JayB

It wasn't an insult, just an observation alongside the uncharacteristic and....rather bourgeois...deviation into sentimentalism and away from the platonic class-interest-uber-alles framework we normally get from flinty eyed dialectical materialists like yourself.

I think it's quite meaningful in the appropriate context, but probably not terribly helpful if you're looking for data that relates to a specific neighborhood or property.

http://reason.org/news/show/public-sector-private-sector-salary

This argument is really only compelling if public sector unions' advocacy is solely limited to increasing their own pay and benefits. It isn't. Workers providing public services have first hand experience with marginalized communities of service users and are the most knowledgeable citizens with regard to state of the institutions they work in, our infrastructure, our schools, etc. Far from simply cynically seeking their own "job security", unions and their members have been powerful advocates on issues they're dealing with on a daily basis, from school lunch programs to women's shelters. The political threat that these unions pose is that they're putting money behind issues and into campaigns and politicians that the Right oppose, working class issues and campaigns that unions and the Left historically champion. Public sector unions, the last American unions with substantial density, represent a concentrated economic bloc that systematically pushes the progressive agenda and pushes back against corporate power. You're right Jay, this is about politics. That's all this shit's about. Agree that it's about politics. If it were about altruism, we'd see public sector workers making sure that their pay and benefits ranked behind funding for delivering all of the services that the most vulnerable members of society rely on, they'd be leading the charge on cost efficiency so that the state could actually deliver more services to more people at a lower cost, etc. Unfortunately for your thesis, we actually see precisely the opposite any time there's pressure on the budget. Zero movement towards cost efficiency, zero movement for focusing the governments priorities on the areas where they're needed most, etc, etc, etc, etc. Take an even closer look at the way they operate and you see things like work rules such as the Metro agreements that staff overtime with the most senior bus drivers so that they can use the overtime to spike their pension payouts, rampant pension spiking via other means, etc, etc, etc. The day that all of the above self-dealing that siphons resources away from other more legitimate public priorities is the day that you'll be able to claim that the public sector unions that actually exist operate in a manner that's consistent with the romantic vignette that you've offered up above. I never said it was all about altuism (a concept you're generally in conflict with anyway, no?). That unions represent the interest of their members is kind of a no-brainer but the notion that many public sector unions have been unwilling to make concessions is false. Link, link, link, link, link. Yes, many have resisted conceding hard-won gains. But it's not clear that they shouldn't since those concessions aren't going to amount to a squirt of piss in terms of addressing the cause of the crisis (the economy cratering/tax cuts) or the only real solution to it (stimulating economic growth). This is born out by the data that's emerging from countries experiencing the same austerity measures proposed here. If there's no real, rational, quantifiable reason for busting American unions then it's simply about undermining concentrated support for the liberal left and reviving the Rovian dream of permanent GOP majorities. It's clearly not about altruism at all. It's a mechanism for extracting maximal compensation from the public. This is borne out by the fact that any time there's a transparent conflict between the public's interests and their own - they have and will unfailingly favor their own interests. It's astonishing that I'm having to make this point to a *Marxist* of all people. The best you can do is claim that there can be an incidental benefit to the public as an unintended consequence of whatever public sector unions do to promote their own interests. The real, quantifiable reason to pay as little as possible to secure and retain qualified workers to deliver public services is to make the delivery of public services as cost effective as possible, and to concentrate public sector resources on the most urgent public priorities.

This argument is really only compelling if public sector unions' advocacy is solely limited to increasing their own pay and benefits. It isn't. Workers providing public services have first hand experience with marginalized communities of service users and are the most knowledgeable citizens with regard to state of the institutions they work in, our infrastructure, our schools, etc. Far from simply cynically seeking their own "job security", unions and their members have been powerful advocates on issues they're dealing with on a daily basis, from school lunch programs to women's shelters. The political threat that these unions pose is that they're putting money behind issues and into campaigns and politicians that the Right oppose, working class issues and campaigns that unions and the Left historically champion. Public sector unions, the last American unions with substantial density, represent a concentrated economic bloc that systematically pushes the progressive agenda and pushes back against corporate power. You're right Jay, this is about politics. That's all this shit's about. Agree that it's about politics. If it were about altruism, we'd see public sector workers making sure that their pay and benefits ranked behind funding for delivering all of the services that the most vulnerable members of society rely on, they'd be leading the charge on cost efficiency so that the state could actually deliver more services to more people at a lower cost, etc. Unfortunately for your thesis, we actually see precisely the opposite any time there's pressure on the budget. Zero movement towards cost efficiency, zero movement for focusing the governments priorities on the areas where they're needed most, etc, etc, etc, etc. Take an even closer look at the way they operate and you see things like work rules such as the Metro agreements that staff overtime with the most senior bus drivers so that they can use the overtime to spike their pension payouts, rampant pension spiking via other means, etc, etc, etc. The day that all of the above self-dealing that siphons resources away from other more legitimate public priorities is the day that you'll be able to claim that the public sector unions that actually exist operate in a manner that's consistent with the romantic vignette that you've offered up above.

