Yes, teachers work 2/3 of the year but many districts offer the option of reapportioning monthly pay for 10 months or 12. Additionally, they’re salaried professionals so the avg. 9-5 workday is about as conceptual for teachers as it is for lawyers. Teachers just can’t bill by the hour.

I haven’t heard, read, or seen an argument on which pays teachers more public or private. Pro-Publics point to higher pay to laud the unions and “better working conditions.” Pro-privates point to the fact that people are willing to accept less money to work outside of public schools and don’t have the same recruitment issues as public. They both agree that private school teachers are paid less than public counterparts because…well that’s reality. They argue that other things matter…

As for your second paragraph you’re wrong on both counts. Teachers are neither a small portion of the public sector nor outnumbered by bureaucrats.

Nationally, there are roughly 4 million teachers, special ed excepted, compared to only 4,000 employees @ ED, which is the smallest of the executive departments by more than a factor of two.

In the states, K-12 employment accounts for the largest # of public employees. In California (which has the 5th lowest ration of k-12 employment in the nation), there are 110,085 employees, representing a full third of all state employees. Their pay accounts for the single largest bloc of public employee salaries. The second largest belongs to higher education employees, and after education, the next highest number of employees/amount of pay belongs to the department of corrections which is less than half that of K-12 education.

Now I’m using k-12 because it’s a more reliable grouping but the vast majority of employees in k-12 education are full time teachers and teacher pay is often among if not the highest single non-construction expenditure for school districts.

That specific subject aside I’d add that Teachers are a very small portion of the public sector. They’re outnumbered by beurocrats in the Dept of Education alone which doesn’t even count the legions of middle managers, accountants and other public servants elsewhere who are to my knowledge paid significantly less than the closest equivalents in the private sector.

Katherine, public sector jobs are universally lower paid than equivalent private sector positions. The reasons are myriad but major ones are that public sector positions are secure (if you want lifetime employment get a government job) and that management in the public sector is strongly disinclined to take financial steps to retain personnel (culturally the departure of an individual is seen as an opportunity to move everyone below them a step up the chain rather than a genuine loss).

Well that’s just false. Teacher salaries in public schools consistently outpace their private counterparts. One comparison between non-sectarian schools and public schools places private teacher salaries at 78% of public and (after 12 years) peaking at 92% of their public counterparts. Moreover, in California (2nd highest average teacher salaries in the nation) real increases in wages were 8.6% over ten years from 94-95 to 04-05. To be fair, 28 states saw real declines but others saw increases like North Carolina 8.5% and Louisiana 13.6%.

Moreover, while in individual cases there may be less resolve/ability to use salary increases to retain personnel, that doesn’t preclude retention as a consideration in contract negotiations/renegotiations.

It is also possible that the union helps mitigate against cronyism.

Care to elaborate on that?

If you look at wages and inflation, sure you can say unions aren’t being unreasonable, however, compensation is more than wages. It includes vacation, paid vacation, benefits, pensions, etc… So, in that sense even if real wages are stagnant or slightly declining, those gains can, might, and are made up by the absorbed cost of benefits and guaranteed pensions offered public employees.

The next point where it matters is that state budgets at least start as zero sum. More money for fire comes from hospitals. More money for roads comes from education. More money for prisons comes from parks and recreation. When those political battles are unresolved, then the sum changes and that’s a bargaining chip that private unions don’t have. They can’t force their employers to simply increase revenue – like public unions – and then provide the political (or other) muscle to back it up.

My experience with this is from the exaggerated state of California where certainly a lot of other issues contribute to our governmental dysfunction. However, the contributions of the pubic unions to our current situation are incontrovertible, if not often overstated.

It shouldn’t shock you that conservatives are ok with that example. Their concern isn’t with who’s getting paid what to do nothing. That’s irrelevant. Conservatives are quite clear that inequality is an acceptable cost of (greater) freedom, freedom they view the unions as impinging upon. Though to complain about do-nothing CEO’s is particularly uncharitable.

I defined breifly the characteristics of public sector employees as good job security and good working conditions. I’d submit that the public sector is naturally inclined towards these by nature. Terminating employment and cutting benefits to the public tend to run hand in hand. Either elected officials or top beurocratic officals who must answer directly to an elected official head the various departments of the public sector. Barring a severe financial crises (and note how so far no significant cuts have occurred even in California’s remarkable budget disaster) the public as a whole is amiable to budget cuts and program elimination as a concept but howls to high heaven when any specific program is targeted. The general benefit to the populace as a whole is outweighed by the specific loss to the beneficiaries and government employees that occurs when a program is eliminated. Thus an elected official achieves only nebulous positive results from eliminating or reducing programs while earning himself dedicated enemies and concrete negative election issues. The downside of downsizing thus outweighs the benefits in the mind of elected officials and so they are naturally cut programs. With no pressure from above there is no pressure at all for mid level management to cut programs or fire employees. Why would you? Firing people is not pleasant and by downsizing you eliminate opportunities for empire building and give your rivals in the bureaucracy excuses to poach your budget. Absent external pressure for cost savings or expense reduction the natural tendency of the public sector is towards comfortable job security.

This same factor explains workplace conditions. It has been my experience that the public sector has less physical distance between the people who are in charge of workplace conditions and the front line workers. Politicians and management are naturally inclined to maintain generally good working conditions. What reason would they have not to? Unhappy employees will merely cause them trouble. There’s no force driving them to mistreat their workers and they’re quite inclined to maintain good working conditions, most of them are working near by. Finally there’s limited cost restrictions. Private sector unions are at least accidentally aware that excessive demands run the danger of putting themselves out of work. Indeed, dissolution of the host company is pretty much the only way Unions seem to vanish now. California aside, in general governments are not in the business of going out of business so the unions become almost like a non-productive permanent addition to government.

So I submit that the benefits that unions produce from the private sector are inherent to the public sector. I am by no means anti union; in fact I have deep historical love for them and respect their present role even if it’s only as a cudgel. But I feel that they are redundant to the public sector for the most part and yield more harm than good. I don’t know if they should be flat out banned but I’d certainly think their power should be strongly curtailed in any public sector areas where they aren’t representing people in genuinely hazardous or strenuous jobs. So nurses and firefighter and policemen’s unions yes. White collar welfare adjustment administrator clerks unions, no.

It is also possible that the union helps mitigate against cronyism.

I guess my question is:
If you remove the public employee union, what factors create the “inherent” nature of public sector employment.