Back in 2012, the long-beleaguered Chester Upland School District in Pennsylvania ran out of money — literally — and the unionized teachers and staff agreed to work without pay. Well, it’s happened again — at least the part about the district being out of cash and all of the teachers, support staff, bus drivers and other adults in the system agreeing to work for free.
No, no, Americans, not you, too. Back in Ukraine in the 1990s, I remember feeling so much rage and disgust towards the people who would agree to work for free (sometimes for a year or longer) that I realized that if I didn’t leave the country, I would inflict grave bodily harm on someone.
But at least the post-Soviet people had an excuse. They had collectively woken up in an entirely different country without any warning. They were traumatized and severely depressed as a result of this shattering transformation. They are still stupid, irresponsible idiots who preferred to deprive their own children of basic necessities rather than get a grip on themselves and go find paying work but at least there is an explanation for their passivity.
Americans, though! People who have not been infantilized by a totalitarian regime that, for decades, eliminated and persecuted anybody with the entrepreneurial spirit! People whose courageous workers’ movements transformed labor conditions throughout the civilized world! You, too, are patiently trudging to work for free, setting a horrible precedent for your colleagues everywhere? And there is not a single person among all these unionized workers with enough self-respect to refuse to be humiliated and exploited in this way?
This is profoundly disappointing. If people who have not known any real hardship (compared to how the rest of the world lives) are so pathetic and beaten down, then it becomes unclear what needs to happen for anybody to recover any human dignity.
Clarissa's Blog 
// Back in Ukraine in the 1990s, I remember feeling so much rage and disgust towards the people who would agree to work for free (sometimes for a year or longer)
My mother worked for free and I asked her now about the reasons. First, because of her being a school teacher she could find many private students and earn money. Also, her supposed pension depended on number of years she worked.
She didn’t want to begin selling something, like people who brought things from Moscow to sell or were illegal workers in Russia.
And she had the possibility to emigrate to Israel, which we finally did.
I remember you mentioning American teachers who buy markers, books for students, etc themselves because the school doesn’t do its job. You have described them positively, as far as I remember.
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Oh, I know all about their reasons. I’ve heard them and heard them but will never comprehend them.
“I remember you mentioning American teachers who buy markers, books for students, etc themselves because the school doesn’t do its job. You have described them positively, as far as I remember.”
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Wow. I am speechless. I am imagining that everyone is doing it for the students in the district. They want to make sure that students don’t miss out on valuable educational time while this mess gets sorted out. On a practical level, I don’t understand how people can afford this.
But though I understand the concern for the students, it would be much more powerful if the teachers and staff allowed the whole district to be shut down. That would trigger change much more rapidly and garner national attention. Right now it’s a small story that hardly anyone is paying attention to and the state and local governments aren’t incentivized to change the situation.
On another note, I scanned through the article that you cited from and am not surprised to see that it’s charter school funding that is partly to blame for this. Charter schools and voucher systems are two nasty plans that suck money away from public schools.
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“But though I understand the concern for the students, it would be much more powerful if the teachers and staff allowed the whole district to be shut down. That would trigger change much more rapidly and garner national attention.”
“Charter schools and voucher systems are two nasty plans that suck money away from public schools.”
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\ Back in 2012, the long-beleaguered Chester Upland School District in Pennsylvania ran out of money — literally — and the unionized teachers and staff agreed to work without pay.
Wait, did they get the money later or not? Or just worked for free for several months and never saw money for it?
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“Wait, did they get the money later or not? Or just worked for free for several months and never saw money for it?”
Yeah, context matters. I can imagine some situations where I might agree to temporarily work for free (or deferred payment, I’m very lax about payment time with side jobs I do).
And there are a lot of others where I’d tell the people asking me to work for free to go take a flying leap.
I’d need more context to know which way I’d go in these particular situations.
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Well, (1) if you care about the kids, (2) you have no confidence that you can find another job apart from minimum wage retail (all the teaching jobs are booked for this school year), and (3) the politicians won’t come up with a solution, then why not work for free? Pennsylvania has been operating for two months with no approved budget. The right wing extremists in the legislature have blocked budget negotiations. That has brought a number of government programs to a close, and made funds for local communities unavailable.
If the district were to strike, the right wingers would be elated to have the opportunity simply to eliminate the district.
These idiots simply don’t care about anyone other than themselves.
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“if you care about the kids …, and (3) the politicians won’t come up with a solution, then why not work for free?”
