Why isn't the WI recall result being considered a big win for teachers?

Great Debates
101

Bull. We’re talking about a contract between an employer and a union. That’s no more a monopoly cartel than a city contract with a private trash hauler, or a comic book publisher’s exclusive distribution contract with Diamond (and Diamond gets called a monopoly mainly because almost everyone signed with them, not because one company did), or a Taco Bell franchise holder’s contract with the Taco Bell parent company. It’s not that far from a company policy to only hire accredited professionals for a given position–like, say, neurosurgeon.

You’re telling corporate persons–employers–they don’t have freedom of contract because individual freedom of contract is more important. Well, guess what? Society really is more complex than just “individuals making decisions.”

102

Union membership worked out extremely well for the Air Traffic Controllers (under Reagan), the Steel Industry (in the 70’s and 80’s) and the Auto Industry (80’s onward), right?

In each case they made their industries non-competetive and in some cases pretty much destroyed both their industries and their own livelihoods. So much for it ultimately being in their best interests to be in a Union, right?

Now that being said, History has some great examples of where a Union was totally necessary and the right thing to do in order to change things.

But they’ve become their own worst enemies with not just wage demands, but with protections that prohibit companies (and municipalities) from removing dead weight and sometimes seriously damaging people. Teachers that can’t be fired no matter how bad they are, government workers who can not only do nothing all day, but can spread negativity and persistently baseless complaints through the system without any fear of being fired, Police officers who cannot be fired no matter how many people they beat the fuck out of and how many lawsuits their employers have to fight and settle… Just totally awesome that the Unions designed to protect the common worker work best to protect the absolute worst “workers”.

103

Sure. Most all Public Charter schools fit this description. They vast majority are in inner cities, and nearly all are open-enrollment. I don’t know of any charter school that says “no learning disabilities” or anything like that – most districts set that up as a condition of the charter. And most, though not all, pay better than the regular public schools. If you want a specific example, look at KIPP schools.

Granted, many charter schools also have higher expectations of teachers w/r/t to hours and commitment level; but that’s part of being treated like a professional and not a clock-puncher.

104

It is a dreadful thing when the nation’s unions become corrupted by greed and avarice. They should be mindful of the example offered by the nations business leaders, paragons of modest decorum, frugal and sober in their compensations.

105

KIPP schools have a selection process that favors students with supportive parents; the exact kind of students who do well anywhere. If you’re using their rates as a measure of how bad unions are for schools, you’re way off.

106

Any charter, by definition, is going to have students whose parents cared enough to make some kind of effort to get them into abetter school, even if it’s nothing more than filling out a form. And by definition, any kid whose parents give a damn is going to have an edge over those whose parents don’t. I’m not aware of Kipp’s being especially onerous, but you can enlighten me

In any event, that’s beside the point. The topic was teacher pay, and the request was for “an instance of a non-union school that pays better than a unionized school, serves the same demographic, and is required to accept all students?” Numerous Public Charters, including Kipp, fit the bill.

107

You made a claim about Kipp schools. Let’s see some numbers.

108

KIPP’s typical practice is to match a base salary of the public schools, and then offer a stipend on top of that to cover the extra hours their teachers put in, usually about 15% above public pay.

You can see it referred to here:
http://www.kippphiladelphia.org/employees.html
http://www.kippbayarea.org/wp-content/uploads/kbas_teachers.pdf

Note that KIPP and other large-scale charters that work in multiple cities have slightly different rules in each, as each city designs the charters a little differently (in some cases, e.g. Baltimore, even the Charter schools are unionized). But public-school base +15% is the norm for KIPP.
Admittedly, what most Charters sell teachers on is not more salary, but more freedom from administrative crap, better leadership and better professional development opportunities. But, yes, some pay better as well.

109

I’m not sure why, maybe because it’s an easier argument to make, but no one is actually talking about corporations here. These were public sector unions who had agreements with the State, their employers were the people.

There are very strict rules in place at the Federal Government and all fifty State governments that generally prohibit just signing a contract to exclusively purchases services from one and only one group. You can get a sole source contract, but there are elaborate procedures in place, and it has to be open to competitive bidding. So in fact the arrangement with the unions would not be legal under normal contract law. Further, if not for the original NLRA it’s highly likely that a State signing exclusivity contracts for all State Government jobs with one and only one entity would violate various laws against anti-competitive practices.

As nobel prize winning economist F.A. Hayek noted:

Your argument is a not-very-clever attempt to hoist “us” by our own petard by using the “let individuals and corporations do whatever they want” argument against us, an argument none of us made here and further it is irrelevant. It is irrelevant because hey, the employers and the union did make decisions of their own free will. The employer decided not to continue the current arrangement with the union, in a two-party contract it’s generally not unheard of for one party to be able to decline to renew it, or to back out of the contract if the contract allows for it. Since the agreement was a creature of executive decision and statute, which can be changed legally by the current executive in conjunction with the legislature there was nothing in this that violates your “let corporations and people do whatever they want” “argument” (which again, is ridiculous for you to be using against conservatives here, no one here has made that argument and no one is impressed with the way you are trying to use it to make us look stupid.)

