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It's confusing for me that so many people will complain about how the police unions prevent reform and allow for bad behavior -- but then support unions for all

It's confusing for me that so many people will complain about how the police unions prevent reform and allow for bad behavior -- but then support unions for all other public sector workers.

falcrist 6y ago
Public sector unions seem a little odd to me. The whole point of unions is to have collective bargaining power to deal with the bargaining power of corporations. That makes perfect sense... but isn't collective bargaining the point of having a democratic government? I'm not saying having, say, a teachers' union is a bad thing. I just feel like it should be redundant. Of course, the police are a special case even within the realm of public sector unions, because they're the ones enforcing the law anyway. It's one step removed from having a union of congresspeople, which really WOULD be completely redundant. What are they going to do? Petition themselves?
- bathtub365 6y ago
  Public sector unions exist because you have two groups of people with opposing needs/desires. The state wants to minimize budget while still providing services, and public workers want to make an appropriate wage for the work they do. The government is organized, so (IMO) there should be an organization on the other side of the table bargaining for the workers.
  - some-are-better 6y ago
    "The state wants to minimize budget" This is a joke statement right? There is no state in the history of the world that attempts to do this.
    - causalmodels 6y ago
      Maybe not in the states you’ve lived in, but this was very much the hypothesis behind Sam Brownback’s experiment in Kansas. Beliefs in a strong version of the crowding out effect result in states trying to cut their budgets.
    - nfg 6y ago
      What nonsense, firstly OP clearly is specifically referring to the budget outlay for education, and even if taken more broadly I can assure you throughout the world there are plenty of governments whose spending is constrained by current income and who very much do aim to minimise expenditure for a given outcome (predictably often with the effect of greatly worsening outcomes).
    - loeg 6y ago
      Maybe you'd prefer it reframed as: elected officials want to minimize spending on line-items they don't care about in order to spend on things they do care about.
    - root_axis 6y ago
      What are you talking about? Education budgets are almost comically prone to budget cuts, it's one of the most contentious facets of government spending (at least in the U.S.)
  - wahern 6y ago
    Wages are only part of the function of a union. An arguably more important part is preventing arbitrary and capricious management decisions, including retribution against employees for expressing grievances. A big part of what unions do day-in, day-out, is dispute resolution. A unionized meat factory isn't going to pay much better wages, if at all, than a non-unionized factory; but it would be significantly safer. The thing is, the courts often grant Due Process protections to government employees on the theory that a government employer taking actions against an employee isn't too far removed from the government taking actions against any random citizen. At a minimum, the government almost always must follow some sort of reviewable investigatory procedure. Compared to at-will employment, the burden (however de minimis in an absolute sense) is much greater. The need for checks against malicious government managers is significantly reduced. The upshot is that unions aren't as necessary in the case of government employees. The downshot is that even if you prevented unionization, the government would still have problems firing problematic employees. The issue is never that they can't be fired (union or not), but whether it's worth the hassle, which has a cost in terms of time & money.
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      > A unionized meat factory isn't going to pay much better wages, if at all, than a non-unionized factory; but it would be significantly safer. Unionized workers make more than their non-union peers, and have significantly better benefits. You can see a huge difference in pay and benefits with union and non-union construction workers and welders. One group is paid a living wage with benefits, and has options for retirement, and the other group makes barely more than minimum wage, has poor benefits if they're even classified as employees and not contractors, and they're on their own when it comes to retirement. Similarly, white collar unionized workers make more than their non-union counterparts, too. They have higher pay, better benefits, and more paid time off.
- fredophile 6y ago