Just what the politicians are counting on. This is not one of the situations where I might consider working for free. Shutting down the schools is the quickest way to get the politicians to move.
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“Shutting down the schools is the quickest way to get the politicians to move.”
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“Well, (1) if you care about the kids, (2) you have no confidence that you can find another job apart from minimum wage retail (all the teaching jobs are booked for this school year), and (3) the politicians won’t come up with a solution, then why not work for free?”
Today, the children of those impotent fathers from the 1990s are joyfully supporting Putin and queuing to be fed from from a shovel. But yes, those fathers had a million excuses about the evil forces that deprived them of everything.
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“everybody else just stayed sighing and cursing existence on the couch.”
Well to be fair, these teachers and district workers are lolling about and feeling sorry for themselves. They are working very hard and trying to serve students (I imagine) as best they can. I disagree with their strategy but actually think there is a sort of touching (though foolhardy) nobility about it.
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Ugh. I meant. “these teachers and district workers are NOT lolling about and feeling sorry for themselves.”
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Let’s not use the word “nobility” in this context because I can’t tell you how many times the post-Soviet people used this word to explain why it was OK to refuse good, well-paying employment and let their own kids faint from hunger. Yes, the people in PA are different. But I still expect more from them.
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“A complete district shutdown . . . would be national news.” And some on the right would be celebrating their victory. There was a push in West Virginia which came close to success that involved shutting all public education. The state’s constitutional obligation would be filled by giving each family a voucher for a nominal amount ($100?) and telling them to go figure it out. In the Pennsylvania case, we have an intelligent governor and right wing wackos in the Legislature who are preventing any kind of negotiation on a budget.
The zealots welcome publicity and none of this is an embarrassment to them.
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Absolutely horrible. The concerted attack on public education in this country is happening because there are political forces that want stupid, ignorant voters.
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Well, (1) if you care about the kids, (2) you have no confidence that you can find another job apart from minimum wage retail (all the teaching jobs are booked for this school year), and (3) the politicians won’t come up with a solution, then why not work for free?
(1)What a classically patriarchal guilt line to throw at a mostly female profession. Do they pull that shit with the police union? Or the fire fighters union?” Please care about the children by taking a defacto vow of poverty, even though you’re not actually nuns?” Fuck no.
(2)The minimum wage is greater than zero.
(3)The solution doesn’t need to come out of the teachers’ hides.
Look, even if you think that teaching is nothing more than glorified childcare, childcare workers still get paid. Many of these teachers have to get master’s degrees to teach in addition to having bachelor’s degrees, minimum.
If your choices are “work for free” or don’t work that job at all, it is functionally indistinguishable from not having a job. Why have a fucking union?
Do you work for free at your main job for your workweek? If not, why not? Why won’t you think of the poor besotted children and souls who suffer because you don’t want to get paid nothing?
In sum: Fuck You, Pay Me
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“Fuck you, pay me” is exactly what my position is. Extorting free labor out of people is exploitation, and I’m prepared to go blue in the face yelling that on every corner. We are already seeing the absolutely cynical and immoral idea that people don’t need to be paid because their compensation is the “experience” they are getting. What’s next?
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What’s next?
We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us?
Working is considered a consumer experience rather than something you do obtain money for goods and services?
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Absolutely. That’s one more part of post-work society.
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What makes no sense in this conversation is an implicit assumption that we are under European collective bargaining rules.
Strikes by public employees including teachers are illegal in most US states. Teachers can and have been jailed for striking, and the public consistently backs school administrators over teachers. Union coffers have been drained by fines. Teachers who are fired for striking lose their healthcare and pensions.
Example: Florida, a striking teacher can be fired on the spot regardless of tenure status. https://stateimpact.npr.org/florida/2012/09/13/why-florida-teachers-cannot-strike-the-way-chicago-teachers-can/
So the choice many teachers really have is: do you want to get paid when funds become available, or do you want to lose your job and wreck your family finances? Under some state rules, workers who lose jobs in these situations may not receive unemployment assistance.
Most families have a pittance in savings, not enough to cover a medical emergency or even a month out of work.
You’re telling them they should commit financial suicide in the name of principle.
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Believe me, I have heard all of these justifications and more, and in circumstances that were much more dramatic. There is always a reason not to stand up for oneself and then complain that somebody else didn’t make life pretty and easy.
But there was a Civil rights movement in this country and there were powerful labor movements that faced actual trouble but still fought and won for us the rights that we are now pissing away. And that’s a crying shame.
