Most of the bad reputation is deserved. Most US unions are horrible organizations. There are still some good unions, just not many.
That doesn't make the concept of a union bad. They worked much better 50 years ago, even. It's a great concept, but the implementation got corrupted over the years.
I don't think we'll fix unions' reputations without first fixing unions. And we really need more unions and more credible unions.
As a footnote, in my local school district, under coronavirus school closures, the teacher's union negotiated that the teachers get paid, but they don't need to remotely teach students. Some teachers continue teaching for some amount of time, but essentially on a volunteer basis. Many teachers are just sitting at home, doing nothing except for collecting a pay check.
Are you sure it was the union which forced the district not to remote teach? I live in an area where teachers are not unionized and the teachers are still getting paid and not teaching. The school district has signed contracts with the teachers which doesn't have any terms which stop payment because the schools close during the year and the district is not requiring remote learning because of equal access issues.
> doesn't have any terms which stop payment because the schools close during the year
And so they shouldn't! In many (most?) US states, the public schools are unconditionally funded by the state based on student enrollment figures. Cutting teacher pay during a closure under such a system would be a purely greedy move.
If my comment seemed to imply I thought they shouldn't I didn't mean to. I agree that they should get paid.
I don't know how it works in the majority of states but I know the model of mostly state funding based upon student enrollment is not universal. In my state the majority of funding is from local tax revenues. For example the budget for my local school district is approximately $1.3 billion. $370 million comes from the state and $30 million comes from the federal government. Another $40 million comes from "misc other sources" and $860 million comes from local tax revenue.
I hadn't considered the local tax aspect. I understand that many areas are projecting large shortfalls in the near future, so I suppose there could be some issues. I guess it would probably depend on how the education taxes were levied in a given jurisdiction (property, sales, or something else).
Wow, that's terrible IMO. Public schools are quasi-governmental entities with largely fixed costs. Aren't the taxes getting paid either way? Doesn't regulation require a specific number of school days per year? And there are certainly truancy laws on the books.
In their defense, developing content for a classroom is a shit-ton of work. Flipping that over to Internet-only is going to take some time. If they are just sitting at home getting drunk and trolling facebook that's one thing, but it's going to take a couple of months for teachers to effectively pivot to a mode of teaching that they've never had to do. Until then you're just going to see a trickle of work even from the best of them b/c they are going to be focused on trying to develop a game plan to close out the year.
My wife taught K12 for 12 years and then became an instructional coach teaching teachers how to teach. There's a shitload of work if you want to do it right, and at least half (in our district anyway) will stretch themselves extremely thin to do so. Half of the rest are 9-5'ers and the remainder are shitheads.
Well, I'm pretty sure. The negotiation between the teacher's union on the administration is a closed-door meeting, but I follow district politics very closely.
Perceived equity issues fed into this as well. The result, of course, is that parents who have time to teach kids have kids who are learning, while the vast majority of the district is learning nothing. With remote learning, the results would be less differential. But I guess the districts feels worse about inequities it contributes to than ones that arise out of inaction. We have a 1:1 program, so all students have technology.
But I would the union preempted this, and is what made this discussion moot.
When my mother was a school teacher, the union had mandatory fees which went to partisan political campaigns against her ideology and self interest. I think this was eventually challenged and overturned in court, but it left a terrible impression.
This is my biggest gripe with unions in the US: that they can basically force you to join the union against your will if you want to perform certain jobs. The Teacher's Union is notorious for this.
There was a fairly recent ruling from the SCOTUS that struck down compelling non union members to pay union dues. It was as recently as 2018 or 2019. Cant remember the case name, but it originated in Illinois (a very, very pro union state).
My wife, two of her brothers, their spouses and obviously many of their collective friends are public school teachers in the US. The teacher's union in our state is largely a spineless organization that will protect the points they negotiate into a contract but leave legitimate educators high and dry when it comes to real issues. It's one of the worst unions that I've had the occasion to see up close and personal...and I'm a former member of the Teamsters.
A lot of the challenges come out of the specifics of the laws surrounding unions. They were written in a much rougher era, where corporations and unions were very much in direct opposition. If we could re-write those laws, we could open the door to much more cooperative relationships between unions that the current laws do not allow. Unfortunately, there's no sign of the republican and democratic parties getting together to make a grand bargain on the laws, so we're stuck with them as they are today.
"much more cooperative relationships between unions"
Sure, cooperation sounds good in theory, but don't we have examples (in the US) of where management of a company and management of their union ended up very friendly at the expense of the workers? I'm pretty sure I read about stuff like that in the context of the recent automotive union corruption scandals.
I'm thinking more like things like works councils, and other ways that the employees could play more of a role in running the company, rather than the adversarial setup we have now. Here's an article from 1981 that gives some background:
https://digitalcommons.law.msu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
Past performance isn't always indicative of future performance. Cultures and worlds change. In many cases, people confuse poor concepts with poor execution (or vice-versa: bad concept with excellent execution or good luck can be successful).
I say try it maybe in one state and see how it goes.
That doesn't make the concept of a union bad. They worked much better 50 years ago, even. It's a great concept, but the implementation got corrupted over the years.
I don't think we'll fix unions' reputations without first fixing unions. And we really need more unions and more credible unions.
As a footnote, in my local school district, under coronavirus school closures, the teacher's union negotiated that the teachers get paid, but they don't need to remotely teach students. Some teachers continue teaching for some amount of time, but essentially on a volunteer basis. Many teachers are just sitting at home, doing nothing except for collecting a pay check.