Non-Contractual Employment

Burt Likko

Pseudonymous Portlander. Pursuer of happiness. Bon vivant. Homebrewer. Atheist. Recovering Republican. Recovering Catholic. Recovering divorcé. Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of Ordinary Times. Relapsed Lawyer, admitted to practice law (under his real name) in California and Oregon. There's a Twitter account at @burtlikko, but not used for posting on the general feed anymore. House Likko's Words: Scite Verum. Colite Iusticia. Vivere Con Gaudium.

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179 Responses

  1. Saul DeGraw says:

    You can even go further back to see regulation. The English Government first enacted employment laws in the period of Black Death to prevent labor from being mobile and demanding higher wages.

    The problem with pay cuts in the 19th century was that the pay cuts did not correspond to a drop of rent in the company town or a drop in prices in the company store. Pullman tried to be enlightened but ended up failing badly in other measures.

    There used to be parental expectations or relationships between the employee and employer. An apprentice could also be considered a future son-in-law/heir if the Master had only daughters. The same was true in early offices. According to Cubed: The Secret History of the Office, modern white collar culture was not created until the 19th century. Most early 19th century offices were small and cozy. You had 2 or 3 partners and a handful of clerks. Clerks could eventually rise to being a partner and/or son-in-law of one of the partners. The initial pay for clerks was low (50 dollars a year) but the raises could be quick. The same thing could theoretically happen today especially at smaller businesses and S-Corps.Report

    • @saul-degraw

      The English Government first enacted employment laws in the period of Black Death to prevent labor from being mobile and demanding higher wages.

      Good point. I particularly like the spectacle of a pre-Black Death lord trying to find a way to unload himself of all the “claimants on his beneficence” (i.e. serfs) and his grandson trying to find a way to prevent his subjects from quitting the manor and serving someone else.

      I also think you point to something else. Employment has probably for a very long time had a strange relation in the law and policy. Now and perhaps for the last 120 years or so, it is and has been conceived largely as a contract issue. But before then and, if Burt is right and if I read him right, after then, it might be something else.Report

  2. Michael Drew says:

    Haven’t read it all yet, but in the early going this strikes me as a contender for the best post in the history of the site. It’s a post that seems to have been waiting in the aether to be plucked down and given pixellated form by someone equal to the task. I can’t think of anyone more so able than @burt-likko to have done it.Report

  3. Kazzy says:

    Excellent piece, Burt. You actually touch on something I’ve been thinking and struggling with a bit recently.

    Independent schools are a bit of a unique environment. For the most part, we are and have been union-free since our inception (there are some exceptions but they are rare). The nature of our work makes abruptly firing or quitting very problematic. We are in the business of providing care, meaning we tend to attract a certain type of person to our ranks. And we talk a lot (and tend to work hard at) fostering things like community within our institutions. As such, employment in independent schools is very often seen more akin to a relationship than a contract. But the law and broader culture do not reflect his. Consequently, problems can arise.

    There is growing dissatisfaction among my colleagues (myself included) with our administration. This is due, in part, to the increasing sense that we are seen as cogs in a machine — easily replaceable and of little inherent value. Not only does is this demeaning in general and insulting in particular to professionals armed with masters degrees and performing a task that is nearly impossible to standardize (despite what some reformers might argue), but it is also very much antithetical to how most folks in independent schools — employers and employees alike — tend to see their relationship. Many of us mention that one of the reasons we choose the independent sector over the public sector is because we wanted to avoid this very type of relationship. We wanted to work somewhere where mutual care and concern were seen as vital to the employment relationship/contract. We didn’t want to work somewhere where employees were exploited — denied mutually-agreed upon provisions of their contract because the labor market favors the employer, even if this is done so legally — and independent schools tended to both promise and deliver on this expectation.

    The difficulty in my situation is that one side tends to see our engagement with one another as a relationship such as you describe at the end there and the other tends to see it strictly as a contract. The new administration (just wrapped up year three) has a very, very different mindset. And the problem — at least I think it is a problem — is that the employees are starting to adopt this mindset. Throughout my tenure there, I have been constantly willing to step up and perform duties beyond my job description if I am able to and if it serves the interests of my students, my colleagues, and/or our institution. This is how I came to find myself teaching 8th grade health (something I arguably wasn’t able to do but nonetheless did my damnedest anyway).

    But no more. When I recently floated the idea that I be relieved of certain formal responsibilities because I was being asked to do more elsewhere, I was told/threatened that my pay would be cut. “You have a contract,” I was more or less told. It didn’t seem to matter that I went above-and-beyond my contract when I was asked; my employer had no interest in going above-or-beyond her end of the deal. So, no more. I will do what I am contractually obligated to do and no more. I will bust my hump for my students and those colleagues who I feel indebted to (through a mutual sense of indebtedness) but will not go a step out of my way for my employer because that seems to be the sort of relationship she wants. So be it. I am not happy with this. This is probably the primary driving factor in me seeking employment elsewhere. But when expectations between employer and employee are not aligned, well, whatever relationship they might have is likely to suffer; especially if the nature of those divergent expectations are what type and form of relationship they are in in the first place.

    Perhaps it is a bit arrogant of me to insist that the institution is going to suffer if the current administration stays the course in this regard. Maybe their view of the employer/employee dynamic is the better one. I do think there are some ways in which a more contractual view of the relationship between schools and teachers can better serve our education system; a relationship that considers mutual care important should not seek to meet that need at the expense of the institution’s primary charges, its students (e.g., bad teachers should not retain employment simply because it is the “caring” thing to do). However, this can simply go too far at times. Teaching is something that is done as much with the heart and the soul as it is with the mind or the hands. You can take care of my mind with professional development opportunities and fill my hands with the proper tools to perform the task. But if you do not care for my heart and my soul, it is hard for me to perform what I’ve been tasked to do as best I can.

    Maybe I am overstating how unique the independent school world is in this regard. I’m sure there are other fields/industries that function similarly. Regardless of the nature of the industry or the ideal way of looking at the employer/employee dynamic, both sides should be earnest and respectful in their dealings with the other. Ultimately, this is what is not happening at my current place of employment, which is why it is unlikely to remain such any longer than it must.Report

    • Chad in reply to Kazzy says:

      Do you work with my wife? I’m joking but you sound like you’re in the same situation as her. The school is arts focused and originally had been one big happy family. New administration came in and now everyone’s watching their backs and keeping their mouths shut in fear of retaliation. The teacher turnover has been so bad that the board of directors requested a private survey – and the teacher in charge of conducting the survey was let go without any warnings.

      The thing is that when she first started we both would have been happy to say that the school was fine without any unions since the relationships were pleasant. Now we would prefer someone there to negotiate the rules for a formal contract.Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to Chad says:

        What’s amazing is that employers seem generally bewildered by employee unhappiness. They create a work environment wear nobody feels appreciated and fears being fired at any moment. They sense a change in mood and conduct a survey. When they don’t like what they hear, they just sack the messenger. The cluelessness is legendary.Report

      • Kazzy in reply to Chad says:

        We currently have an “Emperor’s New Clothes” situation. I recently got taken to task because I asked questions which not only exposed an ongoing issue, but which by the very nature of asking questions indicate I was less than fully satisfied. “People will think there is a morale problem if you ask questions like that!” “But there is a morale problem!”

        My boss has gone the other way: she simply didn’t put out the end-of-year survey that is customary. She says she didn’t get around to it and that we should just write down any feedback on index cards. Ridiculous.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Chad says:

        What’s amazing is that employers seem generally bewildered by employee unhappiness.

        There was a cartoon that was xeroxed and xeroxed over and over again and showed up stapled on every cubicle in the building at that one job I worked.

        A guy sitting behind a desk was yelling “why don’t our temporary employees show any company loyalty?”Report

      • James Hanley in reply to Chad says:

        My brother used to work at a retail outlet in a mall, and once he received a note from company headquarters addressed to Hanley Scott and informing of how much the company valued him. Oddly, getting his name wrong didn’t enhance his company loyalty.Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to Chad says:

        Jaybird, its amazing how few employers seem to understand this. If you treat people like irreplacible cogs and like dirt than they are not going to have any special loyalty to your company.Report

      • Kazzy in reply to Chad says:

        I recently called our telecom provider to discuss possible discounts. We had graduated out of all “new customer” promotions and were now paying full freight. The woman I was speaking with insisted there were no other promotions we qualified at that time. However, throughout the conversation, she started every other sentence with, “We really value your loyalty.” When I finally pointed out that charging me more because I’ve been a customer longer doesn’t really make me feel valuable, she insisted that they really DID value me and I just wasn’t getting it. I eventually just had to say, “I don’t think you know what that word means.”

        I understand why they offer new customer incentives. I understand that this woman was likely reading from a script and had limited discretion with regards to pricing. She didn’t really deserve the brunt of my frustration. But, seriously, it’s bad company policy to think that just saying something is enough to make it true.Report

    • LeeEsq in reply to Kazzy says:

      This is why unions are important. Without collective bargaining most people are seen as cogs in the machine rather than as assets by employers. One teacher or office worker or whatever is much like another.Report

      • Kazzy in reply to LeeEsq says:

        I actually disagree, @leeesq . My understanding of unions is that they contribute to the “cog” feeling. My counterparts in public schools confirm this feeling: some have been told not to go “above and beyond” because it makes others look bad. Everyone gets the same raises regardless of effort or competency. Teachers are shifted around from school to school.

        I’m not anti-union, mind you. I just don’t know that they necessarily combat that particular aspect of the problem.Report

      • Mo in reply to LeeEsq says:

        I agree with @kazzy, If anything, I would think that collective bargaining encourages more cog-like thinking. You are an X, you do Y and get paid $Z. We have certain rules on how to treat X and what they are required and not allowed to do. You will do Y, no matter what your individual strengths are because that’s what Xs do.Report

      • Burt Likko in reply to LeeEsq says:

        Not for nothing do union members refer to one another as brother and sister. I sometimes call at this because the relationship between union members and unions is more heavily contractual then the relationship between employer and employee. Breaches of those contracts become infested with heavy emotion, similar to that of breaches of family obligations. Nevertheless, the remedies available for those breaches resemble strongly the remedies available in a preacher contract situation.

        But, any labor lawyer can tell you that there is a complex and weighty body of statutory law governing the purportedly contractual relationship between union and management. There, there is a fair amount of legal micromanaging of the negotiation and administration of collective-bargaining agreements as between unions and management; with unions representing the employees acting collectively.Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to LeeEsq says:

        Even without unions, employers treated employees as cogs. This was especially true in blue collar, unskilled employment. One factory worker or minor was like another. Unions might discoruage innovation in some ways but they provide a lot of necessary protection.Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to LeeEsq says:

        The reason why unions don’t generally encourage going above and beyond is that doing so is rarely rewarded by management in most fields of employment. The only exception are people who work on the base salary and commission level. You wrote of a teacher than went above and beyond and got fired when she made a reasonable request for more. Lots of people in management seem to want to have the lion’s share of the profits and if they refuse to reward or even punish employees for going above and beyond than why should employees do so?Report

      • Kim in reply to LeeEsq says:

        Lee,
        I knew a man who did the work of four men and got paid double… so long as no one knew that mgmt was paying him under the table. The union would not have been pleased.Report

      • Will Truman in reply to LeeEsq says:

        Some companies don’t reward “the extra mile”… but some do. It’s going to vary from place to place, boss to boss. I can personally go either way. I definitely take notice of whether or not initiative is rewarded and display it accordingly. I’m also more likely to stick around a place where it is than where it isn’t. Which is kind of odd, because in the abstract “Just do your job from 9-5” is attractive to me. In practice, it breeds exactly the amount of loyalty as one might expect.Report

      • aaron david in reply to LeeEsq says:

        @leeesq as someone who is in a union, and has also managed union members before, @kazzy is correct, in that you are now seen as no longer working for the company, but for the union, or at best have divided loyalty. As far as the union is concerned, good only flows from the union, never from the “company.” Managing union members is intensely easy, as all you have to do is follow the contract. Managing a business with unions is very hard, as all you have is the stick, no carrot. In other words you can only punish, as any reward has to come from the union, and if you do reward an individual, you will be grieved, as that deviates from the contract.

        A union management contract is inherently antagonistic, as you have two groups vying for authority over labor and neither one of them can come at a given issue from the prospective of the other group.Report

      • Will Truman in reply to LeeEsq says:

        It should be pointed out that there is a degree of causality that runs both ways. Unionism is most appropriate where a degree of coggification has already occurred or makes the most sense.

