May 28th, 2009
If I’d been asked to place a bet five years ago that United Auto Workers members would take it in the shorts on everything from benefits to wages, the answer would have been no-brainer: not a chance.
Maybe not even a year ago, although by October 2008, the bet would have been a little less risky. One day before Chrysler gave it up to bankruptcy, about eight of 10 union workers swallowed hard and tossed in the towel to do what they could to save their jobs and the car-making company that is one of the Rock River Valley’s most visible manufacturing linchpins.
General Motors likely will join that bankruptcy sandbox later this week. Its unions will take the same sick-making cuts as did Chrysler.
The UAW, like the United Mine Workers and the United Steel Workers back in the “old days,” is the very model of making certain workers get Class A compensation, benefits, pensions and long-term care and comfort. The work they do is mind-numbing, but if one can stand on one’s feet for eight hours a day and transcend the boredom, the paycheck-cum-benefits was considered a worthy trade off.
Today, the auto union membership has one choice: a job or no job. To keep the job, the nifty compensation package goes away.
Non-union — public and private — workers were first into the global meltdown. For us, defined benefit pension plans disappeared a decade ago. We’ve lived with wage freezes and pay cuts for at least two years. Bonuses ditto. Benefits costs increases ditto. Freezes in 401k matches ditto. Buyouts and layoffs ditto. Furloughs (or fur-cations as some are calling them) ditto.
Now the private sector union workers have headed into the meltdown. What happened at Chrysler will ripple through all the formerly powerful, private sector unions.
And, up next? The public sector unions and employees. That’s government from clerks to cops, from legislators to judges, from teachers to fire fighters.
The only questions are how soon, how deep and how done. No one could have imagined a decade ago that the private sector unions would give it up. They did. The public sector is next.
May 28th, 2009
You don’t know Mrs. Saul. Back in the 1950s, she was the strictest, most demanding fifth grade teacher at Edgewood Elementary School in Whiteville, N.C. My recollection is that she was really old, wore those clunky, lace-up corrective shoes and pulled her hair back in a bun, though those memories are likely a tad off-the-mark due to the vagaries of five decades.
Regardless, she loved her kids and she made a difference in our lives. She expected the red-clay farm kids and the white anklet townies to know their multiplication tables and which fork to use first. Yep, Mrs. Saul taught etiquette right along with arithmetic. By the end of the school year her kids were ready for sixth grade, we passed our tests and we no longer chewed with our mouths open.
Yeah, said the fourth-graders-soon-to-be-fifth-graders, “I hope I get Mrs. Saul.”
Kids and their parents know which teachers they “hope they get” and which they pray they don’t. In schools, the customer (that’s parents and students) knows exactly which teachers teach and which are little more than a paid sitter. And those customers know that what counts most is the skill, expertise and passion of the teacher in the classroom.
Perhaps the easiest, most efficient way to grade teachers is to rank them by “most chosen.” The teachers that parents and students say they “hope they get” stay and get the raises. The ones over which prayers are prayed — please, do not let me get Mrs. Perry — get a year to improve before being shown the door.
This week the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation released its own similar conclusion: the key to a student’s success is the quality of the teacher — not the quality of the building, the number of students, the facilities or the curriculum, though those things are nice to have. It’s the teacher. Good teacher good results. Bad teacher bad results.
The Gates Foundation, which spent billions creating and supporting smaller high schools in the belief that smaller classes and more personalized attention would improve student performance, plans to continue its research. I am confident the foundation will come to the same conclusion I did back in the fourth grade: “Oh, I hope I get Mrs. Saul.”