Something is better than nothing. If he called me and asked my opinion, I'd advise him to abolish all collective bargaining rights for public employees, and outlaw all public sector unions. IMO civil service protections are more than adequate for public sector workers, which are much more robust than the average private sector worker is entitled to, and if they don't like their pay and benefits they're more than welcome to try their luck in the private sector. If the people on this board are correct, they'll all get an instant pay raise the second they do so.

The safe bet is that he had political reasons for doing so. Most likely because they supported him, possibly because he thought that cutting all collective bargaining rights for all public sector employees would be a bridge too far. No way to know for sure unless someone brings it up in an unguarded conversation, tapes it, and posts it on the internet, I suppose. This is politics. People that have political motives for supporting particular policies that might be unpopular if they disclosed them tend not to. I suspect that he also believes that collective bargaining rights are a significant driver of cost growth in the delivery of public services, and that the state would be better off doing away with as many of them as possible. I find it amusing that there are adults out there who are innocent enough to believe that Democrats are supporting collective bargaining rights for public sector unions only as a matter of principle and conviction. The state automatically deducts union dues from public sector employees and transfers the balances directly to their unions, who then use the money to elect politicians who use tax revenues to reward them with higher pay and benefits. I'm sure that most Democrats honestly believe this system is fair and just, but it's impossible to determine the extent to which they're motivated by these convictions versus the political advantages that this patronage scheme confers up on them.

Like what? let's talk about no-bid contracts, let's talk about financial bailout and subsequent 20% of the money going to bonuses of CEO's, who ruined these companies in the first place. your head is so deep up your own ass discussing anything in rational manner is a complete waste of my time. now fuck off *ping!* and find your own soap box frigging douche nozzle. Finding oneself on the wrong end of a Crazy Polish Bob diatribe is a rare privilege afforded only to a select few, but I'll confess that I'm disappointed for a few reasons. The first is that it took so long, unless I'm forgetting a previous honor. The second is that the insults were so tediously conventional compared to his normal output, the third is that it was so brief, and the fourth is that it was hampered by an uncharacteristically close adherence to the standard rules of grammar and syntax. I remember the CPB of yore, an idiosyncratic lexical anarcho-fiend who single-handedly shut-down the Rock and Ice message board while posting as "agentorange." The output was all lower case, there often was nary a punctuation mark to be found in the entire entry, there were entire paragraphs without a single space between letters, and if you studied the text closely enough you could decipher insults so baroque, abstract, and depraved that they'd never even been conceived of by another mind since the beginning of time, let alone converted into a human language and transposed into letters. Bob, my friend, I'm so disappointed with "douche nozzle" and whatever proceeded it that I almost expect an apology in the form of a diatribe that does justice to the true magnitude of your talents.

What's the news here - exactly? People who benefit from the tax-funded patronage machine want to keep it going, those who don't want to end it. Please don't tell me that Democrats aren't making tactical discussions with union bosses about how to keep the patronage engine going. The funny thing about this "fight" is that the very best that public sector unions can achieve is a pyrrhic victory. They keep the gravy train rolling and either prevent any measures that would make the delivery of public services more cost-efficient, or better yet from their perspective actually get massive boosts in pay and benefits and the end result is that their states implode fiscally sooner rather than later. The best possible outcome for them in that scenario is the complete gutting of public services with significant layoffs in order to keep pay and benefits untouched for the folks with enough seniority or connections to avoid the axe. Even if the public is cool with the pay-more-for-less dynamic, the bond market won't be, and since the trend cost growth will continue to increase at a rate that exceeds the rate at which the underlying economy grows, even incremental tax increases won't fend off the inevitable forever. If the politicians can't force through a fundamental restructuring of public sector compensation models, the bond market eventually will. The funny thing is that public sector unions have much more to fear from "friends" that encourage them to cling to schemes that are destined to fail than enemies that are attempting to modify them in ways that would actually keep them solvent, even if they have political motives for doing so.

i thought it was to make meteorologists look good? From Beowolf to John Kenneth Galbraith...I raise a glass to your erudition sir.

yup, your colors shine through. nothing so bad partisan hackery can't shine through That's why I'm happy that I can rely on you for dispassionate analysis devoid of any ideological distortions.