        A lot of the places I’ve worked, I’d look at unionization and wouldn’t even understand how it would work. Job descriptions changed on a daily and hourly basis. They had to. At other jobs, whether I would have supported unionization or not, I could at least see a rationale for it.

        It seems to me that unionization would make less sense at an independent school like Kazzy’s than at a school that’s part of a district, under more centralized control, has statutory requirements, etc.

        Which makes the issue at Kazzy’s school less along the lines of unionization or lack of unionization, and more about management being stupid.Report

      • morat20 in reply to LeeEsq says:

        From my father (who was in a union for many years, before moving to management) unions discouraged working ‘above and beyond’ because doing so was potentially costing another union member’s job and/or because management would take advantage of it, depending on your viewpoint.

        Having personally seen the delight in which management will exploit someone’s willingness to work ‘above and beyond’ (ie, assign that work to you as a matter of course and overload you until 40+ hour work weeks, unpaid overtime, and the like are a fact of your job) I can understand their viewpoint.

        While some people may, rarely, be paid extra for doing the work of 1.5 people — most will just keep working unpaid overtime to get it all done, and when they burnout and get replaced the new hire will find that 1.5 people’s work of work is his assignment.Report

      • Jesse Ewiak in reply to LeeEsq says:

        @will-truman I see no reason why a union contract has to include work rules. The main reason why they were put into place for blue collar (or pink collar jobs when it came to teaching and nursing) was largely because the feeling was that if there weren’t rules, management would try to extract extra work with no extra pay coming from it.

        However, if there’s a white collar or even a service job where people do multiple jobs, there can still be collective bargaining for all the people who aren’t salaried employees, without saying somebody who is employed as a Folding Tech I can’t hang up any clothes. 😉Report

      • Kazzy in reply to LeeEsq says:

        @leeesq

        Some people, like myself, go above and beyond because we care about what we do and want to be the best at it regardless. I’m going to bust my hump for my students because I care about them. If this nets me more money, great. But it probably won’t and I’m okay with that. Maybe that makes me a sucker… who knows.

        But that same employee also did other things to go above-and-beyond, such as hosting special breakfasts with students to celebrate achievements. She did this at her own cost and with her own free time. Admin didn’t even know it was happening for a while. And she asked for no additional salary for it. But when admin did fight out, they ordered her to stop. Not because it conflicted with our mission or our values or anything else related to the quality of instruction and education we offered. Rather, the teacher in the room next door complained that it made her look bad because she didn’t do those things.

        So beyond not rewarding going above-and-beyond, my administration actively discourages it unless it suits their own interests.

        No one should be discouraged from working harder or better if they are doing it of their own volition.Report

      • Will Truman in reply to LeeEsq says:

        The wider array of employees you’re dealing with, the more divergent interests. At one of my jobs – and this is one of the more could-be-union places I’ve worked – my division putting limitation on hours would hurt the people over in account management. More money for this department means less money for that department. I have difficulty envisioning an internal union when job areas are too dispersed. I have difficulty envisioning an inter-company trade union with such abstract job descriptions.Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to LeeEsq says:

        Will Truman, my evidence is anecdotal but lots of workplaces of any size and all types seemed plagued by bad management these days. My only theory on why this is, is that management basically thinks that they could get away with. I’d argue there cluelessness might be ruse but the bewilderment seems to universal and sincere not to be genuine in most cases. There seems to be a situation where management knows that they can get away with treating their employees horribly for the most part but doesn’t quite comprehend why people don’t like this.

        I disagree with you about unions. There are plenty of relatively non-cognizable fields of employment that have some really great unions. Most of the theatrical unions and many public sector unions fall under this category. Unions allow the employees to argue as one and it gives them more power. That puts them on better footing when dealing with management.Report

      • James Hanley in reply to LeeEsq says:

        My faculty union’s contract is an interesting case study. The union came about in the ’70s as a direct consequence of a president seen by the faculty as very antagonistic and capricious. Absent that dynamic, there’d probably have been insufficient demand to ever form a union.

        And the contract reflects that dynamic. In order to get the college on board the faculty had to leave them more independent power than they would have liked. It includes a no strike clause, which of course severely hampers the faculty in contract negotiations. And while it has a lock-step sequence of pay raises based on status (Instructor, Assistant Prof, Associate, Full Prof), highest degree, and years of service, it also allows the administration to bring someone in at whatever level they want, so if the Prez really wants someone, they can bring them in with extra years of service, starting them at a much higher pay (which won’t sit well with those who’ve actually worked as long or longer and make less).

        That’s all informative and revealing, but probably not truly surprising. What I find most interesting is how poorly some of my colleagues and friends comprehend the bargaining process. Every time the contract comes up for negotiation, someone is sure to object that the union didn’t get the no-strike clause stricken. They seem to think that just standing firm on that point will make the administration accept it, but don’t grasp what a huge cost that would be from the administration’s perspective.

        That is all to say, if the employer is forced into accepting a union, they’ll try to negotiate the contract to benefit themselves every bit as much as the union will.Report

      • Will Truman in reply to LeeEsq says:

        employees to argue as one

        But the employees aren’t one. That’s another aspect of the problem. Account Management may be content to work longer hours, and would be frustrated with Processing because things aren’t getting done in time. When I worked in the office of a fabricating facility, my interests differ from people in the shop. The notion of collective bargaining works better in some contexts than others.Report

      • Will Truman in reply to LeeEsq says:

        I do very much agree with the fact that employers often misplay their hand (see that post I sent you earlier). I don’t view unions as a solution to this from the management’s perspective, though, because unions almost definitionally aren’t interested in the qualitative aspects that management is also often overlooking.Report

      • Dave in reply to LeeEsq says:

        @leeesq

        Without collective bargaining most people are seen as cogs in the machine rather than as assets by employers. One teacher or office worker or whatever is much like another.

        Respectfully, this worldview assumes that collective bargaining will change the attitude that management has about its workers. If management views them as cogs in the machine prior to collective bargaining, they may well view them as more expensive and harder to get rid of cogs in the machine that are a pain in the ass to deal with every time a collective bargaining agreement has to be re-negotiated.Report

      • James Hanley in reply to LeeEsq says:

        @will-truman

        As another example, the chemists at my college have a higher opportunity cost of being a college prof than do most of the English, History and Political Science profs (among others). But our contract requires equal pay.Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to LeeEsq says:

        Dave, at the same time most people do not have much power when it comes to individual bargaining. For the most part they need the job more than the job needs them. Only when you get into really high level employment is the reverse true. Collective bargaining creates a more level playing field for most employeees.Report

      • j r in reply to LeeEsq says:

        Dave, at the same time most people do not have much power when it comes to individual bargaining. For the most part they need the job more than the job needs them.

        This is true, but it does not mean as much as people often make it out to mean. Most employers have many times more power than any individual employee or job applicant. At the same time, however, employers rely on their ability to attract and retain good employees to stay competitive in their industry. The way to attract and maintain good employees is generally to offer people a compensation package that is roughly in line with the opportunity cost of their time and labor.Report

      • morat20 in reply to LeeEsq says:

        The way to attract and maintain good employees is generally to offer people a compensation package that is roughly in line with the opportunity cost of their time and labor.

        You sure? I mean, hmm…stagnant wages, soaring profit, CEO pay at ludicrous levels…seems like something’s been off kilter for decades now.Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to LeeEsq says:

        Morat20, exactly. CUNY recently got into the press for giving its new CEO a very nice six-figure salary and a rent-free luxurious apartment while their adjunct professors are being paid peanuts. NYU is another school thats known for its rather extravagant gifts to its top administrators and certain special people like Henry Louis Gates, Jr. whose getting a free apatment from them even though he teachers in Harvard. The difference is that NYU pays its adjuncts well because their adjuncts have much better union representation.

        Dave, very few companies have ever acted like this for employees at the low and medium ends of the hierachy. The general tendency was to get as much out while giving as little as possible.Report

    • Patrick in reply to Kazzy says:

      This is due, in part, to the increasing sense that we are seen as cogs in a machine — easily replaceable and of little inherent value… Many of us mention that one of the reasons we choose the independent sector over the public sector is because we wanted to avoid this very type of relationship.

      There are people who like to be cogs in a machine, but there aren’t many of them. Even those who have jobs where they are interchangeable with a robot fastening a widget, over and over again.

      It’s funny, the “Scientific Management” fad of the 1880s-1930s contributed to the rise of the union in American labor history simply because it was so easy to take that train of thought and regress it to treating people worse than labor animals. Although there were some efficiencies to be gained by a workflow analysis, taking it to 11 is horrible management practice and pretty much anybody who reads more than a couple of pages of management literature knows this.

      And yet, every year, a newly minted crop of MBAs forget all the qualitative stuff they learned in business school, they graduate and move into management positions, and they go batshit crazy with the quantifiable parts of their job and sow the seeds that eventually turn them into bosses just like yours, Kazzy.Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to Patrick says:

        I’m wondering why management is so pig-headed about this. My only explanation is that the upside from being short-sighted is so great from their standpoint and the downside so little that they have the luxury of forgetting about the qualitative part of management. The only real remedy is employee solidarity in the form of unions and collective bargaining. Individual employees have little power but collectively employees have a lot of power.Report

      • Kolohe in reply to Patrick says:

        “There are people who like to be cogs in a machine, but there aren’t many of them.”

        I would say though, that the vast majority of people value *predictability* in their daily routine, both in work and in life.Report

      • Patrick in reply to Patrick says:

        I’m wondering why management is so pig-headed about this.

        Because it takes a lot of skill to be a competent manager, and it takes not only that set of skills but additional ones to be able to evaluate good managers (kind of like assessing teachers). And, quite simply, there are too many management positions to fill. I don’t think it’s so much pig-headedness as it is trying to fill positions, and coming up with metrics to justify hiring decisions that enable all this sort of thing.

        Like, who really wants to hear “we’re not hiring the best and the brightest, we’re hiring people to fill positions because it’s just impossible to find competent management”? Nobody. And indeed, unless you’re a skilled manager talking to another skilled manager, telling this to your boss would probably get you fired, right?

        My only explanation is that the upside from being short-sighted is so great from their standpoint and the downside so little that they have the luxury of forgetting about the qualitative part of management.

        Well, when you need a full assortment of tools in a toolbox, but all you can hire is hammers… you’re going to justify hiring the best hammer you can. And then hiring quality hammers becomes the metric by which you measure success, unless you work really hard at making sure you’re still looking for screwdrivers and awls and whatnot.

        Which leads to more hammers.

        The only real remedy is employee solidarity in the form of unions and collective bargaining.

        I think you jumped too far ahead. There are a number of problems, here:

        * This requires the employee union to have competent management, and we already established that there aren’t enough management folks to go around.

        * This moves the problem of assessing management out of the problem domain entirely. Now it’s not a matter of having effective management, it’s a matter of making the union happy.

        Put another way, I don’t see good managers in heavily unionized sectors, either, do you? How many teachers in the public school unions still have problems with terrible principals or terrible school boards or terrible district managers?

        All of them?

        * The actual problem is getting good management, not making labor happy. Because good management leads to happy labor (see: any well-run company, and there are still several despite the difficulties in hiring good management). Trying to move the problem to “make labor happy” is shifting the goalposts, and creating more perverse incentives.Report

      • Kazzy in reply to Patrick says:

        I think my particular boss relies on the fact that we are the only independent school within about 30 miles (more, depending on which direction you go) and that we teachers have limited options for employment. It’s supply-and-demand. And if that is how she wants to run the school, well, that is her prerogative. But it is drastically changing the culture of the school. And maybe that’s what she wants. Again, her prerogative (at least insofar as she meets the expectations as laid out by the Board). But she shouldn’t be surprised when all the benefits that came from the prior way of doing things are washed away with the drawbacks she is attempting to excise.Report

      • Will Truman in reply to Patrick says:

        @kazzy As we discussed in my “Cogs & Clockwork” post, what a lot of employers find out is that their leverage applies to those who can’t leave, while the most desirable employees can’t leave because they are the ones that will have other opportunities.Report

      • Kazzy in reply to Patrick says:

        Exactly, @will-truman . I had forgotten about that post but you’re exactly right. It is amazing how short-sighted some managers can be. Especially in independent schools, where it is generally assumed that they will get at least a four-year leash unless their actions are grossly incompetent or criminal. I know four years isn’t the longest period of time, but it should be sufficient for someone to say, “I can look beyond the next 12 months.”Report

      • Barry in reply to Patrick says:

        “It’s funny, the “Scientific Management” fad of the 1880s-1930s contributed to the rise of the union in American labor history simply because it was so easy to take that train of thought and regress it to treating people worse than labor animals. Although there were some efficiencies to be gained by a workflow analysis, taking it to 11 is horrible management practice and pretty much anybody who reads more than a couple of pages of management literature knows this.”

