In our system, there’s no way to have a job category in which you can opt out of union representation and therefore choose to not join the union and not get the benefits of union representation. The contract the union negotiates covers everyone, even non-union members. Many of the items negotiated, such as work rules, can’t possibly only cover some people in that job. For instance, you couldn’t have union teachers teaching 6 hours and then non-union teachers have to teach an extra 2 hours while the union teachers go home. You can’t run a school that way.
It would be nice, though, if we could, so that workers could see first-hand the benefits of a union.
As for mandatory membership, as I mentioned, in some states unions can charge a fee to non-members to cover the fact that they enjoy the benefits of the union contract. And they have a right to request a refund for any portion used for political purposes. Nobody is actually forced to join a union.
Here is an analogy for the Teachers/Cops/Firefighters “work for us” line of thinking. Let’s see if D’A and Ibn answer the questions.
Let’s assume you work for a corporation called MicroSquish that has its shares traded publicly. To bring it back to the OP, let’s say you’re a member of the Cubicle-Farm Workers Union.
Now Betsy-Lou Hopkins owns 200 shares of MicroSquish.
a) How do you feel when Betsy-Lou says you work for her.
b) Can Betsy-Lou come in off the street and tell you how to do your job?
c) Should Betsy-Lou have any say in what your union does?
d) How do you resolve the situation when Whitey Oldman who also owns 200 shares demands that you and your union do the exact opposite of what Betsy-Lou demands?
e) Do you really work for Betsy-Lou, Whitey and the other 13,508 shareholders?
f) What does it mean to “work for somebody”
Good luck. I tried something similar earlier in the thread to illustrate how meaningless and silly the whole “works for” thing really is, and the only reply I got was being accused of strawmanning.
If teachers “work for” taxpayers, what does that actually mean in the real world? Exactly what power or privilege does that give a given taxpayer, or obligation on the part of a given teacher?
Oh, I get it. I’ve been arguing for two pages that teachers do not work for taxpayers in any meaningful sense. But complaining about how shitty his job is doesn’t add anything to the conversation.
If you are talking about my reply to Shodan let’s look at his post.
Well yes and no. Teachers do a lot of work on their off time for free. The stat that was quoted was that we work 43.7 hours a week but in most of the districts I work at we get paid for 6 hrs/day or 30 hrs/wk i.e. the time we are actually at school working with students. So the time I’m paid for is out of public funds but there’s a lot of time I’m not paid for.
Normally I wouldn’t take issue with his statement because the truth is teacher salaries are a bizarre hybrid of salary/hourly pay and if you are not a teacher then it is hard to understand all of the nuances of it.
What got my dander up was
First of all, it shows his blatant ignorance of how a strike works in that he thinks we get paid when we are on strike. But what I took exception to was his idea that pay should be teaching time = pay / my time = no pay. But I (and most teachers) do a hell of a lot of our work on my unpaid time. So Shodan if you think we should be paid when we are working and not paid when we are not working then understand you will be paying a lot more in teacher salaries to pay us for things we currently do for free. Are you willing to do that?
A teacher, assuming he is one (I’ve missed some posts) and not just trying to discredit them, claiming that correcting papers “on [his] time” is working “for free”, is bizarre.
No. This is ridiculous. Once the money is paid to the teachers, it is no longer taxpayer money and no one has any right to oversee what the teachers do with it.
No. You’re still being ridiculous.
I’d quote and refute the rest of your post, but it’s just more of the same nonsensical claptrap.
It is and that’s the point. Shodan argued that I should be paid for the time I am teaching. According to my contract, I am paid to be on campus and in a classroom from 7:30am to 3:30pm with 30 minutes of unpaid lunch. It is he that is making this distinction between time doing teacher stuff = paid time and teachers doing their own thing like spending time with family = unpaid time. My posts are to point out that for a teacher this distinction of paid time = work and unpaid time = not working is ridiculous.
If I am paid to teach, then I should be paid for ALL of the time I spend working not just classroom time. That’s a stupid idea but that is the idea Shodan is implying.
