This is complicated, because public schools (and police departments, mentioned by another replier) are not for-profit entities. I don't think we can treat public employee unions and private employee unions the same.

Public schools, police departments, etc., are usually "political" entities, run by elected officials such as school boards and city councils. I would say there's no guarantee whatsoever in these cases that the leadership of those entities are even interested in compensating/promoting the "top performers" among teachers, or police. There's no direct financial incentive. The "outcomes" of a school — student education — don't provide much of a feedback mechanism to the financial performance or governance of the school. Likewise with police departments, etc. If anything, poor performance by these public entities may lead to calls for increased funding, standing the incentives on their heads.

Part of the reason for public employee unions is to protect the members specifically from political interference. The alternative is not necessarily "merit" based compensation but rather political favoritism and retribution.

>Part of the reason for public employee unions is to protect the members specifically from political interference. The alternative is not necessarily "merit" based compensation but rather political favoritism and retribution.

And yet all forms of public sector employment, regardless of union status, are treated as staffing agencies who's hiring can be manipulated by those who traditionally hold the power of political interference. The best way to step up your career as a teacher, cop or other bureaucrat is to know a guy who knows a guy who's owed a favor by a politician who can write a recommendation on your behalf to an open position that you want to step up to. This is how people move from line level positions to administrative positions. (And before anyone says "but the police", they are somewhat insulated because they have strict traditions in their industry that have sway over career advancement.)

If the purpose of unions is to insulate the labor pool from political meddling then they have done an incredibly poor job at it.

I'm much more inclined to believe that the purpose of unions is to extract maximum concessions from the employer(s) for the benefit of the people they control while ignoring any externalities. In settings where labor is interchangeable and employed privately the benefits are clear and the downsides are very limited. But when you start talking about the police and teachers unions circling the wagons to protect people who behave badly while simultaneously attempting to extract maximum money from society it becomes much less clear whether the unions in question are an overall good thing. It's one thing for the union to try and extract more concessions from a corporation that would otherwise pocket the money and supposedly has competition to keep them from just passing on the cost without pressure to reduce margins. It's a whole different ethical ballgame when society will be footing the bill and there is no competition to keep downward pressure on costs.

> I'm much more inclined to believe that the purpose of unions is to extract maximum concessions from the employer(s) for the benefit of the people they control while ignoring any externalities.

I agree that this is one purpose of unions. I just disagree that it's the only purpose. Unions have multiple purposes, and it's a common misconception that there's only one specific type of benefit to them. This is why I intentionally phrased my comment with "Part of the reason for public employee unions is..."

With regard to police officers, I would say that it's not just the police unions that circle the wagons and protect them. The courts have been extremely reluctant to charge or convict police officers with crimes for acts in the line of duty. Also, there's widespread support for the police in the general public, "blue lives matter", etc. I would suggest that police unions have only been allowed to wield they power they do because there's outside support in the general public for protecting police officers. Even the politicians who are anti-union tend to exempt police unions from their wrath, because those politicians tend to also be "law and order" types.

So politicians cave to large organized groups who can cause them problems and effect their ability to be elected?

How is that a surprise, of course politicians give public sector unions what they want -- they hold the cards, a huge voting block and cause problems. Most of the tradeoffs are passed down the line so the politician doesn't care either.

> So politicians cave to large organized groups who can cause them problems and effect their ability to be elected?

That's not what I said? I said the general public (who are unorganized) have a great deal of deference for police officers, and the power of police unions is merely a consequence of the public's deference to police.

> How is that a surprise, of course politicians give public sector unions what they want -- they hold the cards, a huge voting block and cause problems.

It's not a huge voting block. Union membership is much lower now than it was, say, 50 years ago. Moreover, politicians don't give public sector unions what they want. Here in Wisconsin, the state legislature stripped public employee unions of collective bargaining rights. There were massive protests at the state capitol about this, but in the end it didn't matter. Afterward there was recall campaign and election against the Governor, but the Governor won the recall election.

It feels to me like many people still have a 1960s conception of labor unions and their power, but empirically speaking, labor unions have been on the decline for decades, perhaps starting with the Reagan years. Now is not the Jimmy Hoffa era anymore.

> Part of the reason for public employee unions is to protect the members specifically from political interference.

That’s one side of the coin. The other side is to be a large enough entity to influence elections and then “negotiate” with those you helped get elected. Is it any wonder that states with large public service unions are in debt (even with high taxes) and have unsustainable pension obligations?

I’m not blaming a party here either. Democrats and Republicans tend to align with teachers and police respectively here and it creates the same problem.

