocracy demonizes unions unfairly, I certainly can't object. But that's pretty much their mission in life -- to unfairly demonize everything they don't like.

The question is how much traction they've gained in the populace as a whole. I think people question the benefits v. costs of unions in a way they did not used to, but that's about as far as it goes for anyone who hasn't bought into the right wing party line. But I consider the old line liberal shibboleth against any criticism of unions to have been a *problem*, not a particularly good thing.

198-201: "I didn't give 'em hell; I told 'em the truth, and they thought it was hell."

In terms of actual sentiment of people generally, I'd guess that anti-corporatism (and various kinds of illiberal economic populism) is about as prevalent as anti-unionism.

This is in no way congruent with my experience. Admittedly, I'm sitting in a law firm, but I could throw a rock down the hall and hit four people who think that unions are a social evil that should be eliminated. I don't know anyone offhand who thinks corporations should be eliminated rather than reined in.

201: Yes. The guilty players in the excessive executive compensation game are to a small extent the executives themselves, to a larger extent the "compensation consultants", and to a much bigger extent the boards of directors, who are theoretically supposed to represent the shareholders.

Schwarzenegger leashing CalPERS is one of the worst things he's done as governor.

200 201

Ok, good liberals don't like to demonize anybody. How about criticizing overpaid corporate executives and/or union members, is that ok?

204: Law firms are about as anti-union as you can get. Up-or-out all the way. See what they say if you suggest letting law firms create a corporate structure (i.e. let people who aren't part of the bar have an ownership interest).

Still, "Unions are obsolete and corrupt -- there's no need for them and they shouldn't exist" is a not implausible belief for a mainstream person to hold. "Corporations should be eliminated" is far, far less conventionally acceptable.

172 we should break down a little bit. Vandalism, harrassment and violence are all illegal. I will take the strong position that they should remain so.

I agree. But the law often looked the other way at union intimidation (especially in the 60s/70s when unions were very strong), in the same way it looked the other way at corporate intimidation in the late 19th century.

What's your position on a law that prevents hiring permanent replacements in response to a strike. My position (as someone who has had to hire people) is that if that's actually more profitable than negotiating with the union, that the union is being radically unreasonable in their demands.

Questions about seniority are political and strategic ones internal to unions, and if you're saying that senior employees should feel layoffs first, I will disagree.

No, but a union negotiator who responds to "Look, we don't have the money. We're already stretching to keep everybody on. If we put a 5% pay raise in the new contract, we're going to have to layoff 5% of the workers." with "I understand, but I know how this goes down with the members. Lay 'em off." is definitely throwing the least senior workers under the bus. Yes, that's an actual story.

208 et al: Well, I'd sooner have unions eliminated than corporations, though I think both hypothetical worlds would be hellish. But I actually have *more* anti-corporate sentiment than anti-union (I'd call myself pro-union). I just think corporations are more a more fundamental necessary evil, and unions just a very imperfect way to make a world with corporations compatible with decent standards of living. Unions don't exist in a world without corporations. So I don't think the comparison works.

Depends on how long the layoff's for, doesn't it? Someone who's now got a contractual right to be rehired at a better salary if the company needs more workers in the future hasn't been unambiguously deserted, particularly given that there's no reason to think that they wouldn't have been laid off in the absence of the negotiations.

208: I think "Unions should be eliminated" as in "workers shouln't have a right to collectively bargain" is not a socially acceptable viewpoint. I hear lots of "I'm special enough that I don't need to work with others, I do better on my own, but sure, people who are idiots with no skills need a union."

"Eliminating the corporation" is also a lot more fuzzy; I'd venture that there's a lot of confusion over if the problem, such as it is, is a) the profit motive, b) limited liability, c) separation of ownership and management, or d) size.

Unions don't exist in a world without corporations.

Not so as a matter of history -- people organized workplaces owned by sole proprietors before corporations were as common as they are now.

205

I think you are letting the executives themselves off easy, after all they are supposed to have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders.

Or maybe we should just blame Joseph Lieberman.

