This feels like half a conversation. A big part of why public sector jobs are high-security, high-benefits is because the base income isn't very good. You don't get a city job for the pay; you get it for the security and benefits. When voters are asked, do you think public sector workers should be paid for performance, are they also being asked if they're willing to foot the bill for higher incomes for high performers?
There are a number of misconceptions this article proclaims as factual and then wrongly generalizes to all government service. For example, there are many different types of public sector jobs. City, county, state, and federal public service cannot be approached as some sort of uniform grouping that can be dealt with as a whole. A police officer position for a 500 person town is much different than a rocket scientist position for NASA. Thus, the statement, "public sector unions regularly push for clumsy work rules and badly designed pay packages that make it harder to supply efficient and effective government services," is a ridiculous extrapolation and has no foundation whatsoever.
A job for a city or county is much closer to the private sector in hiring and firing practices than a state or federal job. Federal employees cannot go on strike like city or county workers, and federal unions are limited to collective bargaining efforts. And so the statement, "public sector unions consistently push for policies that make it very hard to fire bad cops or teachers," has no relationship to state or federal jobs or unions. The author seems to be concerned with improving education, but only focuses on teacher accountability. Again, this issue is much more complex. If the goal is a better pool of teaching talent, then raising teacher pay is mandatory. If you have a waiting list of prospective teachers, then accountability is a simple matter and you will be assured of quality educators. But teachers are in fact only a small cog in the education machine and they follow the direction established by their school districts. They don't set the curriculum, decide on the text books, or even have sole authority to fail students. Anyone who has taught in an inner city high school will attest to the fact that the zoo-like environment encountered is often not conducive to learning. The causes for such dysfunction go way beyond teacher quality. There is a reason why many of these classrooms have panic buttons, something I'm guessing the author never encountered in academia.
The author also seems to be concerned that federal workers not be treated any differently than private sector workers. Again, generalizing to all federal workers is an oversimplification and does everyone who directly or indirectly receives a benefit from the government a disservice. The reasons why federal workers chose to work for the federal government vary. Certainly some did so simply to have a 9 to 5 job. However, many federal career professionals will tell you that they actually believe in the quaint notion of public service, just as those who enter the armed service do. They struck a bargain with the government: A chance to make a difference in the world in exchange for less than average pay and a reasonable expectation of job security across administrations. In fact the federal government has had difficulty in attracting scientists, programmers, engineers, lawyers and other workers with high education and skill requirements and must pay these workers a differential in order to attract them. But not even dedicated public servants can tolerate the chaos caused by doge and a government that ignores its own laws and regulations. One has only to look at the number of lawyers who have left DOJ to see the results. These career professionals do not make widgets—they work to improve the lives of all of us. A few more years of this and the right will be very close to its goal of dismantling our government in favor of its preferred oligarchical alternative.
The lesson here is that Dems should not adopt knee-jerk reactions to oversimplified and in fact misleading polling just to score political points. We must somehow get beyond the endless application of bandaids to compund fractures, and really try to get at the fundamental reasons for societal failures. Be honest with America, admit that real reform is going to take a long concerted effort.
I agree that the public does not have an intuitive deep understanding of policy, and we shouldn't take their word for everything at face value.
However.
The piece links to a series of examples of public sector union malfeasance. Public sector employees are here to serve the public, not to extract benefits from the public because they belong to a photogenic or favored class of people, whether that's teachers on the left or cops on the right.
If the policies favored by the teacher unions do not produce quality education, then the teacher union is a gang of rent-seeking parasites playing off confusion over what it is they actually do.
The point of this piece isn't that public sector employees should be treated exactly as private sector employees are. It is saying, and justifying, that reeling in some of the more cartoonish accesses of public sector unions does not come with the terrible political backlash that said unions and their fandom keep saying it will.
The idea that what America really needs right now is for Trump and Trump wannabes to have a much easier time dismissing public-sector workers who won't toe the fascist line is so utterly bizarre that I question whether the author and publisher are acting in good faith here.
