My friends who are still mourning Hillary’s loss like to say that (1) public school teachers are “underpaid,” and (2) workers need to be unionized. [What’s their mourning process, you might ask? Lately it seems to be full-time speculation about which women agreed to exchange cash for sex with a certain hated billionaire 12 or more years ago.]
The West Virginia teachers recently went out on strike. A Facebook friend interrupted his stream of Trump hatred to post “Solidarity forever. Most people in politics just talk about doing things for working people.” on top of an article about the Legislature giving unionized government workers a pay raise in hopes of ending the strike. (Now the median-earning “working people” in West Virginia will pay higher taxes so that the above-median-earning teachers in West Virginia can move farther away from the median. Also, it is likely that Medicaid funding will be cut so the poorest folks in West Virginia will be financing this raise as well.)
His friend added “The best part is it’s inspiring teacher strikes in other states, too!” and I couldn’t resist pointing out the apparent contradiction of Americans voting to spend $700 billion per year on K-12 schools and then celebrating when those schools were shut down. My response: “That IS awesome. There is nothing worse than children being in school.” (This was a most definite #NotFunnyAtAll!)
Although it was fun to rile up the righteous, let’s circle back to these dual beliefs. Teachers are underpaid and unions secure fair compensation for workers. If nearly all public school teachers are unionized and, at least in some states, they have the right to strike, how can they be underpaid? And if they are grievously underpaid, despite being unionized, shouldn’t they stop paying union dues? (maybe they will get their chance, depending on how the Supreme Court rules in the recently argued Janus v. AFSCME)
Related:
- BLS data on quit rates for public school teachers: They are only about 1/3rd as likely to quit their jobs compared to an average private sector worker, so apparently they are gluttons for punishment, showing up every day in exchange for an unfair wage. Or maybe this explains the difficulty that American K-12 students have with the critical thinking part of the PISA test. Teachers are unable to recognize how much better off they’d be if they quit their underpaid jobs and took different jobs. How can they then teach students to think critically about their own situations?
- BLS says that high school teachers need a bachelor’s degree and earned a median $58,030 annually two years ago.
- BLS says that the median worker with a bachelor’s degree earned $1,278 per week at the end of 2017. So if the school year is considered to be 40 weeks, that would be $51,120 per school year. (i.e., even if the value of health care, pension, and union protections against being fired were worth nothing, teachers earn an above-median cash wage among college-educated Americans)
Most people don’t think that “underpaid” means “paid less than the correct market-clearing wage for a particular set of skills”, they mean “paid less money than I think a person like this deserves.” Since lots of people know at least one teacher, and can identify with them (lots of teachers are native-born, white, college educated, and come from middle- or upper-middle-class backgrounds), lots of people think teachers deserve the same lifestyle as other people with the same background, but who made different education/career choices.
Obviously, the answer to your factoid about low teacher quit rates is that they know that they can’t, in fact, find anything that will pay them any better with their skillset.
Alex: If teachers “deserve” to be paid more, why can’t the union get them what they deserve? Why not simply stay out on strike until the politicians/taxpayers cave in and agree to be reasonable? (Having spent some time within the local public school recently, I would cave in quickly! The kids are fine, but the bureaucracy and regulations make it a job where a fair wage would be closer to $1 million per year.)
They didn’t exchange sex for cash, they exchanged keeping quiet about the sex for cash.
The funny thing about the latest wave of pearl-clutching is the delusions Trump’s opponents have about how Trump’s voters think. It is axiomatic to them that no one could legitimately think Hillary was bad, and that no one could legitimately agree with Trump on any issues, therefore Trump’s personality must have hypnotized them somehow, and if they can just show these people that Trump is a bad person they won’t vote for him, and because they voted for Trump they must “be” Republicans, and because they are Republicans they must “be” conservatives, and because they are “conservatives” they must oppose extramarital sex, so even though if doesn’t bother us that Clinton had extramarital sex it will surely change their minds about Trump if they knew that two women who made their living selling their bodies thought he was worth having sex with in addition to all the other women known to have had sex with him,….., profit!
Joe: Your theory is that the porn actress who got paid to have sex while a camera was rolling had off-camera sex with an ancient billionaire for free? Assuming that her stories about her sexual history are accurate, what would her motivation have been, if not cash in the bank?
“fun to rile up the righteous” explains most of your blog posts.
He was 60 at the time, not “ancient”, and his history indicates that plenty of women find billionaires with aggressive personalities to be genuinely desirable. There may have been a subconscious expectation that money would in some way become more easily available if a relationship with the billionaire occurred, but there is a significant proportion of porn stars who happen to like sex enough that they will have it with some men even without signing a contract first.
