No I am not the one to miss the point. The average mid-career teacher was asked give up over $50,000 worth of earned pay, (in accumulated sick time) and never receive a pay raise for the remainder of their career. Which of course means with the true inflation rate, they would be working for 40% of what they are today, when they retired. You can look up pay for Ohio teachers and find the Median, and guess that we are talking below that. You take this deal, (50k forfeiture, and 40% wage reduction) because I am pretty sure unless you shovel shiit in Louisiana; you probably have the ability to do better.
The point of sick pay is to use it if you are sick. If not sick you don't use it and you lose it. Most places are moving to PTO with a few days available to carry over per year, use it or lose it. Find me anywhere in the private sector where you can accumulate that much PTO, let alone sick leave. For NORMAL people you have Short Term Disability and then LTD kick in if you have that much need for paid time off, er... sick days. You know like all of the Wisconsin teachers that called in sick to march on Madison while private workers had to take PTO days to stay home with their kids that unexpectedly had no school. (good way to lose public support by the way)
Do they also get to stack this "sick" leave to look like salary in the year of retirement and juice their pension?
I also wonder if your pay freeze is a freeze in the pay matrix that has automatic increases for tenure and credentials (more than the rate of inflation in most states). You describe being stuck at the exact same salary forever, I highly doubt it and would love to see sources. CLASSIC union tactic is to push for pay raises acting like teachers don't already get a pay raise just for sticking around another year. Very similar to the Base Line Budgeting bull that manages to compound our spending problems even when there has been no federal budget for years.
$50K for nine months of work looks pretty darn good to a large chunk of the population out there, especially with pension and healthcare attached.
You did not answer the question of how much is "fair" or enough for teachers BTW. I believe $50K annual salary for an average teaching position in an average location is plenty fair and supply/demand metrics support my belief.
I just thought I would address this whole mess. Sorry we got lost in nomenclature. Sick pay, calling it sick pay that is all semantics. Teachers don't get paid vacation. Teachers contract for annual positions. Most teachers I know work evening and weekends. Teachers pay and the time off have structurally set up to reduce the number of days the kids are in school without their regular teachers. The teachers in fact earned that under legal contract, and that would be like ripping off their pension, which has been done in Ohio to almost all public sector and many private sector workers, (by the Governor, before he ran for office, between his stick with Fox News and the Bush administration, to be precise.)
I don't know where you got the nine months thing from, (related to the accumulation of sick days or annual pay, I think someone conflated several facts to manufacture that) but if you think teachers have it so well, become one. You can move into my house to get yourself established to find one. On second thought, there are a lot of people on this site that are very good educations, and I personally know some really good ones, after getting a good look at you through this, I'm not sure you have the right cut to your jib, for that kind of job.
The money they were talking about taking away, was earned, the pay freeze was absolute, no cost of living. The board and administration, (at this school district) slated themselves better cars to take on their gambling junkets.
I believe in paying as much as possible to labor, and not rewarding capital quite as much as has become popular in the last few decades. I kind of follow the philosophy of Henry Ford (who understood the whole thing, soup to nuts.)
Another good example of success diametrically opposed to trickle down, or "pi$$ed-on" economics is the recovery from the Great Depression. Not true that FDR did it. The Second World War did it. Production increased, wages increased and with enough control to keep astronomical inflation down. (Everything was controlled, yet the economy grew like gangbusters, go figure, another inane myth exposed.) It created the late twentieth century middle class which is only being wiped out today.
About Wisconsin: You have a dishonest Governor, with a hidden agenda, who was stopped cold last winter. I saw it firsthand. There is still tremendous support for the public sector employees there. If you want to know how bad that was, in his recent recall, Scott Walker outspent his opponent 12 to 1, and did not win by a comfortable margin, in a state that votes for republican governors. More important, the recalls and subsequent elections replaced the Republican majorities with Democratic. Walker’s agenda is done. That doesn't show anything like the fantasy you were talking about.
I am not going to get into an esoteric conversation about the ethics or economics of paying any group from football players, to doctors, to entrepreneurs, to nurses to teachers. All I know is that I want the best paid "help" for my family.
Finally, I am going to end this conversation with the fact that you are the only one I have bantered back in forth with that "highly doubts" what I have stated, and speaks of "classic union techniques." Like unions have any cohesiveness whatsoever! Man those wimps have been caved for years. My appologies, there I did what I was accusing others of doing. The point is historically, there were many unethical elements involved on both sides of the issue. But one group I cannot say I ever found unethincal was the workers themselves. It is like the myth of the Soviet menace; real paranoid thinking, if you run with it. I have respectfully presented you with facts, limited to my knowledge and experience. It turn I have been doubted, and spoken to in trite and vague generalities.
