Category Archives: Working For A Living

Solidarity?

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tankpipe

(click on the image to read the Tyee’s article)

Throughout my working years I was party to discussions about the role of unions in relation to their members and to the community as a whole. Some felt that the advancement of the economic well-being was paramount in the union’s business to the exclusion of all else. Of course, this being a teacher union, there was also a faction who felt that the social climate was of concern, given that there is so strong a link between the conditions of the learning environment and the well-being of the teaching force, not to mention parents and the broader community.  The Tyee has a piece today about the concerns of unions relating to jobs in the energy sector, a discussion that may drive the wedge that separates economic and environmental well-being in the debate about the construction of energy infrastructure. The trade-off, in the eyes of the energy companies, as in the vast majority of government circles, is that we have to accept huge environmental  risks if we wish to have the prosperity that the export of dilbit and LNG would supposedly bring to our province. Thusly stated, the dichotomy is false and avoids the discussion of who “owns” the economy as well as highlighting the short-sightedness of those leading the discussion.

 

Had we chosen to be serious about jobs and energy, we would long ago have adopted the construction of infrastructure for renewable energy, using public funds as well as reworked taxes and royalties on fossil fuel development to set in motion a transition out of the era of environmental degradation and the rapid use of finite resources for the benefit of a small minority of the population, and into an era of the deployment and maintenance of all forms of renewable energy, paired with a truly effective recycling program that would obviate the need to extract much of the mineral wealth that is currently mouldering in landfills around the country. It would also be reassuring to see industrial production focused on truly durable goods, items made to last a lifetime and more, goods that, when broken, can be repaired and which, at the end of their useful life, can be easily recycled back into remanufactured replacements.

 

A quick look at economic gains made by unions might very well show that they are rapidly eaten up by inflation and by new taxes and user fees imposed by governments looking to reduce the load on their business constituency. Gains in working conditions and environmental concerns encourage broader hiring, keeping benefits in the local economy and social gains for society as a whole. We have to remember that the terms of economic discussion have, for decades, been set by a consensus of people schooled in and attached to the Friedman/University of Chicago group of free market freebooters, a group who barely manages to hold back the tides of discontent as they move us from crisis to crisis and who have produced as great a disparity of wealth distribution as has been known in recent history. They have also been the crew that dispenses the results of their efforts and have not spared the froth in letting us know what a brilliant job they’ve done for us, but there is so little truth in most of the reporting that it’s hardly worth the effort it takes to read it. The bar has been set so low that it wouldn’t be hard for us to do better, all the while keeping in mind that we want to still have an economy in mid-century and beyond. Our current course will lead to disorder and destruction, and unions can step up to help alter the course so that our children, grandchildren and later generations will be the beneficiaries of a decent living space and some equality of opportunity to participate fully in the business of society.

Some Wisdom Shows Through

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tp-Web

 

“Economics is a form of brain damage.”
–Hazel Henderson (economist)
EW
The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.
—Robert Ingersoll
These two people were guests on a forum from Boston organized by HuffPost: they are people who work within the current system, but who have drawn the wrath of much of the political class for advocating a return to some saner version of our current economic/social/political régime. Thomas Piketty got an earful from Kevin O’Leary, and it would seem likely that Elizabeth Warren scares the daylights out of even some of the Democratic caucus, as well as the entirety of everything farther to the selfish Right of the political spectrum. Why is that?, you may ask, when what these two are proposing is the rescue of our “civilization” from eating itself alive and taking much of life on Earth with it.  Fundamentally, they are proponents of redistribution of wealth in the opposite direction from what the Washington Consensus and the Reaganite/Thatcherite bunch have written as law in the post-New Deal/post-Great Society era, in effect the taxation of wealth beyond a certain level of absurdity, where wealth ceases to represent a comfortable living and starts to represent power across the spectrum of economics, social affairs and into the deepest recesses of politics and governance.
Piketty and Warren don’t necessarily have all the answers to all our ills, but the refreshing part of what they say is the reasoned openness of their critique of the corruption and misdirection of human affairs where the corruption becomes entrenched in the institutions that are supposed to serve society as a whole and where  moves are afoot to destroy the last vestiges of the commons, or the ability of society to come together to address the challenges that society has, by and large, created. This is evident in many spheres, but is particularly acute in the environmental field where the fossil fuel has drawn a verbal palisade around issues of energy, economy, and living space, including not only the buying of political influence, but the criminalization of revealing the nature of the damage being done by drilling, tracking, and mining of carbon fuel sources.
It would be nice if we had a special sandbox where the rich folk could hold sway and trade in luxuries as long as they didn’t encroach upon what the World needs to be doing to address inequality (especially inequality of opportunity) while the rest of us worked in a more constructive direction to rebuild a society where sense would be part of the commons and where we didn’t depend of stuff to define who we are. Sadly, the trade in luxuries tends to require an inordinate share of economic resources that will be needed to provide a decent standard of living for all of the rest of us.
Thanks to Crooks and Liars for the link to the HuffPo vid.

