Why would better working conditions only attract better candidates?
It seems more likely to me that better working conditions attract MORE candidates, poor, mediocre, and superior alike.
If the better working conditions were combined with effective methods to winnow out poor performers, I would be more receptive to the idea that the end result is in fact a set of more qualified employees.
Seems like a bit of a bait and a switch, given you went from this:
If it’s constitutionally permitted and serves the general welfare (a compelling secular reason to support it, IMO), what reason do you have to oppose such legislation?
Academic environments with a higher cadre of teachers will perform better, attracting more funding, increasing the working conditions and attracting more teachers. Those with poor funding and a low cadre of teachers will attract fewer teachers and there will be less competition for each place.
I notice you quote only snippets of sentences from my previous posts, and don’t include the links to those posts.
Why is that?
My argument is that without a way to remove lower-performing teachers, you’ll never achieve that “higher cadre” in the first place.
I quote using BBCode rather than the forum button. I quote relevant segments. If you think I’ve missed context, feel free to explain why.
Well, one method would be not hiring them in the first place. Teachers can be fired for cause, too.
Ok.
Herre’s where I started:
So that’s the question: I am asking for a non-religiously-based argument that compels me to accept a given social policy.
You offer the compelling secular reason that feeding people is legally required, by the constitution and the Declaration of Independence:
I refute that by pointing out that the Declaration is not a source of substantive law and quoting the caselaw that rebuts the idea that the Constitution’s free speech or assembly clauses require any such thing.
You then offer the general welfare clause as a source of the compelling secular reason:
And I rebut that:
Then you ask:
At which point you suggest I have switched standards, quoting only the bare snippets of the above posts in your statement. But as you can see, the question was never if any such programs are permissible, but if there is a compelling secular reason to require them. Sure, Social Security is constitutional. But it’s not required, which means you have not identified a compelling secular reason for it. The tiny two-word snippets you quoted completely obscured the distinction.
Firing for cause is not the same as firing for being mediocre. To leave only the highest performing teachers in place, you would have to be able to reliably remove the less-well-performing; it is that very ability which unions strenuously oppose.
It’s true that not hiring low performers in the first place could also accomplish that goal, but there is no reliable way to consistently choose effective teachers aead of time. Promising candidates may not pan out; diamonds in the rough may be missed. This is true in all professions.
This sounds remarkably like you expect all teachers to be above average. What am I missing?
The policy should set a minimum standard for retaining one’s job as a teacher, and of course some teachers will be at this minimum standard, whatever it is, and will thereby retain their job. We should figure out what that minimum standard should be and act accordingly.
Better working conditions would attract more candidates, of course. Assuming the administrator attempts to hire the best available person for the job, attracting more poor candidates is irrelevant; they’ll get trashed along with the current poor candidates.
I expect that the teachers retained would be a subset of all teachers seeking jobs. And I expect that set of teachers retained would in fact be above the average of all teachers seeking jobs, yes.
Sure. I agree completely.
If unions were willing to remove poor teachers, yes.
Well, sure–but every profession will have mediocre employees. There are mediocre doctors, attorneys, software engineers, custodians, and restaurant managers, and overwhelmingly they keep their jobs. Like the joke says, you know what you call the guy who graduates at the bottom of his medical class, right? Doctor. It’s a nice idea that we should get rid of mediocre teachers, but I don’t think it’s realistic. (And believe me: if I could, I totally would.)
I have a similar problem with attorneys–why aren’t defense attorneys willing to abandon sleazy clients?
It is, of course, because their job is to represent their clients. When a defense attorney’s defense of a client results in a not-guilty verdict, a sane person doesn’t blame the defense attorney, they blame the inadequate prosecution.
Similarly, it’s ridiculous to look at a pervy old man who’s kept his teaching job and blame the union for that. The fault is with the administration that’s so incompetent they can’t even fire a guy like that. The union who defends him is doing its job of representing its members. In this case, the job is every bit as distasteful as would be the job of the defense attorney who defends him from criminal charges, but in both cases, the job’s existence is part of the system we have in place. If you cut down the forest to get the devil, as you’re fond of quoting, where will we hide when the devil turns on us?
I suppose we just took divergent views on the purpose of that reference. I think government provided social insurance fulfils a secular purpose in that it promotes the general welfare (compare the life expectancy of states with and without government provided social insurance). I don’t think something needs to be explicitly enumerated in the constitution in order for there to be a compelling secular interest for it (or if there is, then demonstrating a compelling secular interest is an insurmountable obstacle to supporting most legislation).
