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Translation: I got nothin’ but ideology.

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My point was that I suggested you should find data/research to back up your claim "unions do NOT improve the quality of teachers nor journalists. Rather they protect and foster mediocrity. And with respect to teachers they protect its members at the expense of the children." Most of the best newsrooms in the country are unionized.

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Apr 4, 2022·edited Apr 4, 2022Author

Unions also help to attract and retain talent. If you were a good teacher and could teach anywhere in the country, you'd almost certainly choose a state with a unionized teaching force. The top 13 states for teacher salaries are all states in which teachers may collectively bargain. My thought in supporting the Trib's union was that such job protections would encourage staff retention and attract stronger applicants from j schools. You seem to view organized employees as a crew of folks who just want to lean on their shovels based on... your intuition? Which is based on... your ideology? Or some anecdotes you've heard somewhere?

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Jerry - The Catholic Church's ability to provide quality education at lower cost (until the 1970s anyway) was not only due to committed parenting and (usually) motivated students, but largely because they had an an extremely low-cost labor model - a severely underpaid teaching staff (clergy-based sisters/brothers/priests) who were paid a pittance, and were motivated to be good teachers in part by their faith. The costs of most Catholic Schools today exceed (in most/many areas) the costs to educate in public schools on a per-student basis, precisely because of the prevalence of lay teachers who are MUCH more expensive than their clergy counterparts. This is also the reason for the massive closing of parochial schools over the past 30-40 years - the under-market pool of teachers has, of the most part, evaporated (few clergy). The parochial school financial models of the first 3/4s of the 20th century no longer exists.

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When I was in high school, the approach of "holding all factors constant but the one under consideration" was exactly the principle of doing a controlled scientific experiment. This is rarely possible in the real world. I guess that's where the "multi-factor regression analysis" comes in, right? In a simpler way, our problem with the common approach comparing "blue states" with "red states" is the fact that the results are, we're pretty sure, what I've learned is called "confounded." And that's where you go in with your multi-factor regression analysis to separate out the effects of each individual variable, right?

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Social science would back this up by showing that students in states where teachers aren't or can't be in unions perform better that similarly situated students in states with strong teachers unions. Since you are making this claim I'll leave it up to you for produce such studies, which I don't believe exist.

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It's the unions that brought about smaller class sizes, safer classrooms and hallways, more nurses, social workers and psychologists. Also requiring highly qualified, certified teachers and support staff. The benefit to students clearly outweigh the non-union alternatives.

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The "lesson" is that many people hear Soros, Soros, Soros, Soros as an anti-Semitic dog whistle whether you intend it that way or not (and I'll repeat that I don't think Kass intended it that way). For a very simple example, if you call someone "Jimmy" who now goes by "James" and who considers "Jimmy" to be a belittling nickname from his youth, you say, "Hey, sorry, I meant no offense," and he says "I know you didn't. No worries. But don't do it again," and you proceed amicably. Alternatively, you could rage about how "Jimmy" isn't offensive or belittling in your view and you were right to call him "Jimmy" because you didn't know he goes by James and so you have no reason to apologize. Does this clarify things for you a bit?

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Our culture has come to view apologies as signs of weakness, which they need not be. If you believe, as I do, that Kass didn't intend to invoke an anti-Semitic trope, he should have said so instead of denying that it is. Provoking the response of "Hey, that's not what I meant at all, I'm sorry if you took it that way, lesson learned" is not granting a hecklers' veto. It's being man enough to own your mistakes, even if unintentional.

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deletedMar 31, 2022·edited Mar 31, 2022
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A closer reading by you of my post will reveal that people in the newsroom were by no means the only people who felt the Soros-Soros-Soros-Soros drone in Kass column evoked anti-Semitic tropes. It was, in fact, a national controversy. The letter from the union -- which I had no hand in writing and was not a signatory to, for the record -- asked only for an apology and a conversation not, as you wrote on an earlier thread, for Kass to be fired.

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deletedMar 31, 2022·edited Mar 31, 2022
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Freedom of speech?

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So glad you wrote about John Kass. I’d read his column from time to time, trying to find some reasoning for his opinions and conclusions, but he was too in love with his own words, his own “image”, and he appeared to believe he was a great satirist. I think he was a very lazy journalist. It seemed that he dashed off those columns without any research into whether or not it was the truth. Or if it was even logical. I felt his columns existed so he could do some liberal bashing. I’m sure you could put my thoughts into a more coherent and cohesive paragraph, but I will have to live with my own deficiencies. Thanks for your meticulous and insightful research into all matters, Especially Lori Lightfoot and Columbus.

