So, there’s this corporation with 60,000 employees who work in manufacturing plants scattered around Arizona. The plant workers are unhappy. Their pay is lousy, far lower than the national average for people doing similar work, their buildings are in disrepair and their tools and equipment are outdated. Meanwhile, the corporation complains the workers aren’t producing a quality product and has begun outsourcing some of its work to other factories which claim they can turn out a better product for the same amount of money.
The corporation’s CEO, Doug Ducey, recognizes he’s got a problem on his hands. He knows that despite the outsourcing, 95 percent of the company’s production still comes from the plants it owns. There’s a growing sense among stockholders that the workers may be right to complain about their pay and working conditions. Ducey knows things could spin out of control if he doesn’t look like he’s doing something to fix the problem. Worst case scenario, if he isn’t able to tamp down the discontent, the corporation could vote him out and put a new CEO in his place.
So Ducey tells the employees, “You’re right, there’s a problem, and we’re going to address it. I’m on your side. Improving the lives of my workers is priority number one. So I’ve developed a plan. It won’t take care of all your concerns right away, but it’s a strong start. “
CEO Ducey makes a public display of working with the board to look for ways to invest in improving workers’ incomes and working conditions. A few months later he declares, “I’ve succeeded. The board has decided to increase the amount we spend on employee-related issues by $163 million. It’ll be used for raises, bonuses for our best employees and building improvements.”
It all sounds good until you look at the details. Less than a quarter of the money, $34 million, will be spent on a one percent raise for everyone. But 15 percent of the employees, those who work in specialized plants producing the company’s most valued items, will get bonuses amounting to 8 percent of their salaries on top of the one percent raise. They’ll also get brand new, state-of-the-art computers along with other improvements to their work places. Their bonuses will turn into permanent raises, as will the money for workplace improvements, if their work stays at a high level. Total cost of the benefits to the fortunate 15 percent: $38 million.
That’s $72 million down, $91 million to go.
The amount of work at some of the plants sharing in the $38 million in bonuses and improvements has increased to the point that they’ve outgrown their facilities. Six new facilities will be built at those sites, at a cost of $64 million.
Now $136 million is accounted for, $27 million to go.
Taking care of the overdue building repairs and upgrading the worn out, outdated equipment at all the company’s plants would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and there’s not nearly enough money for that. CEO Ducey decides to allot $16 million to cover a fraction of the necessary repairs and replacement. Plant managers will write proposals, and the board will decide who will receive the limited funds.
We’re down to the last $11 million.
CEO Ducey decides to scatter the remaining money over a grab bag of feel-good programs. Day care centers at a few plants will take care of some workers’ young children. Some families with school-aged kids will be selected to receive grants to purchase internet connections for their homes. The corporation will create a few evening education classes to help workers improve their skills and get their GEDs. A little money will be used to pay for workers’ community college tuition. These are token efforts to fund programs to help employees, but the CEO happily adds them to his resume, mentioning them regularly in his speeches and press releases to let people know, “I care.”
Ducey takes to calling himself “The Worker’s CEO” and patting himself on the back whenever he’s talking to a reporter or speaking to a crowd, bragging that his employees are his highest priority. He gets great press in business journals and kudos from chambers of commerce. Some reporters in local dailies and weeklies are taken in by the nonstop public relations campaign and praise the CEO for his efforts to better the lot of his employees. But the workers and their families aren’t impressed. The only benefit most of them will see is a one percent salary boost that amounts to a quarter of the $163 million outlay, an insignificant raise which leaves them at the bottom of the national pay scale. A few workers will have their plant walls brightened with a little paint, a few selected sites will have their leaky roofs patched and their bathrooms fixed so all the toilets and sinks work. Some workers will receive a few perks which will help them a little, but they could afford to pay for the benefits themselves if they received the salaries they deserved. Only the top 15 percent of the employees will reap significant benefits.
The business community and some reporters wonder why the employees aren’t more grateful. They got $163 million, didn’t they? What more do they expect?
This article appears in Jun 1-7, 2017.
“The plant workers are unhappy.”
In the real world those people would change jobs. And most that have some intrinsic value do. But when it’s government they unionize and whine until they get what they want. Glad they didn’t taint my children’s view of a successful career.
