The idea that government workers cannot be hired and fired at will is wrong.
Government workers should have no more rights than the single mother working at a restaurant or business, or anyone working at any normal business in the US.
I other words, they should not have more rights or protections than the people who pay the taxes that pay for their salaries and benefits.
One of the most fundamental problems in various types of organizations with these types of protections is what I call "human rot". These are people who are lazy and incompetent and who only remain employed because of these protections as opposed to merit, doing a good job and actually making valuable contributions to the organization.
Locally, one of the most disgusting examples I came across is a middle school "science" teacher who is a chiropractor and teaches absolute nonsense and falsehoods to our kids. For example --and this is just one of many-- he has been teaching that the moon does not spin on its axis. Yeah. Beyond that, he is a jerk to the kids and does not allow them to ask questions. He cannot be challenged or fired for any of it. He is protected. And we wonder why our results in education are shit.
Maybe instead of punching down("everyone should have to live as bad as I do/did") you should be raising people up("everyone should live as good as they do/did")?
Why not ask yourself what is stopping yourself from having those protections in the private industry(hint: some people do have those protections in private industry) instead of focusing on taking them away from others?
Reality. Plain and simple. As reality changes the "protected groups" that we thought were essential to society become a drain on it. Teachers are an excellent example as they have been deprecated for my (and most living persons') lifetime.
> Why not ask yourself what is stopping yourself from having those protections in the private industry
Easy: Reality. Read on if you care to understand.
> Maybe instead of punching down("everyone should have to live as bad as I do/did") you should be raising people up
You are looking at this from the wrong perspective. What some of these protected groups have is a fantasy, a Ponzi scheme, that is only sustainable because they can take money away from us by force through taxation.
In the real world, a company cannot give their employees lifetime pensions at 80% of their last salary. This is crazy, yet, this happens across a bunch of government and other tax-supported entities.
I am not saying that everyone should live as bad as I do. I don't have a bad life and such is the case for most people. What I (and tens of millions of others) don't have is a fantasy where magical money supports exorbitant pensions, medical plans and other benefits.
Here's a super simplified math experiment. This isn't meant to be a precise model of reality, just a thinking tool to start to ask the right questions.
You hire a 60 year old for a job (again, for simplification). Say you pay them $100K US for that job.
Their healthcare plan costs $25K per year, which you also pay.
Five years later this person retires. Because they are in a protected class, you have to keep paying for their healthcare and, say, 80% of their salary for the rest of their lives. Let's say this person lives to 90, so 25 years.
Well, you need to hire another person to fulfill that role. You go and hire another 60 year old for the same role (simplifying so we only wait 5 years for retirement.
You pay this person the same $100K and spend $25K on health insurance.
In reality, this role now costs you $180K per year in salary and $50K per year in healthcare.
Why?
Because you have to carry the first ex-employee for the rest of his/her life.
Five years later, the second employee retires. Same protected benefits and conditions.
You hire someone for the same role again.
Now the position costs you $260K per year, plus $75K per year in medical.
You are 10 years into this experiment and the entire thing is unsustainable at best. If you have the ability to do it, you are forced to either outsource (China), negotiate a sensible deal or close down the business (because you might have dozens, hundreds or thousands of employees under similar conditions.
The steady state for this is when the oldest employees die, the limit function, if you will. At that point the role will cost you approximately $420K per year in salary and $125K per year in healthcare premiums.
This, of course, assuming there is no inflation and costs remain flat for 25 years, which isn't going to be the case at all. Assuming 5% per year inflation/cost-of-living increases, the numbers at the end of 25 years are $466K and $138K.
You see, what happens is that people read a comment such as mine and don't invest one microsecond actually thinking things through, much less analyzing it. This isn't difficult math. And this has nothing to do with wanting people to live, as you put it, as bad as I do. What I want is for the people WE pay to live in the same reality WE do. In this reality, you'd go bankrupt if you owned a business, small, medium or large, that provided such insanely irresponsible benefit packages.
In other words, these people live in a taxpayer-funded fantasy. And this is wrong.
And that doesn't even cover the issue of incompetence. If you cannot fire people when they are found to be incompetent, you might have to hire two, three or more people just to be able to get that one job done. Now were are in the realm of that position potentially costing you millions of dollars per year. This is incredibly wrong.
The math on the inflation is wrong BTW. I computed 5% every 5 years. I am not going to bother doing the 5% per year case because people just don't care to understand reality. I'll just say the numbers would be huge.
To my point, here's just one, of the likely thousands (if not tens of thousands) of examples of just how bad this can be. This is a local example, yet, you can find the same thing at every level of government and other taxpayer funded organizations. It's a Ponzi scheme supported by taxpayer money.
Yet, that's nothing compared to the Federal net unfunded liability of $30 TRILLION dollars (and rising), which is equivalent to 128 percent of GDP. This is INSANE.
We are in a crisis that is unimaginable for most people. It would not be too much of a stretch to call it existential. How many multiples of GDP can we actually survive until the entire thing comes crashing down?
So, yeah, all of the folks who's knee-jerk reaction is to downvote my reality-based post don't have a fucking clue. You'd think people on HN would at least make a little bit of an effort to do the math. Heck, ask ChatGPT if you are lazy!
Nope. There are a class of workers who have unfair protections that none of the rest of us have. We pay their salaries. They should be subject the same market forces we are. They should exist under the same rules that the average taxpayer lives under. They should have the same healthcare and benefit that the average taxpayer has. This applies to everyone in government. If we pay their salaries, they cannot have it better than we do on average.
They should be competent at what they do. They should be qualified. And they should not be protected from losing their jobs if they are no longer necessary or are bad at what they do. This permeates many levels of society. The local example is just the tip of the iceberg. You could go up the chain to city, state and federal and find similar problems.
It's one of the most fundamental questions and one that a lot of people do not understand because they have never run a business (or ran something trivial). There are countries where getting rid of unnecessary or incompetent employees is nearly impossible. This leads to businesses not hiring people because they cannot afford the dead weight or risk involved (also leads to illicit job markets). Being able to manage your workforce is one of the most fundamental tasks in a business. It is no different in schools or government.
We cannot optimize for the best people and best outcomes because we cannot get rid of dead weight. We get stuck with the incompetent because they cannot be fired. This is madness. And, judging from the downvotes, the ignorance does not escape some HN readers. I hope one day they are stuck with people who just burn their cash and they get nothing for it. Maybe then they will understand. It is unbelievable to me that such a fundamental understanding is lacking from society. We let idiots burn the cash we send them. There is no such thing as government money, it's our money. And it must be treated with more respect than to burn it on layers of bureaucracy and incompetence.
Government workers should have no more rights than the single mother working at a restaurant or business, or anyone working at any normal business in the US.
I other words, they should not have more rights or protections than the people who pay the taxes that pay for their salaries and benefits.
One of the most fundamental problems in various types of organizations with these types of protections is what I call "human rot". These are people who are lazy and incompetent and who only remain employed because of these protections as opposed to merit, doing a good job and actually making valuable contributions to the organization.
Locally, one of the most disgusting examples I came across is a middle school "science" teacher who is a chiropractor and teaches absolute nonsense and falsehoods to our kids. For example --and this is just one of many-- he has been teaching that the moon does not spin on its axis. Yeah. Beyond that, he is a jerk to the kids and does not allow them to ask questions. He cannot be challenged or fired for any of it. He is protected. And we wonder why our results in education are shit.