        As opposed to the period before then, where Jeffersonian yeoman craftsman treated their apprentices as if they were part of the family.Report

      • James Hanley in reply to Patrick says:

        This requires the employee union to have competent management, and we already established that there aren’t enough management folks to go around

        My casual observation suggests that there are 5 kinds of union managers.

        1. Those who are cajoled into and grudgingly accept the role because nobody else is stepping forward.p

        2. Those who seek out the role because they’re very angry at management and think someone needs to stick it to them.

        3. Those who seek out the role because they have a quasi-Marxist vision of how the world should/does work.

        4. Those who seek it because it affords them a personal benefit (whether a little bit of power or a lighter work load).

        5. Those who seek it because they have good management skills and enjoy the management task.

        I can’t pin a distribution on the types, but in my experience #5 is regrettably rare.Report

      • Jesse Ewiak in reply to Patrick says:

        @james-hanley Couldn’t you change a few words around and say the same things about most people in management? Isn’t the dirty little secret about work in general is that only a very few people in the world are actually great at managing people and most of those people aren’t running a call center or a mid-tier office park?Report

      • James Hanley in reply to Patrick says:

        @jesse-ewiak

        Yes, sort of. I don’t think 2 or 3 would apply and 1 less often (maybe). 4 probably applies in spades. Aside from those details, though, I think it sounds like we’re both in agreement with Patrick that truly good managers are rare.Report

      • Mad Rocket Scientist in reply to Patrick says:

        @patrick

        Like, who really wants to hear “we’re not hiring the best and the brightest, we’re hiring people to fill positions because it’s just impossible to find competent management”?

        Perhaps this is a case of, “First, you need to have good managers handy”, but whatever happened to actually training good managers?* I think some places are trying, but it’s an inconsistent thing, and I don’t think there is a manual.

        My wife was recently telling me about one of her upper level managers who was on a rotation through her department. The manager was horrible at actually talking to the workforce, and my wife’s team was not shy about commenting on the managers poor interpersonal communication skills. She heard through the grapevine that the manager was counseled to improve, although no one knows if the manager was given any support, or left to figure it out on their own.

        *This is a problem all up & down the chain, in that no one wants to take on the cost of training new hires anymore, for a variety of reasons, not all of them economic.Report

  4. James Hanley says:

    Excellent post, Burt. This is by far the most intelligent response to a libertarian perspective that I can remember seeing here. Of course that could be seen as damning with faint praise, given the plethora of “you just want to get rid of government” comments floating around, but in fact I mean it is an outstanding and very demanding challenge to libertarians, not at all easily answered. I imagine the knee-jerk response is, “yes, but employment should be a contract,” but that doesn’t even begin to address your critique.Report

  5. Damon says:

    Good article Burt.

    Some thoughts:
    I never categorized my employment as a “contract”. I have an agreement, spelled out in the offer letter for x amount of pay, time off, benefits, etc. Those are all subject to unilateral change by my employer. I can’t see how anyone could call that a contract. There ARE real employment contracts but the majority of people don’t fall under them.

    @Kazzy I’m glad you and your fellows have realized your real significance to the organization. Everybody is replaceable. However, there is a difference between knowing this and being treated like this by manglement. (I find knowing my true position/worth/status much more valuable than believing I’m some unique person who the organization can’t live without-yes there are some of those, but few.) Everyone wants to feel appreciated and probably should be. As to your situation you described, that’s bad management. The natural reaction now is for you to say “that’s not in my contract” when you’re asked to go above and beyond. Again, not in the best long term interest of the company, but we can be notoriously short sighted.

    @Burt
    Dear god, when you list out all the legal points impacting employment, I read through them thinking “wow, I forgot about that one”. However, I suspect that most employees are blind to the impacts of these laws. “Amazingly, people just deal with this, for the most part.” Yes, the people who are responsible for complying with the law, monitoring it, and the reporting requirements, but the vast numbers of employees just get hired and work all the while all this goes on “in the background”.

    Your list a nice example of how we are “not free”, contrary to the illusion so many people have.Report

    • Kazzy in reply to Damon says:

      @damon

      One of the difficult things about the education “market” is how hard value is to assess. We’re not selling widgets which people can compare to other widgets easily. My school could fire me and replace me with a cheaper and lower quality alternative and it probably wouldn’t have much of an impact on their bottom line. Not immediately, at least. It is unlikely that any parents are going to leave over one teacher (though it is certainly possible). What is more likely to happen is that they make this same swap three or five or seven times — whatever it takes to reach a critical mass whereby the change in quality of what we provide is more evident. The reputation we’ve earned will shift and that will have a very real impact. It will be difficult to say, “Enrollment has dropped because of decisions X, Y, and Z,” again because of the complicated nature of education.

      But much of that is simply inherent to the current system. My particular institution simply has really poor management on a number of levels and for a number of reasons.Report

      • Kazzy in reply to Kazzy says:

        Case in point: A former colleague used to really go above-and-beyond. She was initially a classroom teacher but then took on an additional role overseeing our auxiliary programs for which she received a very modest stipend. The latter role was supposed to be largely clerical in nature: gather class offerings from teachers, sent out email blasts to parents, gather permission slips, etc. Nothing to major. Of course, it blew up from there and she was putting in 10+ hours a week to meet a bevy of new expectations for the program. Being a hard worker and someone who takes great pride in what she does, she did what she had to do despite ending up being paid less than minimum wage.

        After a year of this, she went to admin and asked for a raise to compensate her for more fairly and to account for the bevy of other things she did that were not part of her job description (namely, running the middle school student and the faculty talent shows). She was told to take a walk.

        The auxiliary program has suffered greatly in her absence. It got handed off to someone else — someone less well-equipped to run it — with the same pittance of a salary. The talent shows never happened; no one else stepped up to do them.

        We ignore all this when we look at dropping enrollment numbers. “It’s the economy,” we’re told. Um… no… it’s not.Report

      • Damon in reply to Kazzy says:

        @kazzy,
        Actually, I think the ONLY way to value education is the output. By that standard, many schools have very little. Of note is one county in the state where I live that has very good schools. A lot of people move to this county just for the great schools.

        And don’t confuse “replacable” with “just as effective”. I see this all the time in my work as well. It’s short sighted, but that’s how it is.Report

      • Kim in reply to Kazzy says:

        Damon,
        What output though?
        There are schools that only output geniuses, after all.
        They aren’t nice schools, they aren’t appropriate schools for children.Report

      • Jesse Ewiak in reply to Kazzy says:

        @damon Would that county still have great schools if say, the population doubled in ten years and 50% of the new population lived under the poverty line? Probably not. I would be a lot of “good” teachers would become “bad” teachers according to the latest metric thought up by a guy with an MBA.Report

      • morat20 in reply to Kazzy says:

        Would that county still have great schools if say, the population doubled in ten years and 50% of the new population lived under the poverty line? Probably not. I would be a lot of “good” teachers would become “bad” teachers according to the latest metric thought up by a guy with an MBA.
        You could take the greatest school in the US, transplant it and it’s staff into the worst school district in the US and you’d find…

        Most of the staff burn out or left, the grades didn’t budge after a mild spike the first year, and the school went bankrupt because it couldn’t afford the teacher’s previous salaries and they were surprisingly unwilling to take a pay cut to teach in a bad school in a poverty stricken area.

        Dad schools are a conflux of things, but it mostly boils down to ‘poverty’. Poverty means it’s impossible to pay for quality instruction (from teachers to supplies) and poverty means the students generally have bigger concerns than school. Poverty means teachers burn-out after banging their heads into the wall of their student’s lives.

        Of course, unlike every other field (except possibly nursing), teacher’s aren’t supposed to be concerned by [ay or other such trivial material goods. It should be a vocation, where pay is practically immaterial next to the joy of a child’s learning. *snort*Report

      • Jesse Ewiak in reply to Kazzy says:

        @morat20 Right. I’m sure I’ve said this phrasing before, but the biggest problem in education would still exist if you busted every union, eliminated public schools, and gave every parent a voucher for education – the fact our child poverty rate is one of the highest among developed countries (but hey, we’re beating Romania – USA! USA!).

        I’m not saying everything would be butterflies and rainbows if we knocked our child poverty rate down from 20-odd percent to ten percent, but maybe we can try that before we destroy public schools?Report

      • Jesse Ewiak in reply to Kazzy says:

        Oops – forgot the link and yes, before somebody jumps in, I’m well aware that “poor” in the US is different than “poor” in Bulgaria. However, in both places, when you’re poor, kids go hungry, light bills don’t get paid, and where those kids live is more dangerous than the median. Oh, and yes, this is from UNICEF, so it’s obviously all a socialist plot. 🙂

        http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/04/15/map-how-35-countries-compare-on-child-poverty-the-u-s-is-ranked-34th/Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

        Well, there was recently a ruling in California that a refusal to fire bad teachers did, in fact, infringe on the rights of students to get a good education.

        Which strikes me as *HUGE*.Report

      • Jesse Ewiak in reply to Kazzy says:

        Yeah, @jaybird, that was pretty much a terrible ruling with no actual basis in law and will very likely get overturned on appeal. If you don’t believe hippies like me or Scott Lemiuex over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, because we both obviously hate poor kids, then believe Orin Kerr over at (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/06/11/i-like-the-result-but-the-opinion-has-problems/) the Volokh Conspiracy.Report

      • morat20 in reply to Kazzy says:

        Jaybird,

        That decision is basically DOA on appeal. Orin Kerr’s (if you want a very non-liberal opinion of it) post on Volokh on it was basically an extended eye-roll. It, legally, was just a truly awful, awful decision. It didn’t even make sense — the core of it was underpants gnomes ridiculous.

        Strict scrutiny like that says, effectively, the law must be applied fairly in both theory and practice. (Poll taxes and literary tests, for instance, were technically applied equally to all but failed the ‘in practice’ part as they gave a disparate impact). The basic decision logic was “Bad schools can’t fire bad teachers easily, that makes them bad schools, therefore disparate impact” with no actual explanation of how good schools, laboring under the same rules, did not have this problem. (Poll taxes and literacy requirements for voting, OTOH, it’s pretty easy to show why whites got past it to vote and blacks, by and large, didn’t).

        It’s not like poor schools even had a higher % of tenured teachers.

        As a matter of fact, poor schools have less — higher burnout rates. Poor schools have serious trouble HIRING teachers (good schools generally have tons of applicants), not firing them. So the judge’s actual decision will make the problem worse, as he’s slashed one of the few benefits that good and bad schools offered equally (as good schools can and do afford higher salaries, better classrooms and surroundings, more prepared and focused students….).

        Really, really, REALLY bad legal reasoning. It doesn’t hang together either in a legal sense or a logical sense — pretty much a solid example of judicial activism, as it’s pretty clearly a judge who had a goal and tortured the law to get there.Report

      • Kazzy in reply to Kazzy says:

        @damon

        Measuring educational output in a fair way is damn near impossible. There are so many variables that go into it. Plus how do you measure things like social-emotional growth, love of learning, and the other things I key in on in my role? It’s possible, but very, very, very difficult and very, very, very time and labor intensive.

        A teacher’s quality can be assessed. It’s not easy, but it’s doable. It is not done via standardized tests.Report

      • Burt Likko in reply to Kazzy says:

        More than one person behind the scenes has solicited my analysis of this case. I’d like to oblige, but haven’t yet found time to do so in even a semi-coherent way.Report

      • Burt Likko in reply to Kazzy says:

        @kazzy — metrics, damn your eyes, we need metrics! How are we supposed to measure things without them? If you can’t quantify it then you can’t produce a better quantification at a later date!Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

        Well, the number one thing that strikes me as odd in any given discussion of education is the (unshared?) assumption that one of the points of public education is to provide employment.Report

      • Kazzy in reply to Kazzy says:

        @burt-likko

        We actually used to have a rubric-based metric evaluation system under the old regime. We were rated along a number of criteria from 0 to 4 or 1 to 4 (I don’t exactly remember) with a fairly detailed rubric used to determine what rating was assigned. It wasn’t perfect. There was inherently a certain level of subjectivity to it. I suppose some of this could have been boiled out with wholly objective measures employed in some areas, but this could not have been done in all and likely would have yielded minimal gains but at great cost. E.g., under the Professionalism strand, being “always” on time to meetings helped score a 4 while being “usually” on time to meetings helped score a 3. Now, if someone was 2 minutes late to 1 meeting all year, should they get the “always” or the “usual”? Technically, the usual. So “always” is probably a fairer representation of what that part of the evaluation is getting at. Saying they were on time to 99.2% of meetings would be most accurate, but the time and effort it takes to tabulate that for all employees* is prohibitive. But other things, like “Engages with children in a developmentally appropriate manner,” could only be purely objectively measured by recording every interaction and breaking down every word, facial expression, etc.