  Collective bargaining evens out the power imbalances between workers and their employers. It doesn't really matter if the employer is the government or a private company. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about collective bargaining and democracy since the two are unrelated. There are other ways to handle public sector unions. For example, in Canada the military is not part of a union but their pay is tied to other public sector employees who are unionized. This makes sense since you don't want the military going on strike. When the union employees go on strike to get better pay and benefits the military also gets the same increases. You could do something similar in the US by tying police salaries and benefits to another public sector group like teachers or nurses. I have the feeling that this would be extremely unpopular with the police.
  - falcrist 6y ago
    > Collective bargaining evens out the power imbalances between workers and their employers. The reason it's strange is because if the government is a democracy (representative or direct), there should already be a mechanism for collective bargaining. The fact that this is often insufficient strikes me as a pretty strong indictment of our systems of government.
    - vkou 6y ago
      In a private company, there is also a mechanism for collective bargaining, without a union. The workers could just buy up all the outstanding stock, and replace the board. And yet, nobody considers that to be sufficient to deny workers their right to organize.
      - falcrist 6y ago
        That's generally only possible in a public company ("public" meaning "publicly traded"). Even then, I don't think the stockholders are under any obligation to sell to you, so you still may not be able to purchase a controlling interest in the company. So if the board holds a controlling interest, you're out of luck.
- DebtDeflation 6y ago
  >Public sector unions seem a little odd to me You're not alone. George Meany, the first president of the AFL-CIO was opposed to the very idea of public sector unions. As was FDR. And virtually all union leaders through the mid-1950s.
- baddox 6y ago
  The point of unions is to attempt to counter the immense imbalance of power between employers and employees that often exists. That can certainly exist with public jobs just like it can with private jobs.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  The elected leaders represent distinctly different interests than public employees. For instance, in March, in NY state government, public employee union contracts didn't permit working from home in general. That was tightly restricted based on past negotiation. In order to respond to the pandemic crisis, they really dragged out giving permission to work remotely where possible. I don't understand why anyone would think that the rank and file public employees are the same entity/interests as the elected officials or upper level management. You might as well say the employees who own a little company stock or get options at any random company don't need a union because they can vote their shares. Working conditions, due process, etc. always matter, in the face of management having an incentive to find shortcuts and such. Public sector unions are really not the government negotiating with itself any more than a private company. Any time you have management answering to different interests than the workers, a conflict of interest exists so a union has an obvious purpose. If actual unions are bad or corrupt, that's not the same as an issue in the abstract.
deleted 6y ago
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eropple 6y ago
Why? I am agnostic with regards to public sector unions, but I'm pretty convinced that unions for people who exert force on behalf of the state are always bad.
_bxg1 6y ago
It's a question of tradeoffs between professional accountability and improved working conditions in a given field, based on factors like how bad things can get in that field without accountability, how well (or poorly) employees are currently treated and paid, how likely employees are to take advantage of unaccountability, etc. People very much care about accountability when it comes to law enforcement, because compared to regular employees in most fields they have very direct and outsized power over society. And police aren't exactly underpaid either.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  > And police aren't exactly underpaid either. To drive this point home, the median salary before overtime and bonuses is $105,106/year for cops[1], and with overtime, cops can earn over $250,000/year[2]. The median salary for software engineers in the same state is 10% lower than the $105k police salary before overtime and bonuses. [1] https://www.nj.com/news/2017/05/how_much_is_the_median_cop_salary_in_your_town.html https://www.nj.com/news/2017/05/how_much_is_the_median_cop_s... [2] https://www.nj.com/somerset/2019/11/4-cops-in-this-nj-town-earned-250k-last-year-heres-how-they-gamed-the-system.html https://www.nj.com/somerset/2019/11/4-cops-in-this-nj-town-e...
  - grasshopperpurp 6y ago
    Side point: I think it's a bad idea to let cops work OT. I understand that preventing OT would create logistical issues, but I think they're solvable, and for the safety of everyone - including police - I think we should want officers to be as clear-headed as possible.
namdnay 6y ago
There’s a clear difference between police and other public sector jobs, namely that we allow them to use force in our name. I think everyone agrees that having army unions is a bad thing too, even those who support teachers unions
