[pc86]

It's not "just asking for due process." Everyone has interacted with a government office with an absolutely worthless employee who is just sitting around counting down the days to retirement where they can continue getting taxpayer money for doing nothing. Just because there's a process to get rid of someone doesn't mean it will ever happen.

This is a ploy to make it harder to fire bad programmers. If I have to try to hit a deadline and my coworker is garbage, I want my boss to be able to fire them and start finding a replacement, not start a six month process of paperwork, meetings, and HR CYA bullshit with the sole purpose of avoiding some bogus NLRB complaint.

[WalterBright]

I read a statistic some years ago that public school teachers have the lowest rate of firing of any profession. The union has been successful in instituting a "process" for firing a teacher that is so onerous, time consuming, and complicated that it never happens.

The only way a teacher can get fired these days is for showing up drunk or high, or having relations with a student.

(And yes, in spite of this, there are some gems of teachers.)

[inhumantsar]

> showing up drunk or high, or having relations with a student

having worked in a school district and staying in touch with colleagues afterward, I can honestly say that most people would be surprised at the number of teachers aren't fired for misconduct like that, particularly showing up drunk or high.

it seems that getting shuffled into an administrative role or a year of paid leave are the goto solutions whenever an incident can be handled quietly.

back in my grade school days, there was one teacher who would routinely lose her shit and scream at people.

when it inevitably escalated beyond that (usually throwing objects.. chalkboard erasers, garbage cans, even the occasional chair), she would simply end up teaching at a different school in the same district.

they managed to keep that game going for over twenty years.

[WalterBright]

I suppose it's worse than I thought!

I read that teachers are fired at a lesser rate than doctors having their medical license revoked.

[vundercind]

There are multiple unions involved with teaching, depending on the state, not just one national one (the NEA or what have you). In some states teachers unions are effectively toothless and aren't even part of the contract negotiation process.

This should make it pretty easy to see how union strength affects firing rates (no, I don't happen to have the data on hand). IME schools tend to avoid firing teachers even when they easily could, in favor of pushing them out, because they don't want the bad press from a firing, so my guess is firing rates for teachers are low everywhere.

We might further hope to see whether union strength affects education quality, but there are too many confounders—the states with weak teachers unions tend to be red states and to have weak economies, either or both of which may have stronger effects on educational outcomes than union activity. But, on the specific question of the effect of teachers unions on teacher firing rates, we can maybe get something like a useful experiment out of these state-by-state differences.

[WalterBright]

What would you suggest is the reason for extremely low firing rates for union teachers?

[vundercind]

“Union teacher” isn’t the distinction, as unions also provide useful professional insurance even in states where they do practically nothing when it comes to employer/employee relations, so many teachers are still members. Do states with strong teachers unions have lower firing rates than those where the unions do almost nothing? I’m saying we may have to look elsewhere for the explanation, if the firing rate in states with nearly-useless teachers unions aren’t closer to where you think they should be.

I’d guess the rates remain low even with weak unions because schools are piss-pants scared of bad publicity, due to the public’s role in (indirectly) hiring and firing the top of their pyramid, and in allocating funding. But maybe I’m wrong and rates of firing are closer to whatever you consider a desirable rate, in states with weak unions. I did go looking, but couldn’t find datasets tackling that in particular. Frustrating, because with that we could get at least a strong hint of the actual effect of unions on this specific thing.

[lmm]

> Everyone has interacted with a government office with an absolutely worthless employee who is just sitting around counting down the days to retirement where they can continue getting taxpayer money for doing nothing.

Everyone who has interacted with a large company has met a more highly-paid negative-productivity employee than even the worst government worker.

> Just because there's a process to get rid of someone doesn't mean it will ever happen.

If managers aren't competent or motivated enough to follow a process, I sure as hell don't want those same managers firing people just on their say-so.

> This is a ploy to make it harder to fire bad programmers.

No, this is about making it harder for management to fire programmers who do pesky things like informing other employees of their rights, or refusing to work unpaid hours.

[shadowgovt]

> If I have to try to hit a deadline and my coworker is garbage, I want my boss to be able to fire them and start finding a replacement

It appears we have stopped teaching Mythical Man Month in university.

[JamesBarney]

An inexperienced good employee will slow you down far less than an experienced bad one.

[mrguyorama]

>Everyone has interacted with a government office with an absolutely worthless employee who is just sitting around counting down the days to retirement

This is not because "it's hard to fire government workers" as often stated, but simply because government runs on a shoestring budget and cannot hire only good people.

Also because a shocking amount of people working in local government didn't realize Ron Swanson was a fucking satire character.