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founding

As a Mincing Rascals fan I'm sorry to see Lisa Donovan moving on. I hope she is replaced with another female voice. Sometimes the Rascals can be a bit of "sausage fest". I would love it if they would bring back Kristen McQueary, she was terrific.

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Yes, and to be clear this was Lisa's decision.

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When I read Kass column when it first came out, I was struck how many times Kass felt the need to repeat his name, over and over again. To me it just smelled to high heaven of anti-Semiticism, as though he had to pound into the reader's brain that this notable Jewish financier was behind all the giving. So I am a bit skeptical of your contention that Kass did not know he was repeating anti-Semitic tropes. Had it been a revelation to him, don't you think he would have said something like "I didn't know"? His defense of his column would have been much more persuasive, and probably honest.

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As I wrote, I don't think he intended to sound anti-Semitic notes, in part because I don't think he IS anti-Semitic and in part because he's smart enough to know that such notes dramatically weaken any argument or point a columnist wants to make. His response has amounted to "repeated invocations of Soros is NOT anti-Semitic dog whistle (even though many people do hear it that way)." I've long argued that intent does matter in such instances, and that's gotten lost in many similar situations. And because I don't think Kass had anti-Semitic intent here, I think forgiveness would have been in order. I'm reminded of the analogy of bumping into someone's cart in the grocery store. If you do it by accident, you apologize, say you didn't mean it, and the other person says OK, please be more careful. But what Kass did here was, in effect, to deny that the collision took place. I'll work on this analogy.

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"...I think forgiveness would have been in order."

Traditionally, forgiveness follows a genuine expression of regret, an apology, sincerely made.

So, yeah, let me know if/when that happens. I won't hold my breath.

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Two things: first time I’ve ever seen “wroth.” Great word. Also loved the Lee Elia reference.

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Mar 31, 2022Liked by Eric Zorn

You had me at Lori Lightfoot's hello.

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While I mourned your, Mary's, Rex's and Heidi's departure, not having Kass with a pulpit was a blessing.

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I enjoyed Kass for a long while after he earned a column. However, when he wrote his column in support of the 2003 Gulf War (I think he referenced Saddam Hussein as a "rat in the corner") whereby he appeared to greedily eat up all the crap that Cheney & Co spun about WMD, I started to read him with a more skeptical eye. If I remember correctly, in that column he acknowledged that he was taking Cheney & Co's WMD assertions on faith, and would gladly cop to a mea culpa if he was wrong. To his (partial) credit, he did write a "mea culpa" column (again, this happened 15 years ago, and my memory is not what it used to be), but I remember finding it to be grudging and churlish. Thereafter, I found more his column less entertaining. From the election of Obama onward, his column drifted rightward, gathering speed in that vector until it appeared that he embraced the tenets of bad faith Tea Party talking points , then fully drinking the MAGAland Koolaid. Since he left the Trib, it appears that he has felt a great deal more comfortable "letting his freak flag fly". Watching his opinions evolve from his early columns to his current positions has been disappointing.

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The deterioration of John Kass into right-wing grievance has been evident since the Obama years, and has accelerated since Trump became president. From what I've seen since he left the Tribune, and without supervision from respected editors, he's sunk even further. I don't understand the QAnon type madness that infects certain media personalities, but there it is.

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Apr 1, 2022·edited Apr 1, 2022

For roughly eight years he could not write the name "Obama" without referencing his cutesy made-up phrase "real estate fairy." Man, talk about a derangement syndrome. The little man simply made up hinky "facts" about President Obama's south side home and then tried to get *everyone* to believe them by tossing the phrase "real estate fairy" into his columns every time he mentioned the President.

He looked like a complete goof.

Disgraceful that he held Royko's column space for that long. What a shame it was for The Trib.

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Mar 31, 2022·edited Mar 31, 2022

"It was not, however, Kass’ right to decline to “join” the union once the company recognized it. Illinois is not one of those “right to freeload” states where employees in unionized shops can refuse to join the union while still enjoying the protections and benefits afforded by collective bargaining. Once the Tribune recognized the union, all of us were in."

The wrongness of this point of view seems so clear to me that I'm surprised it hasn't generated any discussion (yet). Why is it wrong? Well for one thing, it's just as much mob rule as your having been cancelled before your speaking engagement. The idea that once a union was voted in everyone had to join denies an individual's right to free speech and the right to be left alone. The forcible extraction of "dues" amounts to extortion. ("Those are some nice benefits. It'd be a shame if anything happened to them.") What you see as benefits may not be what others see.

Further, pro-union sentiments rightfully call into question the ability of member journalists to report objectively on anything related to unions and labor relations.