If the blurb is true that's definitely bad policy with a significant potential for ripping off taxpayers by selling public assets to cronies on the cheap. The democrats should return so that they can cast votes against it.

Both sides realize that collective bargaining rights are the means by which public sector employees extract excess pay and benefits from the public treasury, and by which democrats fund their re-elections campaigns via taxes that get recycled back to them through mandatory automatic deductions from public sector union payrolls. Take away public sector bargaining rights and the central mechanism that both sets of beneficiaries rely upon goes away. Great for taxpayers and everyone with a stake in cost-effective delivery of state services, bad for public sector employees and the party that depends on them. Whole tax-funded patronage network goes away. Everyone knows the deal on both sides of the aisle, so it's no surprise that they're pulling out all of the stops to keep the gravy train rolling. If nothing else, at least it's now clear exactly who stands for what, and why.

When you make it clear that it's either take across the board cuts, or layoffs, or put the new guys on a lower pay and benefit scale somehow the old guard finds a way to cope with making signficantly more money than the new hires. Somehow all of the folks that started working for the State of WA managed to sublimate their resentment at not being able to participate in PERS1, GM didn't have any problem attracting hires after reducing the pay and benefits for new workers, and Utah isn't having any problem filling vacancies now that new state workers get a 401K instead of a pension.

Logical fallacy. Just because there are a lot of applicants doesn't meant there are a lot of good applicants, or that there is "no problem" finding good applicants. Your claim that having hundreds or thousands of applicants for every position doesn't pass the logic test either. You can't prove that 5, 10, 50, or 75% of the applicants aren't qualified - which only proves that attempting to treat an empirical question like the percentage of qualified applicants for FD jobs like a logic problem from the GRE is silly. One can simply ask the question - which is more common: Hearing about fire departments that are finding it impossible to fill vacancies at the salary and benefit levels on offer, or fire departments that are thronged with hundreds of applicants for every position, many of whom have been serving as volunteers for many years, have multiple certs, etc. Hell - take a look at the public database for the Seattle FD. Of 1107 positions listed, 551 had gross pay in excess of $100K. That doesn't include the value of current benefits, much less the true cost of future benefits like a permanent, inflation adjusted pension, retiree health benefits, etc - all for a job that has no formal educational requirements beyond a high school education, isn't even in the top-10 most dangerous jobs in the country, often allows for full retirement benefits at 20 years, and offers enough downtime for a significant amount of work on the side. I appreciate the service that firefighters provide, but I'm not convinced that you need to offer pay packages well into the six figures to attract qualified applicants for a job that requires a high-school diploma and some on the job training.

If there were nowhere to outsource them to the incentives to reduce costs via automation would be even higher and the rate of technological displacement would be even higher than it is currently.

It's a good thing police and fire employees are subsidized. Should they be paid more than necessary to staff police and fire stations with qualified employees? How does the public benefit from that? More than NECESSARY? In other words, you're saying you should pay them the absolute LEAST you can, and not a penny more. Enough to BARELY make them schlep into work, but JUST ENOUGH to keep them from quitting. Really? Is that how you'd treat your employees? If you can get a qualified person to voluntarily agree to work as a fire-fighter for X, and fill all necessary positions at X, why is it in the public's interest to pay more than X - particularly when there are many other beneficial purposes that the funds could be dedicated towards. The fact that there are literally hundreds or thousands of applicants for every fire-fighting job suggests that we'd have no problem staffing our fire stations with qualified people who are every bit as capable of performing all of the necessary job functions at a significantly lower cost to the public. If I was an employer I'd pay what was necessary to staff all vacancies with qualified people. If I noticed that good people were leaving or growing dissatisfied, I wasn't able to attract people with the right qualifications, I'd pay what I thought was necessary to agree to continue working for me. If they could make more money elsewhere than I could offer I'd thank them for their time and wish them well. Again - how would paying wages that were sufficient to keep police and fire stations staffed with qualified people, but not more than that - hurt the public?