Once upon a time there was a CEO who fell under the sway of an Evil Magician who believed in strange and irrational theories about an “Invisible Hand” which super-naturally controlled the operations of the manufacturing plants in the CEO’s corporation. Another doctrine of his was that of “constituent investment” which magically appeared to fund things in the manufacturing plants which the CEO refused to fund. Receiving direction remotely from this evil magician who cooked up boiler-plate directives in his magician’s lab on a remote mountain top, the CEO used these formulas to change governance in the corporation and to strip away every form of beneficial oversight and funding which actually kept the manufacturing plants functioning well and producing the desired goods.
Some of the manufacturing plants were small enough and cohesive enough that their workers and the communities surrounding them kept them on track in spite of the lack of oversight and funding. But there was one particularly large, particularly important and previously troubled manufacturing plant that went completely awry. It started manufacturing products exclusively for its management and their friends and entirely lost its sense of responsibility to its customers among the general public. It developed elaborate relationships and defense mechanisms that allowed it to remain completely impervious to complaints from customers who were not receiving the goods ordered from the company.
The CEO, still under the sway of the evil magician, believed he could solve the problem of the rogue manufacturing plant by bringing in a plant manager who also believed the doctrine of the Invisible Hand, and who would even further degrade and undermine beneficial local forms of oversight, on top of the higher level forms of oversight which the CEO had already destroyed. As a result, the products became even more shoddy and the customers even more dissatisfied.
The customers were so enraged that they managed to overturn the plant manager and then, emboldened by their victory, they said to themselves: the root of this problem is the CEO. Can we get rid of him?
This story might have ended well, but unfortunately, there were many among the rebels who believed in a theory just as strange and irrational as the theory circulated by the Evil Magician. This theory stated that increasing funding to the manufacturing plants — all of them, including the most troubled among them — would immediately solve all the problems with the faulty product, without a concurrent increase in the oversight and “quality control” that had been missing under the reign of the Evil Magician who believed in the Invisible Hand. A White Knight appeared on the scene who painted beautiful pictures of a rosy future with perfect products and blissfully satisfied customers. His beautiful visions swayed the customers and stockholders and they achieved their goal of replacing the CEO who had been a disciple of the Evil Magician.
But all too soon, the customers noticed that increased money did not solve the problems and deficient products continued to be manufactured. The customers, enraged that the beautiful future promised to them did not materialize, got rid of the White Knight CEO at the earliest possible opportunity and rule of the kingdom returned to the Evil Magician and his agents of the Invisible Hand.
My favorite Ducey bait and switch is the state paying for full-day Kinder, but only if the district as a whole has above a 90% free or reduced lunch rate. TUSD and Sunnyside get nothing, but 29 charter schools qualified.
All-day kinder = taxpayer-funded daycare.
To BSLAP: Saying all day kindergarten is just daycare just shows how out-of-touch you are. You know not of which you speak, please get better informed.
Yes, Pima Mujer, the Republicans in Phoenix have found ways to avoid funding TUSD and Sunnyside.
Why do you think that is? Do you think it has anything to do with the political networks interwoven with the governance and administration of those two districts?
In May 2017, HT Sanchez gave graduation speeches at two TUSD schools, apparently in ways that violated the terms of his separation contract with the district. He also signed the diplomas for this year’s graduates — diplomas issued about three months after he was forced to resign, leaving parents asking if the diplomas were even valid.
http://threesonorans.com/2017/06/03/mark-stegeman-addresses-ht-sanchez-possible-violation-of-termination-contract-trespassing-on-tusd-schools-was-forbidden/
http://threesonorans.com/2017/05/28/did-ht-sanchez-violate-his-termination-contract-last-week-which-banned-him-from-tusd-schools/
According to one of the sitting TUSD Board members, permission was granted to Sanchez to deliver speeches at these events by TUSD administration, without TUSD Board members being notified.
What was this supposed to show to the public? That some of the district’s representatives have no respect for their own governance structure and no respect for contractual obligations? That they will do whatever they want and thumb their noses at any authorities — including the voters and their elected representatives, including, in many, many instances in the past, the desegregation authorities — that disagree with what they want to do? Great example they are setting for the students in this district, making a spectacle of their willful disregard for our federal court system and the democratic governance structure of a public school district. And we’re supposed to believe this way of organizing an education system is preferable to what takes place in charters? Why exactly would that be?
They are no better than Ducey is.
