-By Warner Todd Huston
Green Bay TV reported on June 21 that the teachers union in Green Bay, Wisconsin is incensed that the school district is demanding that teachers work an extra half hour a day, making their hours a set 8-hour day, or a 40-hour work week. In turn, this absurd ire displayed by teachers is incensing local Green Bay residents.
“They need to be the professionals that they are supposed to be. They sound like a bunch of idiots and they look like a bunch of idiots, they make the rest of us look bad,” said a listener to the Vicki McKenna Show.
Naturally the teachers union president assumes all you Green Bayers are stupid, that you don’t understand the issues, and says that she won’t listen to her critics, anyway.
In the report, Toni Lardinois, president of Green Bay Teachers Union, threw up the straw man factoid that some teachers voluntarily give 10 and 11 hour days to their job. The proper reply to this factoid is a hearty “so what”?
Yes, it is good that some dedicated teachers, all of whom are on salary, spend more time at work than they are obligated by their contracts. But the fact is they are not obligated to spend more than 7-1/2 hours a day at work. And the target are the many more teachers that give only the bare minimum required. That is what the school board is trying to rectify.
Even so, what is the whining going on here? These taxpayer paid for, government employee teachers are upset that they have to work an 8-hour day like everyone else does? How does that win them any sympathizers in the general public?
Hopefully it won’t. Hopefully, these pampered, highly paid public employees will at least find they have to work the same number of hours that the people paying their salaries have to work!
With some Wisconsin teachers making over $100,000 a year in average annual compensation, one would think they’d be smart enough to keep quite and suffer the small indignities, eh?
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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