A state without public sector unions.

[Berkut]

I suspect there are at least 20 states who are all 50th in worker pay.

[Razgovory]

Any reason for this suspicion?

[Barrister]

Okay, so I'm a provincial employee who is not in a union (albeit the vast majority of Alberta public servants are).  I'm quite content with that status.

The thing is - the state / province is still subject to the labour market.  If they pay well, they'll get top employees.  If they pay poorly, they'll get shitty employees.

One thing I disagree with is the "whatever you do you can't be fired" notion.  Not that it isn't true in certain circumstances - it is.  But if unions exist to protect shitty employees from getting fired, then I really question why you have a union.  In my job we are not immune from being fired.  I know several lawyers who have been let go - not as part of layoffs, but the individuals were specifically let go.

[Admiral Yi]

A while back I read about a New York school's "rubber room."  It's where they dumped teachers they didn't want teaching but didn't believe they could fire because of the appeal process.  So they assigned them to sit in this one room and do nothing all day.

[celedhring]

We call that "to do corridors" over here (public workers with nothing to do, just walking up and down the corridors of the building). It used to happen a lot in Spanish state tellies, for example. Most of their personnel (writers, cameramen, postproduction, etc...) had no incentive to keep up with their skills, since they had guaranteed employment. So the public tellies ended up with a staff of hundreds that they couldn't use for anything more complex than the test card. Hence the tellies were forced to hire external personnel (like me), while their own staff was left idle.

It's slowly getting better now, since they lost their unsackable status in a reform a few years ago, which certainly lit a fire on their arse.

[Berkut]

We call that "to do corridors" over here (public workers with nothing to do, just walking up and down the corridors of the building). It used to happen a lot in Spanish state tellies, for example. Most of their personnel (writers, cameramen, postproduction, etc...) had no incentive to keep up with their skills, since they had guaranteed employment. So the public tellies ended up with a staff of hundreds that they couldn't use for anything more complex than the test card. Hence the tellies were forced to hire external personnel (like me), while their own staff was left idle.

It's slowly getting better now, since they lost their unsackable status in a reform a few years ago, which certainly lit a fire on their arse.

That sounds like a bunch of BS to me - I have it on good authority that union workers all work harder than non-union, and guaranteeing someone a job never, or at worst only rarely, results in anyone working any less diligently.

Everyone should get tenure. If that happened, everything would be so much better for everyone.

[celedhring]

Union rules in state TV were some of the most boneheaded stuff I have encountered. For example, to cover news they forced the telly to send the equivalent of a full football team to cover the event, where a guy with a camera and a reporter would have sufficed. Camera guy, guy to help camera guy, sound guy, guy to help sound guy, producer, reporter, van driver... the lot. Since the telly had to pay travel expenses and bonuses to all the people they sent to cover news, it came to a point where the telly actually *saved* money by hiring an external ENG and telling its own personnel to pick their noses and "do corridors". Of course, the unions would then cry foul.

Another one. In order to prevent the fact that state tellies were forced to hire so much external personnel, instead of relaxing union rules *another* rule came where somebody hired for 6 months had to be hired permanently by the telly. So tellies started to play merry-go-round with their external people in order to not get saddled with more permanent staff, which made things even harder.

You know, I'm quite pro-union in concept, but sometimes they make it really hard in practice.

Anyway, the whole thing ended up crashing down quite horribly and got reformed a few years ago. They are now treated as private sector employees, although it will still be a few years until public tellies finish transitioning to a more rational structure.

[Iormlund]

The sad thing is the public sector is pretty much the only employer in Spain where labour laws are consistently followed. Millions want to escape from the private sector, and it rarely is because they want to sit on their asses all day.

[celedhring]

Yeah, that is true. When I worked for TVE, they were extremely scrupulous about that - as opposed to some of the private tellies where I worked in, which for example sometimes broke minimum rest periods between shooting days (which is a pretty dangerous thing to do).

However, what happened in state TV underlines one of Spain's chronic problems. When the law isn't followed, we answer with more and stricter laws, instead of just making it so the current ones are abided to. In the case of labor laws, this forced "good faith" employers like the public sector to be increasingly saddled by more and more regulations, which were ignored in other places.

[Berkut]

The sad thing is the public sector is pretty much the only employer in Spain where labour laws are consistently followed. Millions want to escape from the private sector, and it rarely is because they want to sit on their asses all day.

I don't think the people sitting on their asses all day now in public sector unions went in to the job because they wanted to sit on their asses all day.

But given the opportunity....some of them will. Especially if actually DOING the job is challenging work.

[Razgovory]

We call that "to do corridors" over here (public workers with nothing to do, just walking up and down the corridors of the building). It used to happen a lot in Spanish state tellies, for example. Most of their personnel (writers, cameramen, postproduction, etc...) had no incentive to keep up with their skills, since they had guaranteed employment. So the public tellies ended up with a staff of hundreds that they couldn't use for anything more complex than the test card. Hence the tellies were forced to hire external personnel (like me), while their own staff was left idle.

It's slowly getting better now, since they lost their unsackable status in a reform a few years ago, which certainly lit a fire on their arse.

That sounds like a bunch of BS to me - I have it on good authority that union workers all work harder than non-union, and guaranteeing someone a job never, or at worst only rarely, results in anyone working any less diligently.

Everyone should get tenure. If that happened, everything would be so much better for everyone.

I have it on good authority that some people suspect that state workers in lie about their rate of pay.