Political Incest
by Paul R. Hollrah
Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Fifth Edition, defines “incest” as, “The crime of cohabitation between persons related within the degrees wherein marriage is prohibited by law.”
However, it took an ugly confrontation between Wisconsin’s unionized public employees and their employer, the State of Wisconsin, to redefine the term and to finally shine the light of day on the incestuous relationship that exists between public employees, public employee unions, and state and local government. And while some in the left wing media would have us believe that both major parties have contributed to the development of that relationship, that charge is demonstrably false. The corrupt combine could never have developed had not Democrats let it be known that their loyalty could be purchased with campaign money and support at the polls.
While it is common knowledge that business interests have on occasion exerted undue influence over elected officials… the Teapot Dome, Billy Sol Estes, Duke Cunningham, and Enron cases come to mind… it is those exceptions that prove the rule. The rule being that the relationship between business interests and government is essentially an arm’s length relationship, one that consistently promotes the general welfare while seeking a business environment in which basic fairness and regulatory restraint is the rule.
This is in stark contrast to the Democratic Party where the all-encompassing goal is the winning and holding of political power, and where the party has shown a willingness to adopt the agenda of any special interest that brings enough money or enough votes to the table. In the post-industrial era, the Democratic Party has embraced a wide variety of often competing special interests, including private sector unions, public sector unions, trial lawyers, radical feminists, radical environmentalists, racial minorities, gays, and lesbians… any group with the capacity to subordinate its own special interests, when necessary, for the greater good of the coalition.
Never has that been more evident than in recent weeks in Madison, Wisconsin, when thousands of middle class private sector union members… many bused in from out of state… joined hands with the teachers unions and the other public employee unions to defy Governor Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled legislature. In many instances, those who picketed in support of the public employee unions were middle class taxpayers who not only pay as much as half the cost of their retirement and healthcare plans, but pay the state and local taxes that fund the exorbitant salaries and the overly generous retirement and healthcare benefits of public employees. Talk about dumb and dumber.
Now, as the Madison demonstrators depart the state capitol and put aside their picket signs until the next rent-a-riot opportunity, it appears that a recall petition war is breaking out in which recall efforts will be made against Republican legislators and against the fourteen Senate Democrats who hid out in various Illinois motels for more than two weeks.
The eighty-five percent of Wisconsin voters who are not members of labor unions may soon have an opportunity to show that they understand the nature of the relationship that exists between Democrats and public employee unions, and that what is at stake is the monopoly power of high-salaried union bosses… that, and nothing more.
It is the union bosses who collect hundreds of millions of dollars in dues from classroom teachers and other public employees and use a major portion of that dues money to elect more Democrats to the Congress, the state legislature, and city and county offices (95% of union contributions go to Democrats). The Democrat politicians who are elected with union support then return the favor by creating more and more government bureaucracies, resulting in more and more dues-paying union members; establishing costly and inefficient union-friendly work rules; reducing class sizes in the schoolrooms; and agreeing to salaries, retirement benefits, and healthcare plans that are far more generous than those of the private sector.
In short, when members of the same political family (Democratic elected officials and their brothers and sisters in the labor movement) are allowed to sit down across the table from each other for the purpose of divvying up other people’s hard-earned money, that comes very close to defining the term “incest.” It is precisely why labor icons such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and AFL-CIO president George Meany were so outspoken against public employee unions.
Most Americans would agree that the time has arrived when government at all levels must begin to reduce spending and to eliminate unfair and excessive union work rules. By now, almost everyone has heard about New York City’s “rubber rooms,” the Temporary Assignment Centers created to house unionized school teachers who are either too incompetent or too dangerous to be allowed near our children, but who cannot be terminated because they are protected by their union contracts.
For those who have not been paying attention, writer Steven Brill of The New Yorker magazine gave us a chilling look at the ugliest side of public employee collective bargaining. Describing a visit to a Rubber Room, he tells us, “It’s a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center, but which everyone calls the Rubber Room.
“These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent. The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day – which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school – typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen.”
