It’s been a stereotype for at least the last 50 years. Why has this never changed? Why has organized labor not had a substantial effect for such an essential part of the workforce?
Why has organized labor not had a substantial effect…
Organized labor is working about as well here as funding public schools. Which is to say, not very well at all.
When I was in 8th grade, my school district furloughed over 100 teachers at the same time the superintendent was getting a heated marble driveway installed at his house.
I want to add that teachers unions often look for other things than pay because the members are actually concerned with the quality of education. So classroom size and classroom equipment or budget.
Republicans have taught Americans to resent public education. Also, most teachers are Women, so I’ll let fill in the blanks.
The want us just smart enough to do our taxes and not think too much about anything important.
George Carlin said it best. We want dumb happy obedient workers. Smart enough to runthe machines, but not smart enough to realize how badly they’re getting fucked by the system. So don’t count on the schools to do much more than basic math, and basic skills. Because what helps the elite class screws over the working class. It’s best to start screwing them in kindergarten. Teach them the pledge of allegence, so they feel endebted to our system, and keep them there for their entire lives.
Paraphrasing here, but that’s the jist of a routine he had in the 90s. The important thing to note is that Carlin was NOT a time traveler. He didn’t predict the future. It’s just that we as a society have had the same problems for 100 years, and we never fixed our shit.
Maybe because 98.1% keep voting for either evil or the lesser evil; but almost none of them vote for the good like Nader?
“Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses, and American universities - and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, […] you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain’t going to do any good; you’re just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here… like, the public.” – George Carlin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBrbXOmnW70
“It is infinitely better to vote for freedom and fail than to vote for slavery and succeed.” - Eugene V. Debs, Appeal to Reason, 1900-10-13
“Wage-labor is but a name; wage-slavery is the fact.” - Eugene V. Debs, The Socialist Party and the Working Class 1904-09-01
Please show me one time in the past 50 years that a third party candidate in the US helped the Left win an election.
The GOP constantly funds and pushes for the Greens and Libertarians because they know those candidates sap the Dems.
The Democrats are not Left wing. They’re left of the Republicans, and less authoritarian, but they’re a right-wing party who crippled banking regulation in favor of oligarchy, bailed out the worst banks, lied about drilling for oil[1] and causing a mass extinction event, and kept giving Israel weapons even after they went from defending themselves to committing genocide.
The goal for ethical people is not to get the Democrats to win, but instead to elect ethical people to government, e.g Hawkins and Nader.
It’s possible, even in FPTP voting systems, for people to reject the 2 parties that usually wins - see the UK where the Tories or Labour have been the only 2 winning parties for more than 90 years (including 2 short coalition governments); but where polling shows the 5th party (the horrible Reform) and 8th party (Greens) are now leading.
“It is infinitely better to vote for freedom and fail than to vote for slavery and succeed.” - Eugene V. Debs, Appeal to Reason, 1900-10-13
“Wage-labor is but a name; wage-slavery is the fact.” - Eugene V. Debs, The Socialist Party and the Working Class 1904-09-01
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/08/16/biden-oil-drilling-production/ As he campaigned for president in 2020, Joe Biden made a bold promise at a New Hampshire town hall, adding repetition for emphasis: “No more drilling on federal lands. Period. Period. Period. Period.” […] The Biden administration has now outpaced the Trump administration in approving permits for drilling on public lands, and the United States is producing more oil than any country ever has.
All that effort to show that you can’t tell the difference between ‘bad’ and completely horrible.’
You can babble on and on, but you can’t actually show one time that a strong third party candidate didn’t help the GOP.
From your point-of-view, the Democrats winning is good, and the Republicans winning is bad. You might see them on a left-right scale of 0-10, where 0 is good, the Ds are at 3, the Rs at 9, and Hitler at 10.
Some other people see a bigger window than that: look at https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2020 and compare how these people see the distance between Trump +9+9 and Biden +7+6, compared to the distance between both and Hawkins -5-3. These people agree that the Rs are worse than the Ds, but they don’t want to help the Ds win because the Ds are mass-extinction causing capitalists. To convince these people to vote for the Ds instead of Greens/socialists/not-voting at all, you have to convince them that the Ds actions of:
- making anthropogenic climate change worse and so causing a mass extinction,
- helping genocides, and
- propping up an economic system that rewards narcissistic psychopaths and punishes ethical people;
are good, and worth voting for.
Again, you ignore the actual facts.
Maybe you live in a world of privilege where things like schools, roads, hospitals, and wars are merely theoretical. We who actually have to deal with those things know differently.
Nowhere do you link to a 3rd Party that has any realistic chance of making any change anytime soon.
Quick historical note. Look up a fellow named Frederick Douglas. He was a former slave. In 1860 he had the choice of supporting a full on pro-Abolition candidate who had almost no chance of winning or supporting a candidate who had stated he wasn’t prepared to end slavery.
Douglas figured it made more sense to support a winner and have a foot in the door. He abandoned the Abolition candidate and backed the winner instead.
So, when you reply, please explain why people shouldn’t follow Douglas’s lead and back the imperfect candidate who might win over the ‘pure’ candidate who is sure to lose.
If you want to fight, you have to be prepared to lose.
It was no accident that Rosa Parks chose that particular seat on that particular day. Everyone that came before her had lost that same battle. Black folks (and the white folks who supported them) were thrown in jail for violating segregationist laws. But with each battle, knowledge and support was gained.
