Lemme get this out: while I more than appreciate the work performed by teachers, police, and firefighters, I don’t appreciate them throwing the fact they do that job in my face.
We don’t live in a communist country where jobs are assigned according to intellect or bulk. Police officers and firefighters weren’t drafted. If you chose to be one, I applaud you but that being said, that doesn’t mean you get to tell us how much you get paid because you chose a job that potentially puts your life in peril. If it’s not worth the risk, I wouldn’t blame you at all if you walked, but this job safety-guilt trip shit is starting to fall on deaf ears.
As for you teachers, I’m tired of hearing how long you studied and how much it cost to get your degree so you could be a teacher. If that’s the case, it’s not all about the kids (as you constantly say before you walk out on them to go protest wages) but the career you wanted to get out of it. Granted, taking care of someone else’s brats can’t be all that rewarding, but you still get the summer off paid, almost all extended holidays paid, “professional” or “development” days paid, health, dental, tenure, and even a retirement package paid for.
Yet when you feel you haven’t been paid enough, you just demand more money from taxpayers, some of whom don’t even have kids (but have to deal with the defective product teachers leave us with).
It’s at the point where I really don’t care if you’re a cop, firefighter, teacher, or professional athlete. YOU chose that profession. YOU chose to accept the risks and perils that come with those professions, and YOU knew what the job paid when you applied and for all the ads the unions will put out over the next few months, complete with smiling union workers, I’ll tell you what footage was never shot and will never be in one of the upcoming ads: union workers saying “thank you” to the community after the latest property tax override and/or tax increase.
Anyone here remember a policeman knocking on your door and saying “thank you” for paying a higher property tax and saving his job, or a firetruck driving down the street with sirens blazing and firefighters waving to our neighbors, or teachers sending home one more note with kids saying “thank you” to the community for the raise?
I don’t, but they’ll be the first to leave flyers in your mailbox telling us how hellacious things will get if we don’t give them more of our money.
While their jobs are noble, they seem to feel entitled to not only our tax dollars, but our adoration.
When union members start acting like a part of the community instead of above it, then maybe we’ll feel more generous, but if you don’t want to do the work, someone more grateful for the opportunity will. But none of us could go into a union household and tell that family to spend more than it has for me. It’s about time well-paid union members understand they’ve been doing that to us for decades and we just can’t afford it any more.
Well done.
Very well stated Bob and true oh so true!
The idea is, if some people don’t do certain jobs, the rest are not free to take the jobs we do have. I don’t want to risk my life by becoming a police officer. But if no one does it, I’m not able to do what I would like to do. So, I thank police officers for doing what they do, so that I can do what I do.
As for the last paragraph, the country is not broke. It’s not money we don’t have; it’s money being spent on the wrong things. And, I’d like to meet all these people more grateful for the opportunity to be a teacher or police officer… I don’t think they exist. If they do, there is a high chance they are underskilled to be a teacher or a police officer.
Amen.
I grew up in a professional firefighter’s family in Fort Worth back in the 50s and 60s. My dad was the best in the department, and I learned that from other firefighters. By 1970 three of the top four most senior officers — the city chief and two of the three deputy chiefs — were people he had personally trained. Also, I don’t think I knew a firefighter who hadn’t been injured in the line of duty. My dad had broken an arm, had second and third degree burns on his hands, damaged a knee by falling through a floor and been blown out of a house that exploded due to a week-long gas leak (he was over 60 at that time). All these things happened when he was a captain, which means that he didn’t just stand way back and give orders; he led from the front.
And what I want to say to you, Bob, is
Amen, brother!
I need food and the people who produce and sell it, more. I want a car and gasoline and all the people that produce it, more. I want doctors and hospitals and nurses, more. i want to be entertained by talent. I want someone to keep my money safe and earn a return on my investments, more. I don’t need or want a single public school teacher, because teaching can be privatized with competition providing a tremendous improvement in results. (Public Schools have failed, while teacher’s pay keeps going up. Power corrupts, absolute non-competitive teacher power corrupts absolutely.)
Police and firemen are dangerous jobs. So is working on an oil rig, mining, working in metals industries, fisherman, power line men, construction, structural steel worker, professional sports, chemical plant worker, soldier, farmer, and on and on. We need and want them all.
What you want is nice, but what each of us wants has equal importance. Open your protected job, to yearly bidding. Allow those who’ll do the work gladly without complaint to replace you, so that you can chose more safety and employment where you are satisfied. .
Your seven cardinal vices are
1. gluttony-over indulgence in employee benefits;
2. greed- rapacious desire and pursuit of wealth, status, and power;
3. sloth- early retirement, long vacations;
4. anger-you don’t get what you want;
5. envy-you envy rich athletes and businessmen;
6. pride-identified as a desire to be more important or attractive than others, failing to acknowledge the good work of others
7. vainglory-boasting of yourselves and your work.
