Tag Archives: jobs

Education and Unions

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What do teachers unions have against quality schools?

Georgians will be voting on a State Constitution amendment that would create a statewide school district into which failing public schools from any individual school district could be transferred.  This statewide district would have the authority to make any changes to a failing school it deemed necessary—including ridding the school of its union representatives and including further converting the failing school to a charter school or closing it altogether.

Naturally, teachers unions oppose this threat to their core.  The National Education Association alone has dumped over five-and-a-half million dollars into the state to oppose the amendment, because union teachers.  Never mind that there are 68,000 children currently trapped in 127 failing public schools—535 children per failure.  Unionization is more important to teachers unions than the education of the children for which these unions are responsible.

It gets…better: this is what a Clinton administration will allow unions to inflict on our children nationwide, even if the unions lose—and the children win—on the Georgia ballot tomorrow.

A Teachers Union Disingenuosity

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This example is provided by the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties; they’re holding the education of 100,000 state college/university students hostage against satisfaction of the union’s demands.

APSCUF President Kenneth Mash:

We are headed to the picket lines, but even on the picket lines, our phones will be on, should the State System decide it doesn’t want to abandon its students[.]

And

The union said late Tuesday night that the state had handed it its last, best offer and was done negotiating.

Who’s abandoning the students?  It isn’t the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, which runs the State’s college/university system that’s cut off negotiations.  It isn’t the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education that’s decided to walk out, strike, and refuse to teach the system’s tuition-paying students.

The sticking points?  The union says the offered pay raise isn’t big enough to suit them.  The union objects to paying a share of their health coverage costs.  The system already had acceded to another union objection [emphasis added].

[T]he state said it withdrew several proposals including one that would have required full-time temporary faculty to teach an additional class each semester.

A whole additional class.  So students could get an improved college education.

The union’s teachers and coaches (nominally teachers themselves) just want free stuff of their own.

Disparate Impact

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Some folks sued RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co over its hiring policy that

allegedly gave preference to applicants with two to three years of job experience out of college and disfavored those with closer to a decade in the workforce. The company’s guidelines provided to its hiring contractor, according to the ruling, said the greener group of workers “adjusts easily to changes.”

The suit centered on the premise that this policy had a disparate impact on older workers.  In the words of Lee Parks, an employment and civil rights lawyer with Parks, Chesin & Walbert, the policy means that

Those over 40 need not apply[.]

Judge William Pryor, writing for the majority at the 11th Circuit, which heard an appeal from the trial court’s ruling, wrote Indeed.  Disparate impact questions only apply to job holders, not those who’d merely like to hold a job.

Apparently disparate impact as justification for “corrective” action or as a cudgel is good only for some groups of Americans, but those who aren’t currently the favored ones don’t get its use.

This is one more reason to do away with disparate impact as an excuse for anything at all.

Some Data on the Obama Economic Recovery

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And on Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s policy impact on that recovery from the Panic of 2008, since Clinton has promised, proudly, to continue and extend President Barack Obama’s (D) economic policies.  These data are via Robert Barro’s (Harvard University economics professor and American Enterprise Institute visiting scholar) piece in The Wall Street Journal.  He and a colleague, Tao Jin, looked at

macroeconomic disasters in 42 countries, featuring 185 contractions in GDP per capita of 10% or more. These contractions are dominated by wartime devastation such as World War I (1914-18) and World War II (1939-45) and financial crises such as the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Among other things, they found that blaming the slow- to non-recovery on the Panic’s severity or on global financial crises, in their gentle phrase, “conflicts with the evidence.”

Among the specifics of their findings:

The growth rate of total nonfarm payrolls averaged 1.7% a year from February 2010 to July 2016, despite the drop in the labor-force participation rate. The post-2009 period is not a jobless recovery; it is a job-filled non-recovery.

And

[T]he drop in the unemployment rate—from 10% in October 2009 to 4.9% in July 2016—has been impressive, though overstated because of the decrease in labor-force participation.

Never mind that half the GDP lost during the contraction is typically recovered within two years of a recovery’s start.

So, what policies led to this failed recovery?  There have been lots, ranging from attacking hydrocarbon-based energy production and the destruction of jobs with the subset of the Democratic administration’s war on coal (and growing war on oil and natural gas), the Obama EPA regulations intruding onto private property (no cattle ponds on private ranches, recall), Labor Department’s and NLRB’s restrictions on non-union labor, and so on.  The primary policy, though, has been this administration’s increase in government transfer payments.

Federal social benefits to persons (things like Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and food stamps) as a fraction of GDP rose from 8.7% in 2007 to 10.9% in 2015.  That’s a 25% rise in the fraction of GDP that’s money taken out of the private economy, washed through a middleman government, and the remainder then passed along to others.  In real dollar terms, that’s an increase from a skosh over $1.3 trillion in 2007 to a skosh under $2 trillion in 2015, an increase of more than 50%.

That’s money not applied to actual economy-stimulating and job-creating activities: free trade, rolling back inefficient regulations, fiscal discipline, and, yes, public infrastructure such as highways and airports.  That’s money not applied to enhancing productivity.

The growth rate of GDP per worker from 2010-15 was 0.5% per year, compared with 1.5% from 1949 to 2009.

Instead, Clinton not only wants more of the same.  She was for the Pacific and Atlantic free trade deals on offer (and one soon to be before Congress) before she lately found it politically expedient to be against them.  She favors increasing regulation—evil Wall Street and political speech are her targets du jour—not reducing it.

Her idea of fiscal discipline is increased spending, partially paid for with higher taxes.  She wants “free” education, paid for with higher taxes; reduced borrower liability for student loans, paid for with higher taxes; free day care, paid for with higher taxes; free health care—single payer, yet (never mind that contradiction)—paid for with higher taxes; free family leave from employment, paid for with higher taxes and higher prices since the employer must pay, also, if only through reduced output and so reduced sales; and on and on.

And that infrastructure work?  She is for that—so long as it’s done by Government approved union labor, and not by the most cost efficient contractors.