UCP supporters why you so silent?

[kobe tai]

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I always enjoy hearing teacher/AHS friends talk about potential wage cuts etc.. like its completely foreign concept that would completely collapse their world... then seeing the look on their faces when I tell them my wage was cut back 10% and my 30% bonus went to 0 a few years back.
IMO teachers are paid quite fairly, especially considering they get 3-4 months off every year that they could also find part time work to subsidize. Im guessing they would rather a few teachers let go per school than have their wages garnished by 5%.

3 to 4 months off lol?? Being married to a teacher I can tell you it's more like 4 weeks. And my wife regularly works 12 hour days and weekends for no extra pay. But hey - you can too. Just need that 4 year degree and 10+ years of experience to make that 90k/year.

[Buster]

Teachers have 180 instruction days per year at the CBE. That's 69% of the annual working days for the year.

[kobe tai]

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Teachers have 180 instruction days per year at the CBE. That's 69% of the annual working days for the year.

That doesn't include pd days, catchup days, planning days etc. Teachers work a lot more than you think and there is no overtime.

[ThePenIsMightier]

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Did the NDP make any truly hard decisions with their budgets?

It must have been difficult to bring beer to near prohibition prices! LoL!
So many upset twisty moustaches!

[04Terminator]

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That doesn't include pd days, catchup days, planning days etc. Teachers work a lot more than you think and there is no overtime.

He's an idiot. People like him think teachers are overpaid baby sitters. Absolutely no clue what the job entails.

A good friend of ours is a teacher. 12 hour days, weekends, and stress. They were handed a box of paper in January and told "this is for the rest of the year." Running to the copier to put your paper in before you can print a worksheet. Funds were always very tight and most spend out of pocket.

And it's not 4 years anymore is it? I thought it was 5 to 6 depending if you were stellar and got accepted to the concurrent route, or had to earn a first 4 yr degree to be accepted into the program ?

And our friend says burnout rate is crazy. They lose a big percentage at the 4 year mark if I remember right because it's a hard, stressful job.

[kobe tai]

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He's an idiot. People like him think teachers are overpaid baby sitters. Absolutely no clue what the job entails.

And it's not 4 years anymore is it? I thought it was 5 to 6 depending if you were stellar and for accepted to the concurrent route, or had to earn a first 4 yr degree to be accepted into the program ?

Not sure. My wife did her degree in early 2000's. I think masters was 6 years at the time and you could top out at about 100k salary wise with that after the 10 years.

[04Terminator]

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Not sure. My wife did her degree in early 2000's. I think masters was 6 years at the time and you could top out at about 100k salary wise with that after the 10 years.

Yeah, 5 year minimum now, and it's not wide open, most are 6 year. 4 for your first degree, then 2 more for education degree.

Quoted from U of C site.

The standard structure within the Five-Year Concurrent BEd program is for students to do the first three years within their co-operating faculty (Faculty of Arts, Science, or Kinesiology) and the last two years within Education. Students must end the Concurrent BEd program completing 500-level Education courses.

[hampstor]

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You're leaving out the most important part of this: 'it needs to save $32M in operating costs this budget'

There's a 3 year capital plan done every year. Here's the most recent https://cbe.ab.ca/FormsManuals/Three...-2019-2022.pdf

This year CBE sent it onto the government April 1, and they got a budget at the end of October. Hard to redirect funds and accelerate projects when you don't know how much funding you have. Then redirect and accelerate capital funding on projects that won't even be done in this budget to save operations money in this budget isn't practical advice. Hell, most won't even begin this budget because there's school in session. Replacing Diefenbaker's heating system and upgrading the electrical, or A.E. Cross' vinyl-asbestos floor tile replacement probably isn't best done in the middle of a school year, and is unlikely to save $32M or close to it in operations funding.



When you're given a budget on Oct 28 and need to make a major cut and Dec 2 is when you have to decide whether to renew temp teacher contracts to save that money, damn straight they scramble.

Give them a budget on time and they probably wouldn't have to scramble. But not wanting to hurt Scheer's election chances was more important than announcing a prudent education budget.

I *never* suggested they are going to close a 32M hole (~3% of a 1.2B operating budget) from just their capital plan. I gave a list of things that any responsible budget holder does before they cut FTEs, including reviewing the capital plan for projects that have an economic driver. I don't know why you picked on that 1 item, and gave me their capital plan, but at the end of the day, it's only 1 of many things they should be looking at. If the answer is "no projects in our capital plan have a driver that is to reduce operating costs", then whoever is in charge of developing projects needs to be fired, and the board who isn't questioning this also needs to be fired. That's just incompetence and people should be outraged.