        So, metrics can be employed though they are still going to have some level of subjectivity to them. I don’t have a problem with that, provided those doing the evaluation are well-trained.

        * I imagine such records might want to be kept for employees who are not meeting expectations to provide evidence in the event discipline is pursued. But it is not necessary for the entirety of the staff.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

        Anyway, back to the case, if it is, in fact, dead on arrival then I guess it’s just another blip.

        If, however, they find that tenure is more likely to protect a burned out teacher waiting for his or her pension than a young and firey upstart who inspires students to write their own poetry, it seems like maybe there is a problem here.

        But, hey, I went to a good school district. My experience with teachers and whatnot was an awesome one and I left the public school system with a hell of an education.Report

      • Kazzy in reply to Kazzy says:

        @jaybird

        “Well, the number one thing that strikes me as odd in any given discussion of education is the (unshared?) assumption that one of the points of public education is to provide employment.”

        Employment to whom? The teachers??? I do not share that assumption. Generally speaking, I am troubled any time an argument is made that we absolutely must do X not because of the merit of X but because doing X creates/protects jobs. I don’t like it when Congressmen push for outdated military programs/projects to continue because it creates jobs in their districts and I sure as hell don’t like it if we are doing something that doesn’t further educative goals because it keeps teachers employed.Report

      • Kazzy in reply to Kazzy says:

        @morat20 @jaybird

        It was my understanding that the issue was that bad teachers who couldn’t be fired were being sent to struggling school districts because there was less backlash against them there. The tony suburban school couldn’t get away with teachers on probation but it was easier to hide them in struggling inner city schools where there might be lower expectations or a less-involved parent base or if other factors could be used to explain away their poor teaching.Report

      • Glyph in reply to Kazzy says:

        Well, we don’t want a lot of unemployed teachers, ominously hanging around on street corners and shaking down passerby to get their daily sudoku-and-apple fix.Report

      • Will Truman in reply to Kazzy says:

        At a former employer, we had something that was really quite measurable. When I first started, there was the “Board of Shame” which was the scorecard. It was still slightly game-able and thus was gamed. We also had the matter of one of our best people getting low scores because he was given all of the “problem” assignments while another person got the highest scores despite a mediocre accuracy rate.

        At some point, they determined that it would be easier not to measure accuracy at all and just measure output. You can guess what happened then. The idea was that it would help QA because we would no longer have to enter the data. It was, it turns out, terrible for QA because for every minute they saved there it cost them fifteen in catching more and more errors.

        They ultimately did away with it because, well, the managers knew who the good ones were and weren’t. So did QA. It was best to just proceed on that basis.

        Where it gets problematic is when you can’t rely on metrics or managerial discretion. What’s left?Report

      • morat20 in reply to Kazzy says:

        If, however, they find that tenure is more likely to protect a burned out teacher waiting for his or her pension than a young and firey upstart who inspires students to write their own poetry, it seems like maybe there is a problem here.
        Um, no. Tenure would be a “benefit” — a plus about your job, generally given in lieu of higher salary.

        Like my current employer pays me less, but offers a more generous vacation policy than my last. Ergo, I find myself looking at potential new employers under the “Is what they’re offering minus the cost of purchasing X days extra vacation still higher than my current salary”.

        Tenure is generally considered a benefit — for university level ‘classic’ tenure it’s obviously one. For K-12 teachers (in those states that offer it) it’s closer to a sizable perk — you’re generally far easier to fire than a university prof, it’s not guaranteed employment — but it makes it harder for some board member with a grudge or annoyed principle to can you, since it requires some actual cause).

        In any case, if you remove an actual perk or benefit from a job, you’re reducing it’s overall value, yes? Whether you think it’s a good perk or a bad perk from an outsider’s perspective, it’s STILL reducing one of the perceived benefits of the job. Which is, of course, pretty much exactly equivalent to a pay cut of some size or other.

        Which means the judge literally ruled that if every teacher in the state took the equivalent of a pay cut, this would improve bad schools.

        If this seems stupid to you, it’s because the decision was stupid — it claimed there was a disparate impact but never demonstrated it, and so the result is…a fix that had a uniform result that in no way changed the situation on the ground. Every teacher in the state basically took a pay cut, which obviously won’t fix the problem. Which is a pretty good piece of evidence that the judge was completely out of his gourd.

        Meandering back to your original point: Seriously, bad schools have problems retaining teachers. They have problems finding applicants. Because teachers can get the same or better pay and benefits in another school that is, basically, a lot less stressful.

        Bad schools are not plagued with burnout cases making time to retirement. Burned out teachers quit, or transfer to less stressful schools (ie: Better ones) and then make time to retirement, if they’re going to do that. Most just quit, the only burnout cases that stay tend to be close to retirement anyways.

        Sadly, at no point in this case did anyone really investigate whether bad schools had a problem with being unable to fire tenured teachers. It was, literally, just assumed based on an offhand comment from one expert who suggested 1 to 3% of teachers would probably be bad (based on the fact that, well, 1 to 3% of everyone sucks in their given job) and as he stated later, he didn’t even mean ‘firing’ bad he meant literally ‘needed more training’ bad.Report

      • morat20 in reply to Kazzy says:

        It was my understanding that the issue was that bad teachers who couldn’t be fired were being sent to struggling school districts because there was less backlash against them there. The tony suburban school couldn’t get away with teachers on probation but it was easier to hide them in struggling inner city schools where there might be lower expectations or a less-involved parent base or if other factors could be used to explain away their poor teaching.

        Based on? My school district consists of one high school, three or four junior highs, and maybe a dozen or so elementaries. Texas doesn’t have tenure, but school transfers simply don’t happen. Teachers apply for jobs at other schools in the district, but it’s the exact same as any large employer having an internal jobs board.

        Maybe that’s different in California, but even then — that’d only be within districts (obviously one district isn’t going to accept another district’s teachers like there’s some sort of NFL-style trading going on), and even then you’d have to show it at trial not just assume it was true.

        And seriously, it’s not that hard to fire teachers, even with tenure. It varies by state, but generally it’s just requiring due cause. I don’t know California’s specifics off-hand, but the process is roughly equivalent to handling firing a cop. Including the lay-off process (last in, first out).

        You know, you have to basically show they weren’t performing to standards and you gave them fair warning and a chance to fix it, pretty much the exact same documented steps my — non education, non-union — company handles, except I think teachers get an independent panel rather than HR reps.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

        Well, I remember this blog post from way back when:

        http://blog.simplejustice.us/2009/06/25/when-classrooms-are-lined-in-rubber/

        Unfortunately, the AP story it links to has gone up into the ether but searching for the text of the story still gets you to other places that excerpted it. (Including, brrrr, FoxNews.)

        Maybe things have changed in the last 5 years.Report

      • Damon in reply to Kazzy says:

        @kazzy,
        Frankly, since education is “for the children”, I don’t see any other metric other than “are the children being educated”. Yes, but the devil is in the details. Of course. But the bottom line is that. Understand I’m not talking about how to evaluate teachers. That may or may not be a factor in children learning. The simple thing is, that by that measurement, there’s a lot of schools not doing what they are supposed to: educating children.Report

      • morat20 in reply to Kazzy says:

        jaybird,

        One, that’s New York and not California. I thought we’d been over the fact that education — including teacher’s, teacher’s unions, tenure, and all of that weren’t federalized even remotely. (Again, Texas here — no tenure. Period. Oh, there are ‘permanent contracts’ but none are offered anymore and no one knows anyone who has one).

        As for rubber rooms, IIRC — not enough adjudicators. You can fire a teacher for just cause, which requires some amount of evidence (depending on the cause. Absenteeism is easy, for instance. Problems less subject to objective metrics, harder). New York has like 100,000 teachers and only had 20-something arbitrators.

        Rubber rooming is lazy administration (IE “Don’t want to fund enough arbitrators, don’t want to bother finding anyone up for arbitration work to do, so we’ll just rubber boom them) whining about having to do their job. “Oh noes, I has to pay for arbitration AND gather evidence? That’s so hard and I haven’t hired enough arbitrators, let’s just get rid of tenure so I don’t have to work so hard”.

        Years long wait for arbitration? Hire more. Teachers not allowed to teach until their case is resolved — if it takes so long to handle their case that it’s worth complaining about, you can certainly find them work to do. Grading papers, for one. Free up other teacher’s time.Report

      • greginak in reply to Kazzy says:

        I know this isn’t relevant but there isn’t actual evidence that unionized teachers produce poorer outcomes. Plenty of high performing states have teachers unions and plenty of low performing states don’t have unions. The one statistical analysis i found a couple of years ago controlling for the obvious factors like income found almost no difference between states with and without teachers unions. There are certainly bad anecdotes about teachers unions but overall, unless someone can show some data, there is no apparent difference.Report

      • morat20 in reply to Kazzy says:

        The simple thing is, that by that measurement, there’s a lot of schools not doing what they are supposed to: educating children.
        Actually, to be specific — it appears schools in areas of grinding poverty aren’t educating children well. They others do quite well.

        Which leads to the question: Why is geography and student demographics such a key indicator?Report

      • Alan Scott in reply to Kazzy says:

        @morat20 it’s of note that the plaintiffs in this case are all from big cities, and IIRc, were all students in mega-districts that consist of hundreds of schools. For example LAUSD is the second biggest school district in the nation after new york, consists of over a thousand schools and serves 700,000 students.
        I can’t speak for LAUSD, but I know with our local school districts, job openings must be offered to internal tranfers first, and only open to outside applicants if there are no qualified teachers seeking the transfer. I believe (though I’m not 100% sure on this point) that layoffs are based on district seniority as well, so that a position held by a senior teacher became redundant, a more junior teacher in a different position might be laid off to make room for that teacher’s transfer. In a place like LAUSD, it can be a lot easier to make a bad teacher someone else’s problem instead of firing them.

        One of the experts in the case testified that, basically, well run districts don’t have problems dealing with bad staff, and that the issue of spending many years and tens of thousands of dollars to fire a teacher was an issue of incompetent administration. Sadly, the judge in the case ignored this, along with most of the evidence presented by either side, and created an opinion that seems completely unmoored by the actual facts of the case.Report

      • Alan Scott in reply to Kazzy says:

        @kazzy , bad teachers aren’t being transferred to disadvantaged schools because there’s less backlash. Those school just can’t attract decent employees in general, and are stuck with teachers who can’t get work anywhere else.

        A few of my classmates in my teacher training program work, or did work, at such schools. The schools couldn’t find any credentialed teachers, so they’ve hired long-term subs and student teachers to fill those positions. You’d have to be a pretty terrible teacher indeed to be a worse option that someone whose only qualifications are a bachelor’s degree in a non-education field and the passage of a test that covers 8th grade math and 10th grade English.

        These teachers aren’t retained because firing tenured teachers is too hard. They’re retained because the teachers that would be hired in their place aren’t any better.Report

    • Barry in reply to Damon says:

      “As to your situation you described, that’s bad management. The natural reaction now is for you to say “that’s not in my contract” when you’re asked to go above and beyond. Again, not in the best long term interest of the company, but we can be notoriously short sighted.”

      Why? They’ve been extracting extra labor for no pay. As Kazzy’s learning, the teachers are quite expendable, the child be d*mned (and don’t think that management cares as much for the children as the teachers do).Report

  6. Michael Cain says:

    Nice piece. Might be worth noting that particularly in the case of a large corporate employer, much of the contractual boilerplate is written down, in the employee’s handbook (or whatever they call it). The employer may not ask the employee to sign the agreement, but it’s all spelled out, often in horrendous detail. When I went to work at Bell Labs back in the 1970s, the handbook was a rather thick three-ring binder, and new employees were advised to read the whole thing.

    On a tangent, about unemployment insurance. UI is a federal/state thing, with states encouraged but not required to operate a conforming program. The stick is the federal unemployment insurance tax/premium: it’s high enough that most states can operate a program with a smaller tax, and if the state operates a conforming program most of the federal tax on employers is never collected. Every state operates a conforming program.

