While NEA is dealing with its own labor strife in Washington, DC, the professional staffers of the California Teachers Association aren’t seeing much progress in their own contract talks with CTA management. There is still plenty of time to cut a deal; their collective bargaining agreement doesn’t expire until August 31. But the rumblings have already begun.Teachers unions sound like the management that they are when their own staff unions start picketing. It's definitely popcorn-worthy.
Thursday, June 26, 2014
Ultimate Hypocrisy
The purest, most vivid hypocrisy ever on display is that shown by unions towards their own staff employees--who are members of different unions:
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16 comments:
Collective bargaining only works if it's an adversarial process... this is not hypocrisy.
B.S.
And doing that which you claim to abhor in others is the very definition of hypocrisy.
Of course collective bargaining only works as an adversarial process. The union's not demanding more pay for more productivity, it's just demanding more pay. Not much room for a meeting of the minds under those circumstances since it's just a matter of how much arm-twisting the union can apply and how much the employer can stand. I guess we'll see how much arm-twisting the arm-twisters can stand.
My hypocrisy-watching snack is nachos though.
I really don't understand your point (and that may be on me), so let me try to clarify mine. I start from a point where unions are beneficial to the market in general ... obviously, any employer would prefer they not exist.
The process should go this way: both employer and union make unreasonable demands. they negotiate, using every tool in their chest. Eventually, there is agreement at some level of compromise ... which should reflect a mutually agreeable settlement. Pickets, lockouts ... part of the process.
So, a union of a union using these tactics? Perfectly reasonable. Hypocrisy would be not letting their workers unionize.
It's on you.
It's the *teachers union* that is being hypocritical, not the staff union.
My point is that unions aren't beneficial. They drive up costs without providing value. The only beneficiary, as opposed to the two beneficiaries in a free market exchange, are union members much as the only beneficiary to a mugging is the mugger.
The example of the mugger, by the way, isn't hyperbolic.
Unions provide no service to the employer the employer couldn't as easily, or more easily, provide for themselves. Therefore the benefits workers get via the union aren't as a result of greater productivity courtesy of the union but that the union allows the workers to coerce that greater pay. Great if you're a worker. Not so great if you're a customer.
If there's some benefit to anyone but the worker feel free to describe it but the cost, both financial and societal, of unions would have to make that benefit very great indeed to make it worthwhile.
A hundred-plus years ago, unions did some good. Today, they're nothing but parasites.
I wonder. Since history's written by the victors, and historians aren't without ideological axes to grind, I'm not sure we're getting quite the complete story of the early days of the union movement. I suspect it has a lot more in common with the Molly Maguires then it does with fraternal solidarity and a struggle for safer working conditions.
A hundred years ago unions were hardly more then bands of thugs. It wasn't until the reign of FDR that union violence was legitimized by conferring the privilege of forming a legal monopoly and force that monopoly down the throat of business owners. Of course unions didn't really give up their violent propensities, they just got their way often enough that there wasn't all that much reason for violence. Not that unions and violence are now strangers as the fairly recent situation in Wisconsin proves.
But this discussion of unions may, in fact, be pointless. The decline in union membership in the private sector is astonishing, from 39% of the labor force in the private sector to 6.7% today, and even in the public sector union growth has come to sudden stop. I'm beginning to wonder if the legislative successes that brought the modern labor union into existence will last too much longer.
I know that seems like a crazy idea today but there are some indications in that direction.
I'm even more certain It's not me, Darren ... the teachers' union is negotiating the same way that they expect administrations to.
Since they decry it when schools do it, it's hypocritical.
Decrying things is part of the negotiation process. Not hypocritical.
No, it isn't. That's what unions do. You're equating two different roles of unions. As workers, they do everything to get what they need ... as employers, they do everything not to give in. It's not hypocrisy.
I have to believe that people who aren't in bed with a union agree with me.
I hate to say this, but people who are wrong agree with you. It's fine to be anti-union, although I think it's misguided ... but criticizing a union for doing exactly what unions do is ridiculous.
Again, you're nuts.
(In this case) I'm not criticizing a union for doing what unions do, I'm criticizing a union for doing what unions decry, at least in others--that evil "other", aka management.
We clearly are not going to agree on this ... but, I will maintain, with massive economic theory supporting my view, that whatever the relationship is, management should always be out to exploit labor, and labor should always be out to exploit management. Then, they come to meet in the middle.
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