We seem to have entirely lost the ability to deal with education as a Common Good in this state. It should be about providing the children of every citizen with as sound an education as possible, not handicapping and crippling institutions associated with the other side of the political fence. The children of Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, Independents, and the politically apathetic all need to be educated here. Sufficient funding and the same oversight and accountability standards — financial standards, teacher credentialing standards, curricular standards, etc. — need to apply to all institutions receiving public funds.
Instead, we have the non stop mud-slinging and mutual sabotage of two irresponsible party machines.
But that is no different than what we witnessed yesterday in the Comey FBI hearing. Comey admits he was the leaker to a prof @Columbia and NBC reports “it was a bad day for the President.” Really? I thought America realized it was being served by a buffoon in the FBI and I wonder how much other damage was done. The polictical lines have been drawn so far and so wide, we don’t even know all the motivations. But Comey did back off Hillary investigation when Loretta Lynch pressured him. Why is that not considered election tampering? That’s exactly what it was. Trying to control the outcome by unscrupulous means.
I have my head up my ass so far that I can’t even think straight. Funny thing is, I never could in the first place.
Let’s hit it again. Arizona 8th Grade Black students ranked number one in the nation in math. Hispanics ranked 11th and white students ranked 6th. They didn’t do badly in reading either ranking 14th, 7th and 29th respectively.
What are you going to do when we rank number one across the board? It will be so glaring that education researchers will no longer be able to ignore it.
Also, a massive teacher job satisfaction measure showed Arizona to fare no different than the rest of the nation. Higher pay does not produce greater teacher job satisfaction.
The vacancy rate speaks for itself, without an opinion survey.
Take it from the many fully trained teachers in this state who would be working in the field if the net annual compensation would pay even a fraction of the astronomically inflated per annum cost of enrolling their own children in quality 4-year universities, including public universities, which in this state were intended to be “as nearly free as possible.” Is estimated annual cost of attendance at the University of Arizona of $25K per annum “as nearly free as possible”? Only when the legislature is derelict in its duty to support the state’s public programs of higher education.
Treating education as a commodity and teachers as a low skill, low pay, easily-replaceable-with-untrained-strike-breaker labor pool is having and will continue to have disastrous effects on our schools, our young people, and our teachers.
We do need to increase funding. If we do so, I hope funding will be increased together with responsible oversight of how funds are applied, so the increase will actually benefit students and teachers, and will be sustainable and renewable.
No, the vacancy rate does not “speak for itself.” At the average pay for teachers in Arizona, $46,000 to $49,000 there would absolutely be no shortage of teachers. If placed in an open offer, people would line up in long lines to participate in that salary. There would be no shortage of teachers.
That vacancy rate takes place when teachers are paid $26,000 to $30,000. The legislature can only control the average salary, not the shortage salary.
All this talk about salaries is about something with absolutely no meaning to education other than to distract. A much more meaningful discussion would be to determine why teacher job satisfaction in this nation has plummeted over the last 10 years and how we can create more value and job satisfaction for teachers.
We don’t even know which school districts have the highest teacher job satisfaction and how they achieve it.
The “AVERAGE” pay for teachers in Arizona is $46-$49K per annum? Could you provide your sources for that figure? When I served on a public school Site Council in Arizona, in a school with unusually high faculty retention rates, with teachers who had been teaching for decades, some of them not too many years from retirement, there were no salaries on the salary schedule we reviewed that were higher than the high $40s. And you say that’s the “average” salary?
“All this talk about salaries is about something with absolutely no meaning to education other than to distract. A much more meaningful discussion would be to determine why teacher job satisfaction in this nation has plummeted over the last 10 years?”
Let’s pay physicians what we pay teachers. What would that do to our health care system? We would see, as we’ve seen in teaching in this state, a drastic drop in the number of people willing to do the job. But perhaps that analogy may not be acceptable to state level decision makers, in a context where many of the assumptions underlying their education policy seem to be fantasy-land throwbacks to outmoded forms of family structure and non-existent conditions in family economics.
Talk to teachers. They can’t even offset the expense of working with what they are paid. Many of them have stayed home with their own children during the preschool years to support their children’s optimal social, emotional, and intellectual development — an expensive choice. When they consider returning to the workforce, they often find themselves back at the bottom of the salary ladder for teaching jobs, with no credit granted on the salary scale for previous years worked in the field. When they take into account the services they would have to pay for to replace the labor they are removing from their households if they take a teaching job, the salary is barely break-even. It’s a net loss if they do what most I know do — pay for some of the unfunded supplies their students need out of their own pockets. There is ZERO or LESS THAN ZERO financial benefit to doing the job. So if they find they are in a position where they need to contribute to the family’s savings for the children’s college educations (and fewer and fewer these days find themselves NOT in that position) they take on higher paying work in another field.
