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Anyone have any examples of an employee union that improves business for both employees and employer?
The most salient feature of unions that I know about is that they prevent the employer from firing bad employees, or promoting good employees over ones with seniority. This makes sense to me because unions get their power/support from employees that need the union more than the employer needs them i.e. bad ones. A prototypical example of the leftist high-low alliance.
But there's no reason it has to be this way. It's technically possible for a union to say "fire bad employees, promote some faster than others, but pay us more". Is there any examples of this sort of thing working well?
First of all, unions don't prevent employers from firing bad employees or making promotion decisions based on seniority; rather, contracts do that, and only some contracts do so. Moreover, the general rule is the US is that workers can be fired at any time without cause -- i.e., at the whim of the employer. Union contracts, in contrast, permit firing only for cause. What constitutes "cause" varies, but still, here is one benefit: Those contracts not only make it more difficult to fire bad employees; they also makes it more difficult to fire a good employee who happens to get on the wrong side of a bad supervisor, or who doesn't "get with the program," even when the program is a poor one.
Let me explain in more detail.
First, it is well established that managers of companies do not always act in the best interests of the companies themselves. For that reason, giving employees the power to push back against managers can often be in the best interests of the company. See, eg, Dilbert.
Second, let's analogize with tenure in K-12 schools (which, contrary to popular belief, means only that teachers can be fired only with cause, as opposed to, as CA courts put it re teachers before they get tenure, being fired "for any reason, or for no reason.") When I taught high school, I had tenure, and hence I (and other teachers) were able to push back on all sorts of proposals by administrators which were unlikely to inure to the benefit of students (newsflash: teachers know more about their students than administrators do). Sometimes that was about budgeting -- federal law requires decisions about spending money to be made by a committee composed of administrators, teachers, and parents. Teacher representation would be pointless if teachers on the committee have to fear getting on the wrong side of the principal). Sometimes it was about the administration pushing teachers to teach how to game multiple choice tests rather than teaching real curriculum. The list goes on and on.
Now, this is not to say that teachers always act in the best interests of their students, nor that administrators never do. Ditto re the analogous positions in private companies. Nevertheless, a system in which those in supervisory roles have unfettered power is unlikely to yield anything close to optimal results.
Very true. For example, managers are well known to keep workers who should be fired - either to maintain their "empire" or just because it's socially uncomfortable to fire people they've formed relationships with.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/real-dev.stlouisfed.org/wp/2005/2005-040.pdf https://www.nber.org/papers/w3556 https://pure.eur.nl/en/publications/cultural-influences-on-employee-termination-decisions-firing-the-
Similarly, managers - as employees themselves - are incentivized to minimize accountability and maximize their own compensation.
How do unions counteract this, in either the general case or even in specific cases like education?
Fixed that for you. Sure is convenient that teaching methods teachers find boring (phonics, direct instruction) are bad for students and all the studies showing otherwise are wrong.
https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers/
As it happens, I liked the administrators in question. THAT"S THE POINT: The nature of any organization is that agents, such as school administrators, often are incentivized to act in a manner not conducive to the mission of the organization, even if they are perfectly reasonable, ethical persons.
Also as it happens, I support the teaching of phonics. But, that is irrelevant to my comments, because, as I noted, I taught high school, not elementary school. I am really not sure why you feel a need to personalize this issue.
I note also that you ignored the specific examples I gave, such as pressure to teach how to game standardized tests, and pressure to rubber stamp principals' funding priorities.
Note also that I EXPLICITY said: " this is not to say that teachers always act in the best interests of their students, nor that administrators never do." Why you think that citing evidence that that is true is somehow a "gotcha" is beyond me.
Here's the most I can make out of your reasoning:
Agents don't necessarily act in the best interest of the principal.
...
A second set of agents will somehow fix or improve things.
Can you fill in (2)? The closest you come is "teachers know more about their students than administrators do", but you now seem to be backing away from this claim.
If you're not claiming the second set of agents is somehow better aligned with principals, what are you claiming? Or maybe you aren't claiming (3) at all?
Ok. I'll bite.
Teaching the mechanics of testing along with techniques for ballparking and figuring out certain answers are definitely wrong is not an unreasonable demand. I know there's a claim that "teaching to the test" somehow involves techniques that don't convey the material, but in the rare occasions someone has shown me what it actually involves it's mostly teaching the actual curriculum instead of whatever the teacher feels like.
If you want to argue this claim of mine, a great way to do so would be to a real high stakes standardized test from CA or NY and explain the mechanics of getting students to do well on this test without also learning the material well. A bad way would be saying the words "teaching to the test" or "game the test" with no specifics.
Teachers have no demonstrated ability to be administrators or competent stewards of funds, so I don't know why I should care what they think about funding priorities.
A principal might have more space for flourishing when existing in a conflict zone between two different agents. The principal can play the two agents against each other as opposed to being dominated by a single overpowering entity. That's true even if neither set of agents is particularly aligned with the principal.
On the other hand, the principal in question might be Poland, literally or figuratively.