deleted 6y ago
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gruez 6y ago
Imagine if the army was unionized, and started lobbying the government for whether we should participate in wars or not. Or more worryingly, lobbied for change to rules of engagement. Add to that, the fact that everyone in the military was in the union, from the lowest level recruits to the generals. This is as opposed to other unions where management are typically excluded.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Ah, the traditional military coup popular in Latin America. Turkey used to have the military as an unofficial brake on the islamism of the government, but they finally managed have a purge and consolidate power.
- baddox 6y ago
  The army already has top-down centralized control, right? Much more so than most big organizations. Clearly the army can already choose whether to participate in wars or not, that's what they do. They don't even need to lobby to change rules of engagement, if they chose to change things it would happen. Of course we hope and expect them to follow the rules, but it's not like "letting" them technically unionize would somehow fundamentally change anything.
volkse 6y ago
The issue here isn’t that police unions exist - they can exist and protect the rights of their members without influencing policymaking. The issue is that public policy can be influenced by any special interest group with deep pockets.
kerkeslager 6y ago
Other public sector workers aren't issued guns. Other public sector workers don't fight against any transparency into their actions. Other public sector workers don't murder people on a regular basis and get away with it. Other public sector workers don't seize assets from people unconstitutionally under civil asset forfeiture. Other public sector workers don't regularly lie under oath to keep their buddies out of jail, or to put people they don't like in jail. Other public sector workers don't kill a dog every hour. The entire point of unions is to empower the oppressed. But the police have over and over demonstrated that they are not the oppressed, they are the oppressors.
wittyreference 6y ago
You're confused that people have one set of standards for the providers of trash removal and another set of standards for people authorized to commit state-sanctioned murder? The two are kind of distinct.
- darawk 6y ago
  The point though is that unions, wherever they are present in the public sector, tend to create uniformly sub-pair service. This is true for teachers, it's true for cops, and it's true basically wherever public sector unions are to be found.
  - dlp211 6y ago
    The best k-12 schools in the US are in states that have teachers unions, so maybe go rethink your hypothesis.
    - darawk 6y ago
      That's a strange way of framing things. Anyways, here's some actual evidence: https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies Be sure to read it carefully, and disaggregate the online charter schools from the brick and mortar.
      - dlp211 6y ago
        You can't take the stats of a charter school vs its district peers and extrapolate that to the state level. It's also notable that Massachusetts doesn't have a recent report. I also took a look at the 2019 Washington (my state) press release with the following bullet point: o School level findings identified several charter schools with significantly positive impacts, as much as 165 and 189 more days of learning in reading and math, respectively, compared to the learning they would have realized in traditional public schools. Conversely, some charters significantly underperformed their local school options by as much as 106 and 83 fewer days of learning in reading and math, respectively I'm not saying that charter schools aren't useful, what I am willing to say is that charter schools provide a good solution to a particular problem that has more to do school quality being tied to local tax revenue than unions.
fpgaminer 6y ago
It's a balancing act. With no unions, employers can stomp all over their employees, and everyone is worse for it (e.g. Amazon). When the unions are too powerful, they can stomp all over their employer and everyone is worse for it (e.g. police unions). Like all things in life, nothing is cut and dry. It's not wrong to both support unions, and call for the reduction in power of police unions.
- bravo22 6y ago
  The biggest problem facing Amazon workers isn't unionization. It is the not having alternatives to earning a similar wage in more humane conditions.
- selecsosi 6y ago
  As a point, original comments are only referring to "public sector" unions. The mal-alignment contrasts from private unions being organized by private individuals who's interests conflict against that of the private industry. Public sector unions "bosses" are the people and politicians, so even though these are "private" unions, their alignment is to protect the political class first, cops (members) second, people third. By focusing on politic over people (bad looking cops = lost mayor, DA political race) their primary interested is not public transparency (where the money comes from, leading to lack of consumer alignment on service rendered b/c cops are serving political interests more than they should). In a private union, the first people they are protecting are their membership (lot could be said here about how that works in practice), but their transparency problem isn't regarding factory deaths or issues at the work place because that is precisely what they are created to bring awareness to. If Ford's cars are killing people, the union actually wants to bring that up since it can hurt employment opportunities for future members.