For example, do you think there’s a compelling secular interest in requiring voter ID?
Like your other examples, Voter ID is permissible, but not mandated.
I don’t agree that’s the proper role for unions… or in the alternative, if it is, then I don’t agree with the laws that have permitted unions to amass sufficient power to exert their will so successfully. In much the same way, I might say that defense attorneys should continue to zealously represent every client, but a proposed rule that the prosecution turn over recordings of every witness prep be scuttled, because that rule would give the defense too much advantage at trial.
Defense attorneys have a special place in the justice system became we, as a society, have agreed to it. If we have agreed that unions have an analogous place, to zealously defend their members’ interests no matter what, I say we need to rethink that.
And of course, going after public sector unions is doing just that.
Do you think there’s a compelling secular reason for supporting it, or is a compelling secular interest only requisite for legislation proposed by liberals?
Once again, let’s not lose track of what those words meant when I said them:
If I can imagine the compelling secular reason on my own, I clearly don’t need anyone to follow those steps. So it’s not to liberals that I direct that challenge, but to anyone who proposes a given policy for which I don’t see a valid basis. Naturally, since I am a conservative, I expect liberals will enjoy more scrutiny under this approach.
Society has agreed to having a place for unions to defend their members’ interests as well. The extent to which society has turned against union membership correlates with a greater share of wealth, generally speaking, going to a smaller subset of the population, and a deleterious effect, on the whole, on the economy at large.
The video is from the Economic Policy Institute. It’s only a minute and a half long. The chart describes one possible measure by which this effect is illustrated.
Now, in an economy still weak due in no small part to lack of demand, and a great deal of wealth sitting idle in hedge funds, Swiss bank accounts, and blind trusts ;), what purpose would tearing down the already anemic (by 20th century standards) union structure in America serve, if we posit that the effect on the amount of wealth going to the wealthy; i.e, the amount of wealth being drawn away from the poor and middle classes, will show a similarly direct correlation?
And yes, I am arguing a ‘zero sum game’, in that the amount of total wealth does not increase without labor being performed on the land, since labor in and of itself has such barriers to market entry that it is dependent on the investor class who, for all intents and purposes, owns all the land. So no ‘bigger pie’ arguments, please.
Why don’t you think it’s okay for unions to defend their members’ interests no matter what, but it is okay for defense attorneys to do the same? I don’t belong, technically, to a union, but I do belong to a professional association, and part of my dues serve as liability insurance: if I’m accused of malfeasance, I know that an organization rep will be there to represent me. What’s wrong with that?
That video seems to presuppose that “income inequality” is a bad thing.
Why? Not everyone is as essential to the creation of wealth as everyone else. Steve Jobs was the factor in Apple’s meteoric rise, even though hundreds of developers spent thousands of hours working to bring Apple’s products to market. And drivers were needed to drive the trucks that delivered iPods to stores. But any of those drivers could have been replaced by someone else and Apple still would succeed; remove Steve Jobs and Apple doesn’t.
Screw that complaint about income inequality. Income should be a function of your market value, not anything else.
Needless to say, I also reject your zero sum game.
Because defense attorneys contend against the power of the state. The state itself creates defense attorney and defines their role, with the purpose of creating a system that ameliorates state power to arrest and convict. In other words, the conflict between the accused and the state is not voluntary, not freely entered into.
As between the union and the employer, however, it should be. But this balance is upset when the law carves out areas of advantage to the union. This is not a good use of state power, in my view.
Here’s the reason I referred to.
Do you think market values are accurately represented given state interference in economic decisions? Do you think CEOs have increased in value disproportionately to their workers and are now worth over three hundred times the amount of their workers? Do you think a Bangladeshi child performing the same task as an American adult is worth some pitiful fraction of the American adult?
First, that seems like a general argument against legal protections for unions–I’m not seeing what it has to do with the evils of a union’s protection of its members.
Second, however, the problem with your analysis is that it ignores the theoretical and actual power differential between employer and employee. We as a society have decided to ameliorate this differential through various measures–allowing union organizing, instituting a minimum wage, requiring overtime pay, etc.–because without such limits, many people were getting absolutely screwed by employers, even in semi-voluntary circumstances.