Even A Broken (analog) Clock (with a quick update)

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Update: Heavens to murgatroid! I agree with something from the IMF! So here it is, via the Tyee.

 

…is right twice a day. ( I wonder if this means that we have, through digital clocks, lost half our accuracy.)

 

Subs

The broken clock/record, in this case, is the Fraser Institute, that tireless advocate of all who champion less government, mostly on behalf of wealthy and corporate sponsors. Yet an article posted in this morning’s Vancouver Sun makes at least partial sense when it chronicles the vast amounts of money paid out by three levels of government over the period from 1981 to 2009. The surprising statistic is that the total of subsidies over that period exceeds the current Federal debt, and outlines some of the yearly costs to taxpayers as well as showing that some of the most egregious offenders were corporations that were already well-established and profitable. It also doesn’t account for loans, often forgiven, such as the $457 million paid to GM to upgrade plant facilities in Ontario (this was well before the last major meltdown and bankruptcy protection/bailout for GM) or the awarding of perhaps-fatter-than-necessary contracts for infrastructure and IT. It does include marketing management schemes like the Wheat Board, and the indications are that all governments at both Federal and Provincial level are involved. It would be interesting to see how the Rae government in Ontario handled this file, as well as the Doer régime in Manitoba, Romanow in Saskatchewan, and the Harcourt/Clark crowd in BC. I’m sure that there are good reasons for subsidizing some sectors of the economy to shelter them from predatory practices in the marketplace, providing some protection of the general citizenry from the vagaries of a sometimes twisted and tortured free-for-all in the business world. However it also seems clear that there are many instances where pork barrels are the appropriate metaphor and where, clearly, taxpayers are not getting good value for their taxes. For the most part, the Fraser Institute, through generous subsidies from their supporters who then write these contributions off their taxes as a business expense or as, ahem, a charitable donation, generally falls squarely in the category of an enterprise supported by people it seeks to disenfranchise.

Generally, subsidies ought to be used sparingly and only when there is clear benefit to the broad majority of citizens. Few citizens realize that they are not only paying high energy prices at the retail level, but that they are also subsidizing energy concerns through tax breaks, free use of infrastructure, exploration write-offs, and direct subsidies, not to mention the insane current levels of government support and media attention for energy megaprojects. The sad fact is that energy is more expensive than we’ve come to think, and a large part of that cost has been hidden in the tax bundle that we fork out, wherein we get to purchase at least part of the product, whether or not we use it. The same is true of the products of many agricultural sectors, meaning that it seems outrageously expensive to buy local produce because the price in the market is so much higher than an “equivalent” from the supermarket, and a great deal of the difference can be accounted for by that portion that was handed out as subsidies, meaning that you are paying the supermarket and the CAFO whether you eat the stuff or not. I suspect that many would make different choices in many domains were they confronted with the real price of the seemingly-cheaper goods, and this reckoning doesn’t yet take into account the costs of health, safety and environmental considerations.

Finally, it seems likely that many of the côterie of free market proponents wouldn’t be so keen to support a market that was really free based on broad knowledge of the practices of both business and government.

Again, the prescient wisdom of Mose Allison…Stop this world, let me off, there’s just too many pigs at the same trough.

Encore Redux

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Yes, it’s like déjà vu all over again.

