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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Mark Bauerlein

In Alternative Universe: Iraq War Ends -- Bush Indicted For Treason

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com



The Yes Men media pranksters have claimed responsibility for a million-copy spoof edition of The New York Times handed out yesterday on Manhattan streets.

It captures the gap between what is needed — what we hope and long for — and what we’re likely to get with a pragmatic Chicago pol at the helm, and the NYT filling his sails.

The lead story narrates our exit from Iraq and inquiries into war crimes. Other stories note the passage of universal health coverage, not Obama’s fake plan, and Adolph Reed’s proposals for free higher education, which I’ve discussed in this space before, including a great video interview with Reed, recorded about a year ago.

Of additional interest to Chronicle readers, since its annual “Executive Compensation” issue is in press, is a spoof story announcing passage of a new maximum wage law that caps all executive salaries at 15 times the minimum wage. This means that in a society paying a floor of $10/hour, executives could still earn $300,000.

As I point out in my forthcoming column in the compensation issue, though, public interest pay grades (military and civil service, e.g.) tend to keep the pay maximum closer to a multiple of 5.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and most state governors earn only about five times the salary of the lowest-paid college graduate in their service, generally not more than 8 times more than the lowest-paid 18-year old without any college at all.

In Reality, However
Meanwhile the real New York Times pimps one of the sleaziest Sophie’s Choice deals ever concocted by quality management (you know, the same people who have sold you the idea that you’re “participating” in management by getting to decide whether to take on more work or accept less pay).

Obama’s favorite schools superintendent, Michelle Rhee, is trying to break the union and teacher tenure in the public schools by offering a $40,000 raise to any teacher who will give up tenure. What they’re proposing is a dual compensation scheme: a $40,000 raise for those on the new “green” track, and squat for those on the tenured “red” track.

So the same people who turned teaching into a crap job — a job that qualified, motivated people can’t accept because of the low pay, low workplace autonomy, and continuous, compulsory teaching to high-stakes tests, now can find money and space for creativity?

Sure, that’s just what we need. School administrators with even more control of teachers than they have now. Because they’ve done such a great job with the curriculum — no music, no art, no sports, no thinking, no citizenship.

Rhee (and her fans) don’t think of teaching as a profession at all. It’s something that wealthy and privileged people do as volunteerism, as the NYT eventually, reluctantly, gets around to observing:

Ms. Rhee’s attitudes about teaching were forged in the 1990s in Baltimore, where she taught in an elementary school as a member of Teach for America, the nonprofit group that recruits college graduates to teach for two years in hard-to-staff schools, after which many leave for jobs in other professions. “Michelle does not view teaching as a career,” Ms. Weingarten said in an interview. “She sees it as temporary, something a lot of newbies will work very hard at for a couple of years, and then if they leave, they leave, as opposed to professionals who get more seasoned.” Teachers first won tenure rights across much of the United States early in the 20th century as a safeguard against patronage firings in big cities and interference by narrow-minded school boards in small towns, said Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of history and education at the University of Michigan. “And the historical rationale remains good,” Dr. Mirel said, pointing to the case of a renowned high school biology teacher in Kansas who was forced to retire nine years ago because he refused to teach creationism. “Without tenure,” Dr. Mirel said, “teachers can still face arbitrary firing because of religious views, or simply because of the highly politicized nature of American society.”

The Contingent Majority
Speaking of management getting exactly what they want and crushing tenure, we already have that in higher education as Gwen Bradley, lead AAUP staffer on contingent faculty issues, has long been pointing out.

She’s just released a special issue of Academe devoted entirely to the problem of nontenurable appointments in higher education, including an article by Audrey Jaeger, whose recent series of studies has added to the mounting evidence that management’s victory over tenure has harmed students.

And Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor has just released a special issue on the problem of mental labor: why do smart people do dumb things?