Of course, what women say they want, what they think they want, and what they actually want aren’t particularly correlated, so it’s hard to distinguish between their “motivations” in the economic, emotional, and Stanislavskian senses.
Reality is that teaching has become another bureaucracy which focuses on keeping its apparatchiks comfortable rather than effective.
In the words of a GE middle manager before Jack Welch showed up, “we were facing towards upper management while having our (butt) face the customer” from the book “Control Your Own Destiny or Someone Else Will” .
If they were underpaid they would get a job that paid them properly, no?
Jack: I think the answer to your question is definitely “no”! We have to assume that people act against their own interest.
For example, just today on Facebook a friend posted
http://www.fstopmagazine.com/blog/2018/03/book-review-the-good-fight-by-rick-smolan-and-jennifer-erwitt/
where Hans the author says “I knew that women do not get equal pay for the same work as men do.” Someone like you would ask Why didn’t the magazine hire a woman to write the review instead, then? Wouldn’t they be interested in cutting their costs and increasing their profits by getting an equally qualified writer at a lower cost? So… the answer is that people don’t respond to cash incentives or maybe the reviewer, despite being named “Hans,” actually identifies as a woman.
It would interesting to see what these people write on Facebook. From what I see on the internet and the real world, it’s mostly Trump supporters who are still going on about Hillary Clinton. Most people see her as a person who is fading into history.
It’s also interesting that such people should be called righteous. Most Trump voters often express righteous anger at things like poor people getting access to food and health care or the presence of Muslims in Europe.
Also, regarding this:
I couldn’t resist pointing out the apparent contradiction of Americans voting to spend $700 billion per year on K-12 schools and then celebrating when those schools were shut down. My response: “That IS awesome. There is nothing worse than children being in school.” (This was a most definite #NotFunnyAtAll!)
It was public schools in one state that were closed for a few days or a couple weeks. It’s not funny because it makes no sense. Presumably, what was being celebrated is workers coming together to achieve something. This is an anathema to the wealthy and powerful, because it’s the only way that working people can achieve anything – by coming together in large groups. Billionaires, on the other hand, can simply back the candidates of their choice at election time.
Teachers are underpaid and unions secure fair compensation for workers. If nearly all public school teachers are unionized and, at least in some states, they have the right to strike, how can they be underpaid?
The answer has to be that unions, like many other organizations, don’t always succeed. Also, the link here http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2017/10/participation_teachers_unions_down_likely_to_tumble_further.html says that about 70% of public school teachers are union members, not “nearly all”.
Finally, your last link regarding “the median worker with a bachelor’s degree” fails to consider the fact that a large portion (around 1/3) of all workers with a bachelor’s degree hold jobs that don’t require a bachelor degree.
Vince: A sampling of righteousness from the last few days… [from Facebook friends who are Hillary-supporters; Trump supporters are, by definition, not righteous… they’re deplorable]
“Indeed, Pence’s story is, to a very real extent, worse. It’s not just the hypocrisy – the Indiana Republican repeatedly attacked Clinton over emails during his bid for national office – it’s also the fact that Clinton’s system was never compromised, while Pence’s was.” [Pence was an AOL user! No wonder the U.S. can’t catch up to Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.]
Hillary lost because the Bernie Sanders supporters did not show up to vote… Or voted for Jill Stein… Who was actually at the same dinner with Flynn and Putin in Moscow. Why do you think that is?
Russia Lost the election for Hillary Clinton. And that will become more evident through time as Trump is convicted.
how do we know we elected him. Hilary won the popular vote ? How do we know the Russians were not fixing the system years ago any added a vote here and there to win the electoral college.
please find me a responsible source of reporting that has found any real corruption in the Clinton Foundation. The reason contributions wound down was BECAUSE Hillary was running for president and did not want the appearance of anything improper.
The mud slinging and character assassinations exploded when she ran for president.
Here is a tracking of her lifetime approval ratings. High 50s while sea actor and high 60s while Secretary of State… and then the Fox News and Internet attack destroyed her during the run for president stating after leaving the state department job over five years ago.
If it’s unfair for Democrats to investigate Trump, wouldn’t it be equally unfair for Republicans to investigate Hillary? I hadn’t even heard about this “controversy,” if there indeed was one. But once again HRC bends over backwards to explain nuance and context, and to apologize if she wasn’t clear enough. The steps we require from a woman, seriously. What dude goes to these lengths to listen to criticism and address it, …ever? Certainly no one currently in power.