 

gc

 

Again, Gail Shea does the bidding of the Norwegians:

 

herring_venus

 

(Got this from the Powell River Pesuader)

Against the advise of her own DFO people and First Nations biologists and decision makers, Shea wanted to open up the West Coast of Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii for herring roe fisheries. Her advice from other stakeholders was that there might be enough fish to justify a commercial opening, but that said opening might threaten the long-term stability of the herring population. This would open the possibility of a cod-like collapse in the herring population, something with which Shea ought to be quite familiar in her home turf: it would deprive First Nations of ceremonial and food fish (thereby degrading their cultural heritage as well as a source of healthful food), and would knock out one of the pillars of the survival of wild salmon. Of course, this would make a nice complement to expansion of net-pen fish farming on the coast as well as the increased support that taxpayers have been forced to give to an industry that operates against the interests of said taxpayers. It’s all part and parcel of a policy line that removes citizen control and access to what ought to he resources held and managed in common, and a good reason to choke on Shea’s title of Honourable Minister of Fisheries and Oceans.

In The Isolation Ward

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olympic-rings

 

I had to leave the living room frequently over the last couple of weeks (it was beginning to look like a tart remark free-fire zone and snarkfest, mine all mine), and the weeks leading up to the last couple of weeks, and I’m gun-shy about turning on any broadcast media even now, lest I hear that taahh da-da-da-da  da-da-da-da  dum-dum-dum-dum and the stream of drivel that would follow, haloed with messages from Tim Horton’s and Molson’s, VISA, RBC, GM, McDonald’s and all the back patting and bonhomie that seems to accompany the least success in a major sporting competition. And now we’re into the post-mortem, picking over a corpse that wasn’t all that interesting in the first place.

There is also something of a sense of anticipatory dread stemming from the knowledge that the hype stream has already started for the World Cup this summer, the programs for which will barely have a chance to hit the recycling bin before we’ll hear the clarion of the trumpets signalling the barrage related to the next round of summer games.

The Russians admitted to $50 billion in expenditures for this round (check here for a point of view: who knows how real this is) . How much was spent by all those national teams in the lead-up to the actual competition, one might wonder, along with what a real reckoning of the disbursements for the Sochi installations. It would be interesting to compile a progressive equivalence list: what good could we have done with that money, material and effort were our empathic instincts less repressed?

Oh, and while we were so busy thumping our chests over our world domination in curling and hockey, the Ukraine passed from the hands of one set of oligarchs to a new/old set, Syria continues to be a warlord’s wonderland, Thailand is caught in a see-saw of interests similar to what transpired in Ukraine and the forces of evil are at work stirring things up in Venezuela. Our own deal leader went to misrepresent us in Mexico, then to sign away what last vestiges of democracy might still exist at a TPP meeting in Singapore, and his return will see the passage of an undebated Fair Elections Act that has about as much Fair as the Bush II. administration’s Clean Air Act had Clean in it. Our language is headed in the same direction as our ability to control our economic and political destiny.

Stay tuned. Or perhaps, even better, stay tuned out.

 

We Need To Do More Science (mild Irony)

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gc

 

This is The Honourable Gail Shea, Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, Government of Canada, loyal Conservative and Harperite.

She was speaking at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo yesterday on the addition of $54 million in research grants to the station’s budget, which really ought to be an expenditure to bring joy to our hearts. In support of the grant, Shea emphasized the need for the country to carry on additional scientific research on fisheries, and that certainly ought to be the case.

CTVVI News Report

Nanaimo Daily News Article

Problem number one with her grant is that it is directed solely at the expansion of aquaculture, specifically open-water aquaculture, of both shellfish and fin fish. The government’s program is clearly to support an industry that is largely controlled from beyond Canada’s borders and which, to say it mildly, is not without controversy. This grant will do nothing to lessen that controversy in that there are certain foregone conclusions inherent in the grant, those being that farmed fish are better for the economy than wild fish and that we should be fully invested as a people in net cage open water fish farming.

