The role seniority should play in hiring decisions

There are some jobs where unions should not be allowed to impose strict seniority rules that take preference over other considerations. I think tthat  is the case with teachers and some other professional jobs where the job involves a need that people have for the highest quality performance from the professional. I used to be a legal aid attorney, and then the director of a legal aid program and I think that in that context as well seniority should not be the basis for who gets to secure and do the job. There are other nonprofit and government jobswwhere I think seniority should also not be the sole basis for decisions about who gets and does the job and these include the police and fire department professional employees. Part of the reason for this is the importance of the work to the public but it’s also necessary because for a long time some minority candidates were not actually considered for these positions and therefore hiring decisions were not legitimate ones.

In all other respects I think that unions are one of the most valuable things in our society. They give people the ability to work collectively to get things done with respect to their employers. Unions also play a great societal role in terms of helping bring people together in communities around issues important to the community. While I was a legal aid attorney I worked on projects where community organizations, churches, synagogues and unions got together to work with an organizer to try and fix community issues in the communities where I was working. Even though I was a lawyer. It seemed to me that bringing people together in this way to fix their own problems was much more impactful than having a lawyer try to resolve the problem for them.

None of this is to say that seniority can never play any role in decisions about these positions, but rather that it should not be the controlling factor when it comes to making these decisions as it typically is today. I don’t think that there should be any such thing as tenure with respect to public education. I believe that school’s should be to be able to hire people who are new rather than feeling an obligation to continue to employ people that seem no longer to be the best people for the job. It really goes beyond seniority to the ability to get rid of people who are no longer performing at a high level. if you expect to get paid as a professional and work in a professional job. You should be held to a high expectation of competent performance.

I feel completely different about other kinds of jobs and the role of seniority with respect to them. I think that seniority should play a very strong role if not a controlling one with respect to factory work and similar occupations, though that should be somewhat overcome in occupations where people of color and women were not really given a chance to get into the union in the first place. That is the case with lots of unions and union positions, though not with all. Some unions that are newer don’t have this history of discrimination behind them. I think that Unite is such a union.

the Clinton Foundation

I think that there is a way good way to deal with the #ClintonFoundation as an issue for Hillary. I think it would be possible to simply argue that same people that would give money to the Clinton foundation are some of the same people that the Secretary of State would want to meet with in any event. They are business leaders, and leaders in the nonprofit community, and political leaders both in the United States and overseas. Making this argument would make it possible to talk about all of the good work that the Clinton foundation has actually done.

I think that one of the real problems with the campaign’s response  to the foundation as an issue  is that no one has been talking about what the foundation has actually done. Lots of campaign ads from the other side  have suggested that the money from the foundation actually goes into the Clinton’s pockets. It is important to deal with this perception as well. To talk  about how foundation’s work in terms of where the money actually goes and why doesn’t go into the pockets of the people of set up a foundation.

There has been so much good work  accomplished by the foundation that it’s pathetic that no one is trying to make clear what the foundation does and how the foundations funds are not  actually available  to the family for their own use for personal expenses.

The Electoral College

 

We have a lot of discussion about a constitutional amendment to do away with Citizens United but there is another constitutional amendment we need to be fighting for all as well. The idea of the Electoral College is ridiculous in this day and age. We need to have direct elections for every office without this Electoral College system standing in the way. Presidential elections would be very different in that they they would be considered to be contested everywhere in the country rather than only  in a few swing states which is the way  presidential elections are currently viewed. We need a system where everyone has a reason to understand  that their vote as has as much of an impact as everybody else’s including those people who live in what are now considered to be swing states. That can only happen in a system that’s based on one vote per person rather than a system that’s based on the state you live in.

If we were not using the Electoral College system for presidential elections there  would be no such thing as swing states.  Every vote would counts the same regardless of where you live. That’s clearly the way that elections should be contested and decided.

Charter schools

 

Charter schools are beginning to get a lot of support from liberals and Progressives and I think that is because everyone recognizes that the way the current public school systems work is really not the best for the students. I think there are two different reasons why that is particularly true. One is that currently the regular public schools only provide services beginning around 7 AM until about 3 PM in the afternoon. Most parents need to have the schools available until about five so they don’t have to hire a sitter. Most research also shows that starting at 7 AM is not a good thing for students because they are not really awake at that time of the morning enough to learn in class.

The other thing is that teachers are now chosen by seniority rather than by their ability as teachers. This issue is one that would involve liberals and progressives in battling with teachers unions about using seniority as a basic criteria for choices within the school system, and most progressives are not willing to go there even though it’s probably best for students.  In my mind when it comes to things like education it should be possible to remove underperforming workers without a lot of problems, and replace them with new workers who may do a much better job. I think that the needs of the students should take precedence over a current teacher’s desires to remain employed. I believe that in a lot of cases younger teachers would be preferable to some on the currently tenured faculty and that when that is the case then in the context of education I think that seniority and or tenure should not be allowed to stand in the way of providing our kids the best education possible.