Brill says, “Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved – the process is often endless – they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.”
One teacher, 56-year old Brandi Scheiner, was suspended with pay from her job as an elementary-school teacher. She earns more than $100,000 a year and insists that she is “entitled to every penny of it.” She has been in the Rubber Room for two years and by the time her case is heard she will have twenty-four years’ seniority, which entitles her to a pension of nearly half her salary for life, even if she is found incompetent and dismissed. But because two per cent of her salary is added to her pension for each year of seniority, a three-year stay in the Rubber Room will cost not only $300,000 in salary but at least $6,000 a year in additional lifetime pension benefits.
It is estimated that the annual cost of the Rubber Rooms to the New York taxpayers is close to $65 million. It is the kind of thing that happens when greedy public employees and their greedier union bosses are given almost unlimited access to the public treasury.
In Madison, Wisconsin, according to the Wisconsin State Journal, the highest paid city employee in 2009 was not the mayor, not the chief of police, not even the head of the metropolitan transit authority. It was bus driver John E. Nelson. Nelson earned $159,258, including $109,892 in overtime and other pay. He and his colleague, driver Greg Tatman, who earned $125,598, were among the city’s top 20 wage earners for 2009… They are among seven bus drivers who made more than $100,000, thanks to a clause in their union contract that allows the most senior drivers, who have the highest base salaries, to get first crack at overtime.
Within the Madison city government, any employee who takes a voluntary demotion, in lieu of layoff, continues to receive full pay, plus any subsequent across-the-board salary adjustments, unless the employee voluntarily demotes more than two pay grades.
Part of the job search for those who’ve been laid off involves notices posted on bulletin boards. However, the union contract is so detailed and so complex that it even dictates the size and location of new bulletin boards in the workplace.
A very crude old joke says, “Incest is best; love begins at home.” Not true. Most incest occurs when Democratic elected officials and public employee unions gather behind closed doors to divide up the spoils of a corrupt political system. Is it any wonder that Wisconsin now has more government jobs than manufacturing jobs?
Paul writes a regular weekly column for the Mayes County Banner and for two other conservative Internet organizations. Mr. Hollrah is a native of St. Charles, Missouri. He holds a BS degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Missouri and is a 2001 inductee in the Civil Engineering Academy of Distinguished Alumni. From 1962-70 he served as a Senior Project Engineer for Cities Service Oil Company (CITGO) and the Sun Oil Company (Sunoco) in New York and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
We are of like mind. You might want to take a look at my blog.
http://www.quinnscommentary.com
You think so? See Illinois Teachers’ Salaries & Pensions are Out of Control
Richard G. Neal (rneal1@triad.rr.com) writes from North Carolina: Report Finds Teachers’ Pay Is More than Adequate Across the Country
In their article “How Much Are Public School Teachers Paid?” researchers Jay P. Greene and Marcus A Winters come to some surprising conclusions. According to their findings, “The average public school teacher in the United States earned $34.06 per hour in 2005, and the average public school teacher was paid 36 percent more per hour than the average non-sales white-collar worker and 11 percent more than the average professional specialty and technical worker.”
In his article “Comparable Worth,” Richard Vedder, an Ohio University professor of economics and senior fellow at the Independent Institute, noted, “Teachers earn more per hour than architects, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, statisticians, biological and life scientists, registered nurses, university-level foreign-language teachers, and editors and reporters.”
In his paper, “Is Teacher Pay Adequate?” Michael Podgursky, an economics professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia and expert on teacher compensation, concluded, “In fact, when adjusted for annual weeks of work, teacher pay and benefits compare favorably with those of other college-educated workers.”
That’s absurd. For 2,000 hours — the low end of what a teacher is expected to work in a year — $34 would be $68,000.
That’s more than $18,000 high.
Jay P. Greene needs some remedial math work. I’ll wager he didn’t have to pass Texas TAKS.
Complain to the sources I quoted then, lolthe point is underpaid and overworked isn’t true at all
You couldn’t keep up with my classes. You’ve obviously never taught.