The first bit of irony lies in Shea’s statements that we need to do more science, this from a minister of a government that shuts down scientific libraries in the interest, on the face of it, of saving a rather paltry pittance in tax dollars. Shea chooses to ignore serious science in the public interest that indicated pretty strongly that fish farming, as it is currently practiced, harms habitat for a wide variety of sea life and threatens stocks of wild fish. The DFO has repeatedly rejected any results from any lab linking fish farming to the propagation of fish-borne viruses sea lice. This, of course, is very convenient for a couple of reasons, one being that it obviates the need for fish farming operations to be moved to dry land, and, secondly and of greater interest to the citizens of Canada, it allows for the degradation at least, and the disappearance at worst, of wild stocks. The degradation/disappearance of wild resources has a couple of benefits for the supporters of the Harper political/economic agenda: it turns the resource into a controlled commodity rather than a part of the biosphere to which all stakeholders have some access, and it removes the need to protect vast areas that have traditionally been protected as part of the salmon spawning régime, removing a significant set of obstacles for resource extraction. The science Shea wishes to pursue is the science of the foregone conclusion, that operates on the principle of perpetuating an ideological goal rather than discovering what all the implications are of the action contemplated.

My own sense is that the reports linked above both demonstrated another part of the tilted equation in that they tend to accept with little question the premise behind Shea’s announcement rather than giving sufficient time, space and credence to a well-documented alternative point of view. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if so many people weren’t convinced that CVVI and the Nanaimo Daily News, along with the preponderance of the press organs, speak with the force of deep and broad knowledge. They don’t, they are press release channels.

Hence, the following quip from Woody Guthrie:

“I’d rather have the devil running my country than the screwbally bunch we got in most of our offices these days.”

Meanwhile, here’s a little object lesson from Delbert McClinton:

My Canada

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MiddleOttawa to give IRS information on Americans living in Canada

Headline from the Globe & Mail, February 5, 2014

 

I am one of the million-strong contingent of American citizens living in Canada. I moved here in 1968 and have always resided here since that time. I spent one summer back in California in 1969 mostly, as it turns out, winding down some aspects of a social life that had run its course and was becoming irrelevant. Since then, I have made brief forays into the US, either to visit relatives and a few friends of increasingly long standing, or as part of an annual ritual motorcycle ride, a ritual that disappeared in the rear-view mirror of carbon consciousness a decade or so ago. I became a naturalized Canadian Citizen in 1974.

Due to a recent reinterpretation of US tax law, it turns out that I am delinquent in my filings for the IRS in the US, something to which I hadn’t given the slightest thought, not having generated any income in the US since I worked part-time in a gas station on the corner of Scott and Lombard Streets in the winter of ’67-’68. I did my university schooling here in Canada, worked a variety of part-time and summer jobs, always in Canada, and spent three decades toiling in the belly of the public education system, retiring to my office and garden almost eight years ago.

I don’t mind at all paying my fair share to support the common enterprise that is a nation and all the possible good it can do when citizens get together to provide the services that make life livable for all, and while I certainly don’t agree with much of the way the spending goes, particularly of late, I happily jump through whatever hoops are necessary to pony up what the law says I ought to: withholding at source ensures that I don’t often need to cut a cheque, but when that happens, I do so in the knowledge that I am fulfilling my responsibilities as a citizen, the price of the rights I am supposed to enjoy.

What I do mind, and what no one should have to go through, are unnecessary hoops and bureaucratic bumpf such as the IRS is now proposing, nay, demanding. OK, it’s the law, but we have to ask ourselves why the process can’t be streamlined in such a way that the process doesn’t need to be duplicated on two sides of the border. This is to catch people who are hiding income from the IRS to evade taxes. I don’t fall into that category. I don’t believe that the IRS has any claim to any of the income that I’ve generated in Canada over the last 46 years. Under the right circumstances, I would be happy to attach my Social Security Number to a declaration from Revenue Canada that I had no earnings subject to US taxes, and be done with it.  It’s clear that such will not be the process.

