WhiteLion wrote...
Individuals have the right to assemble into groups to collectively pursue a goal. They always have. Because of this, banning unions would infringe upon the rights of the individuals in those unions to assemble and collectively bargain. The right of the people to form a collective group guarantees that these collective groups have the right to exist. I don't really see how the distinction you are trying to make works. Our legal scholars would not consider it appropriate to ban a group such a political party.
Again, rights belong to individuals not groups. Unions having the right to "collectively bargain" or as others would label as "extortion" counts as a union having rights that others do not have. Yes, people can come together on shared ideas but, that doesn't give them special rights. You and I can form a group and exercise our rights but, being a group doesn't give us extra rights than what we had before. Political parties can still exist and I'm not proposing we ban political parties or unions all together. I'm simply saying throw unions out of the public sector. They are inefficient at their jobs, constantly demand higher wages and benefits for less work and if their ransoms aren't paid they go on strike. Either bleeding a company dry for money or freezing a government service.
Keep unions in the private sector where they can vote themselves out of a job instead of extorting the rest of the country because they want a check for no work.
The government absolutely can refuse the unions' demands though. If there is another source of teachers that can produce the same results as the union teachers(while many of our teachers may be bad, our teachers as a whole are still better at teaching than random people off the street), the government should absolutely refuse to work with the union. The problem is that their isn't. The government could play hardball and try to break the union despite strikes, or offer something in exchange for giving up tenure, and they do try these sometimes.
As if the Dems would ever conceive of doing that. The unions know democrats favor them, so the politicians do the unions favors in return for large campign donations. This is special interest it's where you and I get fucked. That is why the automakers got bailed out because the unions donated to Obama's campaign. I know you'll deny that your golden boy is just as corrupt as every other political hack from Illonois so skip it. Also to dismiss your usual rebuttal towards any criticism of Obama "fuck McCain" I wouldn't have voted for him either.
UAW "donations" and recipients.
Still, the problem is that there are not enough good teachers. Offering to pay bad teachers more will not help if they are unwilling or incapable of improving. The lack of prestige and income associated with teacher when compared to professions requiring similar amounts of post-secondary study has created a shallow and poor talent pool of teachers. We want to fire bad teachers, yes, but first we need to improve the talent pool, which means we need to
a)provide more financial incentives for talented people to become teachers rather than economists or mathematical analysts. If you want the best talent in the field, you have to pay competitively for it,
b)better understand what makes good teachers good. Most of the things one might expect to correlate with teacher performance: advanced education degrees, graduate
school, etc, don't correlate very strongly.
c) a consequence of b) is that our teacher education probably isn't teaching teachers the things they need to know to be good teachers. This is another area to work on
Or there's the alternative view that teaching is an inherent talent that largely cannot be taught so we should let anyone try to be a teacher, put them on the 3 year contract, fire the bad ones after the end of that first contract, and provide very high pay to anyone who makes it past the three year apprentice contract.
I can solve all those problems. Break the monopolies. That means break the governmentsmonopoly of the industry and break the unions monopoly by allowing schools to exist without unions.
Get more schools and education models into the market. This means we split from the warehousing, sit down, face forward, shut the fuck up model we currently use.
Give parents the ability to choose what school their child (and tax money) goes to.
More schools, more models, more incentives for teachers, more choices.
Honestly, who would be against school choice? Oh wait, the
teachers
unions
certainly
[http://www.utea.org/newsEvents/publications/ueaAction/dec07/index.htm]wouldn't.[/url]
Edit; We're derailing the thread. If you wish to continue then make a thread.