It's well-established that the public has zero understanding of how at-will employment actually works and believes that they have far more protections on the job than they do. So linking a poll question to that known misunderstanding ("should public sector workers have the same protections as private-sector workers") instead of just polling the actual options ("should politicians have the right to fire people for their political viewpoints") is deliberately stacking the deck.
The status quo isn't that virtuous employees are protected from politically motivated firings.
The status quo is that all employees, regardless of virtue, are protected from all firings.
Our most highly paid and unionized school systems aren't even bothering to teach kids to read. At some point, when you don't even bother to deliver, people are going to stop shoveling unaccountable money at you.
Well, gee whiz, I guess we should just limit the protections to people with "virtue," huh? Except, gosh, the very way one establishes that one has "virtue" is... through the very right to a trial that at-will employment denies you! As the Supreme Court has pointed out, "Lawsuits also often prove to have been groundless; but no way has been discovered of relieving a defendant from the necessity of a trial to establish the fact." Myers v. Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corp., 303 US 41, 52 (1938).
Your last paragraph is so obviously false that it relieves me of the necessity of further interaction with you. If you were trying to illustrate that this effort to strip employees of due process was undertaken in bad faith, you couldn't have done a better job.
This is a terrible poll. I'm sorry, but what happens if you rephrase the question: "It should be as difficult to fire people in the private sector as in the public sector?" Or "Should it be legal to fire people in the private sector without cause, or for bad cause?"
The implicit message is that government workers shouldn't be treated _better_ than private sectors. I agree. I think that private sector employees deserve the same protections (by and large, I agree that some packages are "clumsy") as in the public sector. If you reframed the question you'd almost certainly get different answers.
This is awesome and I think reflects the broader macro-issue of trust in institutions. I think it rightly reads as very sus to people if a government job operates like an insular cabal that protects its members from accountability.
This feels like half a conversation. A big part of why public sector jobs are high-security, high-benefits is because the base income isn't very good. You don't get a city job for the pay; you get it for the security and benefits. When voters are asked, do you think public sector workers should be paid for performance, are they also being asked if they're willing to foot the bill for higher incomes for high performers?
And also no mention of the current teacher shortage! It's not like there is a surplus of teachers waiting in the wings.
There are a number of misconceptions this article proclaims as factual and then wrongly generalizes to all government service. For example, there are many different types of public sector jobs. City, county, state, and federal public service cannot be approached as some sort of uniform grouping that can be dealt with as a whole. A police officer position for a 500 person town is much different than a rocket scientist position for NASA. Thus, the statement, "public sector unions regularly push for clumsy work rules and badly designed pay packages that make it harder to supply efficient and effective government services," is a ridiculous extrapolation and has no foundation whatsoever.
A job for a city or county is much closer to the private sector in hiring and firing practices than a state or federal job. Federal employees cannot go on strike like city or county workers, and federal unions are limited to collective bargaining efforts. And so the statement, "public sector unions consistently push for policies that make it very hard to fire bad cops or teachers," has no relationship to state or federal jobs or unions. The author seems to be concerned with improving education, but only focuses on teacher accountability. Again, this issue is much more complex. If the goal is a better pool of teaching talent, then raising teacher pay is mandatory. If you have a waiting list of prospective teachers, then accountability is a simple matter and you will be assured of quality educators. But teachers are in fact only a small cog in the education machine and they follow the direction established by their school districts. They don't set the curriculum, decide on the text books, or even have sole authority to fail students. Anyone who has taught in an inner city high school will attest to the fact that the zoo-like environment encountered is often not conducive to learning. The causes for such dysfunction go way beyond teacher quality. There is a reason why many of these classrooms have panic buttons, something I'm guessing the author never encountered in academia.
