Quote (Sgull @ Sat - Jul 2 2011 - 00:44:46)
The point is, if you're a shitty worker or clearly the best worker for the job, you can and should be replaced, clearly offered extra benefits
If you are a shitty worker, there should be an effective course of action in place for the purpose of corrective/remedial training, or replacement. People are rarely a completely shitty worker, especially when a lot of qualifications are required for the job, such as teachers, utility maintenance, more advanced public administration. Those who can be observed in one way as "shitty" likely have many other merits that helped them earn their job - the harder it is to find replacements, the more remedial action needs to be considered.
It can be difficult to quantify who is and is clearly the best worker for a job, as there are many strengths and weaknesses that are considered when hiring someone, and when hiring, you need to find the best available candidate for the job by your judgment. If an arbitrary standard is set by someone else to determine who is an is clearly the best for the jobs you are hiring for, especially without your input, it is likely to be inaccurate. Look at the standards that state workers might have required of them: College degree in a relevant field, teaching license, electrician's license, license to practice law - these standards have been heavily refined by a wide range of experts in the field over a period of decades, even centuries. Setting a new standard to test how good someone is at their job can very easily be inaccurate and ineffective.
I will use public school teachers as an example because they make up a large number of public workers, and there is a lot of data available about public schools. For Mr. Gull, I will use the state of Wisconsin as an example.
If we do set a standard to judge the merits of public school teachers that is effective at determining who is clearly the best for the job, what do we do to improve? An ideal pool of job candidates is clearly available - candidates who live more than ~100 miles away are clearly available unless they consider relocation, candidates who could be considered the most qualified might clearly be looking for the job that you are offering, or compensation might clearly be adequate. What does this job offer to draw in new, better qualified employees? Salary, benefits, stability? If we want to get the best candidates into these jobs, those seem to be desirable offerings. Other factors in taking a new job that are harder to change include location - near population centers, near other places people want to be near, desirable neighborhood location? You can't really change those.
So what we need first to ensure that we have the best available workers for these jobs is develop a process by which to determine this, which should clearly reduce the desirability of the job. Salary, benefits, and stability are what people want in jobs - if your process for removing ineffective workers is perceived as being inaccurate, that lowers the stability of the job. Teachers are clearly going to move from
#1 ranked Connecticut to #44 ranked Wisconsin if they think there is a chance that they will lose their job due to a poor process of removing "bad" employees. Young people already in Wisconsin who want to be teachers are going to be much less likely to focus on the goal of teaching if they are looking at four years of undergrad plus a Master's degree in order to get a job where they are going to have poorly-justified bureaucratic interference getting in the way of their passion, a weak guarantee of continued employment, and comparatively weak pay and benefits. Even if this isn't entirely accurate, if a sorting process is clearly implemented as close to perfectly as possible, then this will be perceived.
Considering this, in order to develop and effectively implement a process which sorts out weaker job candidates in favor of stronger ones, the process needs to be developed over time, observed and corrected in order to ensure that it actually achieves the desirable result, and it needs to be granted power at the rate at which its effectiveness becomes certain, lest it devalue the jobs that it seeks to improve.
Now that we are bringing in new job candidates, how do we get the best candidates to apply for our jobs and stay here? Salary, benefits, stability. Qualified candidates looking to relocate are much more likely to go to #1 Connecticut than #44 Wisconsin. How do you convince them that #44 Wisconsin is a desirable employer, clearly just a number? The perception by teachers in #1 Connecticut seems to be that teachers in #44 Wisconsin are just another number, with their salaries, pensions, healthcare, and wellbeing being another number, a bargaining chip for politicians to push their ideology. Good employees are a valued resource, people who we want to embrace and learn from, clearly people who we want to quantify and pay-by-numbers.
So here we have #44 Wisconsin's current solution: take away their right to unionize, which gives them a strong voice to say what they think is fair for salary, benefits, and job stability. Make Wisconsin look like a great place for better teachers to come work, by strong-arming the defense/representation of bad teachers (and good ones too) so they can improve the system. Does this look like a better place to work for teachers in other states who might be looking for work? If we take away the bonuses of Wall Street executives, they will simply find better paying, less hostile jobs, because they have the convenience of mobility. If labor markets were ideal and people were highly mobile, Wisconsin would be losing all of their good teachers to other states.
Why are unions the first target? Are they really evil, going to bankrupt the government and taxpayers when public workers get together and demand higher wages and job stability? When the public sector, being highly visible to the public, gives employees things like cost-of-living pay raises, and on top of that a possible merit-based pay raise, plus good health insurance, who loses? The taxpayers? The majority of people can look at these basics and say "that sounds fair", then they will wonder why the private sector isn't like that. When the public sector sets an example for fair treatment of workers, the private sector faces competition in a free market, and public jobs become more desirable than private jobs, because employees there are treated better. Better treatment of employees means money out of the pockets of the ultra-rich, who earn their money clearly for their own labor, but through the labor of their employees. If employees expect to collectively bargain with their employer for more money, to get more of what they worked to make for the company and the boss, the boss risks making a lot less money. At some point in this process, the boss will determine that the company can clearly afford to pay out any more, and he will refuse to offer employees a bigger cut. What if the boss makes $10m/year and could afford to lower the standards of workers so they earn $20m less per year collectively, and he can lower the standards his employees expect by lowering the standards of the competition? It would be in his interest to donate $10m to a political candidate who would lower the compensation offered to workers in the public sector, who are his competition, and he would double the money he brings in, at the cost of his employees.
What if a business continually raised the compensation to workers at the demands of unions, who continued their high quality work, but the company mismanaged its business and failed to continue growing, or started shrinking? If the executives design a new product that people don't want to buy, but it is built well by their workers, who is to blame for the failure of the business? Why do you hear so often about how auto-workers unions demanded so much that they put American car companies out of business, yet you rarely hear executive vision and designers blamed for making cars that nobody wants? General Motors didn't fail because their workers did a shitty job putting together cars, they failed because the boss told his factory workers to build the Pontiac Aztek (which was a hideous piece of shit). What about brand-pollution - GM re-badged the same cars as Chevrolet, Pontiac, and Oldsmobile, so they were competing with themselves to an extent. There weren't massive failures and mistakes in production/assembly, the factory workers were clearly the problem with this company, yet they are used as an example of unions putting companies out of business.
A few of the least effective public sector employees are clearly the problem here. The problem can be related to a lot of people who are struggling and don't want to pay higher taxes, but the issue here is pushed by ultra-rich business owners who want a more effective model to exploit their employees and give them as little as possible, thus keep as much as possible for themselves. They can relate this to struggling employees who don't want to pay more taxes, because an extra one percent of income cuts into the lifestyle of the bottom 90% more painfully than the top 10%. The more that is taken away from public sector employees, the more that is taken away from private sector employees whose employers no longer need to compete with better salaries and benefits.
Less competition means lower salaries, fewer benefits. Higher unemployment means more people who you could be replaced with. Why do you think the liberal media is crying about billionaire business owners hiding billions of dollars invested in propaganda and payoffs to the politicians with the strong-arm on the public sector?