Folks who watch Fox News probably think that Hillary Clinton’s emails are the biggest scandal going. The propaganda network deludes their viewers into believing that the Mueller investigation is nothing but a witch hunt. They live in total denial.
One of the troubling aspects of 2016 was the massive latent sexism exposed by having the first female candidate run for president. One of the most interesting untold stories was how so many of the men who were key in shaping the negative media narrative against Clinton have ultimately been undone in the wake of the #MeToo movement. [Harvey Weinstein?]
What is interesting to me about the above is that, apparently, no Hillary supporter has changed his or her thinking since 2016. Americans who didn’t like Hillary are sexist and/or stupid (duped by something as transparent as Fox News). There were no actual flaws with the idea of running the spouse of the former leader (Argentina-style!) or with running a candidate with a multi-$billion foreign-funded family foundation/slush fund.
Maybe the Republicans do have a chance in 2018 and 2020, despite Americans’ basic desire for a planned economy.
This comment I found in a Zerohedge post “Baby Boomers: A Menacing Metamorphosis To America’s Large Cities” would describe your average Hillary supporter:
If you live in the South, you will not escape the thicket of traffic caused by Boomer retirees, fleeing to the quainter city suburbs, and a school zone every few inches due to their womb-productive, Millennial, dual-high-earner children, moving to be near their free babysitters.
The grandparents keep the dual-high-earner parents’ kids during their every-two-month, two-week, excused vacations for busy-working parents in the many crony-parent jobs, where computers do more of the work, enabling the copious, excused absenteeism for crony parents as much as the grandparents who provide at-their-beck-and-call babysitting services for every frivolous thing.
In other zip codes, you have the less-upscale Boomer neighborhoods, where the equally absentee Millennial single-earner moms drop off their kids during some of their excused mornings off, excused afternoons off, excused days and weeks off….for kids.
These are the Millennial moms who dominate the many low-wage office jobs “voted best for moms” due to free rent, free EBT groceries, free electricity, nearly free daycare, free monthly cash assistance and a refundable EITC child tax credit of up-to $6,431.
Some busy-working moms just need back-up babysitters, as their government-financed, nearly free daycare covers most of their childcare expense, enabling them to work part time so that they stay below the earned-income limits for a smorgasbord of pay-per-birth welfare programs.
These moms live in the city, either in totally or almost-free Section 8 housing or in nicer, safer apartment complexes than most single, childless college grads cannot afford on earned-only income. These complexes are called mixed-income apartments, and the single moms get an amount off of the rent per child produced, lowering the rent cost, while the developer gets a per-unit tax credit from governent to build them.
The single, womb-productive, female children of many Boomers let their children’s grandparents in the burbs babysit when they get their whopping refundable child tax credit so that they can treat their latest boyfriend to a beach motel in FL, financed by taxpayers. They, like their highly paid crony-parent managers, always have plenty of excused time off (for kids) to indulge themselves without firing or even critique.
In both types of Boomer burbs, you have another concentration of Millennials and some non-Millennials. These are the Millennials whose cars are parked around every other home in the neighborhoods. These are the battalions of underemployed men—half of all American men beteeen 18 and 34, living with their parents in adulthood due to rent that consumes more than half of their earned-only income and many non-womb-productive women, too.
Fifty million working-aged citizens are out of the workforce, and the employed-in-name-only moms make on-average $13k. Those are the single moms with monthly welfare and tax-code welfare and the married moms, working part time for low pay to add luxury money to an ample spousal income, dominating the low-wage office jobs and many other part-time service sector jobs, as they can afford to work for low pay and part-time hours due to major household bills covered by spouses, child support or Uncle Sam for to out-of-wedlock reproduction.
Many of the basement dwellers have bachelor’s degrees, but no spousal income to boost up pay to rent-covering levels, and anyway, for Fake-Feminist purposes, it is very important that the white-collar office jobs that pay anything, and that have benefits undergirded by a $260 billion employer tax exclusion, are not spread out over more households, but go to frequently absentee moms, married to other high earners, thereby concentrating the wealth from salaried jobs under fewer roofs and halving the size of the white-collar middle class.
It is also very important to undercut the single, blue-collar males with a never-ceasing deluge of welfare-eligible legal / illegal immgrants, getting welfare that covers their housing and grocery expenses by 1) having sex and producing multiple US-born kids and 2) working part time as a male breadwinner for low pay that keeps them below the earned-income limits for the programs, in addition to an up-to $6,431 EITC child tax credit for US-born kids that equals 3 months of full-time pay for non-womb-productive, non-welfare-eligible, single, male citizens in Boomer mom’s basement in the burbs, whether that is a fancier burb or a less-fancy Boomer basement in the burbs.