Labor Union Membership, Right to Work, and Education

Labor unions have been having a tough time competing in the private sector for a long time and now are even shrinking as a percentage of government workers.  In 2015, union workers were 11.1% of the work force.  This fell to 10.7% in 2016 with a loss of 240,000 union members.  Only 6.4% of private sector workers are now union members.  The mainstay of the unions is in the government sector with 29.6% of state government employees being union members and 40.3% of local government employees being members.  The local government union membership is much inflated by the many teachers who pretend to manage 25 or 30 people in the classroom, but are really blue-collar workers unable to negotiate their own work compensation as individuals.  The high percentage of government workers in unions has more recently been falling so that the percentages above are 15-year lows.

Within the last year, West Virginia and Kentucky have become Right to Work states, increasing the number of Right to Work states to 27.  There is a good chance that Missouri will soon become a Right to Work state.  In the 2016 election, a Republican who championed Right to Work hard won the governorship in Missouri despite the unions supplying the Democrat who opposed Right to Work with more than $10 million of campaign funds and other support.  Missouri voters returned every one of the state legislators to office who supported Right to Work.  Missouri, like other states with forced union dues collection, has been losing jobs to states with Right to Work laws.  The bordering states of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky all have Right to Work laws.  Only the basket case state of Illinois still maintains forced unionization on its borders.

You would not know it based on the recent campaign rhetoric, but manufacturing jobs increased by 236,000 in 2016.  Despite that overall growth in manufacturing jobs, union membership decreased by 74,000.  The growth in manufacturing jobs has been in Right to Work states.  In 2016, union membership in the 25 states that were Right to Work states for the full year decreased by 290,000, falling from 7.1% to 6.5%.  Membership in forced unionization states increased by 50,000, making it clear how dependent labor unions are on forced unionization.  Union membership increased in only one-quarter of the states with Right to Work laws, while increasing in 60% of those with forced unionization.  The percentage of Michigan workers in labor unions has fallen by 2.2% since Michigan became a Right to Work state in 2013.  Government worker unions lost their privileged powers in Wisconsin in 2011 and since then union membership has fallen by 136,000 workers or by 40%!

The loss of union power over the school systems in Wisconsin since 2011 and the freeing of school systems to pay teachers on their individual merit, is improving education in those school systems that have moved to the individual merit evaluation and compensation of teachers.  A Stanford University researcher, Barbara Biasi, has found that the school systems that have chosen to stick with union-favored seniority compensation programs rather than individual merit programs are falling behind the individual merit school systems.  Governor Scott Walker's Act 10 collective bargaining reform has allowed the thinking school systems to improve.  Who would think that evaluating and rewarding individual teaching ability would improve education?  Clearly the Democrats who claimed this would undermine the government-run school system would not allow this possibility.  How surprising it is that there is a correlation between being a capable teacher and classroom manager and being capable of negotiating your own working conditions and compensation!

Bad Teachers are the Main Cause of Bad American Educations

The most important factor in student education is the quality of the teacher.  Unfortunately, the average teacher in America is neither bright nor well-educated.  This has long been my evaluation and that viewpoint is much confirmed in a report by Joy Pullman, Education Research Fellow at The Heartland Institute.

Her report notes:

• Students planning to major in education have below average SAT scores.  Students with below average SAT scores are also below proficient on state grade by grade tests.
• The education major curriculum is about the easiest of all college curricula.  Teaching majors need more college remedial work than humanities and social science majors.  Yet, teaching majors are rewarded with the highest college grades.
• Teachers with content-specific majors or who have had an earlier career are better teachers than those who majored in education and took courses emphasizing progressive teaching methods and ideology.
• Teachers with teaching certificates are not any better than those without the certificates.
• Despite low achievement, teachers commonly get early retirement and pay and benefits that are 50% higher than what others of similar ability get in the marketplace.