    In the PPACA case, the Supreme Court seemed to say (IANAL, and maybe I’ve gotten the wrong impression) that the feds couldn’t make a potential punishment so extreme that states had no real choice but to conform. UI seems to fall into that category — all states participate, and while in theory the feds would operate a UI program in a state that didn’t participate, the federal Dept of Labor lacks the staff and computer systems to do so. That is, the stick is big enough that they know they won’t have to do actually operate a program.

    Thoughts?Report

    • I submit for your consideration that the large employer you discuss, with the thick, detailed, complex policy manual, represents even less of a contractual situation then the mom and pop store that hires on a handshake. That large corporation with the thick policy manual has, with 100% certainty, placed as one of the first sentences of that manual the disclaimer “this is not a contract.” Somewhere else, nearby that sentence, is another sentence: “management reserves the right to change, alter, repeal, modify, or add to any or all of the contents of this manual, at any time, and without notice.” If management exercises that right, and changes the policy on the fly, without telling anyone in advance that it is doing so, what are the chances that management is going to alter the compensation to employees to compensate them for the change in the terms of their employment agreement? Functionally zero. Management is going to do what it wants, when it wants, and it’s going to keep on paying you what it wishes to. The employee, meanwhile, does not have the right to alter the terms conditions policies or functionally any other essential terms of the relationship, certainly not unilaterally and without notice. That’s certainly an important relationship between you and your employer, and mutual agreement that these terms will govern that relationship may well be a facet of it, but that’s not a contract.Report

      • Kim in reply to Burt Likko says:

        Burt,
        I know folks who have worked on contract — and when the employer decided to slash the already-discounted pay rate, they found cheaper people to fulfill the terms of the contract.

        It strikes me that part of what’s broken about most employment contracts is the binary nature of negitations: “Take it or Leave it”Report

      • Mike Schilling in reply to Burt Likko says:

        A large corporation of that sort is like a government, in that if a manager violates those rules, the employee can appeal to the judiciary (HR) for redress.Report

      • Certainly some yes, also some no. Yes, there were places that said “company reserves the right to change these terms without notice.” OTOH, in some cases those reservations were meaningless — once promised by someone in a position to know, some retirement benefits are fixed. Eg, once they tell me that I’ll have health insurance forever once I meet specific age-plus-years retirement criteria, they’re stuck with that. Unless, of course, they go through the necessary legal mechanisms like bankruptcy, which voids lots of their contractual agreements. As pilots for multiple airlines have learned the hard way.Report

      • @burt-likko

        Are you familiar with Richard Edwards’s “Rights at Work: Employment Relations in the Post-Union Era.” In that book, Edwards argues that case law seems to be evolving in the direction of making employee manuals obligatory on the employer, even presumably if there is a statement that “this is not a contract” and that “the terms may be changed whenever.”

        The book came out about 20 years ago, and Edwards is an economist, not a lawyer, so I don’t know how much I trust his argument. But if he’s right, that might qualify your comment a bit. It might more deeply substantiate your broader argument in the OP, however, inasmuch as the case law might be evolving in a “relationship” direction as opposed to a *merely* “contractual” one.Report

  7. Kim says:

    The IRS does a lot to prevent crappy terms of employment, due to the threat/annoyance of an audit.
    However, if you don’t /mind/ an audit…

    It is possible to pay someone in chickens.

    It is also possible to pay someone a variable rate based on the tides, but such must be presented as a table and not an equation in the W2 salary slot (the equation implied that it would be possible to pay someone 0 dollars for their work, on a given day).Report

  8. Barry says:

    BTW, people should read: http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/29/fuck-me-or-youre-fired/ before commenting. The author wanted to find an example of employer behavior which not even the most hardcore libertarians would accept.

    He failed.Report

    • James Hanley in reply to Barry says:

      Because it’s not as simplistic as you think, Barry. We had a good discussion about that post sometime back here. I have lousy google-fu or I’d link to it. But in a nutshell, a lot of us considered forcing to fuck outside the bounds of the implied contract.

      But if you want to boast about the “most hardcore libertarians” saying X, the congratulations, you’re that guy all over again. And as everyone says, don’t be that guy.Report

  9. Barry says:

    Kazzy, your original comment shows absolutely nothing new in the history of labor, and especially of teaching. You and the other teachers thought that this was a ‘relationship’, meaning something over and beyond just a job for money.

    Management, of course, didn’t think this way, although they encouraged you to think so. If the original management actually did think that way, note that they were replaced with people who thought otherwise.

    As for unions making you cogs, you yourself are already thinking that way. You have a specific job, which you will do. You will only go above and beyond for people in your personal network. You no longer expect otherwise. Management is saying that you are an X, and will be paid Y. What they continue to do is to try to persuade you to do Z, with no additional pay, and where Z can be indefinitely expanded.Report

    • Kazzy in reply to Barry says:

      @barry

      Prior management wasn’t really “replaced”. The former head retired and one of the two assistant heads left that same year when she wasn’t considered for the position, taking a head role elsewhere. The other assistant head stayed on for two years before leaving of his own volition for a bevy of reasons (at least one of which was friction with the new head). I worked for one year under the prior administration. It wasn’t perfect. But one thing that headmaster did in his 17-ish years on the job was demonstrate a deep and persistent care for his faculty and staff as people. Many people who worked longer under him than I did have repeated the same refrain: “This used to be a second home, a family. Now it’s a job.”

      Now, maybe the new head is acting under orders of the Board, which is what she is ultimately accountable to. Maybe they wanted the ship tightened up or costs cut above other objectives. Who knows. But if that is the case, it is disingenuous to pay lip service to institutional culture and whathaveyou while ultimately seeking to do something else.Report

      • Barry in reply to Kazzy says:

        “Prior management wasn’t really “replaced”. The former head retired and one of the two assistant heads left that same year when she wasn’t considered for the position, taking a head role elsewhere. The other assistant head stayed on for two years before leaving of his own volition for a bevy of reasons (at least one of which was friction with the new head).

        In the sense of ‘fired/pushed out and deliberately replaced’, no.
        In the sense the old group is gone, yes.

        ” I worked for one year under the prior administration. It wasn’t perfect. But one thing that headmaster did in his 17-ish years on the job was demonstrate a deep and persistent care for his faculty and staff as people. ”

        Note that that is not necessarily a recommendation, from the view of higher management. That meant that he likely wasn’t getting optimal production out of the labor units.

        “Many people who worked longer under him than I did have repeated the same refrain: “This used to be a second home, a family. Now it’s a job.””

        It always was a job. At times, a job can carry extras, but in the end it’s a job. Sort of the whole point of this whole discussion.Report

  10. Jaybird says:

    When I worked for that managed service company sub-contracted out to that major multi-national corporation, I was also asked for some bodily fluids and told that a condition of my service was that I would provide more whenever I was asked to do so.

    Oh, and the bodily fluids would be tested by a biochem testing facility for a handful of markers and if any of those markers showed up, my employment would be declined (and, if established, terminated).

    I assume the fluids were tested by a testing facility, anyway.Report

  11. Francis says:

    On Section II (Lack of Consideration):

    In my view, the employment relationship is remade anew every single day. I wake up in the morning and have the choice to go to work, or quit. If I go to work, then I accept the rules that were rolled out yesterday. (This is particularly ironic for me, since I’m an in-house counsel and therefore the one rolling out the rules.) The guarantee of employment is simply an agreement to pay a certain amount of money if termination occurs before a certain date; except in rare situations (like union contracts) no court will require an employer to keep an unwanted employee on staff.

    Being employed, in California, is to a certain extent a status change. What’s a status, you may ask? It’s your major life events. Fetus v. Born. Minor v. Majority. Single v. Wed. Free v. Convict. Competent v. Incompetent.

    For each status, the State of California delivers a significant regulatory regime. Fetus? Your mother can kill you. Born? Not so much. Employed? Congratulations, you now have a whole series of statutory rights and responsibilities that didn’t exist before.Report

    • James Hanley in reply to Francis says:

      since I’m an in-house counsel

      Which, ironically, is not a work from home job.Report

    • Jonny Scrum-half in reply to Francis says:

      I think that this is right. I don’t agree with Mr. Likko’s point that the ability to change terms unilaterally means that the relationship somehow is less than contractual in nature. Rather, it simply is the result of the contract being “at will” on the part of both parties.

      To use a non-employment example, I filled-up my car at the gas station yesterday. I paid a certain amount per gallon for the gas that I bought. That was a “contractual” exchange, based my agreement to pay the advertised price of the gas. However, the gas station can unilaterally change the price later that day, and I can unilaterally decide to buy gas at another station. Nothing in the relationship obligates either party to continue the relationship on the same terms on which it began.

      Still, if the gas station demanded more than the advertised price after pumping the gas, or if I refused to pay the advertised price after the gas was pumped, the wronged party could take the case to court claiming breach of contract.Report

    • Barry in reply to Francis says:

      “In my view, the employment relationship is remade anew every single day. ”

      In other words, the standard libertarian attitude.

      Burt, I’m being a dick here, but I would appreciate it if you’d ask him to not pursue it. The internet is full of this standard line, and IMHO there are no more fruitful discussions to have on it.

      On the other hand, if you’d like this comment thread to devolve to Standard Internet Meme (i.e., wasting your time), that’s your privilege.Report

      • Will Truman in reply to Barry says:

        Hehe, now even bona fide, environmentalist, pro-FDR, pro-gun control liberals are being dismissed as libertarians.Report

      • Jim Heffman in reply to Barry says:

        You know, bro, if you don’t start none there won’t be none. If you’re so concerned about threads devolving into Standard Internet Meme then maybe opening with that Crooked Timber link is not the way to roll.Report

      • Dave in reply to Barry says:

        In other words, the standard libertarian attitude.

        No, it’s the reality for most of us that are in the business world. Apparently you don’t know much about the business world aside from what your ideology tells you.

        Burt, I’m being a dick here, but I would appreciate it if you’d ask him to not pursue it. The internet is full of this standard line, and IMHO there are no more fruitful discussions to have on it.

        I would appreciate it if you stopped whining every time reality offends your political sensibilities and step away from this conversation.

        You have no idea how sick I am of your immature bullshit. Go cry a fucking river elsewhere for all I care.Report

      • Francis in reply to Barry says:

        umm, no. Because labor is at-will on both sides, the labor contract / employee manual is essentially day-to-day. And therefore the State of California has created an enormous body of legislation that backfills all the details that are far too exhausting to renegotiate daily. At some level, the Labor Code is a little like the UCC, with less room for variation, in that it sets the standard implicit terms of every contract.

        My very small point, such as it was, is that the role of the State is so pervasive in the employment context that it is useful to analogize employment to other status changes recognized by the State.

        Libertarians don’t believe in the role of the State in setting those implicit terms, or so they’ve told me.Report

      • Chris in reply to Barry says:

        Because labor is at-will on both sides

        Only technically. Our economic system, of which our government and its particular way of doing certain things is a part, has created an environment in which my most people’s need to work for their current employer far outweighs their desire to do so, even if they like their job (it’s not uncommon to see something happen in the life of a person who likes his or her job that would make it much better if he or she could leave that job, but can’t, because insurance, the job market, etc.).

        As I’ve said many times, and will try to say in a post this week, one of the greatest moral failures of our society is how many of the people within it are almost completely dependent on their employers for their quality of life — their homes, their health, where their children go to school, what they eat. It’s hard for me to call anyone on the dependent side of that relationship working “at-will.”Report

      • Francis in reply to Barry says:

        Chris: Agreed. When your choices are work or starve, the phrase ‘at will’ is pretty ironic. But it’s also the language that lawyers use. 20+ years after passing the Bar, I am incapable of writing any other way. (French? I decided to learn French this summer.)

        Law firms, especially large ones, are notoriously harsh places to work. And these days sophisticated clients are much better placed to drive down rates. This makes the owners of the business — the equity partners — particularly lovely to work for. Couple that with the debt many young lawyers have and the few high-paying jobs available, and being a young lawyer can be a particularly toxic choice of employment.

        At one firm where I worked, the popular phrase among the legal staff was “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”Report

      • Dave in reply to Barry says:

        @francis

        Law firms, especially large ones, are notoriously harsh places to work.

        When I worked at one of the Wall Street banks, many of the people I worked with were people that were formerly employed at the big corporate law firms (Sullivan & Cromwell, Fried Frank, etc.) that washed out of their associate program and ended up in the investment banking groups.