Posted at 11:13:05 AM on November 13, 2008 | All postings by Marc Bousquet

Comments

  1. It must stink to have to live in a society where none of your ideas ever have any chance of being implemented.

    — James · Nov 13, 12:31 PM · #

  2. This just in from some SUNY friends who have colleagues at the University of Buffalo. This was discussed at an open university senate meeting:

    The UB administration has found a new way to further discriminate against and ghettoize women faculty, increase the numbers of contingent faculty, and erode the tenure track.

    Administrators have recently refused to grant tenure to several female faculty candidates who had passed all faculty committee recommendations positively – the women were simply rejected by the Provost and then the President. BTW These faculty aren’t slouches: one of them reportedly is the only faculty member in her department with a Federal NIH grant. And New York State’s human rights commission is scheduling a hearing in at least one case, having granted a “probable cause” determination on discrimination.

    Some of the women were made an unusual (and AAUP-principles-violating offer): Withdraw from the tenure application and the job will be granted on a contingent basis for the coming year – which would theoretically then enable the administration to continue to renew the contracts, contingently, with none of the benefits of tenure.

    Not just two with one blow, but three dastardly deeds at once! These corporate CEO presidents sure do know how to destroy a university – with a little help from their unions, on the side.

    What’s next? Tampering with the terms of Federal funding as well? Of course, since grants are often formally made to institutions rather than to individuals, female principal investigators can be in a precarious position subject to substitution if they are, say, better than their male colleagues….

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Nov 13, 12:39 PM · #

  3. I did some back of the envelope math, and let’s see the effect of Marc’s proposal to cap the maximum wage at $300,000. Right now, the government takes in about 1.3 trillion from the personal income tax. Of that, the top 1% pay about 40% of the whole bill, which is just under $500 billion. If we capped their salary, tax revenues would plummit, since even if we taxed them at 100%, we would collect less than $500 billion. That of course, assumes that they would still work at such a tax rate. So realistically, you are looking at least a $350 billion shortfall from such a proposal. What would you cut to pay for it? The National Endowment for the humanities?

    — James · Nov 13, 12:48 PM · #

  4. Wow, James, you should go tell those horrible Scandinavian socialist states that they aren’t bringing in enough in taxes despite having a much fairer distribution of income than even that suggested in the article by the Yes Men. You see, when you put money in the pockets of all employees, there are fewer capitalist tragedies for the government to ameliorate. In other words, if WalMart (or WalColl) paid a decent wage (including benefits) rather than trying to “externalize” the cost of its employees, then there would be less need for the dreaded Big Government.

    — Unemployed Academic · Nov 13, 02:11 PM · #

  5. Except of course, that Marc wants to increase taxes because he wants tuition to be free. Someone has to pay for that, it obviously won’t be the rich, because Marc gets rid of them in his ideal world. I imagine that beside free tuition, adjunct pay will increase, that will cost money.

    The question is, just where is this new money going to come from when we get rid of the wealthy?

    — James · Nov 13, 02:25 PM · #

  6. James,

    You’re confusing the direction of causality. Marc has proposed a ratio of 1/15 as an equilibrium outcome. I would hope the point of his proposal would be to raise the income of those at the bottom, not to lower the income of those at the top. Also, this is a cap on executive salaries, not all income.

    One of the problems I have with saying these proposals are ‘expensive’ is that innovation tends to take place only after proposals are in place.

    Take a different example. It is routinely the case that the cost of environmental regulations is overstated while they are being debated. That’s because there is no incentive for the market to develop cost-saving technologies that meet the requirements until after the regulation is put in place.

    If the compensation ratio was 1/15, I can guarantee you that executives would quickly find a profitable way to raise the salaries of those at the bottom.

    And as for universal health care, the total cost of health care to the US economy would almost certainly go down. If insurance companies had to cover everyone, and everyone had to purchase insurance, a lot of costs would be eliminated because nobody would be playing games about ‘pre-existing conditions’ and all that jazz.

