Tag Archives: Salary

News

Rhode Island superintendent fires entire staff at unionized public school

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Story here on Business Insider. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

A school superintendent in Rhode Island is trying to fix an abysmally bad school system.

Her plan calls for teachers at a local high school to work 25 minutes longer per day, each lunch with students once in a while, and help with tutoring.  The teachers’ union has refused to accept these apparently onerous demands.

The teachers at the high school make $70,000-$78,000, as compared to a median income in the town of $22,000.  This exemplifies a nationwide trend in which public sector workers make far more than their private-sector counterparts (with better benefits).

The school superintendent has responded to the union’s stubbornness by firing every teacher and administrator at the school.

ECM sent me this article about New Jersey earlier this week, which ruined my entire Monday.

Excerpt:

One state retiree, 49 years old, paid, over the course of his entire career, a total of $124,000 towards his retirement pension and health benefits. What will we pay him? $3.3 million in pension payments over his life and nearly $500,000 for health care benefits — a total of $3.8m on a $120,000 investment. Is that fair?

A retired teacher paid $62,000 towards her pension and nothing, yes nothing, for full family medical, dental and vision coverage over her entire career. What will we pay her? $1.4 million in pension benefits and another $215,000 in health care benefit premiums over her lifetime. Is it “fair” for all of us and our children to have to pay for this excess?

The total unfunded pension and medical benefit costs are $90 billion. We would have to pay $7 billion per year to make them current. We don’t have that money—you know it and I know it. What has been done to our citizens by offering a pension system we cannot afford and health benefits that are 41% more expensive than the average Fortune 500 company’s costs is the truly unfair part of this equation.

And from CNSNews.

Excerpt:

Time.com reported last week that Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry estimated the government shut down cost taxpayers $100 million a day in labor that workers were unable to perform. That would suggest that the four and one quarter days the federal workers missed last week cost taxpayers about $425 million–close to the $445 million calculated on the basis that federal workers average $79,197 per year in salary not counting benefits.

The federal government was officially shut down on Feb. 8, 9, 10, and 11 and opened for business two hours late on Feb. 12.

Federaljobs.net’s Damp told CNSNews.com that not all of the more than 340,000 federal employees stayed home on those days. Some of these workers are designated as “essential” employees and are supposed to show up even when the weather or other conditions closes the federal government. These include, for example, law enforcement officers, key personnel with the Federal Aviation Administration, and workers who are needed for national security reasons.

“But I think it’s safe to say most of the workers did not go to work,” Damp said.

When non-essential federal workers are told to stay home because of a government shutdown, they still get paid, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

And also from CNSNews.

Excerpt:

State and local governments spent $1.1 trillion on employee wages and benefits in 2008. That’s half of what those governments spent overall.

And while the private sector job market remains bleak, there are more civil service jobs than ever. The federal Labor Department projects wage and salary employment in state and local government will increase 8 percent by 2018. That’s a comforting thought for anyone who has to spend time in line at the DMV.

Wish we could be as confident about the prospects for creating new corporate and manufacturing jobs to help pay for these new hires.

It’s not simply the number of new jobs that costs taxpayers. It’s that these government jobs pay more than ever. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that state and local government workers earn almost $40 per hour in wages, salaries and benefits. That’s more than 25 percent higher than the combined compensation of the average private sector job ($27 per hour).

One of the things that weights most heavily on my mind is the outrageous pay and benefits that are paid to public sector union employees. I am in the private sector and I have to pay these exorbitant salaries to people who have probably never worked a day in their entire lives! I have never had a moment’s peace in my career – the threat of layoffs has been a constant since I was doing internships during my undergraduate days. And I have two degrees in computer science!

Look, I’m a child of first generation immigrants, and I’ve been volunteering since I was 14 and working since I was 16 in high-tech. How can it be that people who cannot even teach children successfully can make so much money? It just is not fair, and I find it very depressing that I am paying for these layabouts. It makes me want to give up trying to do anything! The fact that Obama keeps raising public sector salaries in a recession does not help. And Obama opposes school choice, too.

I say abolish public sector unions, and abolish bailouts to private sector unions, too.

News

MUST-READ: How feminism’s war against men ends up hurting women

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From the The Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

There’s been a 145% rise in unmarried births among college-educated women since 1980, more than twice the increase in such births among women without college educations. That’s just births; adoptions are another outlet for women seeking families on their own. But there’s a largely unexplored part to this story: Why is this happening?