212: I'd agree that I don't hear it in the form of 'the law should prohibit collective bargaining'. I do hear people claiming that unions aren't a good thing under any circumstances, though, not just that they, personally, would never belong to one.

That's pretty funny. Lawyers talking about unions as a social evil that should be eliminated.

What are the various bar associations but big powerful unions?

The anarchist sorts I sometimes traffic with have a much bigger problem with the Bars than with more typical unions, because of all the regulatory support they get from big government. For the most part, unions like the UAW only have as much bargaining power as their members skills allow.

A libertarian would argue that unions shouldn't have any special government granted privileges (and neither should corporations), but the idea that they shouldn't be allowed to exist seems like it tips right over into fascism.

"Eliminating corporations" is also made much more complicated by the fact that there are so many different forms of them, and picking which ones you want to get rid of, and how, involves a lot more decisions and line-drawing than getting rid of unions would. It's not really a coherent concept.

213: But anti-corporate sentiments would generally apply just as much to the kind of early sole proprietorships you talk about, no?

216: Don't people have similar feelings about the AMA?

It's not really a coherent concept.

I'm not following this. I agree that the resulting social chaos would make it absolutely unworkable, but every state has a series of statutes under which corporations are created. You repeal those statutes, and pass another law saying that owners of stock in any previously existing corporation are now partners in very very large partnerships, and bob's your uncle. What's incoherent?

See "confused concept of 'corporation'" in 212. Some people care about separation of ownership and management, but I can't imagine that that's a signficant part of anti-corporatism.

218: Well, there's anti-capitalist feeling, which applies regardless of the form of the business, but the analogy to that would be any feeling against laborers generally. The limited liability corporate form is a pretty good analogy on the side of capital for the function unions serve on the side of labor.

220: By "not coherent" I really just mean "very underdefined". It'd be like cutting the red parts out of a picture of a rainbow. What do you mean by red? Do you include orange? Etc.

215

To a certain kind of free market fundamentalist unions are bad for the same reason trusts are bad they make markets less competitive. Which may explain why the union I am most sympathetic with is the baseball players association.

Okay, but I can walk out of my office to the wall of black books with the laws of NY State in them, and pull down the volume labeled 'Corporation Law'. Everything that is a corporation chartered under the laws of NY State is defined therein. Likewise for the other 49 states -- there's a book, not particularly large, that exhaustively defines exactly what a corporation is. It's not a fluid, organically arising concept -- corporations are tightly and artificially defined.

What 225 said. 'Corporation' isn't synonymous with 'business.' It's really easy to define: if you've taken legal steps, X, Y, and Z, you're incorporated. If you haven't, you're not.

225: And if you repealed all of those laws, people wouldn't find ways to do the same sort of things using other legal mechanisms?

Well, I don't think it's the *law* that's fuzzy, it's anti-corporate feeling that's fuzzy.

209: I am for such a law.

Nader was talking about "the corporate death penalty" for a while -- that you could revoke the charter of a corporation if it was particularly malfeasant. I'd say that's an eminently reasonable idea which has about the same popularity as LB's Unions shouldn't exist in 208.

229: what would the corporate death penalty entail? Fire everyone, liquidate the assets, and distribute the proceeds to the shareholders? Give the proceeds to the government?

No. The limited liability corporate form is not a natural thing in our system of law -- what it means is that whatever the debts of the corporation, and whatever misdeeds it commits, the owners aren't financially responsible beyond the value of their stake in the corporation.

If you own a cab, and the driver who works for you hits someone and cripples them, you're personally liable for a judgment on behalf of the person injured regardless of how big it is, and there's no legal way around that. If you own all the stock in a corporation that owns the cab, and all the corporation owns is the cab, when you cripple a pedestrian, all they can recover is what the corporation owns. They can't come after you. The limited liability form is an immensely valuable privilege granted by the state, and it can't be duplicated by contract because it affects people who have not chosen to enter into any agreement with the business in question, like my injured pedestrian.

231 to 227.

229: Not sure; I imagine it would maybe use bankruptcy court as a point of departure, some sort of judicial receivership. Multinational Monitor has an article here.