This opinion has nothing to do with Kass, who I found often right but more often tiresome. "Right" and "tiresome" are not mutually exclusive, however. I like reading opinion that I find both right and not tiresome.

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It's not a "point of view" it's labor law. At least in Illinois. And the idea is that if you get the pay raises and benefits and job protections of the union -- which, again, by law, you do -- then you have to pay union dues. There is a carve out for union political activity, which you don't have to support.

There are "right to freeload" states where you can enjoy all the benefits of being in the union without having to pay union dues (conservatives and pliant, credulous journalists use the term "right to work," which is why I prefer the former if equally tendentious term) and it tends to weaken the union movement and union protections.

One could envision a company where unionized employees would get union benefits and non-unionied employees would not, but one can also see how employers would use the split to weaken the union by offering non-union people the same or even, temporarily, better salaries and benefits in order to get people to quit and kill the union.

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It may be a law, but it's also a wrong-headed point of view. Your preferred term is not only tendentious, but also obnoxious. Yes, of course employers might tend to favor employees who aren't part of the mob attempting to extort the company. I certainly would. And that should be their right. And what about a union journalist's objectivity when writing a story about unions and management? That has at least the appearance of a conflict of interest. Unions have a sordid history of high-pressure tactics, mob actions and corruption. That's reason enough not to force unwilling employees to become members. They should be allowed to tell their union colleagues, "Don't do me any favors" without financial or other penalties.

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Newspaper unions don't have a particularly ugly history and you need to remember why unions were formed-- not to "extort" companies but to win fair wages and decent working conditions. Your conflict of interest argument is silly -- you could make the same claim about non-union journalists covering union/management disputes, as they would have a non-union perspective.

Look, I get it, yoiu don't like unions. You think employers should hold all the cards and workers should be paid the minimum that the market can bear with no job protections or benefits that the employer doesn't think is primarily for the advantage of the company. Pure capitalism. I think unions help take the edge off raw, unfettered capitalism. Their excesses are more than balanced by the excesses of employers who, to borrow your sensibilities, practice a form of extortion themselves.

If Kass would like to make this argument on his website, fine. Instead he's pushing a false narrative. That doesn't bother you, I guess.

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Mar 31, 2022·edited Mar 31, 2022

Please don't be telling me what I think. What I think is that a person ought to be able to work for whomever he or she chooses without being hounded by a union.

As for Kass, what he's doing doesn't particularly concern me one way or another, but as if every politician and most journalists ever born don't push false narratives?

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"Unions" don't work very well that way, experience shows. The power of organized labor is meant as a counterweight to the power employers have and it's by and large been good for the country and good for the middle class. I would never say they have totally clean hands and excesses are easy to find, but so are depredations of employers.

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Mar 31, 2022·edited Mar 31, 2022

I'll agree that extremes one way or the other cause problems. Forcing workers to join unions to keep their jobs seems like too high a price to try to curb those excesses.

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I've said a number of times that unions are necessary to level the bargaining table against the natural oligopsony of employers.

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The UN has a more logical approach to understanding the meaning of "right to work." So does every American who is involuntarily unemployed. And they'd like some effective government policy help to become employed.

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“I have the biggest dick in Chicago.” -- L. Lightfoot

One solution to the Chicago controversy over the Christopher Columbus statues “. . . in Grant Park, Arrigo Park and a Southeast Side traffic island . . .” is to unify all in civic agreement and remove every last antiquated landmark but simultaneously replace them with robust, bronze statues of our more modern Mayor, Lori Elaine Lightfoot – and please everyone!

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Lori Lightfoot isn't ignoring a possible Wilson run for mayor. She's calling his bet with gas cards worth $150 each for as many as 50,000 drivers, and transit cards worth $50 each for as many as 100,000 riders.

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She's not ignoring it now. But the difference between Wilson spending HIS money on a gas giveaway and LL spending OUR money on a gas giveaway won't go unnoticed.

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Mar 31, 2022·edited Apr 1, 2022

I don't think taxpayers are offended when money is returned to people in need. The COVID stimulus payments were very popular.

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founding
Apr 2, 2022·edited Apr 2, 2022

Sorry, Wendy, but I am more than a little annoyed. I had no problem with the covid payments (other than the inept distribution which resulted in 100's of billions lost to fraud) because they went to everyone that was hurt by actions that were taken by government (shutdowns and restrictions). The Mayor is giving away $12.5 million of gift cards, in a lottery. The lottery is open to 3/5ths of the 1 million Chicago households. So it is clearly a political gimmick, with no economic benefit (two tanks of gas or two 7-day CTA passes, to a random15% of households), that will be executed during her campaign for re-election.

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I agree this is a political gimmick, as is Wilson's.

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