Of course, there is the occasional really phenomenal teacher, such as my daughter Kate who teaches biology courses in a charter school in a very poor neighborhood in New York City.  She had a dual major at Rochester Institute of Technology in both Biotechnology and Biomedical Sciences.  She had one-third more credit hours than needed to graduate as well with an amazing 4.00 GPA.   Her students consistently have about a 90% pass rate on the New York Regency Tests for Biology and she has just completed teaching the first Biology AP course offered in the school.  Kate was one of the best teachers of her school prior to getting her required teachers certificate, which she found very onerous because the education courses she had to take at Fordham University while in her first two years of teaching were incredibly boring and useless.

Kate says she has some 10th grade students who have third grade reading skills and who cannot write a coherent sentence, let alone a coherent paragraph.  Many more good, or even just decent, teachers are desperately needed.  It is difficult to conceive how bad a teacher is who allows students to go on to the next grade when they have never learned to read or write.  American schools are full to the brim with such teachers, while teachers such as Kate are exceedingly rare.

Government-Run School Fraud in Camden, NJ

New Jersey government-run schools spend an average of $18,045 a student in K-12 education.  For that amount of money, a student should receive a very high quality education.  Generally, they do not get that high quality education.  In Camden, NJ the school district of 13,700 students spends even more per student, namely $24,709.  For such a princely sum, a student should get the equivalent of a very good private school education.  But in Camden one gets a 49.3% graduation rate in 2011-2012, down from a 56.9% graduation rate in 2010-2011.  There is a consolation.  Trenton, NJ has an even lower graduation rate, though that may only be because Trenton has a higher expectation of graduates.

Camden has the 3 worst schools in the entire state.  90% of its schools are among the worst 5% of all schools in the state.  Only 28% of 11th graders are proficient in math.  Fewer than 20% of 4th graders are literate in the language arts.  Governor Chris Christie has announced that the state of New Jersey is taking over the control of the extremely dysfunctional government-run Camden School District.

There is no lack of examples to illustrate the fact that the problem with the American government-run education system is not one to be solved by spending more money on it.  Many dysfunctional government-run school districts are spending $24,000 per student.  The problem is the purpose and the value choices of these government-run school systems, not their finances.

These problems are generally going to  be solved by setting up a free market of school choices in the education marketplace.  Voucher programs are essential in the transformation to a privately run education system in which competition and innovation in education will come to be more rewarded than thorough paperwork and a rigid, slow-minded bureaucracy with the interests of its union blue collar workers taking precedence over the education of students.  Almost every government-run school district would actually save money over time simply by issuing vouchers for an amount somewhat less than they spend per student.  Private schools will quickly spring up to provide a better education for that smaller cost per student.

Government-Run-Down Education in California

The Progressive Elitists love to wax eloquent about how much they care for children, especially for their education.  California is a state well-controlled by the Progressive Elitists.  True to their stated values, they spend mightily on K-12 government-run education.  Falsely, their children have become nearly the worst educated in the nation.

Conn Carroll in the Washington Examiner wrote an excellent piece on the lessons of government-run education in California.  In 1975, when Gov. Brown was first governor, he pushed the Rodda Act that allowed government worker unions to directly withhold union dues from organized worker paychecks.  The California Teachers Association used the massive sums collected to mount political campaigns to get more money for the government-run schools and for teacher pay and benefits.  In 1988, they helped pass Proposition 98 that required the state to spend at least 39% of the state budget on K-12 education.  The results:

• An average teacher salary of $69,434 a year.  This is third highest in the nation.
• A doubling of unionized teachers.
• Union contracts requiring teacher pay be based on longevity, not teaching quality.
• In 1992, California ranked next to last in reading proficiency for fourth-graders.
• In 2011, California 8th graders were 48th in reading and 48th in math.  They did outperform Mississippi in both!
• California has one of the highest student to teacher ratios in the nation, despite the huge spending.  The national average ratio is 15.5 and California is 20.9.
• California once had among the highest percentages of college-educated people and still is #6 in college degrees for those over 65 years old!  But, its 25 - 34 age group is 1% below the 31.5% national average in college degrees.  It is sinking fast.
• The exodus of companies out of California will have to continue not just due to high taxes and over-regulation, but because they will not be able to find enough college graduates to hire.  There is a projected shortfall of 1 million jobs requiring a college education by 2025.  [College feedstock from the 48th worst elementary schools in the nation must almost certainly lead to a particularly dire grade inflation in college, making many college degrees from California colleges quite bogus.  This is not to mention that high school graduates who cannot read and do simple math proficiently are not suitable for many jobs one might think a high school graduate could handle.]