- selecsosi 6y ago
  Another comment in the thread > Collective bargaining evens out the power imbalances between workers and their employers. It doesn't really matter if the employer is the government or a private company. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about collective bargaining and democracy since the two are unrelated. There are other ways to handle public sector unions. For example, in Canada the military is not part of a union but their pay is tied to other public sector employees who are unionized. This makes sense since you don't want the military going on strike. When the union employees go on strike to get better pay and benefits the military also gets the same increases. You could do something similar in the US by tying police salaries and benefits to another public sector group like teachers or nurses. I have the feeling that this would be extremely unpopular with the police
sangnoir 6y ago
I recently encountered a Reddit comment that might clear your confusion, paraphrased thusly: "We never see the any teachers union consistently come out in defense of pedophiles amongst their members"
- refurb 6y ago
  Clearly untrue. You've heard of the "rubber rooms" correct?
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  We see that all the time. You can read articles in major newspapers about the "rubber rooms" where teachers who can't be fired -- but who certainly also can't be put in front of a class -- are required to spend their workdays.
  - lazyasciiart 6y ago
    If police unions would do that to the officers who kill or beat prisoners, many people would be satisfied.
    - fingerlocks 6y ago
      I would not be satisfied if my tax dollars paid the salary of police officers that killed and beat people, rubber room or otherwise.
      - infogulch 6y ago
        I would be more satisfied with a rubber room than the scenario where they are paid to actively beat and kill people.
  - anonAndOn 6y ago
    In at least one major school district, the beginning the year shuffle for matching the unfilled classrooms with the unwanted staffing is called the "Dance of the Lemons". Those that don't get an assignment are still clocking in every day at HQ & assigned useless tasks like creating lesson plans (that nobody will ever use). Wouldn't that be great if violent cops were assigned to create Public Safety materials all day that went straight into the bin? They can't be fired so their job is to do something completely worthless until they quit.
zorpner 6y ago
Particularly in America, the police exist primarily to enforce class/racial divides (this is not hyperbole -- one of the best quick introductions I know of came out quite recently and is a very worthwhile read or listen: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/05/870227945/nprs-history-podcast-throughline-explores-policing-in-america https://www.npr.org/2020/06/05/870227945/nprs-history-podcas... ). This is fundamentally contrary to the politics of a labor union, which is to empower those who perform labor to negotiate on equal footing with those who would claim the bulk of the productive output of that labor. Both would fall under the aegis of "collective bargaining", but the social aims of the two couldn't be more different: the maintenance of a stratified class system vs the dismantling of same.
heavyset_go 6y ago
> It's confusing for me that so many people will complain about how the police unions prevent reform and allow for bad behavior -- but then support unions for all other public sector workers. Policing is a unique role with incredibly perverse incentives, and it has special powers and protections granted to officers by the state that no other workers are granted. When an officer abuses their power, not only do their coworkers protect them, but the system that is supposed to provide checks and balances turns a blind eye to the abuse, and fights against justice every step of the way. It is clear that this role, and the special status it incurs, is vastly different than other roles for government workers. I'm not sure what is confusing about having a slightly nuanced view on unionization, especially when I gave my reasoning in both the post you're replying to and this post itself.
biohax2015 6y ago
Unions can be both very good and very bad. That’s how power works.
adamsea 6y ago
Well, one possible reason is that even if people support unions in general, they don't support one engaging in behavior they think is corrupt, illegal, or unethical.
hyperbovine 6y ago
What other public sector workers carry guns?
Ar-Curunir 6y ago
Because police are not workers. They are tools of the state to violently enforce their laws.