231

"If you own a cab, and the driver who works for you hits someone and cripples them, you're personally liable for a judgment on behalf of the person injured regardless of how big it is, and there's no legal way around that. ..."

I don't think this is clear. You can lease the cab to the driver so he is working for himself not for you. Then it is a question of whether vicarious liability applies. It might but our system of law does not require it.

If you maintain control of how the driver does his work, as you're generally going to need to do to run a business of any size, he's going to be regarded as your agent and you're on the hook. Certainly you can try to insulate yourself from liability, but in the absence of the corporate form there's no way to run a business and effectively shield yourself with any certainty.

How important is limited liability in anti-corporatist critiques? I guess that technically speaking it out to be *the* thing, but I don't get that impression. And that might be due to my unfamiliarity with anti-corporatism.

I could throw a rock down the hall and hit four people who think that unions are a social evil that should be eliminated.

But do you actually do it? No. All talk, no action.

The executive compensation issue is really in a class by itself. The worst cases are when executive loot a company while they're mismanaging it into unprofitability. The victims aren't primarily labor or the general public, but the company's theoretical owners.

I think that this whole comparison between unions and corporate management is a wast-of-time red herring. Yes, if you tweak everything just right it's possible to describe the two situations so that they seem very similiar, and if that's the outcome I wanted I'd tweak everything that way.

re: 236

I've certainly read critiques of contemporary capitalism that are entirely against the particular legal apparatus that allows corporations to function in certain ways, and limited liability and corporate person-hood in particular, but which aren't anti- free markets in general.

The various free-market anti-capitalist types like Kevin Carson take that view.

The PeachPit Press guy's book on corporations, (Ted Nace's Gangs of America) takes a similar line on corporate liability.

209: what's horrible about that story? The union was forced to make a tough choice, so it did. Someone was going to lose.

free-market anti-capitalist

Is there an introductory paper on this somewhere?

re: 240

Carson's site (both his blog and http://www.mutualist.org) is pretty good.

Thanks.

214: Lieberman has always been a bad guy even on non-military issues. He basically made sure that the Democrats were not able to capitalize on Enron or do much about it. He was close to Arthur Anderson, which was so heavily tied to Enron that they went bankrupt too.

233: Bankruptcy court would indicate stock becomes worthless, management gets fired, workers may or may not get fired. I still think that there's a lot of muddy thinking behind the "corporate death penalty", but I also assumed that most people were not in fact talking about the limited liability corporate structure in their anti-corporatist critiques, when it appears that is not the case, at least on Unfogged.

The thing about the limited liability structure is that it's what enables the pervasiveness of huge businesses -- the emotional reaction and opposition are to the hugeness, but the limited liability structure is what makes the hugeness possible. The limited liability structure also makes the widely distributed ownership, and resulting agency problems, of modern corporations possible -- the shortsighted chasing of next quarter's results is a function of managers trying to look good on paper, rather than serving the long-term interests of the owners and other stakeholders in the company. (Not that the longterm interests of the owners are necessarily benign, but it seems easy to believe that they're less nutty and destructive than doing whatever you have to do to get the next quarter's numbers up.)

Joe Bagadonuts

baa was actually talking about Joe Bogodonuts, Mr. Bagadonuts' non-Anglicized Slavic immigrant cousin. (Emphasis in his name is on the second syllable; in later generations his offspring moved it to the third syllable.)

Unions don't exist in a world without corporations.

Except that the starting point for this whole thread was a particular group of public-employee unions. I tend to believe that teachers' unions do more good than harm, but unionization and collective bargaining in the public sector differ from their private-sector analogues in some pretty fundamental ways, and I'm not convinced that private-sector abuses of employees say much one way or another about what's appropriate in the public sector.

244: Jake, I don't know that you've quite got your finger on the anti-corporate pulse of unfogged. Both LB and I were describing anti-corporate ideas in relation to the proposition that unions perish from the earth--LB one that is comparable in scale, and I one that was comparable in popularity (although I doubt only that). I'm happy to admit that I don't know the ins and outs of the Corporate Death Penalty, and I'm happy to cede you the work of researching it if you want to debunk it. LB can speak for herself, of course, but I would read her point as "the LLC structure is not natural and inevitable" rather than "the LLC structure has to go".