    — me · Nov 13, 02:52 PM · #

  7. “You’re confusing the direction of causality. Marc has proposed a ratio of 1/15 as an equilibrium outcome. “

    Now, just how does one get to a 1/15 salary ratio without mandating a cap on salaries? If there is a cap on salaries, what will this do to work incentives? What will this do to tax revenues? If tax revenues fall, which they by definition must because the top 1% of taxpayers pay more than $300,000 per year in income tax as it is, if revenues fall, where will they be made up?

    — James · Nov 13, 03:06 PM · #

  8. “Now, just how does one get to a 1/15 salary ratio without mandating a cap on salaries?”

    There’s no reason that the lowest salaries can’t rise. If the current lowest salary is $20,000, the maximum executive salary is $300,000. If they spent a couple hours in a room brainstorming and found a way to justify raising the lowest salary to $30,000, the maximum executive salary would rise to $450,000.

    My point is that there is currently no obvious incentive for executives to care about their workers. This would do the trick. No different from tying executive compensation to performance, just with a different objective function. After the law is passed, and only after the law is passed, will the executives have an incentive to spend time finding ways to raise the compensation of the workers, as opposed to finding ways to give themselves new golf club memberships.

    — me · Nov 13, 03:24 PM · #

  9. James teaches at a state (i.e., socialist) university, and obviously has some conflicts to work through. Go easy on him.

    — LuckyJim · Nov 13, 03:28 PM · #

  10. Four days before Lehman Brothers went belly up, its board gave three of its executives bonuses of $20 million apiece. Do you think that the board and the execs knew at that time bankruptcy was in the offing? Even Sarah Palin would have to say “You betcha!” to that one.

    This is the sort of de jure legality and de facto criminality in the capitalist system, as presently consituted, that needs tending to. Prof. Bousquet may be a little meat-axe vengeful, but his basic idea about radical reform is correct.

    — Just Passing Through · Nov 13, 03:46 PM · #

  11. So you geniuses are proposing controlling the market based on what you think is “fair”. Not a new idea, and not one that works.

    — grindocro · Nov 13, 03:47 PM · #

  12. “If the current lowest salary is $20,000, the maximum executive salary is $300,000. If they spent a couple hours in a room brainstorming and found a way to justify raising the lowest salary to $30,000, the maximum executive salary would rise to $450,000.”

    Or of course, they could just move their operation to Bermuda and the whole problem is solved. Kind of like the Physicians in Canada do when they emigrate to the US in order to practice medicine. It wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that they can make more money, would it?

    — James · Nov 13, 03:55 PM · #

  13. grindocro, if I take your meaning correctly, then you should realize that we always control the market based on what we think is fair. We don’t allow the person who can beat another person over the head with a cudgel and breach a contract to do so because it is not “fair”. We think it is fair to allow employers to dictate, among other things, how much time people can spend with their families or participating in politics, which preventable and treatable diseases they will die from and what kind of clothes they can wear. Or, did you simply object to calling policies that favor the broad majority of citizens over the wealthy minority fair?

    — Unemployed Academic · Nov 13, 04:02 PM · #

  14. “Or of course, they could just move their operation to Bermuda and the whole problem is solved.”

    Yes, I’ve heard Bermuda has more than enough room for all of those factories. And we all know how eager US elites have been to renounce their US citizenship (and with it their right to bribe elected officials) so that they can become proud Bermudians.

    — Unemployed Academic · Nov 13, 04:16 PM · #

  15. Of course, the headquarters will be in Bermuda, the factories will be in Mexico or Brazil, which has plenty of room for them. As to renouncing citizenship, plenty of Cuban elites were willing to renounce citizenship once salary caps were put into place there.

    — James · Nov 13, 04:32 PM · #

  16. James: You’re shifting the argument from one of “what is restricted” to “what is the effect of the policy”. It’s possible that they could move abroad. Would that really be cheaper than complying with this regulation? You are raising an empirical question, and neither of us has a good answer. The fact that some firms may change their location of production is a cost of implementing such a policy, but not by itself an argument against the policy.

