No, American teachers don't get paid too much

[phantom power]

As the Chicago Teachers Union strike heats up (and Paul Ryan finds common cause with Rahm Emanuel), it's worth remembering that American teachers get paid much less than in most other industrialized countries, when accounting for the salaries of college educated workers. Catherine Rampel at the Times' Economix blog has the details:

...In most rich countries, teachers earn less, on average, than other workers who have college degrees. But the gap is much wider in the United States than in most of the rest of the developed world.

We do have a problem in the U.S. with education: it's income inequality. American schools in affluent areas are on par with other countries. Schools in middle-class and poorer areas are not. Whatever the shortfalls in our education system, they're not the fault of teachers or teachers' unions. Teachers' unions are the only thing keeping the pay of American teachers from hitting rock bottom compared to other countries, thus worsening the situation both from an educational point of view and from an economic one.

We don't have an education crisis in this country. We have an income inequality problem.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/no-american-teachers-dont-get-paid-too.html

[ibegurpard]

1. sad that that's what's being talked about because of this

because the real issue is corporate education reform. the union should've taken the salary demands off the table and then we could've had a conversation about that.

[tama]

6. They cant

because of the anti-union laws they can legally strike only with salary demands. So they need to make the salary demand in order to be able to make the other real demands.

[yourout]

2. Our son is starting his second year of teaching 3rd grade and after 6 years of school and.....

2 degrees he makes a whopping $31K.

And now there is absolutely no incentive to get his masters as it would make you more likely to get cut.

He is a very good teacher and should be making at least 1/3 more.

[Honeycombe8]

3. I thought all teachers in a given state, teaching a similar grade, got paid the same.

Didn't matter if it's affluent or poor. My sister is a teacher. It's that way for her, I think. She worked in disadvantaged school for year, then switched to more affluent area (but not rich). There was no difference in her pay. It's the same all over the state, I think.

Now the school's condition varies, since the district pays taxes to support an area school, I think.

[caraher]

5. What state?

It doesn't work that way in Indiana or Michigan, the two states where I've lived. Different school systems also can have different benefits packages. When my wife did student teaching she said there were certain districts that paid more if you didn't need medical benefits because you were covered under a spouse's plan, and she knew teaching couples that taught in different places specifically to take advantage of this (so in effect one school system is subsidizing the other).

[Honeycombe8]

8. Louisiana. But I just checked,and the districts do pay differently.

I guess when she changed, she stayed in the same district. The districts are large, looks like.

Bachelor's w/15 yrs experience ranges from $39,400 to $59,100, depending on district.

[mrmpa]

28. That should be a starting salary.............

not a salary w/ 15 years experience!

With 15 years experience you should be making between $50,000 to $60,000 and that' w/ a Bachelor Degree. With a Masters you should be in the $70k to $80k.

[Honeycombe8]

30. The master's is only about $1-$2k more. Sad, huh? My sis has a Master's. nt

[mrmpa]

32. West Virginia is a state...........

where all teacher salaries are mandated by the State. This upsets those teachers living near DC and Virginia, because it's not a livable salary for that area of WV.

[Freddie]

16. Not in PA

Every district has its own salary scale which varies considerable depending on region.

[Reader Rabbit]

4. Public ed is the last hope for equity and fairness in our country.

Of course they want to destroy it. Destroy teachers, destroy their students, destroy public education. It's all part of the game plan. It's a bipartisan effort.

[DonRedwood]

11. beautifully said, this should be an OP

[backscatter712]

7. What, didn't you know? They make $90,000 per year!

They got a 30% raise because of the strike! They get all the benefits, an extra-cool pension, and a free country club!

I heard it on FOX News, so it must be true!

[DonRedwood]

9. I make 42K --my 8th year teaching with a masters degree

concrete hard fact there.

[RebelOne]

31. My daughter is a teacher in a charter school in South Florida,

and is working on her master's degree, but her salary will only go up by $3,000 a year once she gets her degree.

[bhikkhu]

10. I have to admit, I'd love to make what they make

and have a job with benefits as well...and that's probably what a lot of people think.

Realistically, the first problem is that I couldn't do the job. Then, as well, its not their fault that I don't make more money - or that most of us don't make more money. I think the problem isn't that they are paid too much as that even skilled workers in the US are paid too little.

A little here and there, a percentage or two one way or another, would go a long ways to fixing things - a bit higher on taxes for the wealthy and a bit higher on wages for the employed, if school were a little more affordable...

[Zalatix]

13. As long as American corporations keep sending jobs overseas, you unlikely to make that much money.

You support offshoring. You support the very reason why you don't make that kind of money. Enjoy!