It's confusing for me that so many people will complain about how the police unions prevent reform and allow for bad behavior -- but then support unions for all other public sector workers.

falcrist 6y ago

Public sector unions seem a little odd to me. The whole point of unions is to have collective bargaining power to deal with the bargaining power of corporations. That makes perfect sense... but isn't collective bargaining the point of having a democratic government? I'm not saying having, say, a teachers' union is a bad thing. I just feel like it should be redundant. Of course, the police are a special case even within the realm of public sector unions, because they're the ones enforcing the law anyway. It's one step removed from having a union of congresspeople, which really WOULD be completely redundant. What are they going to do? Petition themselves?

bathtub365 6y ago
Public sector unions exist because you have two groups of people with opposing needs/desires. The state wants to minimize budget while still providing services, and public workers want to make an appropriate wage for the work they do. The government is organized, so (IMO) there should be an organization on the other side of the table bargaining for the workers.
- some-are-better 6y ago
  "The state wants to minimize budget" This is a joke statement right? There is no state in the history of the world that attempts to do this.
  - causalmodels 6y ago
    Maybe not in the states you’ve lived in, but this was very much the hypothesis behind Sam Brownback’s experiment in Kansas. Beliefs in a strong version of the crowding out effect result in states trying to cut their budgets.
  - nfg 6y ago
    What nonsense, firstly OP clearly is specifically referring to the budget outlay for education, and even if taken more broadly I can assure you throughout the world there are plenty of governments whose spending is constrained by current income and who very much do aim to minimise expenditure for a given outcome (predictably often with the effect of greatly worsening outcomes).
  - loeg 6y ago
    Maybe you'd prefer it reframed as: elected officials want to minimize spending on line-items they don't care about in order to spend on things they do care about.
  - root_axis 6y ago
    What are you talking about? Education budgets are almost comically prone to budget cuts, it's one of the most contentious facets of government spending (at least in the U.S.)
- wahern 6y ago
  Wages are only part of the function of a union. An arguably more important part is preventing arbitrary and capricious management decisions, including retribution against employees for expressing grievances. A big part of what unions do day-in, day-out, is dispute resolution. A unionized meat factory isn't going to pay much better wages, if at all, than a non-unionized factory; but it would be significantly safer. The thing is, the courts often grant Due Process protections to government employees on the theory that a government employer taking actions against an employee isn't too far removed from the government taking actions against any random citizen. At a minimum, the government almost always must follow some sort of reviewable investigatory procedure. Compared to at-will employment, the burden (however de minimis in an absolute sense) is much greater. The need for checks against malicious government managers is significantly reduced. The upshot is that unions aren't as necessary in the case of government employees. The downshot is that even if you prevented unionization, the government would still have problems firing problematic employees. The issue is never that they can't be fired (union or not), but whether it's worth the hassle, which has a cost in terms of time & money.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    > A unionized meat factory isn't going to pay much better wages, if at all, than a non-unionized factory; but it would be significantly safer. Unionized workers make more than their non-union peers, and have significantly better benefits. You can see a huge difference in pay and benefits with union and non-union construction workers and welders. One group is paid a living wage with benefits, and has options for retirement, and the other group makes barely more than minimum wage, has poor benefits if they're even classified as employees and not contractors, and they're on their own when it comes to retirement. Similarly, white collar unionized workers make more than their non-union counterparts, too. They have higher pay, better benefits, and more paid time off.
fredophile 6y ago
Collective bargaining evens out the power imbalances between workers and their employers. It doesn't really matter if the employer is the government or a private company. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about collective bargaining and democracy since the two are unrelated. There are other ways to handle public sector unions. For example, in Canada the military is not part of a union but their pay is tied to other public sector employees who are unionized. This makes sense since you don't want the military going on strike. When the union employees go on strike to get better pay and benefits the military also gets the same increases. You could do something similar in the US by tying police salaries and benefits to another public sector group like teachers or nurses. I have the feeling that this would be extremely unpopular with the police.
- falcrist 6y ago
  > Collective bargaining evens out the power imbalances between workers and their employers. The reason it's strange is because if the government is a democracy (representative or direct), there should already be a mechanism for collective bargaining. The fact that this is often insufficient strikes me as a pretty strong indictment of our systems of government.
  - vkou 6y ago
    In a private company, there is also a mechanism for collective bargaining, without a union. The workers could just buy up all the outstanding stock, and replace the board. And yet, nobody considers that to be sufficient to deny workers their right to organize.
    - falcrist 6y ago
      That's generally only possible in a public company ("public" meaning "publicly traded"). Even then, I don't think the stockholders are under any obligation to sell to you, so you still may not be able to purchase a controlling interest in the company. So if the board holds a controlling interest, you're out of luck.
DebtDeflation 6y ago
>Public sector unions seem a little odd to me You're not alone. George Meany, the first president of the AFL-CIO was opposed to the very idea of public sector unions. As was FDR. And virtually all union leaders through the mid-1950s.
baddox 6y ago
The point of unions is to attempt to counter the immense imbalance of power between employers and employees that often exists. That can certainly exist with public jobs just like it can with private jobs.
perl4ever 6y ago
The elected leaders represent distinctly different interests than public employees. For instance, in March, in NY state government, public employee union contracts didn't permit working from home in general. That was tightly restricted based on past negotiation. In order to respond to the pandemic crisis, they really dragged out giving permission to work remotely where possible. I don't understand why anyone would think that the rank and file public employees are the same entity/interests as the elected officials or upper level management. You might as well say the employees who own a little company stock or get options at any random company don't need a union because they can vote their shares. Working conditions, due process, etc. always matter, in the face of management having an incentive to find shortcuts and such. Public sector unions are really not the government negotiating with itself any more than a private company. Any time you have management answering to different interests than the workers, a conflict of interest exists so a union has an obvious purpose. If actual unions are bad or corrupt, that's not the same as an issue in the abstract.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