    I’ll leave it at that, however, rather than debate the possible outcomes of proposals that will never become law. I’m not sure whether I would support that 1/15 rule (I probably wouldn’t) but I wouldn’t dismiss it without any thought.

    We have to be careful to account for information problems and incentive problems when we make claims about the market outcome being desirable or even efficient.

    — me · Nov 13, 04:44 PM · #

  17. “I’ll leave it at that, however, rather than debate the possible outcomes of proposals that will never become law.”

    Which is why it must stink to be a guy like Marc and realize that your brilliant policies never have a chance in our society.

    — James · Nov 13, 04:59 PM · #

  18. Actually, the influence of uncapped executive salaries in the United States has been to force other European nations – which used to have cap ratios – to uncap them. In other words, it is not the possibility of earning so much more elsewhere that has raised U.S. executive compensation. No, this is a practice that the U.S. has exported as its own invention.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Nov 13, 06:38 PM · #

  19. James, you seem both to be aware of and to disregard the fact that what you postulate as the result of a salary cap is already taking place when the ratio of executive to average-employee pay is something like 300:1. The reason is, of course, that elites are freer to abuse workers in places like Mexico or to have their surrogates do it in places like China. Yet, corporations like WalMart still choose to be based in the US. I wonder why… Could it be that they need the US military to protect them from the Chinese government? Also, one would assume that if something as radical as a salary cap were instituted, the government would have acted long before that to crack down on tax off-shoring, which some rather mainstream senators are already grumbling about.

    Really, you just have to admire how brilliant the Yes Men have been in forcing issues like this into the mainstream debate. If you ever want to know how capable and smart businessmen actually are, all you have to do is watch the segment of the Yes Men’s video where they debut the executive suit with the — ahem — marvelous appendage… priceless!

    — Unemployed Academic · Nov 13, 07:33 PM · #

  20. James, the adolescent notions of these faculty-lounge socialists aren’t worth a hillybilly’s hoot. From his cushy faculty digs Bousquet must revel in fantasizing about leading a rabble of drawn-mouth, hatchet-faced, cloth-capped Mollies armed with ax-handles and flying red banners while grimly chanting “Which Side Are You On?”! As for his fantasies about jailing President Bush next year, we’ll take care to advise the President of the wisdom of pardoning in advance every possible target of disloyal leftists’ vengeance. And if we change our standards for remuneration to sacrifice and personal danger, we should perhaps reward our military personnel with considerably higher wages than the gutless putzes pontificating about radical politics from their faculty pulpits and office armchairs.

    — emt · Nov 13, 08:16 PM · #

  21. This discussion doesn’t even take into account the fact that some positions just shouldn’t pay $20,000 a year. Leaf-raking for example. Or the guy with a GED who checks the light bulbs once a week. Some jobs just shouldn’t be compensated that highly. So if, say, the CEO of Disney doesn’t pay Mr. GED light-bulb checker the equivalent 1/15th of his own salary, that makes him an unethical employer?

    And whatever happened to the notion that employment is a freely negotiated private contract between the employer and the employee? As such, it ought to be free from government interference.

    I wonder if anyone here is familiar with the Lochner v. New York Supreme Court ruling of 1905 (yes, long before FDR and LBJ, but worthy of our notice nonetheless, right?). The ruling rightly decides that the Constitution bars a state from interfering with an employee’s right to contract with an employer.

    Since when did we decide that it is the government’s prerogative to interject itself into private employment contracts? Who decides what is just compensation? Should one be able to flip burgers for 50 years and make enough to provide for her retirement, send her children and grand children to college, buy a home, two cars, a lap top, and a stable full of horses? Is that role so important to society, and so valuable to business that it must be so well compensated as to provide an upper middle class lifestyle?

    As it has no experience whatsoever in business management, the government ought to stay clear away from placing unreasonable restrictions on private employment contracts.

    If you need any more proof consider this: If I had begun a business in the year zero on December 25 and if I had lost 1,000,000 a day up ‘till yesterday, it would still take me another 730 odd years to lose a trillion dollars. Multiply that by 74 and you will have the unfunded federal liability of Social Security and Medicare alone!

