Category Archives: jobs

Who Needs Knowledge?

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Plainly not teachers union teachers, at least according to the union. The New Jersey Progressive-Democratic Party-run State legislature agrees with them, too, which says volumes about the contempt Party has for ordinary Americans.

A major New Jersey education union is pushing Democratic Governor Phil Murphy to sign a bill into law that would eliminate the basic skills test requirement to become a teacher in the state.
The New Jersey Senate and state Assembly passed a bill in June that would allow the State Education Board to issue an alternative certificate to a teacher candidate who meets all eligibility requirements except for the requirement to achieve a minimum basic reading, writing and math skills test score.

The New Jersey Education Association union, via its political arm, the New Jersey Education Association Action Center makes the claim explicit.

[T]he basic skills test was an “unnecessary requirement” and it “created an unnecessary barrier to entering the profession.”

The only qualification a person needs to teach our children is a union membership certificate.

It’s not necessary to be able to cipher in order to teach arithmetic.

It’s not necessary to be literate in order to teach reading or writing.

It’s not fair to require these things.

91%

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That’s the outcome of a Freedom Economy Index survey of 70,000 small businesses, of whom 905 responded, producing a survey with a 3% margin of error and a 95% confidence interval for the outcome.

And having delayed the lede, here is that outcome.

Fully two-thirds of the respondents think college graduates have educations that are useless to business needs, and another quarter of them think those graduates don’t have very useful educations. Here are some of the comments from respondents, which the survey reported verbatim:

  • The Talent shortage will just get worse because high schools and colleges produce no talent.
  • The skills should be taught in highschool [sic].
  • A good work ethic would be a good place to start!
  • They don’t show up to an interview, and work is too hard, 9-5 is such a struggle.

And this:

Four-fifths of the respondents’ positions range from don’t care about hiring a graduate of a “major” school to strongly less likely to hire such a one. Some more verbatim comments:

  • I found that graduates with the aforementioned scholastic achievements typically have an incompatible ideology with my business culture.
  • We would hire someone with hands-on experience over someone that read about it in a book.
  • I only care about skills. If you ain’t got the skills you ain’t got a job.

And these two, which pretty much speak for themselves:

Businesses—small businesses, anyway—are catching on to the utter failure that is our current generation of colleges and universities.

The survey itself covers a broad range of items of concern to the small business community; it’s well worth reading in its entirety.

Another Counterproductive Union

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This one is ad hoc, but it’s no less destructive of consumer well-being. That’s especially ironic here, given who this group is: a collection of pharmacy employees at chains like CVS and Walgreens, and soon-to-be-defunct for a variety of other reasons, Rite Aid.

From Monday through Wednesday workers at Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid have pledged to call in sick[.]

A fake-sick move that they’re calling, in their manufactured angst, “pharmageddon.” Never mind that the employees’ lying about the reason for their absence should itself be a firing offense.

One pharmacist, who organized a prior, smaller walkout, and who now is cowering behind anonymity, exposed the cynicism of the current move:

Our stores are still thousands of prescriptions behind. Our patients are still going days, weeks, or even months without their needed medicine. And they’re pretending that there’s not a problem. Until they acknowledge that there’s an actual problem and work to address the actual problem…we have to keep pushing.

So: the way to solve the problem of patients going with their meds for extended periods of time—a supply chain problem as much as anything—is to deliberately deny patients access to their meds for extended periods of time by simply not showing up for work. And absenting themselves with their own false claims.

“Why Did Harvard Students Cheer on Hamas?”

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That’s the title of one section of The Wall Street Journal‘s Wednesday Letters section. One Harvard student wrote regarding the plethora of Harvard student groups’ open support of the terrorist Hamas gang,

The morally bankrupt claims made by these groups are not representative of many of their members. They used theirs, Harvard’s, and their members’ names to lend credence to their outrageous claims. These statements were published by organization leaders, often without serious debate or voting by members.

Say that’s true. How many of those members, allegedly omitted from open debate or voting, have resigned from those student groups?

…

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Another Letter writer wrote,

I received the mass email sent to Harvard alumni by President Gay, addressing the war in Israel. One line was especially notable: “It’s in the exercise of our freedom to speak that we reveal our characters.” Well said. Harvard’s character has been revealed.

Indeed. As well as are, via their decision not to speak or act, the characters of some student group members.

Too many illiberal Liberal and mainstream Left “students” at Harvard are terrorist sympathizers. None of them should be employable in the United States, not just a few lawyer wannabes singled out by a couple of law firms.

Featherbedding

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It’s not just for railroads, or auto unions. It seems to have come to the Writers Guild of America. The WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers appear to have reached a tentative agreement, wanting only fleshing out the details and then a WGA rank and file vote.

The tentative agreement appears to include these items:

  • a minimum number of writers per television show
  • guaranteed employment for those writers from conception to postproduction

If those really are included, they would be just naked featherbedding. Not even TV and movie production needs a guaranteed, fixed numbers of writers, or of any other type of employee, nor should these businesses need to provide guaranteed employment, whether or not the employees are needed at one time or another.

Instead, those items should be matters agreed in contracts between employee groups or their representing unions and the particular television and movie production company.

This wastefulness—and increased cost to consumers—is part of the price a union shop inflicts on the rest of us.