Let all workers have tenure

The education reform debate has inadvertently pointed to a solution for all workers while it has a the same time attacked them. As Queen Marie Antoinette might say: LET THEM HAVE TENURE.

Tenure commonly refers to a secured job for life, usually applied to senior academics since their academic freedom needed to be protected. Wage security would benefit all workers, not just academics.

The education reform debate is cloaked and daggared specifically in an attack on public school teachers, their competence, their unions, and especially tenure. The Los Angeles Times, that Swine Flu of US journalism has led this charge.

Yet we do not hear these reformers storming our federal courts to end life-term appointments for judges. That is also tenure. Wealth in the US is still kept with a small gaggle of ruling families. If you think about it, this is a form of perpetual tenure, generation after generation.

But it is no mistake why our Establishment goes after the social service sector.

The LA Times, with a record at heaping vitriol on pro-public, left-of-center, populist causes as far back as the 1930's near-victory of a socialist governor in California, is probably helping produce the farce that is cleverly couched as Helping Our Kids.

Their aim is to dismantle public schools, but you can't openly attack kids. So our Establishment has implemented "Testing" to covertly punish schools with little resources by using these student assessments to take paltry resources from schools.

Schools fail and are defeathered. Teachers punished and are defrocked. Capitalism's social darwinism is victorious.

"They hang us by the neck," Fidel Castro said in a not dissimilar context, "and criticize us for not breathing." This is the dilemma the public school finds itself in.

Ironically, the Establishment. itself so opposed to labor rights anywhere, has given us the logic for giving all workers tenure.

We get a lot of this do-well-in-school lip service, and how college graduates earning power is greater than a high school graduate. But this misses the dinosaur in the room of the swathes of unemployment in all sectors, in all walks of life, but most especially among the working classes.
If the Establishment believes so much in its education, let the country stand behind it by guaranteeing all workers a wage:

* Anyone who has successfully completed an education, GED, degree, or training certificate program is guaranteed a wage by the state. The more credentials, the greater your earning potential.

* If a job is made obsolete, the worker will continue to earn his/her wage and be re-trained or re-assigned to another job. This will disincentivize throwing workers to the streets.

If this exposes the phony degree mills and financial aid scams - such as what this author suffered at an over-rated San Francisco Jesuit university, all the better. Shut them down. The state would have a greater interest in the quality and longevity of these degree programs and certifications to produce employable people.

Let the Establishment stand behind its programs, the education system it touts and funds with tax dollars (often in student loans), and guarantee tenure for all by giving all workers a living wage regardless whether the system has a plough for them to push or a paper to shred.

For more info: George Bernard Shaw makes a compelling argument for Guaranteed Wage in his The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism & Capitalism