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Comment by door5 | Hacker News Reader

I have very left wing politics, socially and economically. A union is by nature far more likely to represent my views than any corporation. If your politics are "rich people should be able to do whatever they want, collaborate with whatever despicable organizations they like, treat employees however they like and have little oversight over their business", that is a justifiable reason to oppose unionization. I don't share those views, but that's the status quo, and it is almost completely inescapable in this industry.

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I think you're thinking a bit too coarse grained. Do you believe that teachers should get performance based pay? Plenty of liberal teachers think so, but they have no choice but to fund an organization that lobbies for the contrary.

Same deal with unions in tech. Say you're in favor of immigration for high skilled workers. Most unions are against immigration when it has the potential to increase the supply of labor in their field (because increased supply = lower costs of labor).

I always thought performance based pay was a very right wing proposal, supported by right wing organisations.

I think that's a good point -- unions are not perfect and may support the interests of their members over the interests of other workers or society at large. However, in my view they are far preferable to any corporate board of directors, which represents only the interests of the owners of the company. Politics is struggle, it isn't just opting out of things you don't like, or else you'll end up a hermit. it's organizing for representation and power, and unions are one example of that kind of organization. An imperfect one, yes, but far preferable in my view to none at all

Performance-based pay just leads to gamification of the performance metric, not better teaching/education. Teachers should get paid a living wage, and that's what their unions should be working for.

There are certainly unions with bad politics. The ideal is a union that is embedded as part of a broader pro-worker movement that supports migrants, women, other minorities, the unemployed, etc.

I have yet to meet a teacher who is in favour of performance-driven pay, and I have a feeling that even in America (where "left-wing" is actually center-right by most metrics) many liberal teachers aren't in favour of such proposals.

In Australia, high schools are ranked based on final exam scores and that's something teachers already hate. But to tie it to pay would lead to an even larger conflict of interest and attempts to cheat the performance indicators. When I was graduating high school, I noticed that all of our raw marks were reduced right before our final exams (they were reduced because the metric takes into account whether the school was "harder" on students than the national exam or "easier" on them, and rewarded "harder" schools).

If this was just done to change a ranking, imagine what would happen if teacher's pay was linked to performance. Hell, what about rural or "bad neighbourhood" areas? Should we always and forever doom them to have bad teachers because all the good ones go somewhere with better pay? This is already happening (because working for a higher-ranked school is better for your career) and is pretty bad -- having performance-based pay would be a disaster.

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