PA State Universities Face First-Ever Faculty Strike
17th November 2012
The Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties has been working without a contract since June 2011. Unions and negotiators for the Pennsylvania state college system have met 40 times but have been unable to reach an agreement.
I am not making this up.
[Recap for the dimwitted: Unions arise when a particular occupation has a skillset that is easily subject to substitution on the part of management because supply vastly exceeds demand, hence collective coercion on the part of workers is the only way to raise (or sustain) their price over what the market-clearing amount would be.]
Think how clever the American higher-education system is. They have arranged it so that they can generate an oversupply of PhDs and thereby drive down the price that they pay for faculty, and the silly buggers pay them to do it, often in the process incurring crippling debt in amounts that an old-time Company Store could only dream about.
Insensitive Politically Incorrect Analogy: ‘Hey, Pedro, for the low, low price of $1000, I’ll be happy to help you sneak a hundred of your relatives over the border so that I’ll never have to pay more than $1.00 an hour for labor ever again. What do you say?’ ‘Gracias, Senor, that is very white of you.’
Isn’t it just.