President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Take it up with the municipalities that negotiated those deals. The unions did their jobs, which were to represent their members to the best of their ability. The municipalities were representing you in those cases and if you don't like what they did, that was their error.

Regarding not wanting to pay for someone else's retirement, that's the price of having employees. Municipalities are employers. That means they are going to have to deal with things such as retirement funds.

Or, as JC asked, are you arguing that nobody should get a pension?

 

Private unions just don’t function the same way. Private unions lack the cudgel of “every cop or teacher’s gonna walk out and hurt the mayor come election time.”

 

Pensions are fine, if a COMPANY decides it's a perk worth luring employees to make their companies more profitable to compete with other companies. Few do anymore.

You work for the government? Cool. You get a government pension, same as me. It's called Social Security.

 

Actually, that is functioning the same way. The threat of a strike is one tool a union can use to make sure its members are treated fairly. Those contracts you hate so much also help us to attract more talented and qualified individuals into those jobs. I guess you don't are much about having good teachers or police officers.

 

No, that's a federal pension fund that everybody pays into. That money comes from a different place than the pensions that municipal employees receive. Why should you have the opportunity to earn both a pension from your private employer and Social Security, but local town and state employees don't get the same right?

Again, like Alma, do you not care about attracting qualified people to be teachers and police officers? Why do you have so little respect for teachers and police officers?

 

I believe in pensions and unions. I also know public unions cost a lot. A glib dismissal of “well, that’s the municipality’s fault” gives short shrift to the declining reputation of unions because of these bloated contracts.

On the police front, it’s become downright untenable. Because we ask police to do so much (too much) legally that it necessitates gobs of overtime. Lay a cop off, and here comes the public safety saber rattlers.

The day’s coming when more private security firms undercut police contracts.

 

Because the COMPANY is paying me that "extra" money, not other citizens.

And the two combined sure as fuck will not amount to the $72,000 one of my teacher friends in Florida is currently bringing home each year --- right about the same as her salary when she retired.

Fuck that.

 

Why?

Should government jobs not be trying to get good people? Good jobs usually have some form of a retirement package, sorry yours doesn’t.

 

87 percent of state and local government jobs provide pensions.

87 percent of state and local government jobs are not "good."

 

I don’t hate those contracts. At all.

And I’m sorry but you just don’t really know what you’re talking about. When, say, beer truck drivers strike, it’s not the immediate front-page, live at 11 news story a cop or teacher strike is. A public union strike is a cudgel in a way the private union strike often isn’t. And when I write the words “I don’t begrudge” - I mean what I write. I don’t.

But when I say “it costs a lot of money,” I am dead right. It is an inconvenient truth for people who believe in unions such as myself, but a truth nonetheless.

 

Ah, so you’re simply bitter they are doing better than you.

 

Yeah yeah, you got yours so fuck everybody else.

If the public sector is performing functions of economic value, the qualified labor force will demand competitive compensation, including pension benefits. If the government employer agrees to those benefits, so be it.

Oh yeah I forgot, nothing performed or produced by the public sector has any value whatsoever.