        Given the brutal workplace that is the typical investment banking floor, especially for an analyst or associate, I can only imagine how bad it is at a law firm.

        I heard they used to work bankers hours – 9 to 5. 9 am to 5 am.Report

      • Burt Likko in reply to Barry says:

        Well, I do have some actual work to do myself during the day so I can’t monitor the thread constantly. Whether that’s an open-ended regulated relationship, an ongoing contract, or a periodically-renewed contract, we all have professional obligations. Now that I’ve a few moments to bring to bear here:

        As a matter of commenting protocol, @barry saying “I’m being a dick here” kind of confuses and irritates me. The best practice is at least “Don’t be a dick.”

        Substantively, @francis and @jonny-scrum-half have articulated a more traditional version of how the law construes employment through a contractual lens. I’m skeptical of the renewed-daily contract theory, at least in my more heretical moments, because both employer and employee have reasonable expectations that there will be further employment in the future.

        And certainly when I handle matters, I bear this model in mind because that is how the law treats it as a formal matter. Many lawyers look on the laundry list of regulations and say that these are statutory modifications to the contract, or gap-fillers the way that the Uniform Commercial Code fills in the gaps for the sales of goods. When I go to court, I bear that model in mind too. I’m aware that this contract-subordinate-to-relationship concept is heretical; the orthodoxy is that the contract is king and everything else is ultimately subordinate to that notion.

        I’m just not convinced that this model accurately reflects how people behave in the real world.

        As an employer, I make projections about my business’ capabilities based on the idea that in the future I’m going to have my employees around to fulfill the contracts I make on behalf of the business. I don’t wake up in the morning and wonder, “Hey, is Elmo the Employee going to show up today?” (Or if I do, I’m probably not a particularly good employer, and I certainly shouldn’t be making any commitments to customers that require Elmo’s involvement.)

        As an employee, I make projections about my personal finances based on the idea that in the future, I’m going to still be drawing a paycheck roughly equal to what I’m making today. I don’t wake up every day and think, “Wow, I wonder if Boris the Boss is going to tell me to go home when I show up to work later?” Or if I do, then I’m probably doing relatively marginal sorts of work, and the employment relationship is pretty weak. In an ongoing, steady employment relationship, I just expect that Boris is going to start assigning me work when I show up, and Boris just expects me to show up and do the work he assigns me.

        Why? Because that’s just what we all do.

        I don’t know of any other contractual situation which combines both the fluidity of the material terms and the rapid periodicity of the “renewed-every-day” model articulated here — particularly because for the most part, terms of employment do not often change as rapidly as this. In other sorts of contractual or sort-of-contractual situations, parties become entitled to reasonably rely on the other party’s behavior as time passes and the behavior in question accumulates in consistency. For instance, in a lease of real property, even if the written lease says “Tenant will pay Landlord $1,000 a month by cashier’s check deliverable to 123 Main Street,” but the Tenant instead direct-deposits the $1,000 a month into an account that Landlord designates, every month for a two year period, the Tenant has a pretty good argument that the course of dealings has made direct deposit an acceptable form of payment and Landlord has a very hard case to make that Tenant has breached the lease by tendering payment in this way again.

        What is so special about the employment contract that course of dealing is not an appropriate basis for reasonable reliance of future terms? “Because it’s at will,” is the default response, but that’s is also the case with other kinds of open-ended business relationships.

        In any event, I’m not suggesting a revolution in our legal regime just yet. Even if I were seated on the appellate bench I would not do so. But I do think that the concept bears out under serious reflection, and a regulated relationship model may well be a very useful way of thinking about employment. Actually, it might not be not so different from the “change of status” model @francis indicates at the end of his prime comment; one’s “status” as, say, alive or dead, on active duty with the military or not, male or female, within or without a legally-protected group, all can affect legal rights, contractual rights, and so on. One’s status as employed as opposed to not employed triggers cultural expectations, business expectations, and legal expectations that run between employer and employee.

        The contract may not be king; perhaps it is merely one of many members of the governing council.Report

      • Francis in reply to Barry says:

        There are few things more awful than lawyers smugly agreeing with each other. 😉

        Saying that the employer can change the terms of employment without notice because employment is at will is a circular argument. Or perhaps a definitional one — an at-will employment relationship is one, by definition, in which an employer can unilaterally change the terms on a going-forward basis. The employee can then take it or leave it.

        The better question, to me, is why we vest so much power in the employer. California is not exactly known for a libertarian legislature. I think (without a shred of evidence, so really I’m just guessing) that everyone — employers and employees alike — has simply bought into the idea. Reducing the power of an employer to have total control over terms, wages, vacation policy and the like is something that the French might do. (Quelle horreur!)

        (With inequality the subject of much discussion, and with the growing evidence that European labor is very competitive with US labor on an hours-worked basis, I wonder if a new labor movement might arise here in California.)Report

  12. Barry says:

    Kazzy:

    “So beyond not rewarding going above-and-beyond, my administration actively discourages it unless it suits their own interests.”

    I think that the key was that this was something they didn’t see as productive labor; if that teacher had taught two merged classes to cover for a quit/fire in the middle of the year, they’d have been fine with that.

    From your description of the way that they worked, they wouldn’t have paid her any more, and if her test scores had dropped, she’d be in deep doo-doo, but they wouldn’t have minded if she had done double labor on a single check.

    “Rather, the teacher in the room next door complained that it made her look bad because she didn’t do those things.”

    There’s nothing in your description of management there to support that; they seemed rather indifferent to teacher morale.Report

    • Kazzy in reply to Barry says:

      @barry

      They cared about the teacher looking bad insofar as parents were beginning to prefer one to the other. Which always ends up happening when you have two teachers teaching the same grade/subject, but you don’t want to arm parents with tangible differences they can point to. It makes life difficult for administrators. So the response was to even the playing field to the lowest common denominator because that was easiest.

      It was easier, ergo preferable, for admin if neither teacher went above-and-beyond. So they cited a teacher for going above-and-beyond. It didn’t serve their interests, so they put a stop to it.Report

  13. Barry says:

    Patrick: “Put another way, I don’t see good managers in heavily unionized sectors, either, do you? How many teachers in the public school unions still have problems with terrible principals or terrible school boards or terrible district managers?

    All of them?”

    First, do you have mother lovin’ thing to back that up? You’re just asserting things.

    Second, if you have a union and still have problems with bad management, that doesn’t mean that the union is not helping, and it doesn’t even mean that the union is not helping a great deal.Report

    • Patrick in reply to Barry says:

      First, do you have mother lovin’ thing to back that up? You’re just asserting things.

      Oh, are we playing “provide a citation” now? Noted.

      On this particular question, are you fucking kidding me? I need to provide some sort of citation that teachers gripe legitimately about principals and school boards? Go read any blog ever written by anybody who teaches.

      Second, if you have a union and still have problems with bad management, that doesn’t mean that the union is not helping, and it doesn’t even mean that the union is not helping a great deal.

      I’ll note that I didn’t say that, precisely.

      The union may be protecting some employees from some consequences of bad management. That certainly helps the employees.

      However, it’s clearly not helping produce better management, which is the problem I was talking about, no?Report

  14. Barry says:

    I going to throw a bit of a rude thing here, specifically to Kazzy –

    What is your complaint, that we should care about? As far as I can tell, you don’t like unions lest you be treated like a cog. Not that this stops you from (a) being treated like one anyway, and (b) complaining about it.

    Either get a job with another school, change careers, found your own school, or go to a bar and tip the bartender generously for listening.Report

    • James Hanley in reply to Barry says:

      It’s fun to see a liberal saying “fish you, just go find another job.” It warms my cold libertarian non-heart.Report

      • James Hanley in reply to James Hanley says:

        Or to echo what a wise man once said somewhere a few minutes ago on this page, “the standard libertarian attitude.” 😉Report

      • Dave in reply to James Hanley says:

        Classic FYIGMReport

      • Barry in reply to James Hanley says:

        My point, James (I thought that it was clear) was that Kazzy was rejecting even the idea of unionization, because he’d be ‘cogified’, even as he complains about being cogified.

        I was (quite clearly) pointing out that by Kazzy’s standards, he’s in that very situation of “fish you, just go find another job.”.

        On the ‘Rescued comment’ thread, it’s been suggested that Kazzy go to his bosses’ boss (or to their boss) and complain. I notice that Kazzy is not doing this.

        I’m not criticizing him, because both he and I know what the situation would be. Kazzy would be immediately fired for insubordination or another legally valid cause, no unemployment compensation, and he/she would be seeking a job in a lousy market after being fired for cause.

        There was a tagline used one somebody’s comment somewhere, from the Drew Carey Show:

        ‘Why didn’t you tell me that your problem was that you didn’t like your job? There’s a support group for that – it’s called ‘everybody’, and we meed at the bar at six!’.Report

      • James Hanley in reply to James Hanley says:

        Telling him to quit moaning to his friends here and go moan to friends at the bar? Well, now, that’s a horse of an entirely similar color.Report

      • Patrick in reply to James Hanley says:

        On the ‘Rescued comment’ thread, it’s been suggested that Kazzy go to his bosses’ boss (or to their boss) and complain.

        Can you point to where that was suggested?

        I notice that Kazzy is not doing this.

        Actually, from Kazzy’s own comment, he did in fact try to make things better for a year.

        I’m not criticizing him, because both he and I know what the situation would be. Kazzy would be immediately fired for insubordination or another legally valid cause, no unemployment compensation, and he/she would be seeking a job in a lousy market after being fired for cause.

        Well, since he apparently grappled with his boss for a year without getting immediately fired for insubordination, I guess that puts paid to what you know, don’t it?Report

    • Will Truman in reply to Barry says:

      As an aside, Kazzy has been pursuing one of those options. That doesn’t make it any less a shame that the school he’s been devoting umpteen hours a week for years any less unfortunate.

      Barry’s position here seems to be the further philosophical distancing between person and employer. There’s something to be said for that, though the notion of devoting so much of oneself to an organization for which they have no fondness seems counterproductive. My employment history is one of being loyal to a fault, but one can go too far in the other direction. I think it also lends itself to a degree of apathy that tends to be bad for all involved. Leading people to “grin and bear” it rather than agitate for internal change.

      The employer that I had that I cared most about… it took a fair amount out of me. The frustration with the mistakes that I saw. The internal battles. At the same time, that’s living, man. When I left, I actually wrote the COO a really long letter. For which he thanked me. At least some of the changes I proposed were in the works when the economy tanked and the company got hit by a tsunami.

      But frustrations and all, I look back on that era with some fondness. I never cared as much about a job before that, and never cared as much after.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Will Truman says:

        The employer that I had that I cared most about… it took a fair amount out of me.

        Yeah, I’ve had jobs where I would work 55+ hours and feel bad about going home at the end of my unscheduled shift. I busted my butt for the owners which included light babysitting, taking a deer hit by the owner’s truck to a butcher in the back of my little Pontiac Le Mans, and taking a coffee cup full of white wine to the owner’s wife when I sometimes discovered her crying in the closet.

        Man, I *LOVED* that job.

        I never want to work anywhere like that again.Report

      • Barry in reply to Will Truman says:

        “Barry’s position here seems to be the further philosophical distancing between person and employer. There’s something to be said for that, though the notion of devoting so much of oneself to an organization for which they have no fondness seems counterproductive. My employment history is one of being loyal to a fault, but one can go too far in the other direction. I think it also lends itself to a degree of apathy that tends to be bad for all involved. Leading people to “grin and bear” it rather than agitate for internal change.”

        If I had options (I’m pursuing them) I’d be gone. That’s my point, and the situation that Kazzy is in. His employer has far better options than he does, and it’s going to be that way for a loooong time. And even if he/she gets another teaching job at an independent (non-commie) school, why should it be different? He/she’s intellectually realized what the dynamics are – the teachers might care about the students, but management does not.Report

      • Not all schools are the same. When a school exists on the basis of getting parents to send their kids there, some of them are going to actually care about the kids. Or at least reward the teachers. Because that’s how you keep kids (especially the kids you want) enrolling.Report

    • Chris in reply to Barry says:

      Ugh, Barry is my least favorite kind of libertarian.

      😉Report

    • Barry in reply to Barry says:

      BTW, I don’t mean to be unnecessarily rude, but am asking sincerely.

      Kazzy, you’ve found out that you are indeed a cog, albeit one which might be treated better than one by management, but only if management feels like it. It’s true that in the long run, this school might go out of business[1] or the current management team might be pushed out (by the same Board that brought them in?), but from your complaints ‘the long run’ is rather long.