The Progressive Elitist program for government-run education is not only failing the children of California, but it is also resulting in many young adults losing earning power relative to the past in California.  Indeed, it is causing the entire middle class that Progressive Elitists also pretend to champion to fall behind in income equality, another goal supposedly dear to the Progressive Elitist's heart.  The middle-earning 20% is faring much more poorly against the upper 20% of earners in California to the point that it is now the ranked 49th among the states by this criteria.  The Progressive Elitist control of education in California is a clear object lesson that they cannot, will not, and do not want to accomplish what they say their goals are.  They are con artists, pure and simple.

Over and over, I have made the point that quality education, for many reasons, must be private education, not government-run education.  California is a great object lesson in the failure of government-managed education.  One of the reasons it cannot fix itself is because its government-run schools are excellent at one thing -- indoctrinating the young with a belief in big government and a fear of the private sector.

Obama Jobs Bill Will Kill Jobs

The Obama Jobs Bill is supposed to cost $447 billion, create as many as 1.9 million jobs according to economists who have already proven they have no clue, and increase the GDP by 2%, again according to those same clueless economists.  Let us examine the effects of the Obama Jobs Bill in a simple and rational manner.

The GDP in 2011 is estimated to be $15.012 trillion.  Obama's clueless economists say that his jobs bill will increase the GDP by 2% because simply printing money you do not have always increases the size of the economy.  Hmmm....., no wonder many of them keep saying we just need bigger stimulus packages and with an outpouring of enough newly printed dollars, the economy will grow and we will all have dream jobs.  If this effect works, then the government should print up $15.012 trillion and the economy will take a Great Leap Forward!  Apparently some us are just too timid to do this.  But Paul Krugman would be happy to push us into it.  OK, so yes, I do not believe this is the way the economy works for a minute, or even a second.  But still, it is interesting to examine whether the Obama Jobs Bill makes some kind of sense even on the numbers given by the clueless Obama economists.

First, we need to note that the cost of the bill, $447 billion, is 2.98% of the GDP.  That is more than the 2% growth of GDP claimed to result from this expenditure!  In fact, we can calculate from these numbers that for every dollar spent by the government in this Obama Jobs Bill $0.33 simply vanishes into thin air.  The Obama economists are claiming that this government expenditure is only 2/3 as effective as other money in the economy, which already includes huge inefficiencies due to the cost of overblown governments with their over-compensated employees and all of the mandates and regulations they impose without regard to cost upon the much more efficient private sector.

But, it gets worse.  Assuming that, most unbelievably, Obama's Job Bill does create the wishful 1.9 million jobs, each job costs $235,263.  This comes from dividing $447 billion by 1.9 million jobs.  We can compare this number with the cost of the jobs we presently have.  Of course the cost of those jobs is already grossly cranked skyward by the many prior costs of government, so we should remember that real private sector jobs cost less than the amount we are about to calculate because we are including all jobs and that includes all of those very expensive government jobs.  At present, each job costs ($15.012 trillion)/(140,335,000 jobs) = $106,973, where the present number of jobs comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Unemployment Report for September 2011.  So a new Obama job will cost 2.2 times as much as the composite of private sector and government jobs presently costs.  Surely, taking 2.2 times as much money out of the private sector as it takes to create a job there and giving it to Obama to create a job is not a good idea.  It is a great way to bankrupt America and many of its families.