There’s a line in the recent Fallout series that really sticks out to me. A “do good” congresswoman is trying to get an audience with the president. She is roughly shoved aside by security. Our hero helps her up and she says to him, “Fighting the good fight is mostly a series of humiliations”.
I think about that a lot. It’s exactly like that, because fighting the good fight mostly happens when you are alone and outnumbered. Otherwise, you’re just in an echo chamber.
or primariesa spoiler effect happens when a losing candidate affects the results of an election simply by participating
Vote splitting is the most common cause of spoiler effects in FPP. In these systems, the presence of many ideologically-similar candidates causes their vote total to be split between them, placing these candidates at a disadvantage. This is most visible in elections where a minor candidate draws votes away from a major candidate with similar politics, thereby causing a strong opponent of both to win.
That the US voting system lacks the sincere favorite criterion is mathematical fact: lesser-evil voting is necessary to avoid losing the best chance of getting anyone preferable to the worst major candidate. Denying that is like denying laws of physics. You can’t coerce logic & causality to your will. Just because you don’t understand that doesn’t mean others don’t. Primaries exist to select better major party candidates.
Viable 3rd party candidates requires voting reform, which again requires passing those reforms through the current system.
There’s a wild spread on both pay and the requirements to work as a teacher. Some places require barely more than a pulse. Some places require years of schooling. Some places pay teachers no better than shelf-stockers. Some pay a decent wage and/or have a decent pension/benefits system. It’s definitely not a monoculture.
The GOP is fully to blame.
They sell the American public on the idea that any taxes are bad, no matter what they are meant to fund. When they are in power they cut public services, give tax breaks to corporations, and schedule tax raises to occur when they’re out of power.
When they aren’t in power they yell about taxes nonstop to make sure democrats are too scared to re-fund them, so they don’t get voted out.
Cycle after cycle, and now there’s no money to give the teachers.
One of their main arguments against taxes is that government will always waste tax dollars due to corruption and incompetence… Which is a self fulfilling prophecy, as they’ve proven to be some of the most corrupt and incompetent political leaders in history.
There’s also the feedback loop where they point at the broken underfunded public services and are like “see how shit public services are? They’re a waste of taxes. We could gut them to save you money”
Absolutely intentionally designed to be that way by the GOP and blatantly obvious when you look at their voting records.
They’ve conditioned people to be so against taxes that you have a significant portion of the public saying things like, “why should my taxes fund public schools if my children graduated 20 years ago?”
This country is full of rotten people.
I’ve heard people say this with my own IRL ears. It’s completely indefensible.
It’s a very common sentiment. It comes from people with no kids as well, which is bad enough, but when it’s boomers who had kids go to public school for k-12, it’s just another level.
There aren’t always. There are plenty of places that pay teachers well. The problem is that the qualifications for a school that pays really well are pretty much the same as the qualifications for a school that doesn’t. Schools that pay well have 1,000 applications and never any vacancies, so new teachers have a hard time finding a well paying job. Public school employee salaries are public information, so you can actually look them up.
Average teacher salaries in Massachusetts dont look bad to me. https://profiles.doe.mass.edu/statereport/teachersalaries.aspx
Obviously, it’s not universal.
There are two parts. First, they aren’t as underpaid as most people think in most cases. The union isn’t dumb. When they negotiate they look at the long term. A career teacher (30 to 35 years) can retire at about 55 give or take depending on the district. And they will get something like 80% of thier salary for the rest of thier life. They will also get subsidized health insurance. And in some states, all of that is tax free. That is a ton of money and a ton of security. And for many, they can retire, collect pension, and go get another job at the same time if they want. I make more than double what teachers make best case, and my wife works too for a 6 figure salary. I can’t possibly retire at 55, let alone feel secure doing so. I also have been laid off twice over the last 30 years, where as most teacher don’t have to worry about that after 10 years. Now, I get to take vacation anytime of the year, I can change jobs or move and not mess up my future benefits. I don’t have to deal with parents. Lots of intangible benefits to not being a teacher. But the point is the union ensures those less obvious benefits, which keeps the current salary low. This keeps the optics of drastically underpaid teachers so that the union can still negotiate for more with public sentiment on thier side. So while they are still underpaid, it isn’t as drastic as it would appear.
The other reason is simple. There are a lot of teachers. Like a lot a lot. And schools are generally built to a higher standard of saftey, so they are much more expensive than other building types. All of this adds up to a very high cost. Education is typically one of the largest expenditures for a state budget. Poloticians could dump more money into it, but it isn’t likely to be enough to make a difference that will get them reelected. So they put money other places that will get them votes.
That’s your reasons why.
You’re right, it’s a stereotype. Teachers get paid plenty these days. My daughter’s 4th grade teacher just bought herself her own house.
Not raising the education of the public is an easy control method and also easily keeps up the myth of the USA being such a great country while completely obviously contradicting itself.
That’s by design
A dumb population is easier to control, which is why Republicans since Reagan have been slashing education whenever possible, trying to inject theocracy on there as much as possible, because religious dumb fucks are even easier to control
That cutting salaries helps them with their greed is just a cherry on top of the vomit cake
L
That cutting salaries helps them with their greed is just a cherry on top of the vomit cake
L
/r/redditsniper OH SHIT THEY’VE HIT LEMMY NOW
Simple. Education isn’t the goal. The US doesn’t need well informed and educated people. They need drones that’ll follow orders from the oligarchs.
They need workers ok with $7.25 an hour. Work 6 days a week then church on Sunday.
