Apparently some people don’t understand that it’s a rhetorical question:
“Wisconsin’s third-largest school district says no thanks to union representation.”
By an almost two-to-one margin.
Apparently some people don’t understand that it’s a rhetorical question:
“Wisconsin’s third-largest school district says no thanks to union representation.”
By an almost two-to-one margin.
Why would anyone want to join a union which really is another form of mafia? I would rather have a standard contract and negotiate terms after my first successful year of teaching. Teachers have either lost the confidence to negotiate for themselves or the weaker “educators” among them would rather hide among the union herd.
It’s job security right up to bankruptcy. Perhaps some Texas thinking is rubbing off on them. I like to think that not all teachers and other employees are blind to the damage these unions are doing. I like to think they can see what unions have done to Detroit and how much better right to work states are doing than union dominated states. I like to think these people are smart enough to see the future. They could prove me wrong but time will tell. Mid term elections next year will tell us a lot.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/13/rick-perry-when-you-grow-tired-of-maryland-taxes-squeezing-every-dime-out-of-your-business-think-texas/
Many – and I mean MANY – union workers voted for Brad Wall in 2007 and again in 2011 because they understood that their future was brighter with the Wall government than with the Marxist heads of Saskatchewan’s unions.
Teachers in private schools don’t have unions (or the fabulous benefits) yet still enjoy job security but I see what you mean. I think many teachers see a problem in the system yet a somewhat powerless to do anything.
Professionals have professional associations. Interchangeable laborers have unions. Are teachers professionals?
This is what democracy looks like.
To borrow a phrase….
Ed, please define “professional”, I was one of your “interchangeable” types, and have belonged to a union only once, I quit that job after 6 months over a bet with some union supporting rectum. I did quite well in life, all without a union.
“Which side are you on, boy?” I still have a Pete Seeger vinyl recording of it. According to the jacket, the song was written in 1932 in Harlan County, Kentucky by the wife of an organizer named Reece. Very effective message.
I don’t like comparing Public Employee Unions with non Public Employee Unions. There is a huge difference in my view. Public Employee unions should all be banned!!!! They have, at least ’til now, had no consequences for their irresponsible actions. Other unions live or die according to their effectiveness.
My dad (RIP) was a teacher and saw the writing on the wall when teachers became unionized. He was prophetic and knew that teachers unionizing was a death knell to the profession.
Teaching is no longer a profession and one sees indications of this daily. The unions (aided and abetted by the Boards) shove teachers around, get their money, and do next to nothing to actually foster teacher professionalism. It’s all about political manoeuvring and making money for the union bosses.
Unfortunately, teachers make more than better salaries with more than better benefits which puts a damper on their speaking out. I know very few teachers who would say they’re satisfied with their work or the various unions which, supposedly, represent them.
As for the students? They’re at the bottom of the heap. No wonder so many parents are mortgaging their houses to send their children to private schools.
Tim Hudak in Ontario should take note!
It is all about the kids, don’tcha know!
Here in BC there is another round of education union’s negociating contracts. This is a regular ritual of fleecing the taxpayers wallet. Student population decreases each year but the education budget goes up 5 – 7%. Individual teachers will say in one on one conversations that they do not support their union and yet the votes are always + 90% for strike action. The profession is populated by pretty sketchy ethics and many down right challenged people. I say that with many family members as teachers. The indoctrination is pretty complete.
As long as society allows the education of our youth to reside with unions and their political agendas we are hooped. These people are producing young adults who will view reliance on government and higher ups in general as the way of the world. Critical thought is now, practically non-existant.
How much longer can the taxpayer be expected to perceive teachers as learned professionals when they act like aggressive trade unionists?
Is there any other group calling themselves professionals that walk both sides of this fence?
Hockey players…
Is there any other group calling themselves professionals that walk both sides of this fence?
Doctors…doing the socialist big government’s dirty work for them. They work for big government in more ways than one. Basically, just employees.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/health/Proposed+private+MRIs+sparks+alarm+about+longer+waits/8855548/story.html
“The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta, the body that regulates the province’s doctors, wants to outlaw privately-paid MRI and CT scans because they allow patients who can afford the tests to jump the queue for care.”
I was in a union once, didn’t like it. “Pie in the sky” demands for benefits and pay well above what the private sector was getting prompted me to make a t-shirt to wear at our meeting. “My union works hard so I don’t have too!”, didn’t go over well.
