jjanecka wrote:Victor you hit the nail right on the head. I probably should have taken a little better time to really explain my stances.
Now that I finally sat down to a nice cigar, I would like to elaborate.
There are some things where unions are of moderate benefit. Like when Smithfield employees were recently diagnosed with TB coming out of their hog processing facilities. That's when a union should step in and say enough's enough.
Or in a situation where a chemical processing plant is ordering their employees to dump caustic waste into a river endangering the lives of more than just the employees.
Or unions for linemen and construction because that work is inherently dangerous.
But unions for sports players, teachers, cashiers, et cetera simply no longer serve their purpose.
Pro Sports players make enough money as it stands, yes even the ones that are only making 30-40k. They get to live out their dream everyday and get paid to do it.
Teachers don't need unions nor should a professor ever be tenured. Truthfully I feel that education would benefit on the whole if it were entirely privatized. It is the professor's responsibility to remain relevant, motivated, and intuitive. There's nothing that I hate more than being talked down on by a teacher because they believe in master-pupil relationships. The greatest relationships with teachers I had came from real-world experienced teachers. The govt teacher who was a very active freemason that lived and breathed the constitution, the govt teacher who actively has been working campaigns since Bill Clinton's era, the Lawyer who had an active practice but still took nine hours out the week to teach business law, the History teacher that works in countless mueseums and could tell the story better than an episode of "drunken history," the Ag teacher who successfully manages 2k acres of land and still has time to come in and teach in the middle of irrigating. These are the people that deserve the respect because they live it and they'll die for it. Not some tenured pratt that only became sucessfull after he received his doctorate who's business only exists to leech off the school or university.
Cashiers? That's a no brainer. I don't know how some of these people are whining about minimum wage. The only time I ever made minimum wage was when I was 16yo and it didn't take but three weeks and I was already making well above that.
Truthfully though, the more America migrates toward a service based economy the less unions there need to be.
Apparently you don't know too many teachers (k-12... sounds like you're mainly talking college professors).
What happens with teachers, is greedy politicians get in there and rape the education budgets, and when that happens, it forces the skilled and talented teachers to leave the profession. A good teacher has the mentality and drive to take up another profession rather easily, they're good because they actually want to teach and make a difference, not because it's all they can do.
So teachers continually get worse, test scores keep dropping (don't get me started on teaching to the test), class sizes keep getting bigger and then people start talking about how much better it would be if education was privatized.
I've known plenty of people who went to private schools, IMO, it's not really better, I mean, they still have to achieve the same standards as public education, and kids can still turn into screw ups, where they simply get kicked out.
Anyway... you found another topic I generally agree with the left on (just their rhetoric, not their actions as their actions don't support the position).
I believe to stay competitive with other countries, we need solid education system. We need to quit teaching to the test and focus on teaching critical thinking skills as most trade jobs of the future are going to engineering the tools/robots that create the products and do the services as opposed to actually doing the work your self.
I'm rambling now, point is, good teachers are good, don't want to pay teachers sh1t? No good teachers, that's the bottom line.