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https://www.psea.org/general.aspx?id=1730Striking is still legal in limited ways for teachers in Pennsylvania — for now
Honestly, the point about financial suicide is almost irrelevant. If striking is basically illegal and you have no ways to pressure people into paying you, you will commit financial suicide in the interim because your creditors do not care that your employer is failing to pay you; the rent comes due regardless. And if most teachers and their families are stretched as you say, then the amount of time they can spend teaching without pay is limited anyways. Nobody scabs for free. They might scab for lower pay than the union; but not free and not for “I don’t know when you’ll pay me maybe if ever.”
Everyone who whines and whines about how teachers are dumb and stupid should realize that labor market rules also inform teachers’ actions and the pool of people who become teachers. When my father suggested I teach, I laughed in his fucking face. No way am I going to get a master’s degree so I can have people shit on me for low pay in a job where people burn out in five years, on average.
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“No way am I going to get a master’s degree so I can have people shit on me for low pay in a job where people burn out in five years, on average.”
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A neighbor who is a teacher is retiring this year at the age of 57. He’ll be getting a very good pension and the best health insurance available in this state (which is very good.) I wouldn’t exaggerate the horribleness of the profession.
First of all, he’s a teacher who’s retiring, which makes him an outlier. Second, those terms are the result of collective bargaining at a time when the union was stronger. The union is weaker today, and I’m not sure that teachers who started after he did or who would start today would have the same kind of benefits and pension. Did he even have close to the same initial work conditions?
Ingersoll extrapolated and then later confirmed that anywhere between 40 and 50 percent of teachers will leave the classroom within their first five years(that includes the nine and a half percent that leave before the end of their first year)…[T]urnover in teaching is about four percent higher than other professions.
Approximately 15.7 percent of teachers leave their posts every year, and 40 percent of teachers who pursue undergraduate degrees in teaching never even enter the classroom at all.
I’m sure your neighbor feels very happy and rewarded. But the lack of control over my working conditions combined with the low pay and the lack of respect make teaching a job I’d never want. Add in the uncertainty of whether I’d even get paid? No thanks.
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I’m not trying to convince you to work as a teacher, obviously. But the wholesale pity towards teachers is misplaced. The ones I know are doing great. Plus, many can retire when they are barely in their fifties which is not what many other professions allow.
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How well teachers do depends on where they teach. One person I know only too well has been teaching middle school for about 15 years. Her pay used to be around $95,000 with scheduled annual increases plus a pension and what are now relatively lavish health benefits, and that’s without teaching summers. She has tenure, of course. The district has never missed a paycheck. Would I put that at risk if it did?
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What puts the entire profession at risk is precisely the workers accepting subpar labor conditions. But the position of “Hey, I’m rich, and to hell with everybody else” is at least healthy enough. It is, of course, not the same to allow oneself to be spat at for $95,000 as opposed to be spat at for a janitor’s pitiful salary. This is precisely why Marx only expected revolution from the really downtrodden.
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I don’t think the concept of a strike is even relevant here. If people aren’t paid, they don’t work. How is that a strike? I don’t go to work at the local Motomart because it doesn’t pay me. But it doesn’t mean I’m striking.
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Yes! How is not going in to work when they’ve said they’re not going to pay you a strike?
Are unions so defeated and pathetic now that that makes sense to anyone?
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“Shutting down the schools is the quickest way to get the politicians to move.”
Yes. That would get enormous attention and be embarrassing for the state. Think about a mess it would be? What do working parents do with the children? It would have such far reaching effects that it would force people to act.
“If the district were to strike, the right wingers would be elated to have the opportunity simply to eliminate the district. These idiots simply don’t care about anyone other than themselves.”
Yes. But the students would have to go somewhere and it’s the state’s job to provide transportation options. So it would still force the state to act and t would still be a miss. Where do you send students suddenly and without warning at the beginning of a semester? Again, something extreme like this would garner public attention. The general public is (bizarrely) anti-teacher. But very few people are so crazed as to think that teachers should work for free.
As it is now, this is a tiny story that nobody is noticing. A complete district shut down because people refuse to work for no wages (not “greedily’ striking for higher wages ind you but simply refusing to participate in slave labor) would be national news.
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“As it is now, this is a tiny story that nobody is noticing. A complete district shut down because people refuse to work for no wages (not “greedily’ striking for higher wages ind you but simply refusing to participate in slave labor) would be national news.”