Perhaps the teachers our state legislators like to talk to are the wives of plutocrats. Those are the only teachers who have the luxury of taking only job satisfaction, not salary levels, into account when deciding whether or not to fill one of the thousands of open teaching positions in this state. Sorry to disappoint RE the likely results of recent reductions in credentialing requirements, but given what the current income distribution is in this state, I think you’ll find that there aren’t enough college-educated wives of plutocrats around who can afford a net loss in the salary vs. expense ledger and want to do work as difficult as teaching is, even when you make it easier for them to do so by ensuring they don’t have to “waste” time in any of the teacher preparation programs which seem to be regarded by our state legislators as bastions of lefty group-think rather than as dispensers of valid professional knowledge.
It’s hard to make out what kind of a value system and world view is behind education policy in this state, but it’s definitely not real world economic analysis that fuels it. Connections could be drawn between our education policy and the desire to return to Father-Knows-Best and Leave-It-to-Beaver land, when women whose husbands were the main wage earners might choose to work in exchange for “job satisfaction” rather than in exchange for the type of salaries college-educated professionals in other fields earn. But in those days higher education costs were much less as a percentage of average family income and the only jobs available to women were teacher / nurse / secretary, drastically and artificially limiting available options.
“The legislature can only control the average salary, not the shortage salary?”
This statement doesn’t even make sense. The legislature controls how much funding is available to schools. The legislature’s budget cuts are part of the background behind insupportable, destructive cost-saving measures like outsourcing substitute teacher labor and destroying long term subs’ ability to qualify for benefits, what we saw recently in TUSD, a district serving more than 40K students in schools with an unusually high number of permanent teacher vacancies. The legislature can’t “control” that? They caused it and / or permitted and / or encouraged it, both through budget cuts and through disastrous failures of oversight and regulatory negligence and through the encouragement of privatization practices.
Is there any use in responding to some of the talking points in these streams? Perhaps not, but it’s hard not to express incredulity.
Response to Expressing incredulity:
The National Education Association, the source for teacher salary numbers, lists Arizona average public education teacher salary at $45,406 for 2013-14. Since then, prop 123 passed which was about a 3% increase in public education funding.
Prop 123, inadvisably, had no restrictions on how the money could be spent, so a 3% increase in spending does not necessarily mean a 3% increase in salary. Take a look at news coverage of the brouhaha in Southern Arizona about whether and to what extent TUSD chose to spend its 123 funds on teacher salaries.
http://tucson.com/news/local/columnists/steller/steller-tusd-broke-promises-with-prop-spending/article_db22aa44-bcf9-5845-bec7-89a189b53e18.html
Lots of interesting data on the NEA website:
Estimated average salaries for 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 for Arizona are $45,406 and $45,477. There was a great big average raise of $71 per annum between ’14-’15 and’15-’16, about a 0.2 % increase? That information is available on page 92 of this report:
http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/2016_NEA_Rankings_And_Estimates.pdf
How to explain the difference between that “average” salary and the compensation levels witnessed in some districts in Southern Arizona? I suppose the NEA estimated average salaries include districts that use other resources (besides state funding) to augment teacher compensation?
Here’s some additional data from NEA’s 2015 rankings of states:
Adjusted for inflation, 35 states saw real declines in average teacher salaries over the past decade. The following [11] states had average salaries declining 6.5 percent or more:
[…]
Arizona (-7.6%),
[…]
The U.S. average per student expenditure in 201415 fall enrollment was $11,709.
Arizona ($7,461), Utah ($7,711), Indiana ($8,034), Oklahoma ($8,043), and North Dakota ($8,518) had the lowest per student expenditures.
Response to jhuppent
2016 average public education teacher salary was $47,218 according to your source. That’s a whopping $22.70/hr if averaged for year round work. I, for one, don’t think that’s shit for educating my children and you couldn’t pay me enough to work with that much patience around kids all day.
Perhaps you should go back and get a new degree (costing thousands) so you can make that $22.70/hr and buy that house on the hill.