eropple 6y ago

Why? I am agnostic with regards to public sector unions, but I'm pretty convinced that unions for people who exert force on behalf of the state are always bad.

_bxg1 6y ago

It's a question of tradeoffs between professional accountability and improved working conditions in a given field, based on factors like how bad things can get in that field without accountability, how well (or poorly) employees are currently treated and paid, how likely employees are to take advantage of unaccountability, etc. People very much care about accountability when it comes to law enforcement, because compared to regular employees in most fields they have very direct and outsized power over society. And police aren't exactly underpaid either.

heavyset_go 6y ago
> And police aren't exactly underpaid either. To drive this point home, the median salary before overtime and bonuses is $105,106/year for cops[1], and with overtime, cops can earn over $250,000/year[2]. The median salary for software engineers in the same state is 10% lower than the $105k police salary before overtime and bonuses. [1] https://www.nj.com/news/2017/05/how_much_is_the_median_cop_salary_in_your_town.html https://www.nj.com/news/2017/05/how_much_is_the_median_cop_s... [2] https://www.nj.com/somerset/2019/11/4-cops-in-this-nj-town-earned-250k-last-year-heres-how-they-gamed-the-system.html https://www.nj.com/somerset/2019/11/4-cops-in-this-nj-town-e...
- grasshopperpurp 6y ago
  Side point: I think it's a bad idea to let cops work OT. I understand that preventing OT would create logistical issues, but I think they're solvable, and for the safety of everyone - including police - I think we should want officers to be as clear-headed as possible.

namdnay 6y ago

There’s a clear difference between police and other public sector jobs, namely that we allow them to use force in our name. I think everyone agrees that having army unions is a bad thing too, even those who support teachers unions