So the real pinch is that Revenue Canada is going to share my information with the IRS as a matter of policy. There are those who will posit that this is already happening, and that recent revelations of the actions of the NSA, CSIS, CSEC and who knows who else pretty much tell the tale that nothing that any of us does is cloaked from the broadly defined security establishment. This would certainly not have been the case when I first came to Canada, and there have been manifold occasions where the government of this country has more or less thumbed its nose at our neighbours to the south, particularly in instances where they weren’t being particularly good neighbours. Our current government is all of a piece with the corporate lobbyist-run show in DC, and, in fact, seems to be trying to outdo our American cousins at the game of enabling a Monopoly-style game of locking down the economy, and eventually all of society. I suspect that most Canadians have changed much less in this direction than their government, but the trend to intrusiveness and dishonesty is so widespread among those who direct our affairs that it seems to matter increasingly little what ethical positions might be held by the mass of Canadian citizens. Richard Newell, the infamous King Biscuit Boy out of old TO wrote a song that seems to characterize what’s become of our fair land: You Don Tore Your Playhouse Down Again

 

 

Competition

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FreutschBags

 

Patronats français et allemands réclament un pacte de compétitivité européen

French and German Business Leaders seek an agreement on European competitivity

I suspect that competitivity is a word made up to describe the competitive nature of an economic unit in terms of labour costs, relative costs of inputs, costs relating to taxes and legal impediments to production and other assorted sticks that get stuck in the spokes of those wishing to make money. I have only heard (seen) it in French media, although I do seem to recall hearing competitiveness around these parts.

In France they have an organization called the Medef, whose equivalent in Germany is the BDI, a group made up of the representatives of the largest business concerns. Much of what they do is to lobby their respective governments on policy matters that affect their ability to do business in as unfettered a manner as possible.This event is like a mini-Davos, and, like Davos, they forgot to send me an invitation.

It isn’t that there aren’t political parties that clearly represent the interests of business and the people who live at that end of the economic spectrum: parties that actually represent the interests of working people are few and considered somewhat on the fringe of the political spectrum: France currently has a Socialist government that gets more of its policies from the Washington Consensus than from any serious socialist theory, a party that has gone the way of Tony Blair’s Labour Party and the Democratic Party in the US.

When these two organizations get together to discuss the competitive nature of business and government policy, we can be sure that they are less interested in competition than in ensuring that wages and benefits, environmental regulations and energy considerations are likely to be diverted to the benefit of the members of their respective organizations and will have little to do with the well-being of either of the countries in question, or of the European Union. Their idea of being competitive is paying workers on a Chinese or Bangladeshi scale, eliminating pensions and sick leave and defunding as much of the social safety net as possible. It begins to look a lot like a cartel.

If you wonder why there are so many strikes in France, in Italy, in Greece, Spain and  Portugal, this has something to do with it. François Hollande, as a candidate, was full of much of the same rhetoric as Obama the candidate. As presidents, they have turned out to be straw men for the commercial class and toxic to the interests of the greater population. The real wonder is that we don’t have more unrest here in North America.

(Original article tom Liberation.fr)

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Billionaires…

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ToCourt

….’cause we got the government using the taxpayers’ coin to do the billionaires dirty work.

In a recent article on Znet, Gabriel Black describes a lawsuit being heard in California aimed at gutting protections for teachers and doing further damage to the state’s schools through further erosion of budgets:

On Monday, a trial began in Los Angeles County Superior Court that could eliminate teacher tenure in California and have national significance. It is part of a national campaign, led by the Obama administration and supported by both Democrats and Republicans, to victimize teachers for the crisis in public education.

Backed by a host of billionaires and politically connected lawyers, the lawsuit’s complaint cynically seeks to cloak a right-wing assault on teachers and public education under the mantle of securing the civil rights of students. Beneath the lawsuit’s pretense of concern for students is a well-planned initiative to dramatically reduce education costs.

In California, a tenured teacher can be fired for a variety of reasons ranging from “unsatisfactory performance” to “dishonesty” and “unprofessional conduct.” However, a teacher has the right to contest his or her firing and be reviewed by a three-person committee consisting of two teachers and a judge.

Beatriz Vergara, et al. v. State of California, launched by Students Matter with the backing of corporate executive David Welch, challenges the three California State Statues that allow for this hearing process. It also targets a statute that gives teachers the right to tenure and another statute requiring that less-experienced teachers be fired first when budget cuts are imposed.

The complaint alleges that “the challenged statutes have a disproportionate adverse effect on minority and economically disadvantaged students.” The complaint argues that “ineffective” teachers are disproportionately stationed in the schools of these minority areas with low-income earners. These students, they claim, are denied their civil liberty of having equal protection to an education.