In the case of employees facing unions vs employers, it's a bit of column A, a bit of column B. Both employers and unions have some level of alignment with the employee: the employer wants a productive worker (albeit at minimum cost) and has to maintain some level of happiness to avoid them switching to a competitor, and the union wants to keep its represented workers happy for fear of decert (albeit with minimal regard for the worker's career growth or more generally the long term growth of the company). This rivalry lets workers play one agent against the other, sometimes siding with the union at the expense of the employer (collective bargaining) and sometimes siding with the employer at the expense of the union (scabbing; ignoring work rules). At their best, unions push for utility increasing policies for workers at minimal cost to the worker; at their worst, they take their dues and do pretty much nothing except funnel it toward bureaucrats' salaries and political pet causes. Most of the time it's somewhere in between in the private sector, in large part depending on how easy it is to unionize (the easier, the more unions manage to extract for the worker).
Note that this is entirely speaking from the perspective of the individual worker, not society writ large.
In the teachers union example, the principal is students. Agent 1 and 2 are school administrators and teachers unions, respectively.
In the case of private sector employment, the principals are shareholders and customers, whereas agent 1 and 2 are managerial employees and ICs (possibly with the latter represented by a union).
I guess you're thinking that students can learn to read via phonics by somehow playing teachers unions against school administrators (or having their parents do so)?
Was speaking abstractly.
As far as public education goes, the issue is that there really aren't competing agents. Where they're most powerful, public sector unions don't exercise their power through competing with the employer for worker allegiance but through influencing the political process to remove their opposing agent as well as the market discipline that forces trade offs to be made. The result of that is a world where there's no accountability; if students are failing, then the issue is that the schools need more funds, which must be appropriately distributed through administrators/teachers/the union, who then use the funds to repeat the process. All the agents in public education are best thought of as a collective symbiote that has a parasitic relationship with the rest of society.
Students aren't agents here at all. Their parents might be agents, but only through the ability to vote or remove their kids from schools (which reduces funding). The political process has the latter avenue already in its sights.
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I discussed #2 at some length.
Yes, teaching how to game the test is not utterly devoid of value. But that is a red herring. The issue is whether teaching that, in lieu of teaching substantive material, is in the best interests of students. It certainly is in the best interests of administrators, which is why it was pushed. And it is why,as I discussed re #2, it was valuable to students that rules making it hard to fire me were a good thing,as they allowed me to continue to teach substantive material.
Btw, I am not talking about "teaching to test," which refers to teaching only the material that will be on the test. I am talking about teaching how to game the test.
This is all kind of silly. First, it's remarkable to hang your hat on "best interest of the students" in the immediate wake of the teacher's unions utterly fucking their students for their own benefit over covid. Second, if this problem of "teachers not being allowed to teach substantiative material" is a general structural problem, then that's a damning indictment of the entire public school system, and we should be moving to the "burn it all down" part of the discussion, which would still involve abolishing the existing union as a part of the corrupt status quo.
Curious as to what this means. It takes like 5 minutes to explain, e.g., the logic of when to guess on the SATs.
As I explicitly said in my initial post, "Now, this is not to say that teachers always act in the best interests of their students, nor that administrators never do"
I don't know why you infer that it is a general structural problem. It was simply a single example of how principal-agent problems can sometimes crop up. And, btw, I guarantee you that it is not a problem unique to public schools. Private school administrators if anything have an even greater incentive to generate high test scores, since they need to sell their school to prospective parents.
IF that is true, then that just strengthens my point, because we were asked to spend several days on it.
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No, you mentioned things teachers unions do. You did not explain how they improve decision making or benefit students in aggregate. If you're merely claiming that in at least one case they do (but might be negative value in aggregate), I don't disagree with that claim.
If what you describe actually exists and takes a non-trivial amount of time, that would be bad. Can you please explain how to actually do this for a real standardized test in one of the 10 largest US states which was given in the last 10 years? I claim that it's not possible, except for some very trivial stuff that doesn't take much time such as "if you can rule out 2 choices out of 4, select one of the remainder at random."
I've had people tell me a few theories about how this might happen when I press the issue, but on the rare occasion they don't refuse to be specific, googling actual standardized tests suggests that their theories are impossible. Would you care to provide mechanics, as well as a link to the specific standardized test on which you think it works?
We were asked to spend about a week on that exact sort of stuff. I don't have all the details on what was in the proposed curriculum because I threw it away. And I never claimed that it worked.
Here is another example. CA has history content standards, and history analysis standards, including:
The analysis standards are not tested on state tests, or at least they were not when I was teaching. Principals, whose jobs depend on how students perform on state tests, have an incentive to push teachers to ignore the thinking standards and focus on the content standards, esp memorization etc (it is impossible to do both, given the size of the standards and the time needed to teach analysis skills). It is in the interests of students that a teacher need not fear being fired for focusing instead on the analysis standards.
I think both are definitely possible if you are teaching gifted kids who could ace the standards without even trying. And the analysis standards are impossible to teach to below average kids anyway. So, why even bother trying?
The only real issue is trying to teach to a mixed proficiency group or teaching mildly above average children who could maybe learn a bit of the analysis standards at the cost of their test scores.
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I'm pretty confused here. Principals push you to do things that don't improve performance on tests because...they are incentivized to improve performance on tests?
On the flip side:
we also have teachers refusing to teach the curriculum they are assigned.
At least it is if you assume some random teacher knows better about what students should learn than the semi-democratically chosen school officials who created the curriculum and decided what was important enough to be on the tests.
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