It’s why public employees should never be allowed to unionize. FDR himself expressed this of all people. It’s an inevitable path to corruption. We can’t expect a reasonable “collective bargaining” when both sides of the negotiations are in bed.

> The other side is to be a large enough entity to influence elections and then “negotiate” with those you helped get elected.

That's the nature of politics. Businesses and business leaders lobby politicians and donate to their political campaigns too. It's strange to single out unions when there are so many different kinds of political interest groups, often with much more money than unions.

Public employee unions are bad, but the Tavern League, for example (I'm from Wisconsin), is ok? The National Rifle Association is ok? The National Landlord Association? Businesses and interest groups of every kind are donating money to the politicians who will directly regulate them. Why specifically exclude public employees from that?

Corruption comes in many forms, yes. But a private sector union that can elect gives the people they elect incentive to grow the union membership and therefore consolidate power. You can’t elect the person you’re going to negotiate with. It’s pure corruption and a major conflict of interest.

Private money has major issues too but it doesn’t have a direct influence on votes. A company can lobby all day and give money and that might get you more ads. But aligning with a union gets you votes and will continue to.

Police unions do this with Republicans as Teachers do with Democrats.

This is the elephant in the room. Unions make it much harder to fire low performers. I think they have great benefits, but this terrible side effect.

For another example look at police unions.

Public unions are a bad idea in general. The citizens collectively employ the government, and that government shouldn’t have a right to organize against the people whom it serves.

So in my opinion, these two examples of toxic public unions shouldn’t be applied to private unions.

I agree. I’m indifferent to private sector unions. None of my business if it isn’t my workplace. But public sector unions are a path to corruption. Both major parties exploit these so I can’t blame a single party here either.

What better way to consolidate power than by aligning with a public service union and “bargain” with them while being incentivized to grow membership in that union to further consolidate power.

If anything I’d support public sector unions if members were not allowed to vote for offices that represent their “management” or control their budgets.

Could you imagine a private sector union appointing the management of the company they negotiate with?

>Both major parties exploit these so I can’t blame a single party here either.

Republicans in Wisconsin abolished public unions back in 2011 (though admittedly they had exemptions for police and firefighters) and there was nationwide outrage from the left about it. There have been recent calls from the left to abolish police unions but those seem almost exclusively about police unions' ability to protect corrupt/brutal/racist cops and not about their ability to bilk taxpayers.

So while it's not completely clearcut, the right has a much better record for opposing public unions than the left.

Republicans have only opposed the unions that don’t support them. Police unions, like the ones in Wisconsin, supported Gov. Walker so he conveniently didn’t break them. That’s corrupt in my opinion and unprincipled.

You have begun to see labor movements distance themselves from police unions. I’d expect at some point it will be politically acceptable for Democrats in places like Wisconsin to strike back at them, which I’d support. So long as the other unions in the public sector are broken too.

No public sector should be able to unionize. If these groups want to lobby then fine. Lobbying, although corrupt in many ways, does not beholden tax payers to corrupt contracts.

Unions in many places explicitly have board seats. No need to imagine it. Of course a board seat is not voting control over management.

No actually what unions do is make sure that any "firing" is done fairly and with the law and not used to harass or discriminate.

I think it's pretty hard to claim that the reason there are bad teachers is because it's hard to fire them because they're unionized.

There are a lot of potential reasons:

- The pay is crap

- The "prestige" is crap

- The barrier to entry is low

In Finland, for example, there are excellent teachers because the profession is treated as on par with doctors. I don't think it's fair to blame unions for this difference in culture.

Your first two reasons are not valid reasons for being a bad employee. Both are knowable before taking the job. If you take a job knowing the pay is bad and you justify being a bad employee because the pay is bad, you’re a shitty person.

The third reason I don’t think is true. Teaching is in the class of occupations that require government certification.

It isn't about the employee choosing to do a shitty job because the pay is low. It is about the super talented, smart, ambitious person never going into the field in the first place because the pay is shitty.

I'd say that super talented, smart, and ambitious describe a finer gradation of employee than the simple good/bad in the earlier comments. It's just my opinion, but, as in most occupations, you don't have to be the cream of the crop to be a good employee.

Teacher pay in the US is pretty good, if you take into account hours actually worked and benefits, especially very generous retirement ones.

Look for data on this and you’ll learn the opposite. Teaching requires a master’s degree in most cases but in many states that’s only getting you pay in the $40-50k range (yes, housing is cheaper in the boonies. No, cars, consumer goods, food, medications, etc. are not.)

