Category Archives: jobs

How Bad is a Vocational Education?

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Especially compared with a formal college education?  Oren Cass, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, had some thoughts on that in a recent Wall Street Journal piece.

Elevating vocational education, and prioritizing its students, must begin with a substantial reshaping of American high schools. Vocational education will not succeed so long as culture and public policy consign it to second-class status—a dumping ground for students who interfere with what school districts consider their real mission, college prep.

It’s absolutely true that we shouldn’t be deprecating the status of those with or who prefer, for any reason, vocational educations.  These folks—the VoTech graduates, the OO graduates—the trades and secretaries are critical to our economy. What road gets built, what office buildings or houses get built, what communications networks get laid out without the trades?  What office is operable without the secretaries and office managers who do the actual nitty-gritty of running things?

What will a designer or an engineer or an architect do without the trades and secretaries to turn ideas into action?

Cass is spot on.

It’s Not Your Company

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Seattle wants to charge a head tax on businesses operating in the city, a tax whose amount would be just what it sounds like—a tax based on the number of hours worked by each employee the business has on its payroll.

In response to the proposal, Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, paused construction on a 17-story office tower in downtown Seattle.

In response to Amazon, the Left in Seattle, spearheaded by the Service Employees International Union-backed activist gang—Working Washington—wants Amazon charged with a felony.

Amazon, after all, doesn’t belong to its investors, and it’s not run by Bezos.  No, the activists, the SEIU, and the city’s governing machine that wants the tax, all insist that Amazon is public property, and it must do what they demand, not what its owners want.

Because those owners don’t own that.  They only hold it in conditional fee from these city Know Betters.

Is Seattle as much a harbinger of future Progressive-Democrat demands as is Jerry Brown’s California?

Update: The Seattle City Council on Tuesday voted 9-0 to impose the head tax, although rather than being based on hours worked per employee, it’s a flat head tax: $275 per employee per year.

A Teachers Union Strike

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There have been teachers union strikes in Oklahoma, Kentucky, and West Virginia, and now there’s one set to go off later this week in Arizona.  Readers know my disdain for union strikes generally: they’re nothing but legalized extortion—”nice business you got here.  Be too bad if something were to happen to it.  Like, say, it’s destroyed because nobody works here anymore.”  It isn’t possible to negotiate when the other party is sticking a gun in your ear—even if it’s “just” a metaphorical gun.

But it’s especially despicable when it’s a teachers union strike.  These persons are using children as hostages to back up their extortion.  And the Arizona one is all about ego and hurt feelings.

Lynn White, a high school biology teacher in Gilbert, AZ:

People feel like the state doesn’t respect the job we do as public school teachers[.]

Never mind that respect comes the way any honest American gets it: by earning it with actual deeds.  It certainly doesn’t come because this or that person, or collection of them—think they’re special.  And in the case of public school teachers, those deeds are how well they teach, as demonstrated by the quality of their graduated students.  And that’s not very high (scroll down the table at the link to see Arizona’s bad and worsening performance in 4th grade math).

Arizona should replace the strikers en masse with substitutes and insist on actual teaching performance.

A Board Whose Time has Come and Gone

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The National Labor Relations Board is supposed to protect all workers, but it’s been focused on union workers exclusively for far too long.  In the effort, too, it’s become far too politicized to be useful or able to be rehabilitated.

For instance, it ignores the courts.

In [a] DC Circuit case…the NLRB ignored the court’s longstanding precedent on an employer’s bargaining obligations under a collective-bargaining agreement, forcing a Michigan health clinic to defend itself against charges it knew the court would reject.

The NLRB ignores other long-standing precedent, also.  For instance, it has ruled [sic] the franchising companies—a McDonald’s, a Subway, and so on—are at least partially responsible for the employment practices of the franchise holder—a particular McDonald’s or Subway restaurant—even though employment decisions are entirely the purview of the franchise license holder.

Peter Schaumber, ex-NLRB Chairman under ex-President Bush the Younger, argued in his op-ed at the link that the NLRB could cure this by issuing a slew of regulations that would reverse those abusive practices.  It’s true enough that regulations ” adopted after public notice and comment cannot be overturned without ‘substantial justification’ or renewed rule-making,” but that’s only a temporary sop.  The same politicization would leave it straightforward (if cumbersomely so) to find “substantial justification” or to spend the time to go through “renewed rule-making” in order to alter the NLRB to its members’ ideology—even ego—rather than staying focused on all workers.

Formalizing regulations through rule-making processes cannot correct the board’s political biases, whichever way those might lean.

The NLRB needs to be done away with altogether.

Fired or Resigned?

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Ex-Veterans Affairs Secretary is making his case that he didn’t resign, he was fired.

Shulkin said he had not submitted a resignation letter, or planned to, and was only told of Trump’s decision shortly before the Twitter announcement.

Of course, the format of a resignation is immaterial to the act; in particular, letters are the polite, professional way to quit, but they’re not required, not at all.  Too, learning that your boss wants you to leave “shortly before the Twitter announcement” might be impolite, even impolitic, but again, learning the boss’ desire is not required for resigning.  Nor is desiring one to leave the same as firing that one.

The distinction in this context might seem minor, but it actually flows from a very serious legal matter.

The semantics could be relevant to Trump’s ability to name an acting VA secretary to temporarily fill Shulkin’s place. Last week, Trump named Defense Department official Robert Wilkie to the acting position….
Under federal law, a president has wide authority to temporarily fill a federal agency job if someone “dies, resigns, or is otherwise unable to perform the functions and duties of the office.” There is no mention of a president having that authority if the person is fired.

The fact is, Schulkin may have felt considerable pressure to resign, and it’s common to conflate pressured-to-resign with being fired, but the two are not the same.  Especially here.  Cabinet Secretaries are nominated by the President, but they are confirmed by the Senate.  The President cannot fire a Secretary.  He must be impeached.  It may be that Secretaries serve “at the pleasure of the President,” but once confirmed, they serve “at the pleasure of Congress,” also.

Schulkin could have held out for being impeached, but he resigned—under pressure certainly, but voluntarily nonetheless.