The basic demand of those behind the lawsuit is to make it easy to fire more-experienced, higher-paid teachers. Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) superintendent John Deasy, one of the first witnesses called, and an ardent supporter of the lawsuit, told the courtroom that firing was a drain on “human capital” and that it was “too expensive.” In the years leading up to the 2008 crash, the LAUSD successfully fired only between 3 and 6 teachers each year using the dismissal process. In the 2011-2012 year, the year Deasy took over, that number increased to a record 99 teachers.

Nowhere in the complaint is there any hint of the real causes behind the crisis of public education. In the past few years, California’s K-12 annual budget has been cut by about $18 billion. Thousands of schoolteachers have been laid off in California, and hundreds of thousands nation-wide. Throughout the country, teachers face classroom sizes of 50 or more students per teacher, with inadequate textbooks, supplies, and proper cooling and heating systems.

If this all sounds vaguely familiar, then you’ve been paying attention: ever since Gordon Campbell’s tax cutting’ posse moved into the Rockpile on Belleville, provincial revenues have been either curtailed or redirected toward those businesses friendly to the current régime. Recall that more than two billion dollars were immediately taken off the books in reduced business taxes and the parade has continued with monster savings all over the store as whole departments went to the private sector, public servants were shown the door and where it essentially became not only risky, but illegal for those toiling in the public interest to bargain for a reasonable share of the wealth in the best place on Earth.

When the Hole In The Rockpile Gang got a smackdown from the courts at the end of last month, it was clear that they wouldn’t be accepting the judge’s scathing rebuke and making amends for their sins if they could at least drag out the proceedings until they can make an immediate election issue out of it (they may yet do that), or somehow fiddle the process, as they appear to have done in the BC Rail Circus, so that they get the result they want. The BCTF pays its own lawyers: that money comes out of the pockets of he teachers themselves. The government’s layers are paid by thee and me, sorta like I get to pay for the ammunition so I can shoot myself in the foot, a process that rankles more than a little.

Fassbender and the rest of the Deputy Dawgs can’t let this go unchallenged. The cupboard probably is legitimately pretty bare after they’ve reduced oil and gas revenues (thanks Norm) and put on the Five-Ring Circus, complete with shadow-tolled highway, the Millennium Line, Delta Port, SFPR (sounds like something out of ancient Rome), nonsensical IPP contracts (unless you happen to be the IPP on the receiving end) and a couple bridges wherein there is a whiff of cozy relationships between government and winning bidders and little things like secret contracts (the list is not exhaustive, sadly). In truest Shock Doctrine style, they broke it, just hoping they couldn’t be called to account for their actions and inactions, so not only to they have to defend their dominance and nastiness, they have to ensure that no one can go back and scratch around to find out where the money really went, sorta like why we used to be able to afford stuff and somehow we can’t any longer.

Billionaire David Welch can go ahead and blow millions on his case: he gave the money to a foundation that will write him a tax receipt and he may just come out ahead, meaning that he would be using taxpayer money to sue the state, also using taxpayer money, to advance the cause of private education.

OK, I finally got smart and went around Znet’s organizational difficulties and found Black’s article. The end of the article outlines much of what is wrong with unions, and I would be quick to point out that the BCTF lies at the other end of the spectrum: they may not be perfect, but they have done a lot of heavy lifting on behalf of all the citizens of BC (Phil Hochstein notwithstanding) in a scenario where the well being of students aligns well with what the teachers’ union is championing.

This case will probably get settled with only seconds to spare before the world becomes uninhabitable.

Inappropriate Time and Motion

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teacher-give-chance-to-students

 

Another piece cropped on the front page (Web) of the Globe and Mail yesterday about how teachers should be paid for performance rather than on seniority: I guess it had been too long since the Globe had taken a shot at teachers and at the public school system. Much of this grousing stems from the lack of desire on the part of those most endowed by out current economic system to pay for the enlightenment that should be the outcome of a thorough education for all, rather than just those students whose parents can afford to send them to Upper Canada College or Jean Brébeuf. It can also be the eagle stirring her nest, so that her young ones don’t get no rest (h/t Maria Muldaur for a 1974 recording of an old spiritual), meaning that we can’t let those fat-cat teachers get too comfortable.