      You’ve mentioned that this is the only independent school for a distance.
      This leads to a partial ‘lock-in’ effect on employees – by economic rationality, management *should* take advantage of this and extract what economic gain they can.

      [1] If you’re still there in a year or two, and enrollment is still going down, be aware that the management will be strongly tempted to screw the teachers out of their last paychecks, and perhaps not make required payments for benefits, Social Security/unemployment compensation, etc. On the other hand, that’s economically rational, so long as they don’t get hurt by it.Report

      • Will Truman in reply to Barry says:

        Except that what happens is people do end up leaving anyway. Kazzy will be gone, even if it means relocating. Others might choose to be SAHM’s (or SAHD’s). Others still may leave teaching altogether.

        Those who have options, and drive, will find something to do. People with options and drive are probably the ones you most want to keep. Because, ultimately, teachers are not cogs. Some are better than others. Some will keep the school more attractive to parents than others. Some will spearhead initiatives that will attract students (or better) students, and some won’t.

        That’s the problem with these policies, on a logistical level. When I worked at a place that had a crap poor economy for computer people, the company sought to take advantage of that. Turns out, that was a good way to keep mediocre employees and a bad way to keep stand-out employees.Report

  15. Jim Heffman says:

    Kazzy said:

    “A former colleague used to really go above-and-beyond. She was initially a classroom teacher but then took on an additional role overseeing our auxiliary programs for which she received a very modest stipend…[o]f course, it blew up from there and she was putting in 10+ hours a week to meet a bevy of new expectations for the program. Being a hard worker and someone who takes great pride in what she does, she did what she had to do despite ending up being paid less than minimum wage.

    After a year of this, she went to admin…”

    Key phrase emphasized. If it “blew up” then she should have asked for a raise to cover it right away. She didn’t do anybody any favors by putting in so much free labor for a year. Management obviously didn’t consider it worth so much effort, or else someone would already be doing it (or, at least, they’d be paying for “10+ hours a week” instead of “a very modest stipend”.) It’s likely that if she had gone in and said “you know, doing this right takes a lot more time than I was planning”, then they might have said “oh, then we should stop doing it, because we don’t have the budget for that”. And then the whole mess wouldn’t have happened.

    I’m sure she was a lovely wonderful person who was a hard worker and took great pride, but she was hired to work hard and take great pride in teaching. If she’s spending so much effort on something else, then her performance as a teacher will suffer; and if that effort is off the books, then the management has no way to identify what the problem is. As far as they know, she’s teaching worse because she’s becoming a worse teacher. The “10+ hours a week” is invisible to them because she didn’t tell anyone about it!Report

    • Patrick in reply to Jim Heffman says:

      It’s likely that if she had gone in and said “you know, doing this right takes a lot more time than I was planning”, then they might have said “oh, then we should stop doing it, because we don’t have the budget for that”. And then the whole mess wouldn’t have happened.

      Well, perhaps.

      But it’s certainly the case that if you’re giving somebody a bunch of benefit for free, they don’t know what the benefit is worth. Not just because they don’t see the true cost, but also because they probably never had it spelled out to them what they were getting.

      By far, the most common pushback I get from people when I tell them what their charge rate is is based entirely upon the fact that they don’t realize what they’re getting for that charge.

      That’s part of my job, to explain what it is that I’m doing, and why it is to their benefit.Report

  16. Barry says:

    Will Truman

    “Except that what happens is people do end up leaving anyway. Kazzy will be gone, even if it means relocating. Others might choose to be SAHM’s (or SAHD’s). Others still may leave teaching altogether.”

    Slooooooooooooooooooooowly. And in the case of your second and third sentences, it means people having a worse life.

    “Those who have options, and drive, will find something to do. ”

    Over the looooooooooooong run.

    “People with options and drive are probably the ones you most want to keep. ”

    Not necessarily. From everything that Kazzy has described, management does want cogs.

    “Because, ultimately, teachers are not cogs. ”

    They can be. And how does the management at Kazzy’s school view teachers?

    “Some are better than others. Some will keep the school more attractive to parents than others. Some will spearhead initiatives that will attract students (or better) students, and some won’t.”

    Management seems to disagree.

    “That’s the problem with these policies, on a logistical level. When I worked at a place that had a crap poor economy for computer people, the company sought to take advantage of that. Turns out, that was a good way to keep mediocre employees and a bad way to keep stand-out employees.”

    True. And many people suffered.

    Perhaps it’s viewpoint. The long run, Big Picture doesn’t interest me.Report

    • Will Truman in reply to Barry says:

      The bigger picture doesn’t care if you care. The long run doesn’t tend to exit.

      Like people, employers often make decisions that prove to be counterproductive past the short run. It’s possible that Kazzy’s employer will never have any regrets. My experience is that employers that do this sort of thing frequently find themselves frustrated with the results. I can’t remember how many times aforementioned employer expressed dismay at employees’ unwillingness to Buy In. There actually seems to be a pretty direct relationship, actually, between employers who generate low morale and employers concerned about morale.Report

      • There are exceptions, of course. I have the honor of having worked for one of the five worst employers in the nation (according to employee satisfaction surveys). They went to ridiculous lengths to antagonize all but the most loyal employees. In that case, though, it was very much a part of their human resources model. The high turnover was an accepted cost. They treated their employees like cogs, but had actually laid the groundwork so that they could and could do so profitably.Report

      • Barry in reply to Will Truman says:

        “There actually seems to be a pretty direct relationship, actually, between employers who generate low morale and employers concerned about morale.”

        That’s something I can agree with. To the extent that management actually cares.Report

    • Jim Heffman in reply to Barry says:

      “From everything that Kazzy has described, management does want cogs.”

      Or maybe management doesn’t want its employees burning themselves out with overtime work, which is why they don’t “reward or recognize initiative”. They don’t pay you extra for working extra because they don’t *want* you to be doing extra work.

      *Or*, maybe, management doesn’t *know* how much work it takes to do the job properly, because everybody just does all the extra work for free and doesn’t tell them about it until they’ve been doing it for a year. Maybe management would be willing to raise its prices and pay people more (or, more likely, hire someone to do the job full-time and allow the teachers to go back to spending 100% of their time teaching.)Report

      • Barry in reply to Jim Heffman says:

        Quoting Kazzy’s original comment: “There is growing dissatisfaction among my colleagues (myself included) with our administration. This is due, in part, to the increasing sense that we are seen as cogs in a machine — easily replaceable and of little inherent value. Not only does is this demeaning in general and insulting in particular to professionals armed with masters degrees and performing a task that is nearly impossible to standardize (despite what some reformers might argue), but it is also very much antithetical to how most folks in independent schools — employers and employees alike — tend to see their relationship. Many of us mention that one of the reasons we choose the independent sector over the public sector is because we wanted to avoid this very type of relationship. We wanted to work somewhere where mutual care and concern were seen as vital to the employment relationship/contract. We didn’t want to work somewhere where employees were exploited — denied mutually-agreed upon provisions of their contract because the labor market favors the employer, even if this is done so legally — and independent schools tended to both promise and deliver on this expectation.

        The difficulty in my situation is that one side tends to see our engagement with one another as a relationship such as you describe at the end there and the other tends to see it strictly as a contract. The new administration (just wrapped up year three) has a very, very different mindset. And the problem — at least I think it is a problem — is that the employees are starting to adopt this mindset. Throughout my tenure there, I have been constantly willing to step up and perform duties beyond my job description if I am able to and if it serves the interests of my students, my colleagues, and/or our institution. This is how I came to find myself teaching 8th grade health (something I arguably wasn’t able to do but nonetheless did my damnedest anyway).

        But no more. When I recently floated the idea that I be relieved of certain formal responsibilities because I was being asked to do more elsewhere, I was told/threatened that my pay would be cut. “You have a contract,” I was more or less told. It didn’t seem to matter that I went above-and-beyond my contract when I was asked; my employer had no interest in going above-or-beyond her end of the deal. So, no more. I will do what I am contractually obligated to do and no more. I will bust my hump for my students and those colleagues who I feel indebted to (through a mutual sense of indebtedness) but will not go a step out of my way for my employer because that seems to be the sort of relationship she wants. So be it. I am not happy with this. This is probably the primary driving factor in me seeking employment elsewhere. But when expectations between employer and employee are not aligned, well, whatever relationship they might have is likely to suffer; especially if the nature of those divergent expectations are what type and form of relationship they are in in the first place.”Report

      • Jim Heffman in reply to Jim Heffman says:

        Kazzy’s description is in no way inconsistent with my interpretation. He’s just taking the attitude of “I do extra work when I feel it’s necessary to do a good job, but my employer isn’t willing to recognize that or reward it, and that is wrong”. I am suggesting that it’s not so one-sided as that.

        If I went to the garage to get my car’s oil changed, and they brought it back to me and said “your tires and brake pads were kind of worn so we replaced all of them too”, I’d say “hey that’s nice”. If they said “and we want extra money for doing all that extra work for you”, and I said “no way, I didn’t ask for it”, then I don’t see how I would be the bad guy there.Report

  17. Barry says:

    I think that most of the commenters here haven’t yet read Kazzy’s comment, which of course makes my comments look even worse.Report

  18. Burt,

    Are you suggesting “employment as a relationship and not as a contract” is a good thing, or a bad thing? In other words, are you trying to describe things “as they are” or “as they are and should be even more”?

    I ask because I’m not sure it’s a good thing. My reservation about employment as a relationship is that it seems to me most “relationships” tend to have fewer opportunities for exit than “contracts.” Or rather, as “relationships” tend more and more to resemble “contracts,” the legal opportunities for exit tend to increase. At least that is my hypothesis.

    You mention in passing that marriage is more and more referred to as a “contract” instead of something else (e.g., a “compact” or a “covenant” or whatever the law calls it). But inasmuch as the opportunities for exit have increased–coverture ending or receding, no-fault divorce–people tend to see it more as a contract. I find that view of marriage much more liberating than an older view.

    Perhaps the correlation I posit between “relationship,” “contract,” and “exit” is only incidental to the few examples I can think of. And perhaps “exit” actually exists independently of “relationship” or “contract.” But I’m concerned about an employee’s right/prerogative to exit. If what you describe in this OP is true, is that a trend that’s bad for employees?Report

    • Patrick in reply to Gabriel Conroy says:

      It seems to me most “relationships” tend to have fewer opportunities for exit than “contracts.”

      Well, according to the most caricatured arguments on the Right, having no freedom of exit on your employment relationship would be entirely one-sided in the employee’s favor, because they could do nothing and never get fired. 🙂

      From the pushback I’m getting on my post, where I talk about taking a course of action that *might* get you fired in order to make the workplace better, the argument from generally the leftie sort of commentator seems to be “nobody will do that, because they might get fired!”

      But inasmuch as the opportunities for exit have increased–coverture ending or receding, no-fault divorce–people tend to see it more as a contract. I find that view of marriage much more liberating than an older view.

      That may or may not be a good thing. I mean, coverture ending is probably a good thing. Having no out for a woman in an abusive relationship is clearly a bad thing. But just because something is more liberating doesn’t mean that it’s better… necessarily. One could argue that we’ve perhaps gone too far the other way.Report

      • Morat20 in reply to Patrick says:

        the argument from generally the leftie sort of commentator seems to be “nobody will do that, because they might get fired!”

        Yes, because most people enjoy having an income. Frankly, you’d have to be either REALLY confidant of your ability to quickly land a comparable job, independently wealthy, or have other means of support not to have that be a huge factor in your calculus.

        In fact, the only group I can think of that routinely will do that are independent contractors, whose entire business model is rapid turnover of jobs — in short, their professional live, savings, and living patterns are built on quickly locating work and periods without it.

        I’m not sure how that’s a “leftie” pushback, though. It seems, you know, common sense. Maybe only leftists worry about income?Report

      • Gabriel Conroy in reply to Patrick says:

        @patrick

        That may or may not be a good thing. I mean, coverture ending is probably a good thing. Having no out for a woman in an abusive relationship is clearly a bad thing. But just because something is more liberating doesn’t mean that it’s better… necessarily. One could argue that we’ve perhaps gone too far the other way.

        I should be clearer about my commitments and what exactly my reservations are. First and foremost, I’d hate to see the law evolve to where an employee can’t quit whenever he/she wants to. I don’t care as much about employers, although you’re right that for them, not being able to fire anyone means they can’t exit from the situation either. And again, from a sympathetic to what I perceive to be the interests of employees side, I acknowledge that if employers can more easily get rid of employees, they (the employers) will be more willing to hire someone in the first place.