I was a member of IBEW 424 for about 2 years. Thankfully I got out before they completely ruined me. The laziest bunch of whining electricians I have ever seen in my life. Most non union electricians would out work these guys by 4:1 on a bad day.
OMMAG brings up the example of hockey players as another group that straddles the professional/trade union line, but at least the players (or their agents) negotiate their own yearly contracts. The collective bargaining agreements in the professional sports leagues are largely about the rules for those negotiations. Professional sports is a (relatively) very small employment sector, and there is no question that individual performance is by far the most important factor in contract talks – consider the statistical analysis involved in baseball alone.
I, too, was in a union. I worked at UPS while I was going to school and membership in the Teamsters was a condition of employment. I would have been making a hell of a lot more money if I was negotiating my own contract, and the guy across the belt from me doing half the work would have made a lot less.
The word professional could refer to a member of one of the professions (engineer, lawyer, doctor, accountant, or actuary. Teaching used to be on that list). It could refer to the distinction between an amateur (someone who performs a task for its own intrinsic value to them rather than monetary compensation) from someone who is paid to perform the same task, such as professional athletes.
Or, it could refer to professional behaviour – attention to detail, knowing when to keep your mouth shut or to seek assistance from a specialist, keeping up with the latest research, accomplishing set goals on time and within budget, negotiating one’s own compensation, personal integrity, honest effort, and so on.
Teaching used to be considered a profession (along with lawyers, doctors etc) due to the professional behaviour and special training required. A dispassionate eye would see that, as for journalism majors, the training given to teachers in university is a joke. Since the introduction of teachers’ unions, the professional behaviour has also been sorely lacking. A few shine, but they would also shine if there wasn’t a union and the good teachers would be better compensated, to boot.
PeterJ….you really have to stop thinking so much! I am sending the pogr…errr..program…errr…h*ll…the statists after you. :):)
Yet another post that took me 45 minutes with no profane language, sent to the SDA shredder. NO sex or bad words. I’m pissed.
Revnant Dream, here is a trick to help you. Once you have composed your reply, and before typing those annoying captcha characters in the box below, hit the “reload” button for your Web browser. In Firefox, mine is at the right-hand end of the address bar. I think for Internet Exploder, it’s on the toolbar. The icon is a circular arrow.
Those captchas are time-limited, and they expire pretty quickly. When you reload the page, at least in Firefox, the text you typed into the comment window remains, but the captcha window vanishes. Just click your cursor in the comment window, though, and you can see the old captcha characters appear, and then get wiped out by a scrolling bar which replaces them with new ones. Type the new characters into the box provided, hit “submit”, and you are golden.
Hint #2: if the above seems too tedious, just use your cursor to highlight the text you have written, right-click on it, and select “copy”. That saves your text to clipboard on your local machine. If the posting effort fails, just start another reply, right-click on the comment box, and select paste, and restore your words that way. That should be quick enough to avoid expiring the captcha.
Hint #3: If you don’t have a wide screen with good screen resolution, go out and get one. They don’t have to cost much, and your eyes will thank you for it. Better screen resolution makes those damned captchas a LOT easier to decipher, believe me.
I use Opera. The post didn’t get past the . We will check your post eater. (O:} Its was not the Captcha
This is what I got twice today
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Revnant Dream;
I’ve been cought in comment purgatory a couple of times too.
I learned the hard way what gordinkneehil sugested,,, copy and pasting to notepad to save your comment if it gets “canned”.
Hope you figure it out. Hate to loose you.
Ed, you’ve raised a good point. I’m an engineer, and if I want to practice I must be a member of the professional association. “Public” teachers are members of two groups: the professional association, and the union. Which raises the question of whether the original purposes of the two can be maintained in the long-term. They are mutually contradictory, and I suspect that the union is weakening the professional association, rather than the alternative.
My union experience was with the United Woodworkers. I wish I had kept the union pension payout check when I quit (went back to school, studied engineering, and radically improved my options) when my back couldn’t take it anymore. I should have had that cheque for $0.24 framed. I’ll never see its like again….
Thanks for the tips folks.I Appreciate it. (O:}
“…Tim Hudak in Ontario should take note!…”
He has, Joe.
But he’s waiting for his advisors to read the tea-leaves from Tor Star and Globe and Mail columns before he decides to (a) stay silent, or, (b) say nothing of consequence.