The idea that teachers are criminally underpaid is a myth. id be happy to pay them more with more quality from their teaching.

keep in mind im married to a teacher, the benefits alone make the profession insanely well paid. i paid like 200$ for the entire birth of my child. and it was a c-section. that's 3 days stay, tongue tie fixing procedure, etc etc etc.

and even the base pay my wife makes is very good, and we live in rural bumfuck nowhere where pay is far lower than other places where the cost of living isn't much more. AND her district is non-union, so she only gets the fringe benefits of the state unions action.

teachers strike by exploiting this narrative, not because the narrative is reality. paying more in a vacuum wont improve education, and many teachers agree. they'd rather increased aides and better resources in lieu of increased pay. bad teachers tho, want that cash.

This doesn't really address what I said though. Even if they aren't working on low pay, if we really can't function as a society without them then the value they bring is probably worth a huge premium in pay.

If we have multiple unions and the pay is good, I can't see a situation where a union wouldn't have out of work members ready to compete when another union goes on strike, which then drives the pay down and lowers the negotiating strategy.

If your union strikes, and your job gets taken by another union, your leadership will get punished.

1. that exact thing happened in Wisconsin. during an economic downturn Scott Walker took away collective bargaining rights of the teachers union, told them it was temporary due to the downturn, told them their benefits and pay were still safe at the last negotiated level, and thousands of teachers struck. many of them going to the capital. all because they not only bought the union propaganda, but also because walker was an idiot who was too scared to touch other unions like cops and prison guards. SHOCKER teachers are less important than prison guards and when they struck it wasnt as big of a deal as they wanted, and all returned to work as he held his ground.

2. expecting a competing union to bus in replacement teachers is not only infeasible it is damaging to a childs education to disrupt them like that.

its a union by union case basis. im less concerned with teachers striking and more concerned with them being able to hold taxpayers hostage. im more concerned with prison guards striking. each public union has a complicated and unique set of problems for its existence, some almost bordering on nonproblematic.

Maybe the government would get social workers better than the ones in the movies like Joker if they paid more than 45k annual.

This post was edited by Skinned on Jun 8 2021 05:13pm

Sounds like the teachers got their asses kicked and everything went back to normal. So the system worked?

France kicks our ass in pre college education and they have teachers strike all the time. So that's not really a convincing argument to me. At least I don't think it will be so bad that it outweighs the benefits, and if we had other teachers to step in and assume their cirriculum that means the damage would be even less.

There's certain places I think the public just shouldn't entertain unions. Like police. No negotiating with unions. Individual officers have the right to leave the job if they don't like it.

If the job needs to be done it deserves a living wage for full time work, end of story, funny how so many jobs that got dumped on by boomers suddenly became essential during covid.

Depends on district. Some make 35k, others 75k. 75k seems like high end here for a teacher which is well compensated imo. That's 25k a season you work, basically a 100k job.

There are a lot of those 35k and 45k jobs out there, which sucks for someone who went to college.

Does anybody have numbers on people who furthered their education during Covid and aren't returning? I'd be nice to see if a lot of the workers who got unemployment learned new skills with their free time and are now making a living off of that.

Tell your wife she is overpaid and post her reaction.

It's always a good thing to see people liberate themselves from wage slavery.