I haven’t taught in liberal indoctrination centers that you frequent, and I am grateful for that, LOL…because ‘my links are better than your links’ isn’t an argument in the real world.
And that is a real problem with Universities today (and all schools, for that matter) – most teachers have no experience in the private sector – they have no real life experience, and the longer they spend on campus, the worse that situation gets.
Hence, Paul Hollrah’s pointing out Brill’s article at the New Yorker where the infamous “Rubber Room” phenomenon mentioned…people in your class (e.g., teachers) – are protected from their incompetence and are paid highly for it, even if they don’t ‘teach’.
Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.
B.S. Ed, I’ve taught, my mother, and sister have taught, my wife teaches at the university as have I. Most teachers work a 180-day school year which is the equivalent of about 1440 hours a year, for which they are paid all year. The average work week for a 40 hour per week employee is 2080 hrs (52×40=2080) if YOU need a remedial math lesson)
There is a HUGE friggin difference between the average hourly employee/wage earner and what teachers are paid. Most non-union employees don’t make near what the average teacher makes in salary and benefits.
1440 hours x 34.00 works out to about 48K which is what I hear is the going rate for teachers in Wisconsin. My daughter teaches in Texas (you obviously haven’t passed the TAKS either – and I live in Texas so I know B.S. when I see it. Texicans are numero uno when it comes to bull shit, because we have it thrown at us all the time) and she makes about 42K. She has been teaching for a little over 9 years and has been named Teacher of the Year in her school two times missing one district wide ToY by just a few votes. She is valued, has been selected by her district in the past to write curriculum and is a mentor to new teachers. Her district is a fairly poor one, hence the slightly lower salary.
Saying teachers are expected to work 2000 hrs per year is a patent lie. If they work summers they are paid EXTRA. So, don’t come in here spreading your clap trap among people that know better.
I taught for 17 years including both graduate and undergraduate classes-full and part time, you obviously would be in way over your head in one of my classes. My wife teaches clinical dietetics and you probably couldn’t even get in – even if you wanted to.
GM out!
Hey Ed? I didn’t read the article, and probably wont. But I have a couple of questions about your comment. You said:
“That’s absurd. For 2,000 hours — the low end of what a teacher is expected to work in a year — $34 would be $68,000. ”
Here’s what I have a problem with; A “regular” job is 40 hours a week. At 40 hours per week two thousand hours is 50 weeks. Fifty weeks is 2 weeks shy of a year. Now that makes sense for a regular wage earner who works and gets his two weeks vacation. But teachers have a 9 month work year (unless they do summer school) and if they are working a normal 2000 hours (which you said would be the “low end” of what is expected of them” in a 9 month span that is (by a rough bit of math done in my still waking up head) around ten and a half hours a day or so…..now with most folks anything over 8 hours is over time which increases their paycheck…do teachers get overtime or do they have a salary?
IF a teacher does only work 8 hours a day for that nine months they work around 1440 hours a year, which would give them a bump in pay of around 25% over someone making the same money and working a full time job all year….so my question is where do you get the 2000 hour number?
I would venture to guess the answer to your last question, but it would have swear words in it.
ROFL
Kender, teachers in most states are obligated for 50 hours a week, on the clock. That would be 40 weeks for 2,000 hours.
Most of my colleagues would be happy to cut back to 50 hours a week.
Teaching is not a regular job, nor a “regular” job. Anyone who calculates a teacher’s week at 40 hours misses the mark. Teaching is not a 40-hour a week job, and never has been.
You could check real analyses:
Some sources put it at 15.5 hours/day:
http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2007/Mar/04/ln/FP703040361.html
15.5 hours/day = 77.5 hours/week. Most contracts are about 38 weeks a year, works out to 2,945 hours.
Yeah, I’ve worked other jobs, jobs with long hours. Most of my teaching colleagues put in longer, harder hours than lawyers I’ve worked with in the past, even the workaholic lawyers, or accountants at Big X firms trying to impress the partners.
