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Comment by Eumenes | Hacker News Reader

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The teacher union seems to be mostly ineffective based on what I've seen/heard in my county. My county literally hires teaching contractors at a significantly higher rate than union teachers because it is such an unattractive job. Somehow the union still fails to negotiate a salary within $20k of the state median.

--- Tangential Rant:

Look into your county's education budget and it might surprise you. In mine, the yearly budget is $1.5B and only about $900M goes to actual school operations (everything from ~300 principles, ~6k teachers, 64 physical/occupational therapists, IT, TAs, and benefits). Another ~$70M goes to bus contractors that can't accommodate reasonable start times across the grade levels. ~$30M goes to facility maintenance/construction/planning. Most of the left over is bloat that manages useless initiatives, flirts with ed-tech/curriculum grifters, marketers/comms/etc, and weird pork that doesn't belong in an education budget. That's like $300-400M/yr in bloat at just the county level (assuming at least some of the left over provides actual value).

It's embarrassing that these administrators get paid 2-4x the teachers, but still fail to staff schools properly with a $1.5B budget for ~80k students.

The problem being that public spending for new shiny projects is much easier to sell to the public than required maintenance. Without a strong voice how would public workers ever get enough leverage to earn even cost of living adjustments?

We should be trying to optimize public services, even if that means cutting staff. This is an area where we should 100% leverage AI and automation. Tax dollars shouldn't be used as charity to employ administrative staff. Many states are having problem with pension debts. These public unions also refuse to act on productivity or performance measurements. Perhaps some sort of bipartisanship Congressional committee for federal workers could be useful, with state and local level peer committees.

Ah yes AI and Automation the solution to all problems. It's basically impossible to directly talk to anyone in my state because of that when it comes to unemployment. What's worse is a 3rd party was hired to basically say they can't do anything but tell you if your account is either good or not. Sometimes it's nice to be able to talk to someone who has some power in the system.

If you mess up in the system good luck figuring it out for a few months. I think my state has had investigations over had bad it is. What's really stupid is unemployment fined me at some point but my unemployment insurance covered it as I had like $10k in my unemployment account the state agree I qualified for that I eventually gave up trying to use as I couldn't get these two parties within unemployment to agree. So I was qualified just unable to qualify. At least I didn't have to pay anything as unemployment covered it and I'm employed now but what a horrible system. I did attempt to go to go to court over this, major waste of time too. Especially because their own system failed with the original court date so they rescheduled for 4 months later. Huge mess. Don't ever be unemployed and you are fine though. Or move out of Texas I guess. I'm glad I had savings but I feel for those who don't. It's way too easy screw up in these systems.

See, even here the impulse is immediately to suggest cutting staff and directly saying that paying public servants is charity. You didn't addressed my point in terms of CoL adjustments. How does adding AI enure that high performance, productive staff members get these adjustments without it being viewed as a waste of tax dollars by the public?

I wouldn't suggest AI making policy decisions, but replacing jobs at the post office or DMV. You aren't entitled to a job. Congress can vote on CoL adjustments for workers, both at the state and federal levels. Right now, its pay to play - the unions, some of the largest political contributors in the US, just pay (bribe) the representatives to advocate for them, in return for donations to campaigns.

> You aren't entitled to a job.

Total non-sequitur. I didn't say anyone was. Not everyone is entitled to a job, but as you said in regards to policy decisions, there are jobs that are required. A lot of the mail service still needs to exist. We are nowhere near machines delivering the mail to people. And those people need to be paid and they need to live on that paycheck.

> Congress can vote on CoL adjustments for workers, both at the state and federal levels.

Yes, this is the mechanism, but that doesn't explain why or how they'd want to go with an adjustment. It's a bad look for a politician to give people a CoL adjustment - many people see it as their wage being stolen to pay another. I'm not saying that unions are the answer, but how do these workers have a voice when the public actively doesn't want them to be paid more?

Not all public unions are the same, I would discourage generalization. Federal public unions are very different from local and state public unions.

My wife's public union in a federal agency is a great tool for them to leverage when dealing with exceptional issues outside the normal channels and processes. Federal bureaucracy can be slow, and it can also be impractical when dealing with various things. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread and the article, a federal public union and their members can't strike, and they generally cannot directly negotiate increased pay since it is congressionally controlled.

"All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service." - Franklin Roosevelt

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/letter-the-resolut...

It's an interesting argument, suggesting that government could simply pay workers 1c per year and that any attempt to address this by the workers by - say - a strike would be "unthinkable and intolerable"

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