Posted on 03/03/2018 4:37:17 AM PST by ilovesarah2012
It turns out it’s tough to give teachers raises when you slash taxes for a decade.
Striking teachers and other public employees in West Virginia have shut down schools across the state for more than a week, flooding the capitol in Charleston each day to rebuke their lawmakers. The workers are demanding significant raises to their stagnant pay and a clear plan to curb rising premiums in the state employee health care program.
(Excerpt) Read more at m.huffpost.com ...
Read my later replies :-)
How can you outlaw unions?
Why does anyone deserve a raise?
I think they should all just quit. I don’t like public schools.
Public service has come to mean that the public is their to service its servants. It’s why, while we live in NYS, we own a very small, very inexpensive home.
People working for government, including public school employees, are compensated based on terms the state and/or school district agreed to. One aspect of our republican form of government is that we elect people to "represent" us. Our representatives are the ones to blame for the excesses of public pensions - not the teachers. The taxpayer's "representatives" on school boards and state houses agreed to this retiree's $100,000 in retirement pay.
Over and over again we elect people who do not keep their promises or we elect people not understanding their positions and convictions. This is a weakness of our form of government. Another weakness is the citizen. The average citizen complains but does little else. Generally, the average citizen is apathetic.
What's the solution? I don't know but I'm afraid we're past the tipping point. Most Americans have lost sight of founding principals which say we and not government are responsible and in charge. Similarly, government has lost sight that the people and not government are in charge.
I find it quite interesting that at the same time they bemoan the “loss of tax money” for “teachers raises” that there are news stories about 59 million in spending on facilities.
We have the same problem in Ohio with school districts constantly seeking tax levies to fund “new schools” while simultaneously seeing declining enrollment.
The best way to increase tax revenues is to increase the wealth of the tax base, not strangle taxpayers with heavier burdon’s.
WV has high taxes, the issue is the state has lost so many residents over the last 50 years it has eroded their tax base.
I agree. This isn’t going to be popular here, but bitching about pensions etc really is not going to solve anything. These municipalities and unions signed these contracts, in good faith. No one twisted the politicians arms to sign them. To turn around and tell retirees, “tough crap, we’re cutting your pension” just isn’t right.
Unionization of government employees was illegal until the early ‘60s.
Wisconsin’s Act 10 targeting health care insurance for teachers and faculty. Turns out that the state’s teachers union formed its own “insurance company.” Then it would only approve contracts that sourced health insurance through its on insurance company. (WEA Trust). Act 10 busted that up, allowing school district to source health insurance much differently, with no teacher contract restrictions.
Too dam bad.
As I recall, once “WEA Trust” was exposed to actual competition, their initial offer was a nearly-50% premium cut.
There are people in WV getting The Disability for drug addiction. I live one county away from WV. The Disability is the scourge of the hills. It locks people into poverty.
For state, county & municipal employee unions ( I guess there is only one AFFGMCE...may have the acronym wrong!) it will take state legislative action. Federal employee unions can be undone with a presidential executive order. (basically issue a EO that invalidates JFK’s EO that allowed them!), much easier to do if the political will is there.
Private sectors unions, it likely would be unconstitutional to ban them. Freedom of association and that that, I see nothing wrong with people banding together voluntarily as a block and saying we offer our labor for this rate!
Of course its equally constitutional for companies to say too high try again or no thanks we will deal with you individually. No coercion & no violence by either side!
So in WV the median pay is $45K and the median teacher pay is $47K. Then there’s the added insurance and pension, which can’t be redeemed in the form of cash for the former, and won’t be touched for 40 years in the case of the latter. If you want teachers with at least a bachelors degree from college in their subject matter, which I think you do, then an extra $2K per year over average is a lot for that? I doubt many WV-ians even have a college degree, yet the median pay is just $2k less than a teacher who does have one. Even if the med benes are of the cadillac variety, it’s only insurance—never used if one doesn’t need it. Do WV get benes 100% free, or do they have a defined contribution level like 10%-20%-30%-40%-even 50% or more like other states do? Are the teachers’ pensions just too expensive, or did the politicians just not set aside enough money along the way and now are coming-up-short on their pay-as-you-go scheme, as other states are? I think we all know the answers here, but it’s just too fun to bash the public servants who teach our children, because, well, once back in the day you got a detention that you feel you didn’t deserve, or worse, just because teachers, who are quite passive in nature anyway, are easy targets to lash out against in anger, greed, resentment, and jealousy.
I sympathize with the teachers. I don’t blame them for what passes as education these days. May as well have robots teaching.
No, the municipalities and unions did not sign these contracts in good faith.
"Municipalities" did not sign contracts; union management, politicians and their agents signed these contracts, intended to maximize revenue and power to each.
The cycle is: politicians give fat contracts to teachers, so teachers can pay union dues, so the unions can make political contributions to the politicians who awarded fat contracts to the teachers.
Nowhere in this cycle do yo see the taxpayers who actually have to pay for all this.
"Tough crap, we're cutting your pensions".
Those employees are also tax payers. As a rule, I’m not a fan of public employee unions, but you’ll end paying for them either way.
That's a valid point - the number I saw was 19% of adults in WV have at least a bachelor's degree (lowest in the nation.) There are some other factors other than those discussed that weigh it the other way:
1. Plenty of people are willing to trade a lot of salary to have a schedule that matches that of their kids (including the summer off)
2. There are fewer work days for a teacher than most professions
3. I don't know how many in WV work in the coal industry, but I would guess that it is a significant number, that many of the positions don't require degrees, and that the pay is decent because of the manual labor and danger involved.
4. Teachers do have degrees, but the education field consistently draws students with lower qualifications than technical fields. One would expect them to be at the lower end of the pay scale for workers with degrees and it is normal for there to be some overlap between the pay scales for those with degrees and those without. (Some jobs require training and certification, but not a degree, and can pay well.)
I don't know what the exact situation is in WV, but I generally don't have a lot of sympathy for the teachers' unions because they don't give a fair accounting of the worth of their employees. ("Look how much baseball players make. Look how much teachers make. Which one is more important?" If professional teachers were only the top .001% of their field, and if 85% of that group made less than $25k/year, how many of that top 15% of the top .001% would be people who are teachers right now? It the teaching field was competitive, most current teachers couldn't compete.)
See post 25.
I believe the major problem with public school costs is our state representatives and school board representatives. The state house has the power to make laws that favor/support the taxpayer but to your point, they generally favor the special interests that benefit from a bloated public school system. School boards are another government body that should be looking out for the taxpayer but again, many of our school boards treat taxpayer money like their private bank. I.e., they have no problem spending other people's money.
I think blaming or punishing the pensioner or teacher is misguided. State reps and school board members are failing to represent the interests of the taxpayer. They are the ones to blame for government excesses including public school excesses.
There is no quick fix. Replacing our representatives with conservatives who will do what they promise is where it's at. There are probably many Freepers who would do a great job sitting on school boards or state houses - to represent the taxpayer's interest.
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