245

I don't see why limited liability is necessary for hugeness. Would Microsoft be any smaller if Bill Gates were personally liable for its debts?

Alas, Clownae, the joe bagodonuts remark was from TLL, not me.

I do, however, entirely endorse his point. Unions and many professional associations function like cartels. They exist for the benefits of their members. Thus, dermatologists limit new resident spots and unions seek closed shops for the same reason: to limit supply and drive up salaries. Mazel tov to them, I suppose. But it seems bizarre to get romantic over teachers, civil service, and police and fire unions which exist to extract additional compensation from the average taxpayer. In Nevada, 16% of the public employees make >$100,000. Does this fact inspire anyone to a rousing chorus of "look for the union label?"

249: This was sort of my thought on this.

Lacking limited liability, you just have Capital getting big loans from banks or bond markets instead of selling off ownership. So the main distinction is that the head honchos are personally liable for the corporation. Which they could probably still get around with trust funds and money in the Caymens or just occasionally going into bankruptcy. and getting another overpaid executive job.

Billy Bragg is so awesome tho.

Would Microsoft be any smaller if Bill Gates were personally liable for its debts?

Yes.

Which they could probably still get around with trust funds and money in the Caymens or just occasionally going into bankruptcy. and getting another overpaid executive job.

And trust funds, international banking, and bankruptcy are all entirely natural phenomenon.

But it seems bizarre to get romantic over teachers, civil service, and police and fire unions which exist to extract additional compensation from the average taxpayer.

Who are you talking to/about, baa?

250 -- the linked article is quite interesting, and I encourage everyone to read it. It isn't at all clear, however, that the problems described in the article are either typical of a larger pattern or union driven. But it is, nevertheless, a nice dose of anti-romanticism.

"Carl Nelson, a 30-year emergency medical services supervisor who, thanks to 2,400 hours of overtime, last year earned $232,791, well above [ Clark County Manager Virginia] Valentine's $180,692."

"As the Clark County School District strains to persuade 2,000 to 3,000 teachers a year to move to Southern Nevada for $33,000 starting salaries, tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money is going to high overtime bills for jailers, firefighters and others."

"In Southern Nevada, nearly 2,000 firefighters, police officers and corrections officers last year earned more than $100,000 - many of them much more - making the local jobs among the best-paying of their kind in the nation. The high salaries - substantially higher and more numerous than those in comparably sized cities elsewhere - also siphon off limited public dollars that otherwise could be used to improve the modest pay of other public workers or targeted at the array of problems facing local municipalities."

Most of the quotes talking about this as a problem are attributed to sources like "Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union" or "Bret Jacobson, a senior analyst for the Center for Union Facts, a conservative watchdog group in Washington" -- which isn't to say that the situation described isn't a problem, but that I don't trust their attribution of causes without evidence.

But the article is very interesting.

Here is the one section that specifically talks about unionization as a cause.

"Michael Shires, a public policy professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., said extensive use of overtime in public jobs, though not unique to Southern Nevada, often is seen as an abuse of public funding."

"(This) is very common, especially in places with heavily unionized public employees," Shires said. "Generally what happens is that from a management perspective you don't want to hire new officers unless you feel you will have stability of funding to keep that officer for a long period of time." "

I think, generally, people on the left of center romanticize unions. Heck, *I* romanticize unions. I always root for the strikers; I do in fact know all the lyrics to "look for the union label." It's been a bit of an education to see, over the course of my life, that public sector unions act like any other type of self-seeking interest group, and that the interest of public sector unions frequently diverge from the interests of the public. Maybe this realization is such second nature to you that it seems pointless of me to belabor it. Good for you, then.

The union needs better, updated songs to speak to Generation Awesome.

I must confess that I can't imagine joining in a chorus of "Solidarity Forever" unironically. I also find that my references for pro-worker music tend to be british -- Billy Brag, Ewan MacColl, Dick Gaughan, Leon Rosselson but there is Rebel Voices for a contemporary, local progressive musical duo.

I would start with Ewan MacColl though.