The author also seems to be concerned that federal workers not be treated any differently than private sector workers. Again, generalizing to all federal workers is an oversimplification and does everyone who directly or indirectly receives a benefit from the government a disservice. The reasons why federal workers chose to work for the federal government vary. Certainly some did so simply to have a 9 to 5 job. However, many federal career professionals will tell you that they actually believe in the quaint notion of public service, just as those who enter the armed service do. They struck a bargain with the government: A chance to make a difference in the world in exchange for less than average pay and a reasonable expectation of job security across administrations. In fact the federal government has had difficulty in attracting scientists, programmers, engineers, lawyers and other workers with high education and skill requirements and must pay these workers a differential in order to attract them. But not even dedicated public servants can tolerate the chaos caused by doge and a government that ignores its own laws and regulations. One has only to look at the number of lawyers who have left DOJ to see the results. These career professionals do not make widgets—they work to improve the lives of all of us. A few more years of this and the right will be very close to its goal of dismantling our government in favor of its preferred oligarchical alternative.
The lesson here is that Dems should not adopt knee-jerk reactions to oversimplified and in fact misleading polling just to score political points. We must somehow get beyond the endless application of bandaids to compund fractures, and really try to get at the fundamental reasons for societal failures. Be honest with America, admit that real reform is going to take a long concerted effort.
I agree that the public does not have an intuitive deep understanding of policy, and we shouldn't take their word for everything at face value.
However.
The piece links to a series of examples of public sector union malfeasance. Public sector employees are here to serve the public, not to extract benefits from the public because they belong to a photogenic or favored class of people, whether that's teachers on the left or cops on the right.
If the policies favored by the teacher unions do not produce quality education, then the teacher union is a gang of rent-seeking parasites playing off confusion over what it is they actually do.
The point of this piece isn't that public sector employees should be treated exactly as private sector employees are. It is saying, and justifying, that reeling in some of the more cartoonish accesses of public sector unions does not come with the terrible political backlash that said unions and their fandom keep saying it will.
The idea that what America really needs right now is for Trump and Trump wannabes to have a much easier time dismissing public-sector workers who won't toe the fascist line is so utterly bizarre that I question whether the author and publisher are acting in good faith here.
It's well-established that the public has zero understanding of how at-will employment actually works and believes that they have far more protections on the job than they do. So linking a poll question to that known misunderstanding ("should public sector workers have the same protections as private-sector workers") instead of just polling the actual options ("should politicians have the right to fire people for their political viewpoints") is deliberately stacking the deck.
The status quo isn't that virtuous employees are protected from politically motivated firings.
The status quo is that all employees, regardless of virtue, are protected from all firings.
Our most highly paid and unionized school systems aren't even bothering to teach kids to read. At some point, when you don't even bother to deliver, people are going to stop shoveling unaccountable money at you.
Well, gee whiz, I guess we should just limit the protections to people with "virtue," huh? Except, gosh, the very way one establishes that one has "virtue" is... through the very right to a trial that at-will employment denies you! As the Supreme Court has pointed out, "Lawsuits also often prove to have been groundless; but no way has been discovered of relieving a defendant from the necessity of a trial to establish the fact." Myers v. Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corp., 303 US 41, 52 (1938).
Your last paragraph is so obviously false that it relieves me of the necessity of further interaction with you. If you were trying to illustrate that this effort to strip employees of due process was undertaken in bad faith, you couldn't have done a better job.
This is a terrible poll. I'm sorry, but what happens if you rephrase the question: "It should be as difficult to fire people in the private sector as in the public sector?" Or "Should it be legal to fire people in the private sector without cause, or for bad cause?"
The implicit message is that government workers shouldn't be treated _better_ than private sectors. I agree. I think that private sector employees deserve the same protections (by and large, I agree that some packages are "clumsy") as in the public sector. If you reframed the question you'd almost certainly get different answers.
This is awesome and I think reflects the broader macro-issue of trust in institutions. I think it rightly reads as very sus to people if a government job operates like an insular cabal that protects its members from accountability.
So you want to keep the same hire timelines but with more layoffs?