Certain things seem to cause a cascading effect. One group does something and all the other groups start to follow suit.
It appears the removal of collective bargaining rights for teachers unions is not only spreading across the nation, so too are more drastic alterations.
A Reuters article states legislation similar to the one in Ohio and Wisconsin was recently approved in Idaho.
The bill “…excludes issues like class size and workloads from negotiations for the state’s 12,000 unionized teachers, was given final approval by the Republican-led House and is expected to be signed by Republican Gov. Butch Otter.
The bill also eliminates teacher tenure, limits the duration of teacher labor contracts to one year and removes seniority as a factor in determining the order of layoffs.”
It’s not enough to go after bargaining rights – now legislators are targeting tenure.
As a future college professor whose mental stability probably will be questioned on multiple occasions, that worries me.
Naturally, rather than analyze tenure’s problems in a modern setting and alter it to fit a new era, the politicians decided it would be easier to just remove it.
Although altering tenure might be beyond their grasp. In any case, I digress again.
With Wisconsin’s legislation finally being passed, the importance of dealing with this type of legislation before it gets out of hand is especially important.
Hopefully it won’t spread to more states, but even sparsely affected areas can have debilitating effects on the future of American education.
One state that prevents its teachers from safely doing their job is one state too many.
This kind of legislation sets a bad precedent for two reasons.
One, it undermines the rights of government workers.
Yes, they may have a nice job with guaranteed hours, but they also have to work for the government, so things balance out.
Second, it’s another example of politicians attacking a voting base of the opposite party.
Keep the politics in the political arena; we don’t need that mess spilling into our lives any more than it has to, thank you.
Right now, the number of states passing or trying to pass this kind of legislation is low and its targets narrow.
It might spread to more states and government employee departments, it might not.
But politicians need to be wary of this kind of action, because once the opposing party takes over, they might go after the opposition’s voting base.
The unions aren’t entirely innocent, mind, but the assault against them in the name of states’ budgets is a bit extreme.
Overcompensation and overreaction to solve a problem seem to be a bad habit of politicians. Hopefully, the unions themselves can help to solve this issue, or at least prevent it from spreading to more states.
Unions of government employees might want to preemptively work with the government to negotiate what the unions can do to help cut expenses without seriously harming the functions of those government jobs.
They might also want to do it soon, in case the politicians decide to do it for them.