Back in the early part of the last century, Frederick Winslow Taylor engaged in studies of industrial production, using time and motion studies as a way to building efficiency into the process of industrial production and refining the idea of measurable outcomes. It has become frequent practice to try to subject schools to the same process, usually by those who represent industrial output and who would like to defund the school system, or at least minimize it and bend it into a factory for productive labour. There are some flaws in the idea, and it’s interesting that the best debunking of the idea came from none other than Peter Senge at a conference in Victoria a dozen or so years ago. Senge was a business consultant and author whose ideas about changing business models found some favour in the late Ninties and early Oughts, but in this address to senior district administrators and ministry personnel, he had some choice thoughts for the gathering.

 

He compared schools to industrial concerns in terms of both input and output. In many production facilities, there are strict controls over the material on which the process is based, and material that doesn’t meet spec doesn’t get into the chain of production. All else is rejected. This, of course, doesn’t work well in a system of universal education, in which society undertakes to educate everyone’s children as opposed to selecting only the brightest and the best, or the most compliant, or the strongest, fastest, most adept.

Along the chain of industrial production, an enterprise will control as many factors as possible in the run-up to output so as to minimize deviation from spec and guarantee consistency of product at the end of the process. This is difficult for schools, given that the level of parenting will vary considerably, the presence of constructive/destructive influences outside the school system will vary widely, and the school system has call on the clientèle for only part of the day. During the other part, students are bombarded with images and messages as an incitement to consume and often actively encouraged by influences in the wider community to refrain from any exercise for their intellect. Unless there is serious intervention by the family or another agency, it is easy for any real education to stop at the school room door (the converse can also be true, where the dead air can happen in the classroom and where the student avails himself of opportunities outside of class to engage his faculties and pursue constructive interests, a necessary phenomenon when curriculum and delivery are dumbed down and strictly controlled within the school system). Again, in the industrial framework, any unit that doesn’t measure up along the production chain is simply flushed out of the system and ceases to be part of the responsibility of the organization. This is more difficult in the case of schools where the utmost effort must be made to retain all students in some part of the educational framework, lest they become part of the remediation/incarceration network.

Measurement of outcomes is difficult for schools. In the immediate aftermath of  public schooling, there are measures of how quickly students enter the job market or post-secondary education (and, eventually, the job market), as well as success at exit exams. These exams measure only a very limited and often mischosen set of outcomes and in a way that often means little or nothing. In the current economic climate, employment statistics are likely not going to be very good because of a dearth of real employment, particularly the jobs worthy of a career and where an exiting student might perceive the ability to build a life on the work on offer.

In addition, there is a serious quandary (not in some minds, I’m sure) about who determines whether a teacher is successful, about which teachers would deserve to be rewarded with merit pay and which teachers should be working for reduced salary because of shortcomings. A great deal  of personal preference and the arbitrary would be difficult to avoid. Fairness and justice in the distribution of benefit doesn’t seem to be one of society’s strong points, and the same can be said for a lot of individuals who have risen to positions of authority for reasons other than simple and demonstrated competence.

Finally, there is the matter of pay. Teachers will generally have spent five or six years learning their craft at university at their own expense. They will then spend eight to twelve years climbing up the salary scale until they reach their maximum. I would say that, by all means, we should remove the “seniority” clause: pay teachers the top salary from Day One. Teachers who are not competent need to be flushed out of the system if they can’t, given the opportunity, develop a series of processes and strategies that will result in success as an educator. But let’s also do the same with doctors, dentists, lawyers, judges, politicians, nurses, burger flippers, insurance sales people and the rest of the folks who toil on behalf of the general population. Teachers should do more of their training in the actual schools and should be paid to do that work, much as we do with apprentices in the trades and should access real salaries as soon as they get a position following successful completion of their training.

It is unfortunate that society has become so much a reflection of its industrial/consumer underpinnings: as a society, we are becoming increasingly unfit to judge the appropriateness of our institutions and incapable of bring the change to the institutions (as well as the creation of new or repurposed institutions) that the same society needs to thrive in the future. In the process of rebuilding our processes of education, a good first step might be the reform of the press and the cheap-shot journalism that produces screeds  such as the article that set off this whole rant.