A popular propaganda claim is that teachers work fewer hours based on the hope that reader doesn’t know teaching includes more than direct instructional time. Summer breaks are shorter now and have things like mandatory training for required professional development, and the few weeks most teachers have off are not enough to make up for the long hours during the school year and inability to take time off when school is in session.

This is anecdotal evidence, but my mom was a teacher and she was getting paid 85k, had no masters, didn't work at all during the summer, and didn't work at home at all (<8 hour work day).

This isn't your mom's educational labor market. The stats are there to support most assertions in the above reply. They're just inconveniently scattered across the states and not all electronically accessible. I wonder whose interests that serves? When I taught in inner city Paterson back in the mid-90s most teachers worked at least two jobs but still spent many extra hours a week outside normal school time on phone conferences with parents, curriculum development and grading tests/papers, because they all had a full load of classes with 35+ students each. Things weren't much easier down here in NC two decades later where my own kids were in school (our district has a year-round calendar -- so no summers off for teachers). The master's requirement exists in NY, but practically discouraged in other places because school districts didn't want to pay the differential. Sure, none of this approaches the often 24x7x365 experience of many sysadmins and devs (my own tech experience for over 20 years), but it's also far from the bankers' hours myth that's been pushed since at least the 80s.

More power to her — that sounds a lot better than any of the teachers I know.

For me, the biggest push here is that we've had a generation or so of our society collectively telling everyone that the future for good jobs is STEM, STEM, STEM or maybe STEM. If we actually believe that, we should be paying and treating teachers well because we are targeting education-intensive subjects and because we need to hire teachers who have an understanding of subjects which pay well. Teaching shop was a great job option for a contractor who was getting older and needed the benefits but that dynamic doesn't apply to someone who can teach most STEM subjects can often get comparable benefits and likely better pay, and enjoying teaching only goes so far to compensate the various drawbacks.

Generally, states requiring masters degrees pay more than $40-50k a year. Teaching is a rewarding profession, so naturally there will be a lot of teachers willing to work, which depresses wages. Regardless, teachers get paid well above medium incomes regardless of where they live.

I agree that teachers should be paid more, particularly newer ones, but I blame the unions for this. So much money gets funneled into pensions, which only a small fraction of teachers ever get.

Three months off is not a “few weeks”. Good lord. What school district are you referencing where teachers are forced to work every day during the summer?

Yes, they don’t get paid for not working, but can usually have their employer stretch the 9 month salary to cover all 12.

There are a lot of reasons I wouldn’t want to be a modern American teacher, but the time-off schedule is not one of them.

Note that I never claimed teachers were forced to work every day of the summer. I said “a few weeks” because for the teachers I know scheduling a vacation ends up being a couple of weeks where they have a contiguous free stretch between the end of school in June (usually a week after students), staff meetings and trainings, professional development, and planning for the school year which begins in August. No, they aren’t working every day of that period but it’s nowhere near as generous as people tend to describe it sounding like June 1st to September 1st.

> Look for data on this and you’ll learn the opposite.

I looked at the data and stand by my assessment.

> Teaching requires a master’s degree in most cases

It does not. Most teachers get masters degree because pay schedule pays extra for master degree holders. Master degrees are less prevalent in private schools, because private schools are not typically so dumb to have rigid pay schedules that pay extra for degrees, regardless of whether these degrees are actually useful.

> that’s only getting you pay in the $40-50k range

That’s already above median wage. It’s slightly below median wage of all workers with a university degree, but once you take into account hours actually worked and non-wage benefits, this is actually significantly above average pay of workers with university degrees.

> A popular propaganda claim is that teachers work fewer hours based on the hope that reader doesn’t know teaching includes more than direct instructional time.

A popular propaganda claim is also that non-instructional time is a lot. It might be for some teachers, especially younger ones fresh into their careers who need more time to prepare for their classes. The non-instructional work sometimes is also pretty concentrated, making some weeks very busy and requiring hard work in those. However, most weeks are not busy, and most teachers do not spend more than a handful of hours each week on non-teaching work.

The rubber room story that is trotted out all the time is the exception, not the rule.

The very existence of teachers unions has probably kept tens or even hundreds of thousands of people from being out of work without healthcare during a global pandemic.

In my experience, having a teacher as a spouse, discipline of even union employees is not rare when warranted.

The best teachers have to fight to get paid what they are worth.

The best teachers have to fight for the resources they need to do their job well.

Most teachers are being asked to do unreasonable and unsafe things during COVID.