(Press-News.org) CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – New research by a University of Illinois expert in employment relations and labor economics shows that, for more than a decade, Wisconsin teacher salaries have fallen behind changes in the cost of living as well as wage growth in the private sector.
Craig A. Olson, a professor of labor and employment relations, says the salaries of Wisconsin teachers have lost ground to those of their private sector counterparts over the last 16 years.
The paper compares the earnings of an average college graduate employed in the private sector in the U.S. versus the earnings of an average college-educated teacher in Wisconsin through public data from 1995 to the present.
Olson's analysis shows that, after accounting for inflation, the average private sector college graduate saw weekly earnings increase by 10 percent from 1995 to 2009. By contrast, the average teacher in Wisconsin saw salary decline by 10 percent, not counting fringe benefits.
"Not only did Wisconsin teachers not keep up with inflation, their earning power also fell behind their private-sector counterparts," Olson said.
In 1995, the average college educated private sector worker in the U.S. earned 17 percent more than a Wisconsin teacher; in 2009, this gap had increased to 36 percent, according to Olson's research.
Olson's research also discovered that while the salaries of public sector workers have not risen dramatically, expenditures on their benefits, especially health insurance benefits, have increased. In Illinois, the average inflation-adjusted premium for a family health insurance policy for Illinois teachers increased from $5,758 to $10,905 from 1993 to 2008.
Not surprisingly, health insurance premium costs for the private sector also have risen sharply during that time, increasing from $5,742 in 1999 to $13,770 in 2010, adjusted to 2009 prices.
Faced with rising health insurance costs, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has argued that Wisconsin public employees should be required to pay higher premium co-payments to match the higher co-payments paid by employees in the private sector.
"Obviously, Gov. Walker's argument misses a key point about how health insurance premiums and employee co-payments influence other employment outcomes such as wages," said Olson, who also is a professor of economics at Illinois.
An analysis of Illinois teacher wages and health insurance premiums from 1993 to 2008 that Olson is working on with Darren Lubotsky, a professor of economics and of labor and employment relations at Illinois, shows that in districts or time periods when premiums went up the most, teachers, through their local unions, typically accepted lower salary increases or agreed to higher teacher premium co-payments when compared to districts that faced smaller increases in health insurance premiums.
Olson applies these results to Wisconsin to suggest that through the collective bargaining process, Wisconsin teachers protected their health benefits when premiums were rising rapidly by accepting lower wage increases.
According to Olson, the budget bill in Wisconsin will likely have unintended consequences that have not been considered in the rush to pass the bill.
"My rough calculations of the changes in employee pension and health benefit contributions required under the proposal suggest the changes will cost the average Wisconsin teacher about $5,000 in total compensation," he said. "This reduction in total compensation is equal to about 10 percent of the salary for an average Wisconsin teacher. Since salary increases under the bill are limited without a voter referendum to changes in the cost of living, teachers will have great difficulty negotiating higher pay to offset these higher contributions."
While these changes will save Wisconsin school districts some money in the short term, Olson says it's likely to have a serious adverse impact on the quality of the state's teacher workforce.
"Obviously, it will make it more difficult for Wisconsin to attract high quality young adults into teaching," he said. "What parent in Wisconsin would encourage their child to become a teacher given the trends of the last 16 years and Gov. Walker's proposal?"
###
Editor's note: To contact Craig A. Olson, call 217-333-2586; e-mail caolson@illinois.edu. The paper, "The Battle Over Public Sector Collective Bargaining in Wisconsin and Elsewhere," is available online.
END
TORONTO, March 2, 2011 – York University researchers have zeroed in on a genetic process that may allow ovarian cancer to resist chemotherapy.
Researchers in the university's Faculty of Science & Engineering studied a tiny strand of our genetic makeup known as a MicroRNA, involved in the regulation of gene expression. Cancer occurs when gene regulation goes haywire.
"Ovarian cancer is a very deadly disease because it's hard to detect," says biology professor Chun Peng, who co-authored the study. By the time it's diagnosed, usually it is in its late stages. And by that ...
