I have lacked the time to get back to this before now, but this is a continuation on the first post regarding public unions. The current concerted attack on public unions by the GOP and its Tea Party wing, is just a stepping stone for a larger attack on working Americans. We all know that governments on all levels, local to national are suffering terrible financial crises. This fact has been a major motivating factor in the pattern of the last two election cycles.
As it continues to be more and more difficult to meet basic needs, Americans are suffering and afraid. Well....most of us anyway. The exception would be the top one or two percent who are buying the services of our governments at all levels, local to national. Those folks are in better shape than they ever have been . The current income disparity in the US is the widest in our history. They also seem to have a pressing interest in ensuring that the US economy will continue to be structured to re-distribute wealth... Upward.... To them. The attack on the public unions is a keystone in this re-distribution plan.
For the last 30-40 years , there has been a continuous broadcast message from the right. It comes in many forms and is applied to the concept of unions in general. It runs something like this.. Unions are monopolies that hold vital services hostage for unfairly high compensation. Unfairly high union compensation prevents businesses from hiring more workers or investing more in the growth of the business. Unions have outlived their usefulness and now represent only an outmoded drain on the economy. In short and to paraphrase into the vernacular of the current debate: Unions are milking the rest of us for unfairly high wages and benefits, which is killing business and thus contributing to the enormous unemployment levels AND (most importantly to this post), public unions in particular are causing a huge portion of the budget shortfalls that governments at all levels are experiencing. This message has been generally successful. The membership of unions in the private sector has plummeted in the last (nearly) three decades leaving public unions as the bastion of union activity in the US. Unions, having been the source of not only improved conditions for all American workers, but a major source for limitations on how employers may exploit their work forces, it is unsurprising that the last major bastion is under attack by the corporate-owned lawmakers.
My general public unions discussion with the RW tweeter is the topic of the prior post on this blog, as are some of the many benefits the country and ALL of its workers (union and non) have received as a by product of the union movement in the US. This further post regards the later discussion I had with the anti-public-union tweeter that evening. Further poking produced statements from my tweetmate that indicated that he did not regard "government workers" as part of the general "evil public union" group we were discussing.....Er....Wha..???
Yet more poking revealed that what he was actually after were teachers. A reflection of the concerted attack on teachers unions which has, of late been such a frequent feature of the current GOP overreach program and the media coverage thereof. I guess I should not have been surprised. After all, turning the spin machine against teachers unions is a triple win for the conservatives as it encompasses three of the things they like least. Unions, public education and, well.....education in general. So then lets do talk a bit about teachers.
My absolute favorite of the lies...err...talking points that the Right likes to spout regarding teachers, is that of how incredibly overpaid they are as a group. 'They make SO MUCH MORE than the average American and yet they only work 6 hour days and 9 months a year!' Really?....Lets look at that claim a bit more closely.
Average per capita income for the US in 2009 was around $39,000. Average income for teachers of all public school varieties for the US is about $42,000 annually. Slightly higher than the national average for everyone, but hardly a massive difference. Bear in mind, those numbers are a direct comparison between teachers and absolutely everyone else. Teachers however, have some base requirements in order to get a job that are NOT directly comparable to everyone else in the country. I am speaking, of course of the general requirement that they have at least a Bachelor's degree (usually in education) in order to be allowed to teach our children.
Let us then take a look at where teachers' income levels lie with regards to everyone else in the US with at least a Bachelor's degree. This is a very different story. In a study of average earnings by educational attainment, the average for all adult males with at least a Bachelor's degree is about $94,000. For females of the same stripe its about $60,000, Compared to their educational counterparts in the general populace, suddenly the teacher salary is still out of line, but this time it is significantly out of line on the down side. (The disparity which still remains between men and women is a subject for a different time) Lets move along to what teachers have to do in order to earn that salary, which is about 54% of the average of their comparably educated counterparts in the non-teaching world.
This would be the bit where those who are not, never have been and who have never known teachers will whine that they only work 6 hours per day and 9 months per year. This, like the "outrageous pay scale" is pure fiction. Its hard to give a definitive site for this, so I would suggest you do as I did and Google how many hours teachers work. I spent A LOT of time reading all kinds of things. Studies, blogs, forums (both US and UK) etc. There did tend to be a general consensus that the average teacher work week is around 50-60 hours, once class time, grading, extracurricular hours (frequently mandatory), conferences etc are added in. This is despite the fact that they only get paid for that 6.5-7 hour day, no matter how many hours they actually put in. One teacher in the UK (which seems to be having a similar discussion) actually calculated that on average, he/she worked the equivalent of 7 unpaid weeks a year in extra hours per week.
