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Comment by VirusNewbie | Hacker News Reader

I will fight tooth and nail to keep our industry from unionizing. One can simply look at the public school system and how well it performs with one of the strongest unions in the country. You don't have well paid teachers (except those who have been teaching for a long time, at the detriment to new teachers),you don't serve the children well and you now have to navigate both a career and politics of a union.

Unions benefit those who play the social game more so the job requirements, as it allows for an alternative power structure to be climbed.

Those are the exact people I love being able to avoid in the software field.

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Have you worked somewhere (big enough to no longer support a flat hierarchy) where there were no office politics or social games? I don't think unions are the cause of that.

Yes. Office politics can exist anywhere, the problem is people. But unions can cause more of it, just like Diversity & Inclusion, or minority incentive programs. The point is things get in the way of the work.

I have to strongly disagree with this assessment,for a simple reason: There are many different public school organizations, not just one, with a vast array of outcomes among each organization. Sure, there certainly are some bad school systems, but it is very hard to generalize over such a massive system.

The total salary of all of the public school teachers in the US is probably well over $150 billion. That's the market cap of many "huge" companies.

Just saying -- it's easy to criticize when you're overgeneralizing a huge dataset based on one subset of that dataset.

My experience with private schools where the teachers aren't unionized suggests the non-unionized situation can be even more fraught. Chaotic, manipulative principals, skeevy board members, low pay in exchange for "prestige", etc.

My experience with public schools includes sexual abusers keeping their jobs due to union protection.

My direct experience is the more tenured teachers not showing up at all. Spent a significant amount of my high school roaming the halls because some of the teachers didn’t show up. This was opposed to the younger teachers who cared and put the work in, but also had second jobs, etc.

> One can simply look at the public school system and how well it performs with one of the strongest unions in the country.

Except that states that outlaw teacher's unions have lower teacher pay and worse average scores/outcomes. They're totally comparable too, public daycare ahem school and software engineering.

Non union private schools have higher test scores than union public schools in the same states

Private vs. public school comparison introduces a lot of compounding variables including skirting the requirement to adhere to the same teaching standards - a lot of private schools embed either religious or political ideologies into their teaching which drives private interest groups who share those interests to financially underwrite them.

Sadly due to how strange private education in the US can be I don't think any comparisons between private and public education are really fair.

That seems like an incredibly misleading comparison at best. There are about a million other variables factoring into that, obviously including the money spent per kid, and the background of the people attending the school.

My understanding of the public school system is that administrators and football takes up all the money, and the government will forcefully end teachers strikes.

The teachers union is probably the only thing keeping public schools running in a country where a political party explicitly wants them to fail and will sabotage them for political gain

Why can private schools run perfectly fine without unions?

Because when a kid is truly problematic, they can kick them out, and kicking them out means kicking them into the public school system? The public school system has to either spend a disproportionate amount of time/money on troubled children or completely neglect them. Private schools can do the math to decide if the child is profitable, and kick them out if they are not.

It feels very disingenuous to try to make an argument about teacher's unions and then use private non-union schools made up of those who can afford the tuition or qualify for a merit based scholarship and public schools made up of everyone else.

You think in rich states (like california) with liberal, democratic legislation and liberal governors that the political parties are the ones keeping schools from being effective?

If you look at CA, teachers aren't getting rich, but they're making decent wages at 9 months a year, with some fairly nice benefits depending on the size of the district and level they teach. We need to raise some of these numbers, but I suspect smaller schools are in more remote areas of California where it is certainly cheaper to live than say SF, or LA.

https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/sa/cefavgsalaries.asp

"The average salary of public school teachers in 2019–20 for the State of California was $84,531."

That averages out to be about 58 dollars an hour if we assume the teacher works 9 months out of the year with 20 working days per month or 180 days a year. This only includes summer, not winter breaks or spring break or other observed holidays, which is quite a few. Again, not a great number but certainly better than plenty of other folks.

It looks like you used 8 hours per working day in your calculations? Anecdotally, I haven't encountered a teacher who does a flat 40hrs a week. Also, summer break is only 2 months in LAUSD, not sure of the smaller districts.

You can see here on the LAUSD calendar the schedule is for 180 days:

https://achieve.lausd.net/cms/lib/CA01000043/Centricity/Doma...

As a parent of someone who went to an LAUSD school, my experience is completely different. Half the teachers didn't even bother to show up for parent/teacher night and were never available. The only teacher I'll give props to is the robotics club teacher, he was heavily involved, stayed late, but outside of him, that bell rang and it was a ghost town 20 minutes later.

There are IT/engineering/developer unions in Europe. Their popularity varies between countries and between sectors.

However, "union shops" or "closed shops" don't exist, so the situation isn't directly comparable to the USA.

Instead of looking at the US teachers union I'd really suggest you look at the Canadian teachers union - culturally we're almost identical and both countries have a strong general anti-union sentiment. But, IMO, due to the red scare being much more subdued in Canada our unions haven't been stripped down to the bare minimum.

1000% agree. Unions promote individual rights at the expense of the customer, product, and company. In reality they facilitate corruption and union rights over individual rights.

I understand everyone wants to feel valued at their company, but value should be evaluated on merit and unions essentially lower the bar to keep more people paying dues and less product/service running efficiently. WE ALL HAVE THE OPTION TO FIND A BETTER JOB!

The automotive industry is a great example of how unions made factory operating conditions worse. Employees had piece rates and controlled their time and pay. I.E. get 100 parts done in 4 hours get paid the same as someone who takes 8 hours to make 100 parts. Then unions stepped in, now everyone works 8 hours, with half the work force slacking to fill the time.

> WE ALL HAVE THE OPTION TO FIND A BETTER JOB!

For now most of us in this industry do. This is not a long term solution to anything.

> Unions promote individual rights at the expense of the customer, product, and company.

Individual rights? It's collective bargaining of workers, no?

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