Republican Senator Bill Seitz explains why he is opposed to Senate Bill 5.
Showing posts with label Public Sector Unions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Public Sector Unions. Show all posts
Friday, October 14, 2011
Republican Senator Explains What is Wrong with SB5
Republican Senator Bill Seitz explains why he is opposed to Senate Bill 5.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
The Columbus Dispatch on Proposed Changes to Education in Ohio
Public-school teachers are facing a multitude of changes that could diminish their pay checks, benefits and working conditions - among them Gov. John Kasich's proposed state budget, legislation overhauling Ohio's 27-year-old collective-bargaining law and plans to restore fiscal solvency to public-employee pension systems.
An Ohio public-school teacher's average salary is now about $57,000 for 182 official working days.
Among the changes that have been proposed:
• Cutting school funding $1.3billion over the next two years
• Increasing the pension contribution rate, which now is 10percent, by 2 percentage points to save money ($200 million statewide)
• Increasing the pension contribution rate by another 3 percentage points to give the pension system financial stability ($300 million statewide)
• Requiring teachers to pay at least 15 percent of their health-insurance cost (the average now is about 9 percent)
• Taking 15 sick days out of state law, making it a term of negotiation instead
• Limiting the number of unused sick days that can be built up and paid out upon retirement
• Ending continuing contracts
• Eliminating automatic pay increases for longevity, replacing them with merit pay
• Quadrupling EdChoice vouchers to 56,000, funding more students to leave public schools
• Lifting the cap on charter schools, where teachers are paid less
• Instituting Teach for America, which brings in college graduates to teach for two years at low-income schools. Unions in other states have opposed the program.
• Delaying the retirement age from 30 years of service at any age to 35 years and age 60
• Lowering retirement payments to 77 percent of a teacher's highest five years of salary after 35 years on the job, down from 88.5 percent based on the highest three years
• Chopping annual cost-of-living-adjustments for retirees from 3 percent to 2 percent, with no COLA the first five years of retirement
• Streamlining the process to dismiss teachers for poor performance
• Banning collective bargaining for health insurance or limits on a school's ability to privatize services
• Ending work rules as a topic of collective bargaining, such as length of school day, building assignments, class sizes
• Eliminating the ability to strike
• Allowing a school board to implement its own last offer in order to end a bargaining impasse
• Allowing a school board to terminate, modify or renegotiate the collective-bargaining agreement if it faces significant fiscal problems
An Ohio public-school teacher's average salary is now about $57,000 for 182 official working days.
Among the changes that have been proposed:
• Cutting school funding $1.3billion over the next two years
• Increasing the pension contribution rate, which now is 10percent, by 2 percentage points to save money ($200 million statewide)
• Increasing the pension contribution rate by another 3 percentage points to give the pension system financial stability ($300 million statewide)
• Requiring teachers to pay at least 15 percent of their health-insurance cost (the average now is about 9 percent)
• Taking 15 sick days out of state law, making it a term of negotiation instead
• Limiting the number of unused sick days that can be built up and paid out upon retirement
• Ending continuing contracts
• Eliminating automatic pay increases for longevity, replacing them with merit pay
• Quadrupling EdChoice vouchers to 56,000, funding more students to leave public schools
• Lifting the cap on charter schools, where teachers are paid less
• Instituting Teach for America, which brings in college graduates to teach for two years at low-income schools. Unions in other states have opposed the program.
• Delaying the retirement age from 30 years of service at any age to 35 years and age 60
• Lowering retirement payments to 77 percent of a teacher's highest five years of salary after 35 years on the job, down from 88.5 percent based on the highest three years
• Chopping annual cost-of-living-adjustments for retirees from 3 percent to 2 percent, with no COLA the first five years of retirement
• Streamlining the process to dismiss teachers for poor performance
• Banning collective bargaining for health insurance or limits on a school's ability to privatize services
• Ending work rules as a topic of collective bargaining, such as length of school day, building assignments, class sizes
• Eliminating the ability to strike
• Allowing a school board to implement its own last offer in order to end a bargaining impasse
• Allowing a school board to terminate, modify or renegotiate the collective-bargaining agreement if it faces significant fiscal problems
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Teacher Unions
"The entire point of seniority-based systems like the ones that many teachers unions have negotiated is to protect long-serving teachers from losing their jobs when the budget gets tight. Think about it – if a teacher who has served for 25 years is fired, you could probably replace them with two rookies for almost the same price. That’s a bargain for the taxpayer in the short-term, but not very good for the teaching profession in the long-term. For those of us who take the long-view seriously, this has serious implications for our education system and its ability to attract talented teachers down the road.
Furthermore – and even better for politicians – the teacher will either lose their pension or face a massive reduction in pension benefits, saving governments a ton of money. You can see pretty quickly how teacher retention becomes a problem, and how young people thinking about becoming teachers might take a different career path. No, job security is not the only important factor, but in a profession with lower pay and less advancement options, benefits and job security are important. When your job is constantly hanging in the balance of budgetary decisions, you might as well make more money than a teacher.
Ezra implicitly blames teachers for poor results and for not implementing a system that would not only weaken their political power and likely their standard of living, but also make the profession far less appealing to new teachers. Never once does he address alternatives to layoffs or why so many of these states are facing budget shortfalls to begin with (hint: this is also not the fault of teachers). Nor does he examine whether those states which do not have seniority-based systems are fairing any better than those that do in terms of teacher quality or student success. This not only perpetuates the anti-union narrative, it affirms the ‘government is out of money’ fallacy touted by budget hawks and conservatives across the country.
It’s important to remember that this new batch of Tea Party conservatives will use any means at their disposal to weaken the influence of organized labor and the public sector – including lines like “Even the liberal, Ezra Klein” when justifying their attacks on teachers and teachers unions. Perhaps we should write our reform-the-unions columns with more caution." -E. D. Kain
http://blogs.forbes.com/erikkain/2011/03/01/ezra-klein-on-reforming-teacher-unions/
Furthermore – and even better for politicians – the teacher will either lose their pension or face a massive reduction in pension benefits, saving governments a ton of money. You can see pretty quickly how teacher retention becomes a problem, and how young people thinking about becoming teachers might take a different career path. No, job security is not the only important factor, but in a profession with lower pay and less advancement options, benefits and job security are important. When your job is constantly hanging in the balance of budgetary decisions, you might as well make more money than a teacher.
Ezra implicitly blames teachers for poor results and for not implementing a system that would not only weaken their political power and likely their standard of living, but also make the profession far less appealing to new teachers. Never once does he address alternatives to layoffs or why so many of these states are facing budget shortfalls to begin with (hint: this is also not the fault of teachers). Nor does he examine whether those states which do not have seniority-based systems are fairing any better than those that do in terms of teacher quality or student success. This not only perpetuates the anti-union narrative, it affirms the ‘government is out of money’ fallacy touted by budget hawks and conservatives across the country.
It’s important to remember that this new batch of Tea Party conservatives will use any means at their disposal to weaken the influence of organized labor and the public sector – including lines like “Even the liberal, Ezra Klein” when justifying their attacks on teachers and teachers unions. Perhaps we should write our reform-the-unions columns with more caution." -E. D. Kain
http://blogs.forbes.com/erikkain/2011/03/01/ezra-klein-on-reforming-teacher-unions/
Friday, February 25, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Now that's a really good question
"I don't see a realistic alternative organisation that can enlist and mobilise manpower in the interest of middle-class and poor people's pocketbook concerns."
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