[bhikkhu]

15. There's a lot of blame to go around

...and I don't support sending jobs overseas, I support regulated trade, and I generally think people everywhere are worth much more than they are paid for their labor. You can't fix our problems by building big walls to keep the outside world out. We are already too isolated, and it shows in many ways.

[Zalatix]

17. Why not? The world has built big wall to keep American workers out.

It goes both ways. And it's the PRIMARY reason why many people can't find a good paying job.

[bhikkhu]

20. Automation is by far the biggest factor in manufacturing job losses

...and in any case the president's policies are working, and we have added 500,000 new manufacturing jobs in the last three years.

That we can't compete is a myth, commonly used to suppress wages. I don't buy it.

That the trade deficit is killing our economy is also a myth - it has been more or less steady at 3% of GDP for years, a small amount which is more than made up for by foreign investment here. A larger problem: in the same period health care costs have risen from 5% of GDP to 15%, swallowing 10% more of our economy than it does in most other countries, for less services per capita.

The primary factor for wage stagnation here is income inequality between the wealthy owners (taking record corporate profits) and the "executive class" taking massive salaries and bonuses. There are no foreigners to blame for the difference between our CEO's pay and the floor workers, and the US is one of the worst in pay differentials.

I can't even imagine a perspective that would shift the burden of responsibility for our poorly paid workers from the wealthy here to workers in other countries. Xenophobia has always been a popular tool of fascism? Labor can be broken by getting regular people to hate one another? If you can get a people to hate, they'll accept most anything?

[Zalatix]

22. The trade deficit is adding directly to our national debt. It translates to MILLIONS of jobs lost.

This isn't Xenophobia and you know it. Quit spouting that canard. It's about the world building walls to block out American workers.

[bhikkhu]

24. Only if you believe the national debt is costing us millions of jobs

I've never heard a viable cause-and-effect explanation for that, but I have heard it repeated by the other side quite a bit lately.

Reference material: http://www.automationworld.com/semiconductors/outsourcing-not-culprit-manufacturing-job-loss

http://beforeitsnews.com/libertarian/2012/09/automation-causes-job-loss-in-china-too-and-thats-great-for-human-wealth-2453238.html -

meaning - the problem isn't so much the lack of wealth, but in its distribution. Productivity is up everywhere, meaning wealth is up, but it tends to concentrate in fewer hands - its the same problem everywhere. If you go back in time to 1900 or so when farm machinery and new agricultural methods were destroying farm jobs everywhere, its the same thing - millions of jobs evaporated while food production increased greatly. The end result was cheaper food:



...all while shedding workers. Agriculture is a good example of automation displacing jobs because imports play such a small role here.

On trade, this is only up to 2008, but there haven't been any big changes:



This is more or less balanced by foreign investment in the US. If all you look at is trade anyway, the US is already relatively isolated - we trade much less than any other developed economy:



If you look at the biggest traders there, don't they have infrastructures, economies, standards of living, education, etc, about the same as ours, or better? If the argument is that trade destroys jobs, why didn't it destroy their jobs?

Its not about trade, its about income inequality here. Hating and blaming the rest of the world is unlikely to solve that. The people who fought for worker's rights worldwide a hundred years ago would have been ashamed of the notion.

[Zalatix]

27. So you're in favor of preserving the existing global barriers against American workers. Gotcha.

You want to know what offshoring has done to American jobs and wages? THIS.

http://businessfinancemag.com/article/economic-amp-business-focus-global-labor-arbitrage-resets-wages-0401

Offshoring will flatten wages in the United States and other advanced economies.
Global labor arbitrage -- the practice of constantly replacing expensive labor in one location with cheaper labor in another -- has been a cornerstone of corporate strategy for more than a century. This strategy matured over the past decade as technology and higher levels of development in the low-wage nations enabled their workers to take on service jobs and knowledge work; no longer is the practice limited to low-level production jobs. As developing countries provide an increasingly skilled workforce, developed nations' ability to differentiate themselves is dissolving, and the companies operating in those countries no longer need to pay their workers a premium. The most widespread and lasting impact of the maturation of global labor arbitrage is the decline in real wages in the developed nations. CFOs of U.S. companies can prepare now for a permanent resetting of wages for many workers in the upper salary ranges.

Increased global competition and low pricing power are driving the more aggressive forms of arbitrage: overseas sourcing, offshoring and foreign direct investment. In the IT industry, these practices are already moving into their second generation; Indian companies that took work from the United States and Europe are now offshoring less-skilled jobs to lower-cost locations such as China and Malaysia. IT wages in the United States dropped by an average of 3 percent in 2004.