Now, some economists believe in magic and they will disagree with me on what I am about to point out.  When you remove 2.2 times as much from the private sector as it takes for the private sector to create a job, you actually destroy 2.2 jobs for every job you create.  Yes, Obama will create jobs with his $447 billion expenditure of our money, but he will kill more than 2.2 jobs in the private sector for every job he will create for his campaign contributors.  He will create some union jobs to build and repair infrastructure.  He will maintain some teaching positions for the teachers unions in public schools.  He will create some temporary green energy jobs, but the collapse of those businesses will still occur soon, as it did with Solyndra and numerous other green jobs companies producing expensive and unreliable energy products.  Obama will try to point out the jobs created, so this is what will be seen.  What will not be seen, except partially in the rising unemployment statistics, will be the 2.2 minimum number of jobs destroyed in the private sector.  Obama is counting on our failing to see those jobs die.

What I am saying is based on recognizing that if government spends money, it is taken out of the private sector one way or another.  Generally, it is either taken out in taxes, by borrowing it with the payment of interest paid with future taxes, by simply printing it and diluting the value of all other money and assets, and by imposing mandates upon the private sector that cost them time and money.  In this case, Obama wants to raise taxes on the "rich" or companies which will remove money from the private sector in a simple and straightforward way to pay for this turkey bill.

Now I do not believe the Obama Jobs Bill will create 1.9 million jobs at all, even if we do not subtract the jobs killed by Obama.  We can easily calculate the number of jobs that will be killed.  These jobs are jobs that might well have been jobs long sustained by the private sector and they will be replaced by a smaller number of jobs that will not make economic sense once the immediate government expenditure runs out.  The private sector jobs killed will be about $447,000,000,000 / $106,973 = 4,178,625 jobs, or more than 4 million jobs, to be replaced with maybe 1 million jobs for Obama's cronies.

As I said, it gets worse.  Creating about 1 million temporary jobs while killing more than 4 million longer term jobs cannot be the act of rational men and women.  But it is the way the wrongheaded Obama wants badly to drag the country.  It is Obama who will throw most of us off the cliff.

Someone should make an ad of a jackbooted Obama marching shackled American workers to a cliff and then pushing them over the edge, one by one, with the calculations above overprinted on the images of a fascist Obama.  This would only be justice to pay back the injustice done to Paul Ryan.

Erecting a Ladder

Last Saturday, I helped a friend remove a large branch which had fallen on her roof in a storm earlier in the week. She had borrowed an extension ladder from a neighbor who had stored it in his yard. The rope for raising the extension had rotted away and the springs which would cause the latches to lock in place on each rung as they came into alignment with it had rusted away. We wanted to put the ladder against a particular edge of the roof over a room which made a right angle with the main part of the house from the deck. The deck was edged with a somewhat high rail and two sets of parallel wires ran outward perpendicular to the main part of the house. We needed to erect the ladder amidst all of these obstacles and then extend it to a safe height.

When we finally maneuvered the ladder into the upright position after a couple of false starts, she asked me how many Ph.D.s does it take to put a ladder up. I laughed. She has a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering. We then had to use a stool to raise and lock the ladder a couple of rungs higher than we could reach from the deck. This was still not a safe height, so we brought a 5-foot ladder up from her basement and raised the extension ladder another two rungs and locked it. We took note that most any tradesman in the roofing business or tree-trimming business would have been equipped with a proper ladder and would have gotten it erect more efficiently than we had. Most American workers are fairly competent at what they do for a living.

But, I also reflected on an issue I have often thought about over the years. While I sometimes, well maybe frequently, am frustrated that most Americans give little thought to what I believe is the most essential issue of our time, and probably of most any time, namely the ever on-going fight for the rights of the individual, this does not mean that I have a low opinion of most people's ability to manage their own lives. The socialist elitists who want the government to make almost all decisions for the people, believe this is necessary because they actually do hold most people in contempt. They really do believe most people are unable to intelligently manage their own lives. Yet, when you see how well most people do their jobs, which is something most do care about and do put some real effort into doing, shouldn't you be able to understand that most people are also capable of generally managing their own lives? Besides, they showed that they could historical in the American wilderness, which we now are inclined to forget.