        Second, I believe that the prerogative exit is presumptively a good thing. In other words, I presume it to be good unless there’s a countervailing claim. A parent “exiting” the family and abrogating his/her responsibilities to children is bad and ought to be compensated for, say, by compulsory child care payments. A spouse leaving another spouse because of an abusive relationship or even irreconcileable differences? I’d say it’s presumptively a good thing that a spouse can do that, although the individual circumstance might differ. An employee being able to quit whenever he/she wants to is in my opinion good, but I wouldn’t allow a brain surgeon to quit in the middle of delicate surgery, leaving someone at danger.

        But back to your main point…..maybe the correlation I see between relationships vs. contracts and fewer vs. more opportunities for exit is 1) nonexistent or present only in a select number of examples; 2) not causal; or 3) both.Report

      • Patrick in reply to Patrick says:

        Yes, because most people enjoy having an income. Frankly, you’d have to be either REALLY confidant of your ability to quickly land a comparable job, independently wealthy, or have other means of support not to have that be a huge factor in your calculus.

        Again, Morat, just like on that thread, you’re assuming stuff I’m not saying.

        In fact, the only group I can think of that routinely will do that are independent contractors, whose entire business model is rapid turnover of jobs — in short, their professional live, savings, and living patterns are built on quickly locating work and periods without it.

        I’ll note here that most independent contractors live and die on their reputations, so working with a bad client is tricky and exiting from that relationship can actually be much more difficult, and have longer-lasting negative consequences, possibly than a normal 9-5 type corporate dude.

        I’m not sure how that’s a “leftie” pushback, though. It seems, you know, common sense. Maybe only leftists worry about income?

        Aside from the snark that it seemed like there was a correlation between “commentors’ alignment with the Left side of the spectrum” and “really reading something other than what I wrote”…

        generally the left seems to assume axiomatically that there is a massive imbalance between an employer and an employee, and thus it follows that a more equitable relationship model than contractual model would be appealing; fewer opportunities to exit are typically sought after by the left, as most opportunities to exit are currently held by the employer.Report

      • Gabriel Conroy in reply to Patrick says:

        @patrick

        generally the left seems to assume axiomatically that there is a massive imbalance between an employer and an employee, and thus it follows that a more equitable relationship model than contractual model would be appealing;

        If I still qualify as a leftie (besides being lefthanded), my assumption about the “massive imbalance between employer and employee” is probably one of the chief markers, because it’s an assumption I still cling to. I am, however, willing to negotiate and posit that the imbalance is not as “massive” as some (presumably Morat, but also others here) believe. I also believe that the contractual model–buttressed by extra-employment welfare guaranties–has possibilities for being the best society and polity can do. That latter belief probably makes me more a neo-liberal than anything.

        (I’m not writing to criticize, just observing how what you said could apply to me. For the record, I think the assumption you cite is indeed a key, though perhaps not sufficient, marker of who is “left” and who is not.)Report

    • Well, first of all. @gabriel-conroy , I don’t see the historical trend as being an evolution of marriage towards a more contractual cultural understanding. It is my impression that the trend history is that once upon a time, marriage was seen as a very contractual, very economic, very power-focused sort of transaction, and is becoming less so. You no longer need to marry the boss’s daughter in order to secure your place in a business. Marriages to secure class prestige and economic status for mutual family advantage are becoming more stratified into the higher levels of Western society.

      Your last question, whether a move towards a relationship based rather than contract based lens through which our culture views employment would be a good or bad thing for employees is a sort of difficult question to answer. What does it mean for something to be good for an employee? Would they move from a 40 hour workweek to a 20 hour workweek be good for employees? Presumably, employees would only earn half as much money in that world. I’m not so sure that that would be a good thing.

      Right now, we have a constellation of notions about what it means for an employer and employee to treat one another fairly. To a very large degree, the constellation is shaped by many of us buying into the notion that employment is principally a contract. We create laws in response to employers, and sometimes employees, deviating from the cultural norms outlined by that constellation we have drawn in our minds.

      We don’t have to draw the lines between the stars that way. The same stars would still be there, but a different culture would see different patterns in them. (To pursue the analogy, the stars in the constellation might be things like monetary compensation, provision of healthcare insurance, vacations, expectations about productivity, expectations about loyalty, notions about when one is working or at leisure, etc.) If we demote the importance of the contract in our understanding of this relationship, we are sure to draw a different constellation, and therefore our idea of what is good and bad will also shift.

      For instance, consider the cultural expectation of a 40 hour workweek. In a principally contract driven view of employment, we believe that the employee owes the employer 40 hours of work per week, and in exchange the employer owes the employee 40 hours of pay. In other kinds of relationships, we don’t seek to quantify the time of one’s contribution. The quality of effort matters in some relationships. The quality of the end product matters in some relationships.

      Children are expected to help clean up around most middle-class homes, although the expectation of the child’s qualitative and quantitative contribution to housework is not necessarily the same as that of an adult, or even a teenager. The child who does nothing is thought of as disobedient, lazy, or otherwise not contributing to the household. The child who contribute much is thought of as helpful, industrious, and praiseworthy. But, in times when cleanup is not necessary, the children are frequently left at their leisure. Children enjoying leisure time when work is not necessary are not typically thought of as lazy.

      Employment won’t ever be quite like that, but hopefully that gives you some idea that maybe rewards and expectations don’t have to be evaluated along the heavily quantified calculus typically used today. Perhaps, what matters in an employment relationship is the quality and quantity of the workers output. Particularly in cases where a workers output is difficult to isolate from that of other workers, even other metrics might be used. Effort, maybe, or peer evaluation. It’s difficult to think of a system that can’t be gamed, but that’s because we are so used to thinking of systems that are created essentially as games.

      I certainly do not propose that we enter a regime and which exit from a relationship is a very difficult thing. But then, other kinds of relationships have exits available as well. A marriage may end in the divorce, and the historical trend has been to make divorces easier and easier to get, meaning that the exit is easier to reach. Most states have no-fault divorce now. That was not always the case. Parental rights maybe terminated, typically by court order only, but that happens from time to time. Fiduciary relationships have a contractual to mention such as that between attorney and client, but there are noncontractual aspects to that relationship as well. No one forces and attorney and the client to stay together forever, although there are dimensions of that relationship that may persist after it has formally ended. Still, if I decide I don’t want to represent a particular client anymore, in most cases I simply have to tell the client that and offer her the file. Sometimes, I might need to get a judge to agree to let me quit, but that kind of permission is typically granted freely.

      The legend of Japanese workplace culture is one where the expectation is of employment for life. I have always doubted that this legend is congruent with reality. I don’t know for sure. But what I do know is that there is a higher degree of commitment to workers by employers who buy in to management styles that larger Japanese industries seem to have adopted. E.g., to my knowledge, Toyota has never laid off employees, nor forced pay cuts on them. In the company’s entire history. During the recent economic crisis, Toyota employees in the United States were asked to produce fewer cars, because demand decreased. Toyota used this time to retrain its employees, and to solicit ideas from them about how to improve productivity for the future. There has to be some sort of a notion that the company owes more to its employees then just a paycheck. In return, the company seems to expect more of its employees than that they show up and turn wrenches for eight hours a day. And the employees, on the whole, seem to be happy to meet that expectation.

      Is that good or bad? On balance, and from my current cultural paradigm, it seems good to me.Report

      • Burt,

        Thanks for the very thoughtful response. Most of it I’ll just have to chew over, and I think you’re convincing me about the evolution of marriage. Perhaps what I see there as an increasingly “contractual” relationship is just an increasing (over the last 150 years) recognition that the men aren’t the only ones involved in making the choices, and that women (as well as men) have greater likelihood of exit. (And inasmuch as exit can be initiated without the consent of the other, it’s non-contractual (I imagine) because the change is unilateral.)

        The rest of your stuff, again, I’ll have to think on. I do think it’s a good thing for firms to owe their employees more than simply a paycheck. My main resistance is that I see most workplaces as places of contention and some form of coercion. Maybe that’s the latent/former Marxist in me. I don’t know if “contract” or some other “constellation” (which is an excellent metaphor, if you ask me) works better to recognize the power imbalances that I believe inherent in most work situations. But again, it’s interesting to think on.Report

      • Burt Likko in reply to Burt Likko says:

        Indeed, @gabriel-conroy , part of what makes my musings smack of heresy is rejecting the assumption (well-baked into the law and, to a large degree baked into our culture) that the relationship between labor and management is necessarily and always adversarial and generally is a zero-sum game. And while it often is that way, I don’t think that it needs to be the case.

        I’m just an idealistic free spirit that way, I suppose.Report

      • @burt-likko

        I agree it doesn’t need to be the case, and I could point to examples where employers and managers need each other, too. Frankly, I believe it’s both, and it’s unhealthy not to acknowledge that fact.Report

      • I guess what I just said is contradictory: I claim (or at least agree with you) that the employe-employee relationship doesn’t need to be antagonistic, and yet say some degree of antagonism is inherent in the relationship, even when there are other elements that aren’t antagonistic. So, I guess the relationship really does need to be antagonistic, at least in my view. Still, I don’t think that antagonism sums up the relationship in its entirety.Report

  19. James Hanley says:

    Patrick,

    Have you read Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States? It’s relevant to what you’re saying, and I think you’d grok it pretty readily.Report

  20. Barry says:

    Jim Heffman June 17, 2014 at 7:08 pm
    “Kazzy’s description is in no way inconsistent with my interpretation. He’s just taking the attitude of “I do extra work when I feel it’s necessary to do a good job, but my employer isn’t willing to recognize that or reward it, and that is wrong”. I am suggesting that it’s not so one-sided as that.
    If I went to the garage to get my car’s oil changed, and they brought it back to me and said “your tires and brake pads were kind of worn so we replaced all of them too”, I’d say “hey that’s nice”. If they said “and we want extra money for doing all that extra work for you”, and I said “no way, I didn’t ask for it”, then I don’t see how I would be the bad guy there.”

    To me, that’s a poor analogy, and is reading a lot into Kazzy’s statements. For example, he ended up teaching an extra class, not making cute decorations during the evenings.Report

  21. Barry says:

    Dave June 17, 2014 at 1:17 pm
    “@James Hanley
    He’ll always be “that guy”.”

    I’m the guy who’s always amazed at just how right-wing the people at this place are.Report

    • Patrick in reply to Barry says:

      I’m the guy who’s always amazed at just how right-wing the people at this place are.

      I will frankly admit that this comment completely blew my mind.Report

      • Barry in reply to Patrick says:

        The two posts which most impressed me were:

        1) The post on the slavery-supporting ‘minister’ (I and one other commenter were the only ones who found something odd in this).

        2) The Hobby Lobby post, where pretty much everbody (including Burt!) were fine with the owners of a for-profit corporation demanding exemptions from the laws to suit their religious beliefs. They wanted all of the protections of a corporate entity, but wanted to be able to project their personal beliefs into it – but only when they wanted to.Report

      • Burt Likko in reply to Patrick says:

        I don’t remember being fine with that. I remember arguing a) a corporation is inherently incapable of having a religious belief, and b) the individuals who own and operate a corporation are not the same thing as the corporation, so their religious beliefs are irrelevant because as individuals they aren’t being asked to do anything.

        So I would have denied all of the plaintiffs the relief from the Contraceptive Mandate that they requested.

        In our mock court, my argument a) prevailed by a vote of 4-1, but my argument b) lost by a vote of 3-2.

        Now, I guess in a technical sense I’m okay with the plaintiffs asking for relief, because that’s better than them simply ignoring the law and doing whatever the hell they wanted; that’s why we resolve disputes like that with courts and lawyers instead of with guns. But I would not have granted them the relief they requested.Report

  22. Barry says:

    Patrick, I can’t copy your comment because I’m on an iPad, and something’s wierd, but please meditate on the difference between ‘boss’ and ‘bosses’ boss’.

    If you’re going to slam me, at least get your facts right.Report

  23. Barry says:

    Michael: “Unless, of course, they go through the necessary legal mechanisms like bankruptcy, which voids lots of their contractual agreements. As pilots for multiple airlines have learned the hard way.”

    One thing which impressed me a lot over the past few years was the sheer power of corporate bankruptcy. It should not have, because I’ve seen it all my life, but it was a sharp reminder that in any deal with a corporation, you shake hands, and can be left holding just the empty glove.Report