    This is not an entity that I feel can make an objective decision on the subject of compensation for a leaf-raker OR a CEO. Leave alone what you don’t understand, and let business get on with the business of doing business. That means you, too, Bousquet.

    — Pinkster · Nov 13, 09:00 PM · #

  22. The top CEOs in the US don’t pay their lowest paid employees 1/350th of their salary.

    What could someone do that would possibly merit earning the salaries you’re talking about? Bringing back the dead? Jesus worked for free.

    If you socialize the cost of your alleged “risk,” you’re at the absolute height of hypocrisy to say someone trying to work for a living deserves what they receive and no government should intervene.

    The market makes no legitimate decision about the relative worth of leaf-rakers or CEOs. Leaf-rakers risk more, clearly. If leaf-rakers were paid like CEOs, they’d get compensation for being dismissed after piling your leaves up onto your porch, setting fire to them, and fanning the flames until your house was burned down.

    And you know what, given your attitude, I’d be willing to pay them their bonus.

    — angry · Nov 13, 09:53 PM · #

  23. You know, I always here about these 20K a year “leaf-raking” jobs, but I never knew anyone who had one.

    Most of the people I knew who made that much money worked their butts off doing stuff the people who think they don’t even deserve that much would never do (like waitressing, working in a fast-food kitchen, inhaling toxic fumes from painting, etc.).

    I think some of the commenters’ elitism is showing.

    You might be surprised to discover that uneducated peon checking the light bulbs has several other tasks to perform. Besides, are you gonna get off your well-paid behind to change the fluorescent flickering over the cafeteria? I didn’t think so….

    P.S. If anyone knows where they’re hiring bulb-changers, let me know. My Master’s degree and Ph.D.-training isn’t getting me any adjunct jobs. [Probably cuz all the freeway fliers need 10 a semester just to make 30K. You’d think they’d be able to spare 2-3 for me, but noooooooo.]

    — Amanda Huggenkiss · Nov 14, 12:52 AM · #

  24. Ugh! here = hear.

    I used to be able to spell before I started reading undergraduate writing everyday.

    There goes one more job skill supposedly valued outside academe.

    — Amanda Huggenkiss · Nov 14, 12:54 AM · #

  25. For those who think that executives get paid too much, there is a simple solution. Start your own business and voluntarily agree to cap your salary at 15 times the lowest salary. If you are making only $300,000 whether others are making $5,000,000 think of how much lower your prices will be. You can put the evil ones out of business.

    — James · Nov 14, 06:14 AM · #

  26. “Physicians in Canada do when they emigrate to the US in order to practice medicine.”

    I’d like to see exactly how many U.S. physicians emigrate to Saskatoon or Edmonton when their incomes are officially or unofficially limited by a new health insurance policy.

    As applied to CEOs, James’s point is supposed to mean that if we don’t allow Lehman Brothers execs to get $20 million bonuses in the wake of leading their company into bankruptcy, they’ll take their marvelous talents to other companies, where they’ll be paid “market value” for…uh, leading their companies into bankruptcy.

    “The headquarters will be in Bermuda, the factories will be in Mexico or Brazil, which has plenty of room for them.”

    This is addressable by tax policy and penalties imposed on de facto U.S. companies nominally headquartered in other countries, and by closing loopholes.

    “As to renouncing citizenship, plenty of Cuban elites were willing to renounce citizenship once salary caps were put into place there.”

    Cubans emigrated for a lot more than salary caps. Of course, the in-theory-capitalist/in-reality-socialist James (to flip emt’s phrase, he’s a “faculty lounge capitalist” in a state university) would counter that the slightest move to regulate salaries leads directly to a dictatorship. One little bit of Medicare and you’ve got Dear Leader. Hasn’t happened.

    “And whatever happened to the notion that employment is a freely negotiated private contract between the employer and the employee?”