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

gruez 6y ago

Imagine if the army was unionized, and started lobbying the government for whether we should participate in wars or not. Or more worryingly, lobbied for change to rules of engagement. Add to that, the fact that everyone in the military was in the union, from the lowest level recruits to the generals. This is as opposed to other unions where management are typically excluded.

pjc50 6y ago
Ah, the traditional military coup popular in Latin America. Turkey used to have the military as an unofficial brake on the islamism of the government, but they finally managed have a purge and consolidate power.
baddox 6y ago
The army already has top-down centralized control, right? Much more so than most big organizations. Clearly the army can already choose whether to participate in wars or not, that's what they do. They don't even need to lobby to change rules of engagement, if they chose to change things it would happen. Of course we hope and expect them to follow the rules, but it's not like "letting" them technically unionize would somehow fundamentally change anything.

volkse 6y ago

The issue here isn’t that police unions exist - they can exist and protect the rights of their members without influencing policymaking. The issue is that public policy can be influenced by any special interest group with deep pockets.

kerkeslager 6y ago

Other public sector workers aren't issued guns. Other public sector workers don't fight against any transparency into their actions. Other public sector workers don't murder people on a regular basis and get away with it. Other public sector workers don't seize assets from people unconstitutionally under civil asset forfeiture. Other public sector workers don't regularly lie under oath to keep their buddies out of jail, or to put people they don't like in jail. Other public sector workers don't kill a dog every hour. The entire point of unions is to empower the oppressed. But the police have over and over demonstrated that they are not the oppressed, they are the oppressors.

wittyreference 6y ago

You're confused that people have one set of standards for the providers of trash removal and another set of standards for people authorized to commit state-sanctioned murder? The two are kind of distinct.

darawk 6y ago
The point though is that unions, wherever they are present in the public sector, tend to create uniformly sub-pair service. This is true for teachers, it's true for cops, and it's true basically wherever public sector unions are to be found.
- dlp211 6y ago
  The best k-12 schools in the US are in states that have teachers unions, so maybe go rethink your hypothesis.
  - darawk 6y ago
    That's a strange way of framing things. Anyways, here's some actual evidence: https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies Be sure to read it carefully, and disaggregate the online charter schools from the brick and mortar.
    - dlp211 6y ago
      You can't take the stats of a charter school vs its district peers and extrapolate that to the state level. It's also notable that Massachusetts doesn't have a recent report. I also took a look at the 2019 Washington (my state) press release with the following bullet point: o School level findings identified several charter schools with significantly positive impacts, as much as 165 and 189 more days of learning in reading and math, respectively, compared to the learning they would have realized in traditional public schools. Conversely, some charters significantly underperformed their local school options by as much as 106 and 83 fewer days of learning in reading and math, respectively I'm not saying that charter schools aren't useful, what I am willing to say is that charter schools provide a good solution to a particular problem that has more to do school quality being tied to local tax revenue than unions.

fpgaminer 6y ago

It's a balancing act. With no unions, employers can stomp all over their employees, and everyone is worse for it (e.g. Amazon). When the unions are too powerful, they can stomp all over their employer and everyone is worse for it (e.g. police unions). Like all things in life, nothing is cut and dry. It's not wrong to both support unions, and call for the reduction in power of police unions.

