No, I’m not talking about the unions bringing down what used to be the biggest company in the United States, GM, but about how unions harm our public education system:
A $13.2 million, five-year grant from the National Math and Science Initiative, designed to add new Advanced Placement teachers, courses and exams for thousands of Washington high school students, has been scrubbed.
The reasons?
The state’s rule against merit pay for teachers, and top-down inflexibility, said discouraged Southwest Washington program leaders who broke the news Friday.
Victims include Evergreen and Union high schools in east Vancouver. They were among seven statewide that stood to win an average of $114,000 for AP teacher training and courses for the 2008-09 school year.
Despite weeks of talks, no way was found around teachers union collective bargaining rules to meet the rigid guidelines of the grant organization.
I’ve described the economics of this in detail before here, “Because of unions, our public education system pays science teachers the same as english teachers, and given that science majors are in great demand in the private sector, this has a downward push on able science teachers.” In other words, you can blame our abysmal math and science public education directly on the teachers unions. Joanne Jacobs has more.
A major problem with US unions is that they’re so fragmented that you end up with sectors where unions bite off more of the pie than their workers deserve. I agree that K-12 teachers have become overly pampered. (Although we can’t fault the unions too much in this case: a few decades ago, teachers were making less than electric meter readers.) In the end, unionization itself isn’t the problem–unions have always provided better conditions for workers (union leaders are the people who invented the weekend, after all). What we really need are strong pan-national (or better yet, pan-world) unions that are tasked with looking out for all workers.
(union leaders are the people who invented the weekend, after all)
Not so, the weekend was invented by Henry Ford, a strong union hater, see here. Moreover, the weekend could have never come around without the great advances capitalism in general have provided - advances that, in many ways, unions fight against, see here.
Not a big fan of unions.. they have become increasingly corrupt over the years and now they are fat and bloated