Posted on 05/14/2011 6:52:29 AM PDT by HorowitzianConservative
I've been arguing with my leftist friends again. Bad habits die hard. I still manage to let the dirty laundry pile up for weeks too. Some day I'll learn my lessons -- and have more leftist drinking buddies and fewer days wearing faded t-shirts from college.
This time it's Chris, an admitted Socialist and proud Union Man. (I suppose I'm being redundant aren't I?)
An argument that started over the futility of the attempt to create a "digital picket line" to boycott the Huffington Post (Chris's link was responsible for me suggesting to our star blogger Walter Hudson that he write this FANTASTIC post here) soon drifted over to the subject of the damaging effects of teachers unions. I challenged my friend when he seemed to play dumb on the horrific effects of lousy tenured teachers:
Oh come on, Chris. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Are you disputing the obvious reality that the result of making it much harder to fire elementary and high school teachers is that more bad teachers get to keep teaching kids poorly? It's very hard to fire a tenured high school or elementary school teacher. The result of this is kids get left behind when they're stuck with a lousy teacher for a year. Are you telling me that you're perfectly satisfied with the status quo of the hoops that have to be jumped through to fire bad teachers?I expected Chris to argue with me about this and insist that I'd been indoctrinated by evil right-wing talking points -- not that I was genuinely concerned about children getting a good education.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsrealblog.com ...
price of salary should operation with supply and demand, just like anything else. If theres low supply of workers willing to do cleaning, then the salary will need to increase to entice ppl to do the work. Sometimes it does need higher salary, but it should not be set in stone.
The janitor will probably get a pension too. Most college professionals have to fund their own retirement.
It's a very good question that also came up over the past few days in the context of a report that lifeguards in Newport Beach, CA make $125,000/yr, with some making >$200,000/yr.
I use the Olympic gold medal as an example. Why would anyone get up a 5am every morning to train, and put in years working 7 days a week to perfect their skills, if everyone who wanted to participate was given a gold medal?
The janitor is probably doing more good work than many college professors and lawyers.
Just sayin
>>> The janitor is probably doing more good work than many college professors and lawyers.>>>
Don’t you mean doing LESS HARM?
“Why would anyone go to college or risk starting a business when they can live comfortably on 50K a year mopping floors?”
i don’t want to mop the floor, and i want more than 50k.....
but if i don’t have my current job... maybe...
BWAAAHAAHAAAAA! Right.
“Conservatives and Tea Partiers’ anti-union public policies do not have the end goal of breaking up unions but of correcting some of the problems that have resulted from union overreach.”
Speak for yourself, pal. I see NO REASON at all for allowing unions to spend one more day in existence - and that applies to both public and private sector unions. If you HATE your boss, then take your skills elsewhere. Every white-collar person understands that - so what’s so hard about workers understanding it too?
As for the “good things” that unions have brought in the past...like safer workplaces - they are enshrined by law and punishable by jail and lawsuits (when the law isn’t followed). That applies to union shops and it applies to non-union shops. Unions simply have no relevance there.
Go to college, get a masters and teach for 6 years in a South Carolina high school and still do not make $50,000. Right to work state with no union helps keep the pay low. The medical benefits are not so good. I don’t understand why the person stays there. She says loves the south, the people and her job. Go figure. They are now starting to furlough teachers and administration several days a school year to address budget issues.
I don’t get people who have leftists friends.
What a bunch of pikers! In the Louisville, KY school district, we pay our janitors in excess of $100K a year (Bus mechanics and school librarians too).
In 1980 as a new engineer, I went to work for a paper company in a pulp plant. Salary was $26,500/year. The unionized plant workers’ lowest paying job was $17/hr. That was for the idiots who did nothing all day long but sweep up wood chips with a push broom.
That's why people are flocking to all of those union shop states with high pay, great benefits, job for life. Try to buy a house in Detroit these days. Workers paradise up there.