The Sun has been in the news a lot lately because it's beginning to send out more flares and solar storms. Its recent turmoil is particularly newsworthy because the Sun was very quiet for an unusually long time. Astronomers had a tough time explaining the extended solar minimum. New computer simulations imply that the Sun's long quiet spell resulted from changing flows of hot plasma within it.
"The Sun contains huge rivers of plasma similar to Earth's ocean currents," says Andres Munoz-Jaramillo, a visiting research fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics ...
Retail executives from across the nation will be descending upon San Francisco March 8th-10th for the Retail Advertising & Marketing Association's (RAMA) annual Retail Innovation & Marketing Conference. The show, catered to senior executives in retail e-commerce, marketing and technology, is about the changing business and marketing landscape.
RAMA Chairman of the Board and Executive Vice President of Half Price Books, Kathy Doyle Thomas, will be among conference attendees. "This year's conference will showcase the leaders of our industry discussing what they do best: ...
KNOXVILLE, TN —March 2, 2011 — In an effort to develop strategies for breast health awareness in rural populations researchers asked the question, "What message strategies will motivate Appalachian women to attend to breast health issues and become actively involved in their own breast health?" A new study published in the Journal of Consumer Affairs finds that two types of reasons motivate rural Appalachian women to perform breast health self-examinations, get mammograms, and to talk with doctors about their breast health.
The women articulated their concerns with the ...
A reliable and trustworthy system of weights and measures is vital for economic activity. Maintaining that system requires constant vigilance, and that's where the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Weights and Measures Division (WMD) comes in. While the division routinely hosts meetings and online classes to help state regulators enforce compliance, NIST is now making an effort to reach out to industry and retailers so that they can proactively identify and address problems in their measurement procedures before the regulators show up. Proactive compliance ...
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published the final version of a special publication that can help organizations to more effectively integrate information security risk planning into their mission-critical functions and overall goals.
Managing Information Security Risk: Organization, Mission, and Information System View (NIST Special Publication 800-39) provides the groundwork for a three-tiered, risk-management approach that "fundamentally changes how we manage information security risk at the federal level," says Ron Ross, NIST Fellow and ...
While lab tests and imaging can sometimes help diagnose juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA), a physical examination and thorough patient history are the most valuable tools in identifying this disease. According to a new literature review from the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (JAAOS), the rate of false positives in laboratory evaluations and imaging studies meant to screen for juvenile arthritis makes their value limited.
Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (formerly known as juvenile rheumatoid arthritis) is an autoimmune disease that affects nearly ...
PHILADELPHIA — New research from the University of Pennsylvania demonstrates a more consistent and cost-effective method for making graphene, the atomic-scale material that has promising applications in a variety of fields, and was the subject of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.
As explained in a recently published study, a Penn research team was able to create high-quality graphene that is just a single atom thick over 95% of its area, using readily available materials and manufacturing processes that can be scaled up to industrial levels.
"I'm aware of reports of ...
Intensive adherence counseling around the time of HIV treatment initiation significantly reduces poor adherence and virologic treatment failure in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a recent study in PLoS Medicine by Dr. Michael Chung, assistant professor of Global Health at University of Washington, who works at the Coptic Hope Center for Infectious Diseases in Nairobi, Kenya.
The study published March 1 also found that using an alarm device has no effect on adherence counseling.
The findings of this study define an adherence counseling protocol that is effective and ...
Boulder, CO, USA - LITHOSPHERE is now regularly posting pre-issue publication content -- finalized papers ready to go to press and not under embargo. GSA invites you to sign up for e-alerts and/or RSS feeds to have access to new journal content the minute it is posted online. Go to http://www.gsapubs.org/cgi/alerts and enter your e-mail address to manage your subscriptions for pre-issue postings, tables of contents alerts, and more. The following LITHOSPHERE articles were published online 10 Feb. 2011.
Mafic granulite xenoliths from the East Indian Shield: Evidence ...