Teaching is grueling, too. It’s a performance, four to eight times a day depending on the school and schedule, generally with inadequate lunch breaks and no “coffee breaks.”
Summers off? You haven’t seen the state-required or district-required training schedules, have you.
When I teach college, I’m expected to spend 6 hours in preparation for every 1 teaching. Assuming just one prep a day (most teachers don’t have that luxury), that would be another 30 hours a week.
No, teachers don’t get overtime. Exempt employees.
If teaching is such an easy profession, why don’t you? If it’s part-time as you appear to believe, surely you could fit it in on top of your other job, eh?
If a teacher did 8 hours a day for nine months, they’d be terminated at 60 days for non-performance.
I have state regulators in my classroom at least 8 times a year, an my “rater” another 8 times. Neurosurgeons are not watched as closely. How many times a year does your state licensing agency come watch you?
What union employees make less than teachers, Roper? How much?
Oh, but let’s calculate real time, not an assumed 8-hour day and 9-month calendar. Those don’t exist in the real world.
Ed, if you’re working 16-hour days, put in a complaint to your local teacher’s union — you can bet they’d be happy to join a lawsuit with you. No, seriously.
The report you cite was produced by a teacher’s group. What a shock. And the folks in that study mention that they work extra hours — voluntarily. They’re not forced to, nor are they asked to. If they think they’re being asked to do too much work, maybe they should form a union that would help them negotiate shorter working hours.
And then there’s the job itself. Sorry, Ed, but teaching is a simple job. It’s incredibly easy and repetitive. Once you’ve taught one class, you don’t have prep for that class for a decade — unless you want to. In general teachers are paid more than the skills required. Consistently, college students with the lowest SAT scores and early college grades go into the Education degree. Sorry, that’s just a fact. It doesn’t mean everyone that teaches is less smart, just that more less smart people go into teaching than other professions that require a college degree.
And that leads to the next point — the entire idea that college degree is even needed to teach. That’s another artificial barrier put in place by teacher’s unions in collaboration with government. The education college degree doesn’t actually teach people how to teach. Instead, it shows how to make a social environment out of captured subjects.
So Ed, you go on spending 16-40 hours a day working at teaching. But your whining falls on the deaf ears of reality, sadly modified by the powerful unions that despise truth and freedom.
Ed, I’ve taught at the college and university level for 17 years, full and part time, grad and undergrad. I’m in full time private practice and with documentation requirements, believe you me the paid 50 minute session doesn’t exist… it’s much more like a 75 minute session.
If you have to prep 6 hours for a one hour class you don’t know your subject very well. I prepped usually no more than one to one and a half hours for each hour at the podium and always got high marks from both students and raters. Teaching a full time college load is still only a “full time job.” but with paid summers off. I space out my inservice hours on my off time and I’m required to have 12 hours per year including 3 hours of Ethics. State monitors can come in anytime they have a mind to. That doesn’t happen often, but it does happen, un-announced usually. Plus, in private practice, the state licensing board can and does review inservice hours closely complete with full documentation required. Again, you are dishing out crap.
Try your B.S. on someone that doesn’t know the difference between B.S. and Pop-Tarts.
GM out
“What union employees make less than teachers, Roper? How much?”
Ed, are you that ignorant about unions? OK, try this list on for size. Food service workers, janitors, maids, non-licensed hospital staff. Typically in the 12-20 dollar range.
Git it?
GM out
I think theatre technicians also make less than $20 an hour…
Ed? Why in the world would I want to teach? Even IF I did the 8 hours 5 days a week, just putting up with snotty ill behaved children who’ve never been disciplined and enduring the bureaucracy of the district, state and fed levels would be enough to drive me to suicide, add in being a union member and I see no benefits. Most of the teachers I personally know (first hand, IRL) are NOT that smart but somehow retain their position. Why would I want to join a profession like that?
Thanks for the warning, GM. I certainly won’t have Pop Tarts at your place.
…that would be because you’re more comfortable with your own brand of BS than common sense and the truth.