As it happens I DO know teachers. A number of them. So I have had years to observe how their schedules actually work. Most of them are at school anywhere from half an hour to an hour before school starts. There are often extracurricular activities they sponsor which happen at least 2-3 times per week, and which keep them at school for an extra hour or two each session. Then they go home and grade. And grade. And grade. Frequently until bed time. Then, of course there is the extra time for lesson planning (often on weekends), parent/teacher conferences, meetings etc. All of this turns rapidly into that 50-60 hours per week. On to the cushy 9 months deal.
Don't you believe it. Not for a minute! Most teachers spend at least two weeks both at the beginning of summer break and at the end, dealing with wind down and spool up respectively. The Winter and Spring breaks are also often diluted with catching up on the administrative duties. And those "In-service" days your kids love and you hate (because they make scheduling difficult)? The teachers don't have those off. They are IN SERVICE. So that leaves us really with about 6-8 weeks of "off time" in the summer. Nice. If that were all there were to it.
Teachers have yet another requirement to keep their jobs that most of their similarly educated and much better paid non-teaching compatriots are not subject to. Continuing education. For the teacher. And quite a lot of it at that. On their own time and their own dime. If the teachers are working 50-60 hour weeks during the school year, that makes fitting in continuing education more difficult. So many do this over the summer. Still working, if fewer hours. Furthermore, teachers are more likely to work a second job than most other Americans. This too is often in the summer to make ends meet (guess those extravagant salaries just are not enough).
Add to this just the pure stress of trying to herd 100 or so children at a time through the educational process. Without adequate support either in $$ or from home. Especially in a world where the parents are less willing and/or less able to be actively involved in motivating and helping their children. In a society that has come to glorify the stupid and at the same time is terribly upset with teachers if the children do not excel at everything. The meme of the lazy public union worker has had decades to stick and has done so (including teachers). Though there are clear links to socioeconomic disadvantage and lower educational performance, and despite clear evidence that socioeconomic disadvantage is becoming a more common state for an ever increasing portion of our population, its always "the fault of the teachers" if children under-perform. And yet we think teachers are overpaid and over compensated. Why? Because they still have benefits and pensions (which by the way they pay more into than you do into Social Security)? OK then. Lets talk about pensions.
There is much conversation about how much teachers are costing the "taxpayers", as though teachers themselves are not taxpayers. They are. They also pay their income taxes and sales taxes and property taxes just as everyone else does, for the benefit of the "general welfare". Further, teachers are employees as are any others. Their employers just happen to be the rest of us.
The decline of pensions in the private sector has come hand in hand with record profits for corporations, record tax cuts for the richest 2%, and decline of the unions which once ensured competition in wages and benefits for all. Free trade and opening labor markets in poor countries has led to massive outsourcing of American jobs. Why pay an American worker a living wage when you can pay a third world laborer 86 cents an hour, not bother with benefits or even whether the worker is free or functionally enslaved? Outsourcing, which has contributed to record corporate profits (along with massive tax cuts and loopholes) just points back to the fundamentally amoral and rather predatory nature of unregulated businesses. Just days after the centennial of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire we should be mindful of what an unregulated profit motive will do to those who make the money for the top 2%.
It is hard to countenance that with even a fraction of those record profits, the corporations could not help their employees with pension funds much like those remaining in the public sector, and which used to be ubiquitous in the private sector as well. Instead they continue to reduce benefits, eliminate pensions or even employer contributions to 401k's. They lay off American workers while continually shifting operations to the next cheapest market overseas, when the one they have been using starts to get savvy and worker costs rise. Its not that they can't afford it, its that the new ultra-wealthy greed culture (plutocracy) chooses not to afford it, and they rely on the complacency and ignorance of the average person to manipulate the system to their continued advantage, and our continued detriment.
Complacency. Ignorance. The plutocracy's favorite tools. Hmmm....What's a good way to fight these factors? OH Yeah! EDUCATION! Education, which leads to thinking (oh dear), the ability to discern fact from fiction (double oh dear), a better understanding of the workings of government and economy (OH DEAR) and which correlates directly to income levels (unless you are a teacher). What better way to keep the workers they still want nicely ignorant and complacent than to feed the idiocracy? What better way to do this than to marginalize teachers and dismantle the public education system? How to do this? keep telling the majority of the population who are suffering and afraid, that teachers are responsible for their suffering and their fear.
Teachers, who are your middle class (or maybe not quite up to middle class) neighbors. Who we entrust to give our children the intellectual tools to cope with our world and succeed beyond our accomplishments. Teachers, who choose to forgo much greater income that similarly educated people enjoy, in order to serve us, our children and our society. They work. HARD. Knowing they will never be monetarily rich, rarely famous and usually tired.
Why begrudge them things which were once common throughout our society? Things which we all want? And things which, compared to the endless tax cuts for those who don't need them, tax exemptions and open trade practices for the plutocracy, are quite small in the overall economic scheme of things? Instead of indignantly asking why public unions and particularly teachers continue to have pensions and health benefits, it might be more productive to ask the plutocracy why you don't.
Go get 'em!
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