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” I’m in a state that is also failing to pass a budget because of a deranged Republican governor”
These fuckers* think they want to live in a third world country, the best way to cure them of that idea is to show them what it’s really like.
*people that voted for your governor
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Yes, it is absolutely a third-world thing. We are not holding our legislators to any standard whatsoever. They believe it’s acceptable nor to do their job and pass the budget already.
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They believe (broadly) that their job is to shrink govt, so in that case they are doing or at least attempting to bring that about. Also, teacher unions are the easiest group to pick on (hard to pick on individual teachers politically and fire and police deal iwth more life or death immediacy). Lastly, teachers are the biggest single cost item in local govts (funded by property taxes) and property taxes are probably the only tax most americans can accurately tell you (they don’t know their federal effective tax rate, or social security share, aggregate sales tax for the year). If they go from $4000 to $5000 (which is very low in some areas vs actual) individuals know that and bread resentment. I personally realize that it is complex, but teachers are the biggest cost in local govt and with the general economic pressures today this leads to a ton of the outrage / resistance i believe.
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“They believe (broadly) that their job is to shrink govt”
Because they think they won’t be affected by it. That this is wrong needs to be brought home to them, very vividly.
“teacher unions are the easiest group to pick on”
There’s not a great deal of respect afforded teachers in the US nor has there ever been AFAICT. Picking on teachers unions is lazy politically and mentally and the people that do it are mostly incredibly ignorant about what goes into teaching.
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“They believe (broadly) that their job is to shrink govt, so in that case they are doing or at least attempting to bring that about. ”
“teachers are the biggest cost in local govt and with the general economic pressures today this leads to a ton of the outrage / resistance i believe.”
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are you disputing they are the largest cost in local govt? I highly doubt you understand better how the 6 -7 trillion in govt spending at the federal, state, and local levels is allocated than I. I highly doubt you could have even said withing a few trillion what the total govt. spending was. Totally fine to differ on opinions, but when i am armed with facts and you result to juvenile insults before challenging any data whatsoever it makes conversation difficult. It “endearing” in a way 🙂
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“I highly doubt you understand better ”
“when i am armed with facts and you result to juvenile insults before challenging any data whatsoever it makes conversation difficult”
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This is unlikely to be effective, as the most outspoken hard right is wealthy (wants lower taxes), older (unlikely to have any more kids in school) and obviously conservative about size of govt (ok with less public schooling), http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/us/politics/15poll.html?_r=0 . So, if a third world type situation happens they will still personally do pretty good. Again, not saying that is the world i want, but i think you are mistaken if they would in mass suffer
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“This is unlikely to be effective, as the most outspoken hard right is wealthy (wants lower taxes), older (unlikely to have any more kids in school) and obviously conservative about size of govt ‘
In other words, they want to be free riders (and are thus morally bankrupt).
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That may be (only very slightly) unfair. Since election surveys began, the issues most affecting voters are those that affect their wallet. Most don’t care a hoot about the treaty with Iran — unless you could show an expected impact on gas prices. That’s why areas with heavy senior citizen populations have lousy public schools (Florida, Maine and parts of California). Retirees won’t vote for budget increases. Retirees are also more likely to vote than are others. Politicians know that. Now is this a “I put my kids through school, now screw you!” attitude. You bet.
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Yep. I am not saying this is right… but its hard not to see this as the basic analysis. Thank you vic for giving me some hope of rational analysis on this comment board.
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“Thank you vic for giving me some hope of rational analysis on this comment board.”
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Reviewing the thread, there’s a fundamental paradox that some of us are trying to highlight: conservative politicians run on platforms about shrinking government, but in office they don’t do it. Christie in NJ is a classic example, with the creation of a new tier of jobs paying six-figure salaries that didn’t exist before he came to office. Reagan and both Bushs expanded government — Shrub was ghe worst. Bill Clinton actually reduced government employment.
I have seen educational political campaigns work — campaigns in which you explain to seniors that the value of the equity in their home is affected by the quality of local schools. If saving $500 in school taxes comes with a $50,000 hit on resale value (or what you can get in a reverse mortgage), do you really want to do that? Even old farts can figure that one out.
However, those campaigns require intelligence, facts and effort. Mot politicians and their campaign advisors don’t like to work that hard.
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Exactly. One has to be profoundly dumb to believe that Bush Jr was against big government. The freak introduced the Patriot Act, hello! If that’s small government, somebody needs to have their dictionary updated.