Now it is interesting to examine who is most likely to be an elitist who believes that others cannot manage their own lives. One such group is college and university faculty. Another is the teachers of the public school systems. Another is politicians and government employees. Lawyers and accountants are special interest groups looking for a validation for expanded government mandating the extensive use of their services. Another yet is women.

College professors have often become professors because they have a low regard for people who enter the free market and are willing to trade their productive work products with others using money as a medium to facilitate these exchanges. Professors are quick to heap scorn on these "money grubbers", losing sight entirely of the fact that money is the means to making voluntary exchanges much easier to arrange. They believe they deal in the realm of ideas, while others are simply materialists. This is a terrible oversimplification. Yes, there are many people in business who are very motivated by a desire to acquire money. But, then there are many in academia who are very desirous of prestige and the power to influence government to use force to make all of the people live by the values dictated by the professors. This is not a superior motivation. Power has served as the motivation of many a brute going back in human history to times long before money was even invented as a facilitor of trade. Few of these professors live like monks either, since most are fairly well paid. These same professors who decry the materialism of the businessman, analyze every difference of worldly goods that exists among Americans and people generally in the world and claim that all variations from equality are clear signs of injustice. They ignore the choices the people involved have made, the differences in dedication to learning and to hard work, the differences in intelligence, those of place, those due to partitioning the use of their time differently, choices of occupations based on factors other than remuneration, and those due to better or worse governments. They protest against materialism, but then they use almost entirely materialistic equality as the measure of social justice.

The teachers of the public school systems are to a degree the guardians of the children who study under their direction. To some degree, the teachers extend this accustomed mode of thinking as guardians into their relationship with the rest of society. Disproportionate numbers of the public teacher ranks are also women, who will also have maternal instincts in many cases for the care of others. The children they deal with are not yet mature adults and are not generally ready to fully manage their lives. The way the public schools work, they are not particularly encouraged or helped toward taking on the responsibilities of a self-managed individual. They are not even much encouraged to view themselves as individuals. Then, as though this is not enough to understand why teachers have a strong tendency to favor governmental nanny states, they are public employees who do benefit from transfers of wealth from the private sector to the government sector. Teachers are also union members. Teachers see their interests almost uniformly then as being tied to ever-growing governments.

Politicians and government employees are constantly looking for reasons to justify their positions and to increase their powers and budgets. This is clearly done effectively whenever they can convince the voters that many of the people are dumb sheep and need them as sheepherders. The lawyers find massive employment and income from the huge number of overly complex government laws and regulations. They play a disproportionate role in drafting the legislation that produces this end result. They work especially hard as a special interest group in control of the actual levers of government. They also enjoy the court system, which they principally control. That system's many delays, strange trial logic, and by and large, the choice of judges is all determined by lawyers. Accountants are more and more massive beneficiaries of our overly complex government taxation and regulatory requirements. Companies and individuals are forced more and more to pay accountants for help in producing the mountains of government-required paperwork on income, expenditures, employment, and taxes.

Finally, there is the predominant role of women in the socialist Democrat Party. This is the party of feminism and anti-masculinity. This is the party of those elitists who view themselves as the caregivers for the many adult children who do exist and the many more who are imagined to exist. As women have long been particularly prone to the appeal of the traditional religions, so too are they prone to a religious approach and zeal for socialism, equality of material results, the politics of envy and class warfare, the politics of group identity, anti-man environmentalism, and anti-business attitudes. They have a tendency to feel uncomfortable unless they are enveloped within a group. Male individuality, analytical thinking, and self-confidence are often offensive to them. Women are less than comfortable in the analytical thought required to gain mastery over science, technology, and economics than are men. It is not difficult to understand why the Democrat platform appeals to many of them. There are, of course, many women who are exceptions to these statements, but they are definitely a minority of women. There are also many men who are also susceptible to the Democrat platform, but for several decades, they have generally been a minority group among men.

I continue to believe strongly that most American men are capable of running their own lives with minimal interference from government. Despite the way they vote and the uncertainties that women seem to feel about having such an ability, I also believe most women are capable of managing their own lives, especially with the help of a decent man.