bravo22 6y ago
The biggest problem facing Amazon workers isn't unionization. It is the not having alternatives to earning a similar wage in more humane conditions.
selecsosi 6y ago
As a point, original comments are only referring to "public sector" unions. The mal-alignment contrasts from private unions being organized by private individuals who's interests conflict against that of the private industry. Public sector unions "bosses" are the people and politicians, so even though these are "private" unions, their alignment is to protect the political class first, cops (members) second, people third. By focusing on politic over people (bad looking cops = lost mayor, DA political race) their primary interested is not public transparency (where the money comes from, leading to lack of consumer alignment on service rendered b/c cops are serving political interests more than they should). In a private union, the first people they are protecting are their membership (lot could be said here about how that works in practice), but their transparency problem isn't regarding factory deaths or issues at the work place because that is precisely what they are created to bring awareness to. If Ford's cars are killing people, the union actually wants to bring that up since it can hurt employment opportunities for future members.
selecsosi 6y ago
Another comment in the thread > Collective bargaining evens out the power imbalances between workers and their employers. It doesn't really matter if the employer is the government or a private company. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about collective bargaining and democracy since the two are unrelated. There are other ways to handle public sector unions. For example, in Canada the military is not part of a union but their pay is tied to other public sector employees who are unionized. This makes sense since you don't want the military going on strike. When the union employees go on strike to get better pay and benefits the military also gets the same increases. You could do something similar in the US by tying police salaries and benefits to another public sector group like teachers or nurses. I have the feeling that this would be extremely unpopular with the police

sangnoir 6y ago

I recently encountered a Reddit comment that might clear your confusion, paraphrased thusly: "We never see the any teachers union consistently come out in defense of pedophiles amongst their members"

refurb 6y ago
Clearly untrue. You've heard of the "rubber rooms" correct?
thaumasiotes 6y ago
We see that all the time. You can read articles in major newspapers about the "rubber rooms" where teachers who can't be fired -- but who certainly also can't be put in front of a class -- are required to spend their workdays.
- lazyasciiart 6y ago
  If police unions would do that to the officers who kill or beat prisoners, many people would be satisfied.
  - fingerlocks 6y ago
    I would not be satisfied if my tax dollars paid the salary of police officers that killed and beat people, rubber room or otherwise.
    - infogulch 6y ago
      I would be more satisfied with a rubber room than the scenario where they are paid to actively beat and kill people.
- anonAndOn 6y ago
  In at least one major school district, the beginning the year shuffle for matching the unfilled classrooms with the unwanted staffing is called the "Dance of the Lemons". Those that don't get an assignment are still clocking in every day at HQ & assigned useless tasks like creating lesson plans (that nobody will ever use). Wouldn't that be great if violent cops were assigned to create Public Safety materials all day that went straight into the bin? They can't be fired so their job is to do something completely worthless until they quit.

zorpner 6y ago

Particularly in America, the police exist primarily to enforce class/racial divides (this is not hyperbole -- one of the best quick introductions I know of came out quite recently and is a very worthwhile read or listen: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/05/870227945/nprs-history-podcast-throughline-explores-policing-in-america https://www.npr.org/2020/06/05/870227945/nprs-history-podcas... ). This is fundamentally contrary to the politics of a labor union, which is to empower those who perform labor to negotiate on equal footing with those who would claim the bulk of the productive output of that labor. Both would fall under the aegis of "collective bargaining", but the social aims of the two couldn't be more different: the maintenance of a stratified class system vs the dismantling of same.

heavyset_go 6y ago

> It's confusing for me that so many people will complain about how the police unions prevent reform and allow for bad behavior -- but then support unions for all other public sector workers. Policing is a unique role with incredibly perverse incentives, and it has special powers and protections granted to officers by the state that no other workers are granted. When an officer abuses their power, not only do their coworkers protect them, but the system that is supposed to provide checks and balances turns a blind eye to the abuse, and fights against justice every step of the way. It is clear that this role, and the special status it incurs, is vastly different than other roles for government workers. I'm not sure what is confusing about having a slightly nuanced view on unionization, especially when I gave my reasoning in both the post you're replying to and this post itself.

biohax2015 6y ago

Unions can be both very good and very bad. That’s how power works.

adamsea 6y ago

Well, one possible reason is that even if people support unions in general, they don't support one engaging in behavior they think is corrupt, illegal, or unethical.

hyperbovine 6y ago

What other public sector workers carry guns?

Ar-Curunir 6y ago

Because police are not workers. They are tools of the state to violently enforce their laws.