Actually, it's easy money that flows to the union, then to democrat campaign donations... So, it's a forced-funding of one party (and one-party rule here) with taxpayer provided resources.

Break the union, and it breaks the liberal stronghold.

The California Civil Service Closed Shop Bullpucky for rank and file is nothing but a legally mandated racket to keep easy money flowing into the unions (and give nothing in return). If that's not a Balph Eubanks/Wesley Mouch scam, I don't know what is.

The happiest moment in my career with them was when I made management and could tell the unions to take their "fair share" thievery and go pound sand. They "forgot" to take me of their rolls when I promoted... and made me fight like hell for almost a year to get my 5 months worth of stolen dues back from them.

Hell, they worked harder to keep their illegally gotten gains than they ever did when I was forced to give them part of my paycheck every month.

About time! When I was becoming certified to become a school principal, I learned that the Los Angeles created a special condition related to school evaluation. (Schools are evaluated every few years by the State. A 'failing" school does not affect the entire school district.) In the case of Los Angeles, EVERY school is tied to the evaluation of single school. Fail the school and the entire district fails. That's why LA schools always pass their evaluations.

Let's not get in to a PC vs Mac fight as it's not germane to the topic. I was focusing on how corporate culture directly affects (or infects, your choice) employee mobility within an organization and how my former company was not handling mobility particularly well because of its dependence on "stack ranking". The approach is not conducive to harmonious employee interactions for the very reasons that blarman identified. It creates an adversarial environment and pits teammate vs teammate.

Hasn't Microsoft got a little fat? I'm in the technology industry, have been for 25 years, but even I switched to a Mac 3 years ago and only touch one of the 3 PC's on my desk under protest. Redmond really turns out some garbage these days... sales statistics show it... PC business down 5% last year, but Mac sales are up 12% year over year. Now Apple is targeting the healthcare industry dead-center (something I originally advocated by pointing out the Mac's power and superiority to Windows with imaging and graphic handling). Obviously... no comparison in the mobile device field. iPhone owns it.

Next stop, judges for life appointments Ten years max and a way to remove nutcases'

Concerning "employee responsibilities; I can testify that Microsoft has never done a particularly good job of making them clear, at least in the customer service arena. One was at the mercy of how good one's supervisor was at communicating and mine was particularly inept resulting in slow progress for her people. Most of them (myself included) either left the company or moved to a different job within the company at first opportunity.

I don't doubt that the environment would focus everyone's priorities double-quick. But are you sure those people would be able to stay healthy, and would not have an insurmountable obstetrical-gynecolocial problem (babies growing too fast) if they subsisted in the one-third gravity of Mars? Would they not be better advised to build a beveled gravity wheel they could then spin to live in Earth-normal gravity? And how easy would it be to build that with a few Mars Direct crews, do you think?

I'm not sure Dr. Zubrin thought that concept through. He might perhaps have thought the one-third gravity would be more healthy because it would feel better. But eventually you want a colony where someone could stay for a synodic year (the time for Mars to come back to alignment with Earth) and then return without breaking his bones with every step on Earth.

In fact, Microsoft abandoned this approach in 2012, my last year there.

Why not? A few years back, Robert Zubrin (Lockheed Skunkworks) wrote a book, The Case for Mars, and advocated the "Mars Direct" approach, rather than the Battlestar Galactica style NASA mission. Instead of building a ridiculously large mothership to make a roundtrip to Mars (difficult because you have to catch up with Earth's orbit speed again), we make a one-way trip, live off the land like our ancestors did, and build a new society. Eventually after the resources are developed we can make trips in both directions more easily. This shrinks the cost from something on the order of half a trillion to like $20 billion (we borrow $40 billion+ a month on the deficit). Send small ships ahead that are unmanned with the equipment to extract resources from the environment, when they set themselves up and we know they are working, then start sending the people. Live in the ships at first, then build a dome/habitat, build a greenhouse, extract water from the soil (which we know is there) and fill the habitat with oxygen extracted from the sparse air so you don't have to wear a suit all the time. Believe it or not, there would be a lot of volunteers for that. We just tested laser-based data transmission and it worked fine, meaning we could put the Internet on Mars for most of the year (unless the Earth & Mars are separated by the Sun until we get some satellites in non-Earth orbit).

You would be amazed at how stable their society would be when daily-survival is the primary duty rather than watching Kanye West & whatever.

After only terminating 91 people in 10 years out of 350,000+... I'm good with nuking the bottom 10% every year for a few years to take out the trash.

If you consider the inverse, maybe it isn't such a bad name after all. Unions are basically "right to not work and still get paid"... ;)

Let me guess: you would recruit those loners for a mission to Mars Send up a crew of scouts, plus a rover for each.

That methodology was found to be extremely flawed. Hewlett-Packard used to use it every year in a process they called "rankings". What they found was that all it really did was pit teammates and coworkers against each other because each knew that if someone other than them succeeded, they themselves wouldn't be up for a raise. It took all the emphasis away from performing one's job and helping move the entire company forward as a result (where everyone benefited) and turned everything into a dog-eat-dog adversarial corporate atmosphere. You will notice that very few corporations employ this methodology today.

Harvard Business Review actually advocates a very simple and effective method: make sure employees know what is expected of them and hold them responsible for carrying out those duties irrespective of what everyone else does. If they go above and beyond to bring something great to the company, reward them. If their performance is dragging other areas of the company down, fix it or let them move on. Most of all, make sure that both the employee and management are on the same page regarding employee responsibilities!

