We tend to love to lump things together and treat them as all the same stuff. It's so much easier than taking each thing on our list and thinking about it separately. It's human nature, I guess.
One case in point emerged in the conflict in Wisconsin, over public workers rights to collective bargaining and other union issues. Seems all the public employees are protesting, the teachers among them. Some teachers were talking about an attack on collective bargaining and tenure, as if these were like items, fit to reside in the same bag. They are not.
Collective bargaining is an organized way for employees to negotiate wages, working conditions and benefits. Management and labor can sit down and engage in give and take until they work out an arrangement that both sides can live with. Neither side has absolute power, so neither side gets totally screwed.
Tenure is a different animal, and not every job has something like it. Someone who starts his or her third year as a contracted teacher suddenly has a job essentially for life, whether he or she continues doing it properly or not. That's a right no one should have, teacher or janitor.
Naturally, firing anyone should involve due process, where perhaps a panel drawn from workers and management can hear the case and decide the merits. In the case of teachers, a school board member and perhaps a parent should be involved. In any case, a good teacher should be retained, a bad one fired. And that has nothing to do with the pay or benefit package, which apply to those who are worth to receive them, not to anyone who managed to hang in there until the magic day.
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