Tomorrow in Madison

This seems like a politically inept move given that Republicans are going to claim that the unions don’t care about the children. Plus there will be working parents who now have to scramble to find daycare for their kids.

(And I’m not asking that sarcastically: I don’t have to go campus tomorrow because mine’s closed, and I just assume everyone else’s is too.)

Schools are closed for Presidents’ Day.

The teachers in Madison have been calling in sick en masse at the urging of the union, which amounts in practice to a strike but is technically not one. To strike outright would jeopardize union treasury and teacher jobs, both. It is a strike in all but name, and for good reason in all but name.

You know, I’m quite certain that if I took an unauthorized vacation, and turned in a fraudulent medical excuse to explain it, I’d be fired. Care to explain why these teachers should be treated any better?

For Christ’s sake, Brett, if you took the illegality of the Wisconsin teachers’ sickout and put it next to the continuing illegality of the chronic non-enforcement of labor laws by the NLRB over the last several decades, it would be the size of a pea next to a planet. Can’t you bring yourself to get as indignant about the colossal injustice inflicted on unorganized, relatively powerless American workers over many years as you are about a gesture of defiance by teachers (probably supported by an overwhelming majority of their students) against a high-handed and double-talking state government?

Harry, you say it is not a strike, but they are holding mass meetings and counting heads as to whether people want to go back to work or not. It’s not a formally declared strike, perhaps, but it is a voluntary withdrawal of labor, collectively organized. What you say about how teachers are actually performing their duties while existentially refusing to sign in is fascinating and noble, but it still seems a strike to me, in essence.

But more power to them. While contracts are meant to prevent strikes, in this instance collective bargaining is threatened mortally, lending a moral legitimacy to striking despite a contract being in place.

By the way, teachers like almost everyone else (certainly professionals or those with union contracts) have a routine allocation of sick leave. Few of us make it across a career without taking a few days off with illness as an excuse. Since these days are built into the contract I see it being pretty hard to discipline these teachers since the burden of proof will be on the district to prove them not to have been sick.

The only difference between what’s going on now, and a regular strike, is that a regular strike is honest illegal.

“that lots of private sector workers, as well as entrepreneurs, depend on public sector spouses for their health insurance.”

In no small measure because providing that public sector health insurance costs enough to burden the private sector to the point where things like health insurance can’t be afforded.

@22: It’s not such a burden to the private-sector businesses who administer the health care to public-sector workers. Or to the people who fix those people’s cars, mow their lawns, etc.

Tax money doesn’t just vanish off the face of the earth, you know (and even if it did, money isn’t wealth in the first place). The primary effect of this cost is to *make people healthier*.

In any case, the private sector absolutely can afford to provide health insurance to its workers. It just chooses not to because that is more profitable when the workers lack the bargaining power to demand otherwise. Putting the screws on the American worker is not a matter of necessity; it is a matter of opportunity. (More precisely, for a corporation, there’s no difference. Any profit you can make, you must make, or be replaced by someone less scrupulous who will do it anyway. Corporations are not just profit-making machines, they are racing-to-the-bottom machines.)

Look at it another way — what if private-sector employers had no choice but to provide health insurance to their workers? They would do so and costs would go up. So that everyone would pay slightly more for consumer products, but have health care — surely a worthwhile tradeoff. An iPad, however cheap, is useless to a corpse, or even just someone with untreated macular degeneration.

But one business can’t unilaterally provide health care and raise prices without losing competitively — only the government, or unionization or serious tightness of the relevant labor sector, can overcome the collective action problem. (Henry Ford is not a good counterexample; although he may have meant well, his policy was more high-minded than cost-effective, and only his first-mover advantage temporarily allowed him to get away with it.)

That’s why it’s generally pointless to blame an individual corporation; the system that pits corporations against each other for the prize for getting the most productivity out of workers while paying them the least is the problem.