Part of the answer is found in a Pew Research Center report released this week: A sea change in relationships is taking place as everyone adjusts to the new reality of women being better educated and in some cases more preferred than men in the workforce. Especially unsettling to some men is their role as second-best earner in the family. As the Pew report documents, 22% of men with “some college” are now outearned by their wives, up from 4% in 1970.

[…]Women are feeling the pinch from years of gender imbalances on college campuses, where today nearly 58% of all bachelor’s degrees and 62% of associate’s degrees are earned by women. Given that women prefer to find a well-educated, reliable earner as a husband, this creates a simple math problem. Well-educated women can’t find enough equally or better-educated men to marry.

Couple the education gap with the current economic “man-cession”—as many as 80% of the jobs lost in the recession were held by men—and the dilemma for single women becomes even worse. Today, more and more well-educated women have to ask themselves: Am I willing to “marry down”?

As I’ve written about before, the reason why men are not able to do well in school is because they are discriminated against by the teachers, legislators and educrats. There are almost no male teachers. Men do better with male teachers. But there is a fear among educrats of male teachers getting near children, so boys end up suffering. Affirmative action keeps many men from attending college. And then of course in the workplace, companies have quotas to fill, which shuts even more men out of jobs.

Children need to have a mother and father, and the father typically gets his authority and his role by being the primary earner. What women have done is that they have decided that it is a better idea to compete with the man for money. But this undermines the man’s authority in the home. Why would a man get married only to have his influence diluted? The threat of false charges of domestic violence or of a unilateral divorce can also easily be used to control and silence him. Why try to lead a family if you are going to be silenced and coerced?

More importantly, the more that a woman focuses on vocational skills, the less time she has for reading about marriage, education, economics and parenting, e.g. – Jennifer Roback Morse, Laura Schlessinger, Maggie Gallagher, Stephen Baskerville, etc. If a man is a software engineer, the last thing he wants in the home is another software engineer. A mother needs to teach the children everything they need to know to succeed and to have a relationship with God that will stay with them as they grow. And she must also be able to talk to her husband about his interests, like science, economics, politics, theology and apologetics.

And it’s not just a question of having the right knowledge. It’s a question of character. She has to make choices and have experiences all along the way to build up the capacity to care, nurture and communicate. That means actually doing things that cause her to become comfortable caring for others even when it goes against her own selfish interests. Being selfish disqualifies a women from being marriage material. Instead of being focused on making money, women should be studying how husbands and children work.

And I think this is why women are so anxious to throw themselves at men sexually. They are trying to get men to love them without actually having to care about men, marriage or children. They don’t want to have to take on the traditional role of mother and wife, which is what causes a man to love and need a woman in the first place. But a woman cannot make a man love her by tricking him with sex. Women can only make men love them by being willing to encourage and support him in his plan to serve God and to raise children who also know God and serve God. It’s a relationship, not a slot machine.

NOTE: When I say that women should be more focused on children, I mean while the children are not yet all in school. Once they are all in school, then women can go back to work full-time, or part-time, or work out of the home, whatever they want to do.

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News

France introduces bill to require boards of directors to be 40% female

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Story from the UK Times.

Excerpt:

The French version of the glass ceiling has just been cracked open by parliamentary vote. With the backing of President Sarkozy’s administration, the National Assembly last night passed a bill that aims to force big companies to appoint women to 40 percent of their seats on the board.

[…]Norway introduced a 40 percent rule in 2002 when women accounted for only 6 per cent of board seats there. Spain has also just passed a similar law.

The measure will mean an upheaval because the boards of France’s top companies remain male bastions, along with those of southern Europe (see chart below). Women occupy just 10.5 percent of board seats in the 650 publicly quoted companies to which the new law will apply. Corporations will have six years to reach the 40 percent mark. After that, all board appointments will be voided if they do not maintain at least a 60-40 share between men and women.

Women today seem to prefer a pay check and government social programs over relationships with husbands and children. A relationship means that the other person may say or do things that hurt you, and that they may make demands on you to act morally or to think rationally or to take care of others. I have heard the demands of men and children described as “harassment” by women, and compared unfavorably with workplace relationships. For some reason, women have decided that the workplace is less “harassment” than the family.

Women may still marry for the spectacle of the wedding. They may still have babies to play with and show off. (But the man should change the diapers). But the willingness to accept the demands of relationships is gone. Today’s women think that life should be about their happiness all the time, and that no one should ever confront them with moral judgments and moral obligations. So a husband’s demands for a woman to spend less will be met with a unilateral divorce. And a child’s demands for attention will be met with day care.

Today’s women are just not interested in communication, relationships, commitments, and nurturing.

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