We Can't Afford Teachers?

A friend posted the following on Facebook:

My son's teacher, pink-slipped

Last week, California's budget cuts put a pink slip in the hand on my son's teacher, Irma Navarette, one of the best educators I've ever met.

Robert Reich put it this way:

"Last year, America’s top thirteen hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion each. One of them took home $5 billion. Much of their income is taxed as capital gains – at 15 percent – due to a tax loophole that Republican members of Congress have steadfastly guarded.

If the earnings of those thirteen hedge-fund managers were taxed as ordinary income, the revenues generated would pay the salaries and benefits of 300,000 teachers. Who is more valuable to our society – thirteen hedge-fund managers or 300,000 teachers? Let’s make the question even simpler. Who is more valuable: One hedge fund manager or one teacher?"

Only One Reason: March 10, 2011

There is only one reason for right to work legislation or limits on collective bargaining. It is to reduce the wages and benefits of all workers--union or not. No employer or politician fights for these measures so that they can raise workers wages or provide them with more benefits or to work for a fairer deal for their employees. It is all about a concentration of wealth and power.

When they remove provisions of contracts that have been negotiated with the workers it is to drive more money into the hands of the wealthy to remove the limits on their concentration of their wealth.

Regarding workers in the public sector: it is not about balancing a budget. The unions have agreed to economic concessions. Just before these take-aways from workers, tax breaks for the wealthy added millions to budget shortfalls.

It is all about transferring wealth from those who create it to those who hoard it. It all adds up to increasing the gap between the tiny minority of the super rich and the vast majority of working people.

In the end this system is unworkable. It starves our economic engine of the fuel that it needs to run--wages.

Layoffs, decreased wages, will only deepen the economic crisis.

Mark Shields on Unions: March 8 2011

"Inside Washington" on Public Broadcasting hosted a panel discussion on various issues, one of which centered around the protests in Wisconsin over the Governor's attempt to limit collective bargaining rights for state employees.

Mark Shields, a noted commentator and columnist, was uncharacteristically passionate about the role of unions in the United States.

Here is the transcript in part:

MR. SHIELDS: Let’s be very blunt. The United States workers would never have had a five-day work week, an eight-hour work day. We would never have had minimum wage laws, child labor laws, health and pension benefits, without the skill, the passion, the commitment, and the clout of organized labor. Owners and employers just didn’t voluntarily wake up one morning and say, let’s be nice to the workers. So unions made a difference in America’s landscape. Do they make a difference every day? You better believe it.

At the same time, the same people, my good friend Evan, whom I respect enormously, endorses and embraces private sector unions, which now have fallen in strength to the point where they represent one out of 12 workers. They’re defanged. They’re basically powerless, okay? When they represented 35 percent of workers, a generation ago, not Evan, but many on the right said, they were a threat to American democracy. They’re a threat to the American way of life. Now public employees have the same right to collective bargain that any employee does. And it’s that simple. How does a school teacher, a lone school teacher negotiate with the city of New York or the city of Milwaukee. You’ve got to pool your resources to do that.

…..

MR. SHIELDS: Here’s the rub. Yes. This is ground zero in the fight for collective bargaining for unions. But here’s the rub. Between 1989 and 2009, the average hourly wage – the median hourly wage for the American male fell by 2 percent – fell by 2 percent. All of the concentration was in the top 1 percent, 56 percent of all the economic growth was in the top 1 percent. Thirty six percent was in the top one-tenth of 1 percent. The bottom 90 percent got 16 percent. That’s why this tension exists right now.

People in Wisconsin have had their own lives decimated and threatened and they bought into, quite frankly, the specious argument that the enemy is not the economic system that’s rigged against them with a tax system that’s exploitative. Somehow it’s a social worker [who wants to protect her rights to collective bargaining.]

Sharing the Pain: March 1 2011

Gasoline and home heating oil prices are rising in advance of anticipated disruptions in availability.

Yet employees and pensioners are asked to accept freezes in cost of living increases for increases that have already happened.

Is there a double standard for the ordinary person vs. a huge corporation?

Exxon Oil registered the largest profit of any corporation every in the last quarter of 2009 yet there is little talk of regulation, freezes or cut-backs on government benefits for industry there. (Halts on drilling in the Gulf are being lifted even as baby dolphins drift up onto Gulf beaches.)

The people who are pushing freezes and cut-backs on wages, benefits, jobs and collective bargaining rights for the working class are against regulation of industry and business.

Public employees have to "share the pain" with taxpayers?

Can we "share the pain" with Corporate America?