The popularity of sort-of-open government has inspired the growth of entertaining websites that attempt to list the salaries of every single state, county and local government employee of interest to the patrons of the particular site.
Sponsored for the most part by conservative public policy think tanks, the web data have proven to be popular with journalists and good-government types.
Early in the birth of any new site, the most frequent and persistent consumers of the salary information have tended to be government employees – curious to discover how much the dope at the next desk might be making.
Salaries remain perhaps the most secretive aspect of business and professional life – unless you are, perhaps, a public school teacher whose salary is mandated by labor contract, based on years of service and whether you have one of those really, really important graduate degrees in education.
One of the more subtle and even more difficult-to-measure areas of worker curiosity is how “hard” a fellow colleague might actually work – how much physical and/or mental exertion is required to do a particular job, as compared to someone else down the hall.
Especially in the case of “knowledge” workers, of white-collar folks and R&D folks performing mystical tasks, the bottom line is intended to be, well, the bottom line, not necessarily the amount of perspiration required to get one through the day.
The issue came to mind following a recent whiny letter in the Boston Globe, written by a Boston Teachers Union functionary, who urged us all to “follow around a typical teacher for a week before making unsubstantiated comments about their professional status.”
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The letter was prompted by a column criticizing the union for its resistance to teachers working longer days, or more flexible hours, or some other thing that would make them seem more like professionals and less like truck drivers on a Teamsters contract.
The “follow me around” defense, and the “spend a day in my classroom” defense, so common among teacher-union types, raises the question of whether exertion, or time with nose to the grindstone, is the best way to evaluate performance.
As a philosopher-king once put it: Even ants work hard – but what good does it do them?
The union letter writer – who co-edits the Boston Teachers Union newspaper – had the nerve to suggest that perhaps the Boston Globe columnist who angered him doesn’t really have to work very hard. After all, how long can it take to write a few columns?
Well, Mr. Smarty Pants Union Guy, columnists get paid based on the quality of the final product, not how long it takes to crank it out. I don’t earn my $5 per column at Banker & Tradesman based on an hourly wage – it is the finished work of art that earns me the big bucks.
When the national consensus prompted the evaluation of teachers based on student test scores (the “final product”), the unions resisted, of course.
That’s not to say that the question of how best to evaluate folks who aren’t on an assembly line isn’t challenging. I’ve often wondered exactly what the Banker & Tradesman editor does all day to earn his pay, but whenever I want to ask him about it, he’s napping at his desk. And yet, the paper comes out every week, just fine.
The teachers’ unions do themselves no favors with contracts that specify, down to the second, how many days, hours and weeks per year the “professionals” must be on the job. This summer, in Rhode Island, the teachers and school board in Central Falls engaged in an amusing comedy of negotiation that caught national attention, which eventually led to the teachers agreeing to work an additional 30 minutes per day.
It’s fair to question whether the marginal utility of that extra 30 minutes will amount to much, but it does reinforce the notion that teachers want to be evaluated based on a clock, and how much running around they do, as opposed to hard data at the end of the semester.
I’m going to stop now. The editor just woke up and he’s calling my name.