110

From one of your links, Kipp states that their teachers work a 10 to 11 hour day (7AM to 5pm). In public schools, 7.5 hours is more typical. Going with the more conservative 10 hour day, Kipp teachers work 25% longer days in exchange for 15% more pay. It sounds to me like they aren’t even at parity with the public schools, much less making more.

111

No public school teacher I’ve ever met has admitted to a 7.5 hour day. I don’t believe teachers are paid hourly in most places. Sure, they may only have to physically be present at school from say, 7:30 to 3:30 (with a lunch, break periods, and usually some planning periods), but every teacher I’ve ever heard bitch (which is every teacher I’ve met ever) has talked about the many many hours they do outside of work for which they receive no pay. Which is sort of how salary works of course, when you’re on salary you don’t have an hourly pay rate (although HR might calculate one for various internal purposes.)

112

So, in addition to the 10-11 hours they spend at school, do Kipp teachers spend more or less than their public counterparts on work done at home?

113

Is it relevant? Teachers aren’t paid hourly, so as a matter of fact it isn’t really appropriate to talk about hourly rate, but only total compensation.

114

If one group works more than the other, it is very relevant.

115

Yeah, but, but, but… But…

Never mind.

Excellent post.

116

Exactly.

117

Why is it relevant? Salaried employees aren’t paid based on hours worked.

118

Not directly, no, but there is an understanding that the more hours you put into your profession, the better your compensation should be. If I were salaried at a job where I worked 40 hours a week, I’d expect to be earning less, everything else equal, than I do at a job where I work 50 hours a week.

Do you disagree?

As for unions, I’m a proud teacher in a non-unionized state. After my fifth year of teaching, I’m earning the same thing I was earning during my second year of teaching (a little less, actually, since the state removed our merit pay for raising test scores), in contradiction to the salary schedule posted when I accepted the job. It’s less than I earned straight out of college at a corporate job, some 14 years ago, working a job outside of my field.

So yeah, I kind of wish we had unions negotiating our contracts, to counteract the near-anarchists who run our state’s legislature.

The OP’s question is not a legitimate one, I think: it’s a gotcha, not a question asked with serious interest in the real answer. I’ve yet to meet a teacher, especially here in this non-unionized state, who considers the WI result anything less than a crushing defeat for teachers everywhere. [Almost] nobody in the profession thinks that less negotiating power in the hands of teachers is a good thing.

119

I’ve negotiated a couple of teaching contracts in my time. Your statement above doesn’t betray any great knowledge of how teaching salaries are negotiated. The district pays x-number of dollars and the teacher puts in y-number of hours over a school year that is z-number of days long. In the case of my district, for example, that is a 7.5 hour day over a year that is 187 days long. When teachers are “officially” kept past their contracted hours, it is in our contract that they must be paid $30 per hour. Our contract is in no way unique.
Kipp teachers are putting in more time at school for less money than their counterparts in the Philadelphia public schools. I’m guessing that they put in approximately equal numbers of hours in take-home work.
I’m well aware of what being salaried means in the business world, but we aren’t talking about the business world so you needn’t try to shoehorn that into the conversation.

120

Despite having never made any claim about teacher salaries in union versus non-union environments, I’ll provide a little bit of data.

The following States do not have teacher unions at all:

Georgia
North Carolina
South Carolina
Texas
Virginia

cite shows unionization rates by State. Various resources say that the above following States do not allow teachers to be in unions, although if you look at the unionization rates most have some % of unionization (other than South Carolina, which has 0.0%)–I do not immediately have an explanation for the discrepancy but will note that either way these are five states with extremely low or no unionization of teachers.

Here is the average pay per state:



Georgia         $48,300
North Carolina  $43,922
South Carolina  $43,011
Texas           $41,744
Virginia        $43,823

Now I could just start pointing to all the states with lower pay than these 5 as proof that unionized labor can make less than union labor, but that’s not really demonstrative of anything.

Instead I’ll compare CPI numbers from a few selected cities (if you know of statewide CPI numbers available from the BLS, let me know, I couldn’t find any.)

Georgia has an average teacher salary of $48,300 and virtually no unionization.

Florida has an average teacher salary of $43,302 and is 100% unionized.

Atlanta, GA has a CPI in Feb of 2012 of 210.26.

Miami-Fort Lauderdale, FL has a CPI in Feb of 2012 of 232.60.

So here we see a State with a higher cost of living (Florida > Georgia) that is 100% unionized, and pays its teacher’s less than a non-union state. These aren’t teachers in special schools that require extra work, but aggregate data involving public school teachers in general.

There’s also little difference in benefits that seem to correlate to unionization.

Georgia teachers receive tenure after 3 years, which many alarmists would say teachers would not even receive without a union. Florida teachers receive tenure after 3 years as well. In Florida, the firing rate for experienced teachers is 0.36%, for experienced teachers in Georgia it is 1.36%. So that’s obviously higher, but don’t look for a trend.

In North Carolina with virtually no-unionization they get tenure after 3 years and have a 0.6% firing rate of experienced teachers. In Ohio with almost full unionization they get tenure after 5 years and the firing rate for experienced teachers is about 1.91%. In Wisconsin with almost full unionization and 3 year tenure, they fire experienced teachers at a 2.14% rate.