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Debatable. But what is true isn’t they wouldn’t suffer as you say from shrinking govt. as much as you are indicating. Be careful what you wish for is my point, which i think you may have proved.
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Michigan State University had a few “payless paydays” in the 1950’s. I don’t think any faculty left because of a rare month with no pay. If they had, they would have had to look for another job in a very difficult market. It worked out well for them in the long run. I am not sure, but I suspect that the lost pay was paid a couple of years later.
I heard about this while I was a graduate student there. I don’t think simplistic answers work when times are difficult financially. At many universities nowadays, pay increases have been nonexistent for decades. This has a worse effect on employees long term than does a few missed paychecks, since it means a permanent reduction in lifetime pay as base pay does not keep up with inflation.
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“I don’t think simplistic answers work when times are difficult financially. ”
As people in Spain say, “This isn’t a crisis. This is a con.”
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It’s not a lie now. Median HOUSEHOLD
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“I don’t happen to believe that “times are difficult financially.” I think it’s a lie.”
It is a lie now, but it was not a lie in the 1950’s recession, I think. I was a child then, so I do not have firsthand memories, of course.
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It’s not a lie now, either. We’re in the land of the great economic divide.
Median household income in the US is $52,000 per year — usually with both adults working. Median individual income is $36,000 per year. 10% of the population earns less than $10,000 per year (including govt. assistance); 20% earn less than $20,000 per year. For kicks, try getting through a month on $1,500 and using no credit cards.
The reason we don’t have a viable economy is that most people have no money for discretionary spending after necessities (rent or mortgage, health and auto insurance, student loans, food, gas). The Commerce Department publishes the data on consumer spending by income level. It’s depressing. At median income, a family actually has less than $1500 per year for anything other than necessities, including saving for retirement.
In the “golden age” of the US economy ( the 1950s and 1960s) mortgage rates were capped by law at 3%, students could attend college for free, health insurance was provided by employers and didn’t have either copays or deductibles.
That left a lot of funds available to circulate in the economy to push spending and growth. Taxes on the rich were higher, but that didn’t stop people from making a lot of money.
In our current, “screw-you” economy, all of that is gone. The wanna-be rich don’t get the point that they can’t do it if there are no buyers for what they sell.
There are a lot of people in real hardship. That’s not a con.
However, make people poor, take away hope, and give them guns — that’s a great combination. Welcome to Chicago, St. Louis or Baltimore. And just wait, as the saying goes, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
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What do you mean, “try”? I lived for years on an income of under $20,000 and with fully maxed out credit cards. My husband did as well and with no credit cards at all. And then he was unemployed for 2 years because he didn’t have a work permit.
Remember, we are immigrants. We’ve known every shade of material hardship. And our hardship is of the kind when you literally don’t know a single person in the country, don’t know how anything functions, feel confused by the simplest daily tasks.
My husband was an undocumented field worker for several years. I found myself, at the age of 22, literally in the street, in an unfamiliar country where I didn’t speak the language. I had $300, no cards, and a kid on my hands who was traumatized and didn’t need to see me falling apart in front of her.
There is nobody here who can teach me anything about hardship. It’s every shade of bizarre when people begin to lecture immigrants on poverty. It’s like there is a complete lack of understanding of what our lives are like.
Every immigrant I know has had to go through all this and often much, much worse. However, becoming financially successful happens quite fast and easy. It’s fast and easy in our understanding, of course. The scale for measuring fast and easy is very different from the one held by non-immigrants. 🙂
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Thanks for sharing your experience. Context is vital to making sense of a conversation and we don’t really know each other on a blog like this all that well. If we’re paying attention, we’re learning.
Banks fall over themselves to push credit cards to college students. The non-student poor don’t have credit cards to max out. 12% of Americans don’t have any bank accounts; inner city banks don’t offer the free accounts that suburbanites can get. Instead, the poor use check cashing services and payday loans, which further deplete their resources. As expensive as these services are (loan sharking comes to mind), they are cheaper than the fees they would see from banks that are located in proximity to them.
Want to hear a not so funny joke? When I was struggling a while back, I looked into financial assistance with utility bills. The needy can get a grant of $200. Sounds good? Well, that’s not $200 per month, that’s $200 per year. With AC, my utility bills average $300 per month. So the grant does what exactly?
Symbolic politics. The ability to say one is doing something without doing anything at all. There was a vintage 19th century punishment called “tar and feathering” which was applied to hucksters and bullshit artists of the day. Maybe.
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