> Front-line workers' unions like teachers and nurses strike to improve conditions for the people they care for; police unions' main cause is reducing oversight and accountability, waging a decades-long war on civilian oversight boards.
Teachers also wage war on accountability. They resist every attempt to measure their performance (for example through standardized tests), never suggesting alternative approaches where they see a flaw in methodology. Most recently teacher unions have started mixing demands for safer reopening plans with a mix of other wholly unrelated demands - asking for charter schools/parental choice to be abolished, asking for police defunding, asking for Medicare for all, etc (https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/l-a-teachers-union-say...). These have nothing to do with safer reopening plans. The teacher unions want protection from accountability by squashing competition (charter schools) and they are bundling this ask with an ask for safer reopening plans and police defunding to garner public support. But make no mistake these are political games.
In Seattle earlier this year, nurses in one hospital system went on strike (https://apnews.com/106ced24f239ea09b709e8959c385e45). They marketed the strike as pushing for better nurse to patient ratios but it really was about pay. The hospital had offered a generous pay increase out of the gate that was better than what another medical group had recently offered its own workers, who accepted the new package. The increased pay at this other hospital was the motivation for these other nurses to strike, but the striking nurses rejected that generous offer and demanded double the increase. The strike resulted in numerous patients having procedures delayed by months (waiting for openings in schedule) and expecting mothers scrambling to deliver elsewhere and so forth. I don’t see how their strike served patients at all.
The reality is that all unions bring with them dynamics of power that they use to serve their own member’s interests. They often market benefits to the public or other parties to present their demands in a less offensive way, but their core purpose is to serve their own member’s interests. The lack of competition can cause many negative behaviors - that happens across the board whether we are taking about police or teachers or nurses. Cory Doctorow’s
Twitter defense, trying to separate out police unions from all other unions, makes no sense and just seems biased.
Teachers aren’t against measuring progress they’re against tests that have been shown to not help the children but instead detract from learning useful things and instead encourage memorization. I recall wasting entire quarters in school learning “meta” subjects about the FCAT. Utterly useless. And biased towards minorities
No nurses are unionizing for lack of oversight asking to “make hospitals great again”. Asking for a better nurse to patient ratio really isn’t comparable to asking to rollback reforms and oversights. Complete apples to oranges comparison there
Again, the nurses were simply asking for more pay, and when given a competitive package they asked for even more. The marketing of asking for better nurse to patient ratios is the same sort of bundling of concerns teacher unions perform, to gather support for their push.
> Front-line workers' unions like teachers and nurses strike to improve conditions for the people they care for; police unions' main cause is reducing oversight and accountability, waging a decades-long war on civilian oversight boards.
Teachers also wage war on accountability. They resist every attempt to measure their performance (for example through standardized tests), never suggesting alternative approaches where they see a flaw in methodology. Most recently teacher unions have started mixing demands for safer reopening plans with a mix of other wholly unrelated demands - asking for charter schools/parental choice to be abolished, asking for police defunding, asking for Medicare for all, etc (https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/l-a-teachers-union-say...). These have nothing to do with safer reopening plans. The teacher unions want protection from accountability by squashing competition (charter schools) and they are bundling this ask with an ask for safer reopening plans and police defunding to garner public support. But make no mistake these are political games.
In Seattle earlier this year, nurses in one hospital system went on strike (https://apnews.com/106ced24f239ea09b709e8959c385e45). They marketed the strike as pushing for better nurse to patient ratios but it really was about pay. The hospital had offered a generous pay increase out of the gate that was better than what another medical group had recently offered its own workers, who accepted the new package. The increased pay at this other hospital was the motivation for these other nurses to strike, but the striking nurses rejected that generous offer and demanded double the increase. The strike resulted in numerous patients having procedures delayed by months (waiting for openings in schedule) and expecting mothers scrambling to deliver elsewhere and so forth. I don’t see how their strike served patients at all.
The reality is that all unions bring with them dynamics of power that they use to serve their own member’s interests. They often market benefits to the public or other parties to present their demands in a less offensive way, but their core purpose is to serve their own member’s interests. The lack of competition can cause many negative behaviors - that happens across the board whether we are taking about police or teachers or nurses. Cory Doctorow’s Twitter defense, trying to separate out police unions from all other unions, makes no sense and just seems biased.