    Maybe it took hits with child labor, seven-day weeks, Pinkerton’s strikebreakers, sweatshops and the rest. Since a worker needs to eat and be protected from rain and snow every day, under pain of looming death, “freely negotiated” has a rather hypocritical ring to it.

    In short, the unregulated, “free-market” Bush years have been our Roaring Twenties, the recent crisis our Black Friday of October, 1929. The pendulum has to swing—and is swinging—back in the direction of worker protection and corporate regulation.

    Question to James: Why don’t you get off the public teat and go out and start one of those wonderful free-market businesses, maybe offering better finance classes at a cheaper rate than that nasty ol’ socialist state university you work for does? You could make yourself a million or two and help bring down that whole socialist educational institution you’re trapped in.

    — LuckyJim · Nov 14, 08:33 AM · #

  27. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that our behavior as consumers is not disassociated with our outcomes as producers. The average house has tripled in size since the 50s, while families have gotten smaller; for that to be even remotely affordable, we’ve had to reduce the price and the amount of labor that goes into it. We can now buy a whole day’s worth of calories in a bag for four dollars; we’ve had to reduce the price and the amount of labor that goes into it. We can buy five-dollar t-shirts and eight-dollar garden chairs, only because we’ve reduced the price and amount of labor that goes into them.

    Our (mostly shoddy) gains as consumers have been directly driven by our losses as laborers.

    Also, we keep hearing that the “productivity” of the American worker keeps rising. Seems to me that a lot of that comes from salaried employees who’ve been “freed” from the concept of the five-day workweek and the eight-hour day. I know that if I cut back to 40 hours a week or so, we’d have to dramatically scale back my job description.

    — Herb · Nov 17, 08:40 AM · #

  28. James (and others): Money not paid in executive salaries would either increase corportate profit (and hence tax revenues), increase corporate investments (leading to more jobs and hence tax revenues), or dividends to shareholders (and hence tax revenues). We need some economists to work through some of these numbers.

    I confess that I find the idea of legislation about this creepy on a number of levels. But then, I also believe that excessive executive compensation is immoral. Ideally, shareholders would hold boards more accountable, particularly when CEOs get big bonuses as companies lose money and stock prices tank. But we know that shareholder accountability doesn’t seem to work. If we have gross injustice, what other ways of reigning in this wrong do we have?

    Maybe not a strict “limit” on executive compensation. How about a dramatically higher tax rate when executive comp rises above a threshhold ratio tied to lowest paid workers, corporate profits, return to shareholders, etc.? How about putting a major chunk of that income in trust for five years, so that there is time to get it back if we find the books were cooked?

    — drj50 · Nov 17, 10:12 AM · #

  29. James, grindocro, Pinkster and other free-market capitalist advocates: would you please mind explaining why Big Business—constantly pushing the envelope on laissez-faire, unfettered, unregulated (“government, just get out of our way”), win-at-all-costs, screw-you-Jack-I’ve-got-mine, tax-loophole-, tax-shelter-, and tax-avoidance-seeking capitalism—is lining up in droves at the Big Gummint trough? That giant sucking sound is capitalism at the public teat, ya-think?

    — lynn · Nov 17, 10:44 AM · #

  30. “That giant sucking sound is capitalism at the public teat, ya-think?”

    This definitely is a bad thing. Governments shouldn’t be in the business of bailing out companies. If you make stupid decisions, you deserve what you get. This applies to companies as well as individuals.

    On the other hand, even academics will sell their souls for the right price.

    — James · Nov 17, 03:08 PM · #

  31. “On the other hand, even academics will sell their souls for the right price.”

    Is that just liberal, socialist-leaning professors selling their souls when capitalism offers enough money?

    Or does it, perchance, include conservative, free-market-leaning professors who continue to draw their salaries from the taxpayers by working in state-run institutions?

    I thought so.

    — LuckyJim · Nov 17, 04:12 PM · #

  32. Marc:

    You mention Michelle Rhee who’s being praised for her work in the DC schools.