Why care for what you want, when you don’t care what others want or must pay to satisfy your greed and envy. Get your hands out of our pockets. I thank everyone who does their job honestly, diligently and without complaint
Whenever I hear of the law enforcement officer or firefighter bringing up the “putting life on the line” subject I can only think of men and (yes) women in the military. No union there. So until the death and injury rates (including training injuries and fatalities) for all others starts to approach the military and the long hours, long deployments I don’t really want to hear the justification for the need for higher wages and benefits or even the continued compensation at current rates.
It is not a secret that many emergency responders in NYC, Boston and other similar areas with strong unions practice hiring discrimination. Don’t think so? Just look at the pictures and names of the NYC firefighters and police that died on 9-11-2001. Mostly Irish names. So open the ranks and make the pay openly competitive and see what happens.
Oh yeah… thanks for serving, Bob.
My father-in-law was a teacher and hated the union. He called it evil. He and two other teachers rited near the same time because they could not stand the union anymore.
The government is corrupt. The unions have contributed to progressive corruption. They served as a temporary remediation for a time, but they have since become part of the problem.
It looks like the principal issues are too great to ignore.
New York Times: State Workers and N.Y.’s Fiscal Crisis
At a time when public school students are being forced into ever more crowded classrooms, and poor families will lose state medical benefits
I wonder if this can be attributed to immigration rates, especially to the illegal alien invasion.
To point out these alarming facts is not to be anti- union, or anti-worker. In recent weeks, Republican politicians in the Midwest have distorted what should be a serious discussion about state employees’ benefits, cynically using it as a pretext to crush unions.
When civil servants organize, they effectively create a 4th branch of government. Both civil and private unions enforce structural inequalities in the labor market. The unions serve to protect the status quo and mask the causes of underlying issues. Not to mention that there are union corporations which are multi-agency, multi-corporate, and multi-national. Exactly who do they serve?
Unlike Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Governor Cuomo is not trying to break the unions. He is pressing them to accept a salary freeze and a reduction in benefits for new workers. The unions need to negotiate seriously.
Equivocation is a character flaw. When they call a potato a “potahto”, that does not change the nature of the potato.
The state’s middle-class workers will have to make real sacrifices. New York’s many wealthy residents, all of whom are benefiting substantially from a new federal tax break, should have to pay their fair share as well.
They continue to betray their true nature. Once they break the middle-class, then a violent revolution will no longer be necessary, as was required in other community reorganization efforts.
The state’s middle-class workers will have to make real sacrifices.
Punishing the productive and responsible members is an effective way to sabotage the viability of a society. Rewarding irresponsible, counter-productive, and self-defeating behaviors is a certain way to collapse a civilization.
I think good intentions is all they have left. And without semantic games, they cannot even make that claim.
Consider the source (New York Times), because Cuomo is a fraud.
Cuomo’s first Teachers Union Payback:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/mike_cuomo_plan_skips_lifo_heave_PX1OTe5kW3zFbJa3D43S7H
Cuomo’s first SEIU payoff:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704005404576176913603098604.html?mod=WSJ_NY_LEFTTopStories#articleTabs_comments
The path to a Hell is paved with their “good” intentions.
Just another slush fund. This is becoming par for the course.
I give no credit to NYT, other than revealing the truth while equivocating to protect their special interests. That’s two birds with one stone. Whether it was intentional, or they are overwhelmed with the web they have spun, they continue to expose themselves. They continue to demonstrate that a real rift exists within the American left’s ranks, despite the common desire for coalition in order to achieve instant gratification.
I’m especially fond of the following line, which stands on its own, without any further context.
The state’s middle-class workers will have to make real sacrifices.
There goes “think of the children” and “think of the families” distraction.
It’s like we have awoken and discovered ourselves in a Marxist paradise. We’ll, I am not surprised. The first order of the establishment is to protect the castle and the occupants therein.
Just looked at the sign they are holding and thought this:
They are being silenced at the top of their lungs, just like the protesters in WI and OH.
As public school teachers in CA, my wife and I pay our union more than $2000 a year.
We’re both offended by the far-left political agenda we a forced to support. Our union was among the biggest funding sources for the anti-Proposition * campaign (Prop at was the anti- same sex marraige innitiative). Even though Prop 8 had absolutely nothing to do with education, the CTA/NEA more than a million dollars to fight the innitiative. All this was done without consulting the union membership. In fact, I didn’t even know about it until after the election.
Of course, we have the option of leaving the union…but we’d still forced to hand over a percent of our paycheck to the CTA. But by leaving the union we’d be forced to do without liability insurance, leaving us 100 percent exposed to an abusive lawsuit or a false accusation.
So as a teacher, you forced to either pay $2000 a year and have some protection, or pay nearly $2000 and be uninsured and unrepresented.
Pingback: Murphy's Blog