From one of the nation’s most progressive cities… “Newton[, Maskachusetts] schools closed Tuesday as teacher strike continues” (NBC):
Students in Newton, Massachusetts, will be home for another day on Tuesday as the public school district’s teachers remained on strike.
The Newtown Teachers Association is also pushing for increased wages, better parental leave, reduced class sizes, affordable health care, mental health resources for students, social workers at schools and more.
What percentage voted correctly in 2020? State-sponsored NPR says 82 percent:
We are informed that lack of union representation and the existence of Republicans are the obstacles that prevent American workers from getting paid what they are worth. How can we explain the need for unionized workers to strike against an all-Democrat city government?
“Progress reported in Newton teacher strike, classes canceled for 5th day” (NBC):
Among the sticking points is teacher salaries and counselors in every school.
If people break the law, the smartest thing to do is change the law. “It is illegal for teachers to strike in Mass. What’s the argument for changing the law?” (boston.com):
The Newton Teachers Association became the latest group of educators to go on strike in Massachusetts last week when 98% of its members authorized a work stoppage. As classes were canceled again on Thursday and the NTA racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, some lawmakers are continuing a push to make future strikes like this legal under state law.
In Massachusetts, public employees including teachers are prohibited from going on strike. That has not stopped teachers unions in communities like Brookline, Andover, Haverhill, and Malden from taking to the picket line in recent years.
When(if?) the kids finally do come back into the classroom, the law-breaking teachers can give them a lecture about how laws should be obeyed!
Related:
- “Newton School Committee approves indoor mask-wearing requirement for students, staff, and visitors” (Boston Globe, August 2021), regarding the potential end of a 1.5-year school closure during coronapanic: On Monday, one member of the schools’ medical group, Dr. Ashish K. Jha, wrote on Twitter that the group believed it’s safe to bring children back to schools full-time. He praised the city’s advisors as an “amazing group of world-class experts.” (Florida didn’t have “world-class experts” so the school employees were ordered back into the classroom by Ron DeSantis a year earlier than Newton’s)
Uniparty does not mean unity. I always joked with some my “liberal” friends that advised me not to walk in what they called dangerous places, inviting them with me for a family trip and telling them that the place voted exactly for the same people like they did in the last election and populated with their friends.
How can we explain the need for unionized workers to strike against an all-Democrat city government? We cant’t!
When(if?) the kids finally do come back into the classroom. They aren’t coming back.
One of the real failures of US government is it permitted public sector workers to unionize – so the unions threaten the elected officials, the elected officials dishing out to the unions tax payer funds and the unions then support the election of the public officials who rewarded them with tax payer funds. So the elected officials are incentivized to spend OMP in order to receive personal benefits. The rewards are often in the form of benefits such as pensions and health care that the average person cannot comprehend because of concepts like exponential growth. It is too bad and there does not seem to be a solution short of municipal bankruptcies.
If was a JFK-era decision that started in New York City and spread. NYC went insolvent only about 15 years after allowing city employees to unionize. There is a great book on the subject that I reviewed here: While America Aged. See
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2009/09/07/history-of-public-employee-unions/
and
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2009/09/18/pensions-how-states-and-local-governments-indulge-in-deficit-spending/
———- from the first link
All of this was changed in 1958 when an aide to New York Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. suggested that city workers could be a large enough voting bloc to ensure his reelection. Wager signed an executive order authorizing city workers, notably those of the transit system, to unionize and bargain collectively. As the percentage of Americans working for the government grew, other politicians began to see support for public employee unions as a way to get votes. State politicians around the country allowed public employees to unionize shortly after Wagner’s executive order. President John F. Kennedy allowed federal government workers to unionize starting in 1962.
According to the author of While America Aged, public employee unions should be able to win much higher wages and benefits than private company unions. The UAW could shut down GM or Ford with a strike, but they couldn’t vote the GM and Ford CEOs out of office. Once a sufficiently high percentage of voters are unionized public employees, there is essentially no limit to the obligations imposed on the state. Because it would cause too much backlash from non-union non-government employed voters, most of the money extracted from taxpayers will be taken in the form of long-term health care and pension promises. A voter working at Walmart gets upset hearing that a bus driver is earning $130,000 per year. If instead the bus driver is paid $70,000 per year and able to retire at age 41 (MBTA here in Boston), it is tougher for a voter to figure out how much is being spent. Pushing most of the spending out 10-50 years gives the politicians who agreed to the obligations at least 10 years in which to move to the next level of government before the true cost of the agreement becomes apparent.
Hahaha! I’m a 44-year old big city Firewhiner (oops, I mean Firefighter) with 24 years of “service.” I deserve to get paid! I’ve got bills! Alimony & child support to three ex-wives, payments on my Escalade, Harley, and speed boat. I’m juggling three girlfriends, and have some serious gambling debts.
I now make close to $200K per year but deserve more! Not bad for a high school grad who was washing cars before I got on with the FD. I did, however, earn my A.S. degree in “Fire Science” on the City’s dime. And that silly degree got me promoted three times to Sr. Deputy Assistant Deputy Big-Cheese Battalion Chief Indian Chief. I still have lots of free time to work out, nap, and watch TV while on the job.
Last year I “worked” tons of OT to spike my pension and next year I turn 45 y/o and will retire and start collecting my $100K lifetime pension with built-in annual COLA. In 20 years, I’ll be 65 (the retirement age for most of you stiffs), the 3% COLA will have nearly doubled my pension to $200K per year! My life expectancy is 88, so my pension will double again to almost $400K per year by the time I die. It gets better; my lovely 20-year old Filipina mail-order bride will collect my pension long after I die. Her life expectancy is 90. She’ll collect my growing pension for another 25 years after my death! Twenty-five years on the job will trigger almost 70 years of growing monthly pension checks! Now get back to work and pay those taxes!
I’ve lately been reading about the history of public education in America.
I am recommending “The Schools We Need: And Why We Don’t Have Them” by E.D. Hirsch Jr.
Also, “Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America’s Teachers” by Rita Kramer (1992).
The nonsense reported in these books is almost limitless. As an example, Hirsch goes to a conference and gets shut down for suggesting that the elementary school students should also be learning basic facts, like basic history and geography. It’s mind boggling, really.