Unions by always pushing for higher wages without any necessary improvement in worker productivity or efficiency eventually kills the business. Look at US automakers as a perfect example where union wages have long outstripped the value created by their workers or the ability of the company to pass these added costs on to consumers.
In public organizations where there is no bottom line or tangible value for the services provided, unions have pushed so that public employees are often paid many times what a comparable private worker would be paid doing the same job. Hence janitors are making $50,000 per year. This is the problem that is now pushing states and local governments to bankruptcy as taxpayers have reached the limit of what they can pay.
I have a lot of liberal friends through marriage (my wife's friends and their husbands). All of them voted for Obama. A couple years ago, I was sitting with this group of guys (all white), and each one of them started talking about how they don't like visiting places like Idaho because there isn't a lot of racial diversity and it really makes them uncomfortable to only be around white people. I realized then that my friends are the biggest bunch of politically correct pussies on the planet.
Oh yeah---so how much do you pay lifeguards?
(CALI) $200,000 Lifeguards to Receive Millions in Retirement
Townhall.com ^ | May 8, 2011 | David Spady
FR Posted on Sunday by Kaslin
EXCERPT Public outrage over lavish government employee compensation and pensions is becoming more heated as new revelations about excesses seem to crop up every week. The latest: Newport Beach, California, where some lifeguards have compensation packages that exceed $200,000 and where these "civil servants" can retire with lucrative government pensions at age 50.
Newport Beach has two groups of lifeguards. Seasonal tower lifeguards cover Newport’s seven miles of beach during the busy summer months. Part-time seasonal guards make $16-22 per hour with no benefits. They are the young people who man the towers and do the lion’s share of the rescues. Another group of highly compensated full-time staff work year-round and seldom, if ever, climb into a tower......... the typical Daily Deployment Model in the winter for these lifeguards is 10 hours per day for four days each week, mainly spent driving trucks around, painting towers, ordering uniforms and doing basic office work—none are actually manning lifeguard towers.
........last year the top earner received $211,000 in pay and benefits, including a $400 sun protection allowance. In 2010 all but one of the city’s full-time lifeguard staff had annual compensation packages worth over $120,000. Not bad pay for a lifeguard - but what makes these jobs most attractive is the generous retirements. One recently retired lifeguard, age 51, receives a government retirement of over $108,000 per year—for the rest of his life. He will make well over $3 million in retirement if he lives to age 80.
In 1999, California legislators, including many Republicans, felt very generous with the public's tax dollars and created "three at fifty" for public safety workers. SB 400 allowed these government employees to retire as early as age 50, well over a decade before their counter-parts in the private sector, and calculate their annual retirement pay at three percent per year or 90% of their final year's pay.
With the ability to spike final year's pay based on over-time, vacation and sick leave time, uniform allowances, etc., many former government employees now earn more retired than when they worked. There was a domino effect of this incredibly generous law resulting in local communities jumping on board to stay "competitive" by offering local public safety personnel, including lifeguards, the same great deal. Thousands of state and local employees are locked into generous pension contracts which the courts have decided cannot be broken despite the lack of budgets to pay for them.
According to a Stanford University study, California taxpayers are facing a pension liability that could exceed $500 billion, a figure the non-partisan Little Hoover Commission says will "crush" government.
As bad as Newport Beach's situation is, it pales in comparison to some other cities in California. The city of Fresno currently spends 53 cents of every payroll dollar on pensions. The state average is 31 percent and is expected to rise significantly in the next few years. --SNIP--
SOURCE http://media.townhall.com/Townhall/Reu//b//2009%5C243%5C254f62a0-a420-4f58-b614-1b2fd0b8bd1b@news.ap.org.jpg
Pfft. That’s nothing. Lifeguards in California can make up to $210,000 a year. And this isn’t administration of lifeguards. This is lifeguards who are not summer help, who paint things, stock shelves, etc.
I am not kidding.
So, a $50,000 custodian doesn’t surprise me.
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