    In my daily paper today there is a column by Leonard Pitts, a writer who is, for me, often refreshing and insightful. Pitts praises Rhee who is devoted to NCLB and gettin’ tough on teachers. He also makes it oh so very easy to choose up sides on who’s to blame for the lousy public schools. Though he tries to say it’s “we” who are to blame, anyone reading the column quickly realizes that for Pitts, the villains are the teacher unions who are bent on protecting incompetent or mediocre teachers, you know, the slackers who are doing such a crappy job that has the Obamas searching for private schools for their kids.

    The sad thing is that Pitts, who so often writes columns that vilify stereotypes and do such fine work in complicating issues in an edifying way, and who, as an African American ought to be especially sensitive to these kind of caricaturizations, falls victims to them himself.

    We may have elected Obama, but there’s still lots of work to be done, but one wonders if there will be any real change when even good minds like Pitts’s can be so infected by prejudices.

    Perhaps it will take the Yes men, with their daring comic thrust, to wake people from the slumber we have, when it comes to education, been in all too long.

    — George T. Karnezis · Nov 18, 12:02 AM · #

  33. Of course, the problem is that unions do protect the lazy and the incompetent.

    — James · Nov 18, 06:01 AM · #

  34. As Charles Peters put it when the Clintons were searching for a school in 1993, “The point isn’t that Chelsea Clinton shouldn’t have to go to D.C. public schools. The point is that no child should.”

    — Dan · Nov 18, 08:04 AM · #

  35. #33: On the other hand, it’s Henry Paulson, Congress and, ultimately, taxpayers, who protect incompetence…in management, that is.

    — LuckyJim · Nov 18, 10:10 AM · #

  36. “#33: On the other hand, it’s Henry Paulson, Congress and, ultimately, taxpayers, who protect incompetence…in management, that is.”

    Which I agree is wrong. Do you agree that it is wrong that unions protect the incompetent?

    — James · Nov 18, 11:01 AM · #

  37. James # 33, as is so often the case, substitutes pronouncements for argument. I suspect that if asked to provide evidence that Teacher Unions protect lazy incompetence, James will simply retort that the poor schools are the indication of such protection. Of course, as anyone with a college or even superior high school education, this is a classic begging the question.

    When James provides large scale evidence, not the usual anecdotal manure, to justify this claim, I will carry his flag.

    By the way, James, do you believe it’s wrong to beat your partner? (See how easy it is to sidetrack?)

    — George T. Karnezis · Nov 18, 12:37 PM · #

  38. Perhaps George, you ought to refrain from telling me how I will make my argument. Poor performance in schools is not necessarily evidence of union malfeasance.

    Now, let me give you an example of how unions protect the incompetent. I teach in a unionized environment and we have a number of incompetent faculty who are routinely defended by our union.

    1. We have a faculty member who we ended up paying not to teach because he was so bad in the classroom. Who prevented his outright firing? the union.

    2. We have faculty members who routinely fail to show up to class and not report them as sick days. When we try and discipline these people, who defends them, the union.

    3. We have several faculty members who are approaching senility. Who files the complaints to prevent the assessments that can be used to fire these incompetent professors, the union.

    — James · Nov 18, 01:00 PM · #

  39. The following article reviewed some data, which either supports unions supporting incompetence or administrative incompetence, or some combination of both.

    http://thehiddencostsoftenure.com/stories/?prcss=display&id=266539

    — James · Nov 18, 01:14 PM · #

  40. I’m surprised that James still shamelessly pokes his free-market head above ground in these threads.

    He spouts all this competition, survival-of-the-fittest, markets-make-the-best-decisions stuff, along with moralist criticism of collective action by workers, publicly financed safety nets, etc., and yet he chooses to work in a publicly financed university whose services include duplicating classes in finance (which James teaches) that are also offered by private schools, both for-profit and not-for-profit. (I thought that one of the basic tenets of free-marketers is that government shouldn’t compete “unfairly” with private enterprise by using its public-funds muscle to underprice their goods.) Why doesn’t James get off the public teat, hire himself out to free enterprise, or go into the finance-class business for himself? Why doesn’t James act according to the principles he espouses?

