Obstructed Employment

I'm in the rather peculiar position of wanting/needing a full time job with benefits and having one of my sites wanting to hire me on a full time basis or close enough to qualify for benefits.

So what's the problem?

If the department submits the paperwork to human resources for the position then that position gets offered to a totem pole of other folks in my department based on their seniority. It will also be offered to recently laid off workers who get priority rehire treatment for 39 months after being laid off.

But the site doesn't want to fill the position with anyone, they want to fill it with me. But they are not able to actually choose who they hire, they can only choose that they hire someone. Everything else is out of their hands. Which is, of course, ridiculous. Sites and departments should have the final say-so on who works for them and should be able to reject any prospect they choose. But the sites are unable to do this because of collective bargaining agreements, bumping rules and all the other things that unions put in place to protect the most senior members at the expense of the most junior.

So I'm stuck either staying as an unprotected contract worker or opening up the position the tender mercies of a bumping lottery.

In the end, nobody wins. The site gets short changed because I've got one foot out the door at all times, I am and have been on a constant job hunt. If/when a job is offered to me, I will take it and they will have to start from scratch with a new employee.

The education system in California is seriously broken and in need of a fix, not continuing budget cuts and furloughs. And there really needs to be an amendment to the collective bargaining agreement that returns some of the local site administration to the local sites. Running school sites by unionized bureaucratic dictums is backwards at best and directly detrimental to the smooth operation of school sites and districts at worst.

At the end of the day there is really a pretty simple calculation to run. Do we want to have to build more prisons or do we want to have to build more colleges? Underfunding education at the primary school level means we are going to be building more prisons to house an uneducated and unemployable populance. If it were up to me, I'd definitely go with funding education. It is a long term investment that strengthens the state on all levels. Prisons just weaken us all and cost an insane amount of money.

Fund Education Now or Build More Prisons Later

A Future Union Grunt's Perspective

If all goes according to plans, I'll be a unionized employee of the school district in a few weeks. Which definitely has some quality perks to it and I'm looking forward to having them. But gaining an understanding of the impact of the union on positions within the district makes me question the uncommon goals of the educational system and the union that represents the workers.

Uncommon meaning that the educational system has a goal of graduating every child with a certain level of skills. The union has a goal of getting as much as possible for the workers it represents. And affording those workers a strange sense of job security even if they happen to do a really bad job.

That's one of the things I don't get about unions. They protect really crappy workers. People, who would normally bounce out after a few months and go on to find something they were actually good at, can sit and fester in their position. They can do a bad job for a long, long time and still draw a paycheck just for occupying their seat at their desk.

There are also some bizarre job claiming rights things going on. If my current temp position's job requirements are rewritten and hours are added to make it full time then the position is opened up to anyone qualified person with seniority (pretty much everyone) in the district to decide they want it can come and take it and force me to work somewhere else. Oh, and the school has no say in it either. Does that make any sense? The school that will be dealing with the tech can't say no to the person coming in to occupy the lab and work around the campus.

Just because they can pass a fingerprint background check doesn't mean that there aren't some pretty freaking creepy geeks walking the earth. Some say over who works at your school would be, I don't know, polite at the least and smart bureaucracy at the best.

I don't pretend to understand even half of the nuance of union relations and definitely not very much of the educational system. But I have a little knowledge of bureaucracy and its special forms of tortured process. It involves lots and lots of meetings and meetings drain life force.

If there are any union folks reading this, enlighten me as to the value of retaining obviously sub-standard workers.

As an aside, someone should make a funny movie called Bureaucrazy modeled after Office Space, it would be instantly accessible by far too many enslaved 'crats.