Although corporations around the world increasingly practice labor arbitrage, most are still reluctant to call it what it is. TeleTech Holdings Inc. is one of few companies that use that term. The Englewood, Colo.-based company operates 66 customer management centers (CMCs) staffed with 33,000 employees spread over 16 countries, including 10,000 in the low-wage regions of Asia and Latin America. "TeleTech was one of the first customer management providers to successfully implement a labor arbitrage strategy more than 7 years ago," says Dennis Lacey, executive vice president and CFO. "Since then, we have expanded our labor arbitrage strategy globally, providing our clients high-quality, lower-cost customer management solutions in various languages and from many countries, including India, Argentina, Canada, Mexico and the Philippines."

Call-center workers in low-wage regions make 10 percent to 12 percent of what U.S. call-center workers earn, according to Datamonitor. That firm predicts wage inflation in the offshore markets and wage deflation in the United States as more call-center jobs move abroad. "Labor-arbitrage customer management centers have a lower cost profile than comparable CMCs in the United States, which lowers the overall cost to serve," Lacey says. Although wages in the United States have flattened, wages in India and the Philippines are rising rapidly. "Wage inflation is a natural component of a growing and evolving industry, particularly in developing countries," he notes.

Let me explain it to you simply:

Firing American workers and hiring cheap labor overseas is what fuels the income inequality problem.

Firing American workers and hiring cheap labor overseas is the primary weapons companies used to bust unions.

It's definitely about trade. As much as or moreso than automation. And it is why many people can't find a good paying job.

[pampango]

26. That is a key. Automation has caused a decline in manufacturing jobs in China, too.

So Who's Stealing China's Manufacturing Jobs?

You know all those U.S. manufacturing jobs that have been high-tailing it to China? China sure is doing a lousy job of holding on to them.

China lost 16 million manufacturing jobs, a decline of 15 percent, between 1995 and 2002, according to a study of manufacturing jobs in the 20 largest economies by Joe Carson, director of economic research at Alliance Capital Management. In that same time, U.S. factory employment shrank by 2 million, or 11 percent.

In fact, in the seven years ended 2002, the number of China's manufacturing jobs fell at more than double the rate --15 percent versus 7 percent -- of the other countries in the study.

So who's stealing China's manufacturing jobs? It seems that China's advantage as a low-cost producer hasn't halted the insatiable drive worldwide to replace even dirt- cheap labor with productivity-enhancing equipment.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aRI4bAft7Xw4

since the 1990s, China has lost more manufacturing jobs than the United States and other major countries. From 1995 to 2002, China lost 15 million manufacturing jobs, compared with 2 million in the U.S. (Xu, Spiegelman, McGuckin, Liu and Jiang, 2004). Moreover, it lost manufacturing jobs in those industries where the U.S. and other major countries have also seen jobs disappear, such as textiles. The U.S. lost 202,000 textile jobs between 1995 and 2002, but China lost far more jobs in this sector (1.8 million).

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043951X07000107

[pampango]

18. "... its not their fault that I don't make more money. ... the problem isn't that they are paid too

much as that even skilled workers in the US are paid too little."

Nice! Spoken like a true Democrat. Republicans would have us believe that it is the teachers' fault that I don't make more money so we should break their union, privatize the schools and drag teachers down to my level. Unfortunately repubs are good at selling this drivel and too many people seem to believe that dragging down people with decent pay and benefits is somehow going to help those that don't have them. The opposite is true. By protecting and empowering people with decent pay and benefits we make it more likely that we will get them, too.

[phantom power]

21. I want to thank you for asking exactly the right question....

Our plutocrat overlords enjoy waaaaay too much success getting Americans to waste energy resenting other Americans for 'making too much' when the problem is that they're not making enough.

[rl6214]

12. My wife recently retired after 31 years teaching and no, they absolutely do not get paid too much

but never in her career did she ever make what the Chicago teachers make.

[plcdude]

23. I think we need

a more accurate assessment of what CPT's make other than an average or mean score. I very much doubt that the majority of CPT's make 70+ thousands of dollars a year. The average is skewed by the high salaries of administrators. It would be more realistic and informative to find out the median salary figure.

[eppur_se_muova]

25. +1 Such basic distinctions -- mean vs median, teachers vs administrators ...

these are the first facts to be buried by corporatist propaganda.

[Zalatix]

14. Teachers get paid TOO DAMNED LITTLE for the shit they put up with.

[phantom power]

19. When I volunteer in my daughter's class, I'm exhausted after a couple hours...

And that's usually working with just 1/4 the class at a time. And they're basically well behaved kids. And it's a well funded, well equipped school.

I see no reason why an experienced teacher with a graduate degree shouldn't make six figures. It's just as skilled as what I do. It's arguably harder, at least in some ways. It's certainly at least as important, and maybe more so. I mean, what's more important than educating my children?

Our national discourse on education, like everything else, is completely disfunctional.

[Egalitarian Thug]

29. It all comes back to the absurd way we fund education here. It was a bad idea in the 19th century,

it's completely insane today.
& R