    The reason I keep hammering James on this is because he’s rather typical of a self-righteous, self-congratulatory and, yes, hypocritical, kind of American who sees himself, delusionally, as wonderfully independent and self-reliant, as if he wore a coonskin cap, carried a flintlock, and lived off the land. (Stolen from the Indians, but that’s another story.) In reality, James—like everyone else—is dependent on the polis as a whole; directly and indirectly, he uses all of the society’s services, including welfare, unemployment insurance, etc., if only to be able to live in a stable society.

    The other delusion from which James—and his economic-Darwinist brothers and sisters—suffer is the idea that it’s a level playing field out there, that anybody who works hard and plays fair can enact a real-life Horatio Alger story. Not so. The “Golden Rule”—he who has the gold makes the rules—has been in effect for a long time in this country, and it takes constant vigilance, regulation and enforcement on the part of government to regrade the distinctly unlevel playing field.

    Sure, there are downsides to unions, protecting incompetent workers being one of them. But the upside—preventing wages from being that “race to the bottom,” seeing that its members get health insurance the only way this society allows it, and securing pensions so that their retired members won’t have to live off dog food in their old age—far outweighs the downside. And make no mistake, the same kind of conscienceless executives who accept $20 million bonuses four days before their company announces bankruptcy (as if they didn’t know about it in advance) wouldn’t hesitate to drive workers’ conditions back to the days of Andrew Carnegie and using the National Guard to break up strikes if they thought it could pad their excessive personal wealth just a little more.

    These big-time capitalist guys are also just as merciless on wannabe entrepreurial barons as they are on workers. Which is probably why James stays hiding in the skirts of that state university.

    — LuckyJim · Nov 18, 01:32 PM · #

  41. “He spouts all this competition, survival-of-the-fittest, markets-make-the-best-decisions stuff, along with moralist criticism of collective action by workers, publicly financed safety nets, etc.,”

    Of course, LJ is distorting what I have said. I have not said that markets always and everywhere make the best decisions. I have said things in support of markets, things that people who dislike the market must wrestle with. Such as the fact that we don’t have a class of freeway flyers teaching finance. Why not? At starting salaries exceeding $100k, we certainly could use them.

    I also have not criticized collective action by workers, except for the fact that unions do tend to protect the incompetent, which is a downside of unions. I have said that I am not convinced that faculty solidarity will get better results that faculty acting in their own self interests.

    — James · Nov 18, 02:14 PM · #

  42. Thanks, James, for your second response which gives me something more than the merely anecdotal stuff in your first response. I have not read the second piece as yet, but if what you say is true about your own experience, then all I can say is that it is the weakness of the school district to provide ample evidence (well documented) to let such incompetents go. My experience with arbitration and grievance hearings indicates that if “management” provides sufficient documentation to justify termination, the arbitrator will support a termination decision. Also, since termination is a serious business, there is the idea of “progressive discipline” — i.e. the employer must demonstrate a good faith effort to assist the employee in remedying his or her weaknesses or failures. This protects employees from summary dismissal.

    Your experience suggests that the Union is so powerful that, even when they meet adequate standards of evidence and have attempted in good faith to resolve matters via progressive discipline, school administrators remain powerless to purge their workforce of incompetents. In such cases (if there are any) I suspect adequate parental outrage would force the issue, though I remain suspicious of claims that it is union omnipotence rather than administrative weakness that insures continued teacher incompetence.

    In future, I would appreciate it if the reference to evidence beyond the confines of your personal experience, which may not be typical, be offered first. It would serve us conversants better than pronouncements. I realize the blog format favors the glib rather than the discursive, but the latter is worth practicing lest these exchanges become mere fussilades. Thanks again.

    — George T. Karnezis · Nov 19, 11:47 PM · #

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