Misery Loves Company
Kevin Drum made a comment this week that touched on one of the great annoying paradoxes of American life. In the course of a discussion about the Davis-Bacon act, he writes:
I've long felt that public hostility to unions, and especially to public sector unions, is based not so much on their demands for higher pay as on their demands for byzantine and highly restrictive work rules. Most people aren't unwilling to pay teachers decently, for example, but they also think that teachers should be held accountable to a boss (just like they themselves are) and that it should be possible to fire bad teachers without five years of hearings and red tape.
The paradoxical thing here is that many of the very same people who argue stridently that teachers need to "be held accountable to a boss" are busily decorating their cubicles with Dilbert cartoons and spend their off hours blogging about what short-sighted morons their bosses are. If the "normal" business model is so great, why all the bitching? Or, put another way, if being accountable to a boss in a normal corporate environment is such soul-sucking hell, why should we inflict the same system on teachers?
It's the flip side of the phenomenon where large numbers of poll respondants believe that Congress is hopelessly corrupt, and then turn around and vote for the incumbent anyway, because their guy isn't like the others. In this case, I think the reasoning is that corporate structure in the abstract is a Good Thing, and it's just their specific boss/company that's all screwed up. Presumably, if we put bosses in all the schools, we'll only be putting in the good bosses, not the incompetent windbags running their office.
Either that, or they're hoping for a chance at schadenfreude...
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