don't pretend we can compete with slave labor in developing nations and it'll be fine, like it was before you imposed your "free trade" scam (I.e. NAFAT, etc..). Workers here have the benefit of massive capital investments that massively leverage their output (thus an obese guy operating a backhoe can outproduce a team of 100 ditch-diggers equipped with shovels), massive capital markets, transparent modes of contract enforcement, a gajillion dollars worth of public and private infrastructure, etc, etc, etc. Even if the rest of the world disappeared, jobs that involve unskilled manual labor would be displaced by automation. Manufacturing output in this country has continuously increased while manufacturing employment as a percentage of the population has continuously decreased. Same as what happened with the advent of mechanization in farming. The guy who harvested his grain with a scythe would have disappeared even if the rest of the world didn't exist, and the same is true for most low or unskilled fabrication/assembly/etc.

It's a good thing police and fire employees are subsidized. Should they be paid more than necessary to staff police and fire stations with qualified employees? How does the public benefit from that?

more fuzzy arithmetic from laissez faire boy. Education isn't worth anything according to this joker since schools don't directly make money. Is this supposed to pass for intellectualism in your parts? There's lots of fields of study that have much to commend them even if they aren't the least bit useful in generating an income - but studies that attempt to correlate pay and credentials aren't the place to indulge in completely subjective value judgments about what a given degree should be worth in some fictional world where there's an equal demand for all degrees.

So you don't know. Compelling accusation you haven't made. 99.999% of mostly rural counties are subsidized by folks from the big city so it isn't a stretch to strongly suspect you belong to that list. we already know that you like to pay as little as you can for labor irrespective of whether it constitutes a living wage. As long as less comes out of your pocket you couldn't give a shit about anybody else. What - exactly - constitutes a living wage? What should happen when that wage exceeds the amount of revenue that the people who receive it actually generate for their employers? If the employer can't price his goods or services at a level that can sustain pay above a given wage level - that is, pass the expenses along to his or her customers - what happens to the employee and the business that he's employed by?

You are lying. Public employees earn less than private sector employees. There is no alternative but to pay people a living wage. This claim is never borne out by studies that actually add in the value of total benefits, much less those that account for the value of a particular skillset being employed in a particular job function. Per these ludicrous studies, someone with a BS in electrical engineering from a top-tier school, that actually works somewhere designing computer chips is put in the same basket as someone with a BA in sociology that works feeding documents into a scanner. "Look - when you don't account for the fact that this person with a sociology degree works a straight 40 hour week, or the value of all of their benefits, and pretend that a private employer would pay someone who feeds documents into a scanner the same as someone who works in chip design...public employees are underpaid." Ditto for all of the other credentials that are held by folks in the public sector that have absolutely zero capacity to enhance earnings in the private sector. What, exactly, does a PhD in Education get you in the private sector? How about a master's in Teaching? The only class of public employees that surveys that actually incorporate half-decent controls show make less than their private sector counterparts are people with professional degrees or qualifications that there's an actual market for in the private sector. Even here that's probably only true for MD's, JD's, RN's, and a smattering of engineers. I salute these folks, but no one was or is putting a gun to their head, and when and if they decide the compensation the public is offering them is inadequate, they can and should leave. If their vacancies can't be filled, we should pay more - in the form of higher salaries that show up immediately on public balance sheets as opposed to detonating decades later in the form of massive pension shortfalls.

You're totally right. First and foremost, socio-economic status in society should be predetermined by hereditary birth lottery. Even if it were possible to arrange reality so that everything from IQ to a loving, stable home, to looks and talent were completely normalized by some arbitrary formula - the aggregated choices of individuals responding to their own needs and desires would result in a situation in which some people in some occupations earned dramatically more than others. And this distribution would constantly be changing. The distribution at any particular time, and the changes from that point will always be perceived as unfair relative to some arbitrary standard or merit or virtue. I'm sure that the buggy whip and candle-stick makers felt that society owed them a certain standard of living, and thought that the demand-driven redistribution of income to people in the light-bulb and auto industries was a terrible injustice that warranted an indefinite public commitment to maintaining their incomes with taxes paid by others. Thankfully there wasn't, and the declining wages and jobs in the candle-stick sector sent a useful signal to others that society didn't have much use for what they were making, and they moved on to other occupations where they were making a good or service that people actually wanted or needed.

Arguing that some abstract definition of rank or merit should entitle someone to a pre-determined socio-economic status in society pretty much puts you in the same camp as social conservatives who can't cope with the fact that when people are free to spend their money as they please, pornographers tend to out-earn priests.