Hard to say... California used to kind of lead trends like this that eventually happen nationwide... but Colorado and Washington went for that recreational pot-smoking stuff... and California shot it down every time it's been attempted.

Absolutely agree. The vast majority are for general neighborhoods of an urban area though. I think we have something like 15 districts or so (at least) here in Sacramento.

In the earliest days of push-back against unfair state laws requiring union membership (and subsequent confiscation of union dues) as an absolute condition of employment, people fighting for employment freedom of choice decided to use the label "Right to Work" to describe the law change being advocated. Of course, liberals reject any kind of freedom of choice that does not match their ideology.

"Districts in California tend to be rather small, we don't have many "county-wide" districts, most are neighborhood area ones with maybe a dozen schools." Except the LAUSD is the elephant in the state with 700,000 students (72% hispanic, 9.6% black, 10% white)and over 45K teachers. By most accounts its also the most disfunctional.
/wiki/Los_Angeles_Unified_School_District

As a former resident for 36 years who still loves the state (just not its politicians, taxes, regulations, etc.) I hope you are right and I hope I lose the bet.

If you look at recent judicial decisions actually... the Supreme Court overturned established union bargaining agreements with public workers as being 'nullified' when the legislature only approved reduced pay for the workers during the recession. Using that as a precedent... they may also agree that nullifying teacher tenure may also be in the public interest. Education is pretty awful in California... we're the 8th largest economy in the world, and we are slugging it out with Mississippi and Alabama for the bottom of test scores in the United States. It would be hard to find anyone other than a teachers union wanker that would agree with whatever they are doing is working. The teachers union has another problem... they have dramatically under-funded their own pension plan.. by most estimates, its underwater by about $70 billion, with most agreeing its really like $200 billion because so many districts don't pay into social security, that if the teacher didn't do anything before being a teacher, they don't qualify for Medicare, so they are completely dependent on state/pension healthcare into perpetuity... http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-teach.... An interesting sidebar there... the California Teacher's pension (CalSTRS) owns Bushmaster Rifles... Lock/Stock & Barrel... literally... oops... they forgot that when the libatard media beat the crap out of the company in the media...

Realistically, California has a 12% income tax rate, we have "low" property taxes... but our values are gigantic, so 1% of $700,000 is still $7,000 a year in property taxes... around 9% sales tax... something like 50 cents on the gallon for gas tax... Capital Gains taxes... by most estimates, with federal and state, we're in it for about a 60-62% marginal tax rate at the upper end, there is no room to raise taxes to fix the education problem. Education already gets 50 cents on every tax dollar.. or well north of $50 billion a year and we spend more per-pupil than anyone. So to fix the problem, we need to start swapping out the people at every level.

The union fought deviously to keep this out of the court system, they knew what would happen if a reasonable person takes a look at this bullshit. I think this is the first of many decisions that don't go their way, actually.

Also, by most accounts, Schwarzenegger was better to unions than Jerry Brown is.. the public unions are presently rejecting anything he offers them versus Schwarzenegger was able to usually work out the differences and stay in budget. Jerry is just mandating by fiat, then ignoring the differences and sending it to the legislature. http://www.sacbee.com/2014/06/03/6454967...

Reality... they don't have a friend in the governor's office either I don't think. He's happy to take their money, but they didn't get what they thought they were paying for either, nor does he have the room in the budget to do anything.

I stand corrected on Wilson being the last Republican governor, but if you want to take the other side of the bet, I still think this decision gets reversed on appeal.

Well, first, Pete Wilson was NOT the last California governor. Arnold Schwarzenegger was (about 7 years in office preceding Jerry Brown).

Second, appointment to office by a governor in California doesn't necessarily mean much. In the case of the judgeships, they would be presented as a short list to pick from from the Judicial Appointments Advisor and would probably have the endorsement of the AG, and letters of recommendation from law schools, etc. AG is an elected constitutional office, as is the Lt. Governor, and has no bearing on who the sitting Governor is.

The Governor's staff reviews the application and if acceptable, moves it to the State Bar judicial nominees evaluation committee... which is a pretty left-leaning group, if the candidate gets a high rating from the JNE, it moves back to the Governor for consideration for appointment.

In a state as large as California, there are not a lot of coattails appointments kinds of things I don't think... there are over 200 state agencies, and most managerial-level positions are appointments, with a work force of about 220,000 (not including teachers & law enforcement/fire obviously). A safe bet would be something like 10,000 appointments... but I looked & couldn't find the number. You wouldn't have coattails for all of that, so most are just grandfathered from the previous administration.

An interesting note, my wife's uncle is Cruz Reynoso, a previous Supreme Court Justice during the Reagan governorship. Interesting guy to talk to. Has some interesting stories about pre-Presidential Reagan and was fairly fond of him (despite being very liberal) until Reagan's people argued the ketchup case before the Supreme Court of California... (Reagan argued that a ketchup packet in school lunch met the "vegetable" requirement for school lunch nutritional requirements, Cruz laughed it out of the court room). We talked about the appointments process once, unlike the federal system, it's pretty hard to get nominated out of the blue - the vetting process is pretty long.

Very glad to read of this decision. I was disgusted a month into my first year teaching when my dept chair gave me a card and said fill it out, get it back to me. I had at that point in time never been in a union and was naive that you could actually be forced to be in the union, or leave.
I would love to see tenure done away with, as well as a few other rules that protect bad teachers. The one rule that gets me is that administrators have to give a teacher 24 notice before coming in for an observation, basically ensuring a show and not everyday classroom activity.
It's a fun and challenging job though, and I want my tax dollars back so I'll keep going for a few more years.
Have fun!