They were about 1Q through their fiscal, were in a time crunch (~1 Month) to figure a comprehensive plan to find ~3% (out of a 1.2B operating budget) for the remaining 3Q, the only thing they could come up with is cutting 300 front line FTEs??

Fuck, politics makes people crazy. I wish I could pull that kind of stunt (firing staff because I don't know my budget enough to make other cuts) and get people to support me.

I don't even a horse in this race anymore - this is fucking hilarious watching this unfold.

edit: removed a line that I had inserted by mistake from another discussion.

[suntan]

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Chomsky at age 100, on his deathbed from a brain tumour would make more sense than you.

It's a common "rape by privatization" step by step from the crony capitalist playbook. Didn't need Chomsky, but I googled it to have something to show the non readers.

The lease. you are lying. It was negotiated during Calgary's unprecedented boom. I know, you would have made better decisions. But if the UCP government can go to bat and have the lease halved without some crazy penalty, I am all for that.

ROFL. Chomsky thinks the IMF is a bad idea. Like I'm not too keen on one world governments but holy shit that's just a little tooooo far.

[90_Shelby]

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Yeah that's basically where i'm at on this topic too. It's become an "us vs them" zero sum discussion.

Ministries operate just like departments in a corporation. If a department get less operating budget than what they asked for, they reprioritize and makes changes to business plans. Sometimes this means cutting operating costs like training, events, laptop refreshes, reducing maintenance schedules (running things to failure and replacing vs. proactive maintenance), reduces salaries, bonuses, reducing contractors, or reducing FTEs.

If any department just goes to cutting FTEs without doing anything else, you should be questioning why they are doing that, not blindly holding it up as an example of the evil conservative trump supporters who are lining the pockets of big business at the expense of the people. It blows my mind that people will hide behind "You don't care about health, you're just supporting big corporations, you don't care about students" as a strawman against very basic business and budgeting practices.

Cutting 300 FTE's and not getting called out on it is hilarious. No reduction in training budget, no reduction in non union staff wages, no reduction in maintenance plans, no deferred technology plans, no reductions in contractors, no analysis of in source vs. outsourced work, no capital plan on how to reduce operating costs, and on and on.

To be clear, all the jobs are not going to be saved by cutting back on office supplies budget, but if you don't even look at your office supplies budget, then you're going to have very limited credibility with decision makers when you say "I don't have enough money to run my business".

[gwill]

what a troll. Malibu makes a quick anti ucp posts and then runs and hides.

It would certainly make twitter and reddit a lot more manageable to be on if the ucp threw money at everything. They should take a play out of the ndp book which starts with throwing billions of dollars away and ridiculous ideas.

[Misterman]

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Are you surprised by the cuts and impact it will have on yourself and your children?

Nope. A 1.5% cut isn't really anything worth mentioning. Cuts should have been WAY steeper.

Although I'm not really a "supporter" per se. Just choosing the only option to get rid of the NDP.

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Two weeks before Mat leave, my wife was handed a brand new MacBook Air as a work computer, and her two year old MacBook Pro was taken back...
$2400 work laptop every two years??

For comparison, my $800 Lenovo thinkpad is still running strong 6 years later and it’s used almost daily.

But no, there is nowhere they can find savings...

This is a great example of how retarded left wing types are. They have zero understanding of efficiency, and how the same jobs can be done for less money. To them dollars spent is somehow a magical connection to service provided, there is no wiggle room in this equation for them.

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I would be interested to see the outcomes if the government hired a consulting firm to find efficiencies in health care, education, etc. They won't ever, but I bet it'd be money well spent if they actually dedicated funds to a third party optimization of their operating model. I'd be happy if my tax dollars went towards that.

Government auditing government gl with that.

Hell yes. I've been saying this for years. Maybe if someone that knew a single thing about business looked at the books, they could find out where these departments are somehow flushing the extra 100% of budgeted money down the toilet of what it would cost a private business to operate the same service.

[soloracer]

I had a discussion with my father some time ago. He was a teacher for 30 years before taking early retirement. I know that he didn't make a lot - I made more my first year working in the oil patch in the field. This would have been around the early 1990's. Have teachers wages relative to others risen at a greater rate? Just curious is all. The discussion I had with him was regarding cutting the size of government. In business - especially an oil business - you go through cycles of growth and decline during which you adapt. My father was of the opinion the government shouldn't cut during a downturn as it would put even more workers on the street. And there is some merit to his argument. However, if you don't cut government when times are tough and you don't cut government when money is flush when do you cut? Never? Is government the one entity that should be allowed to grow and grow with no end in sight? Seems like a formula for disaster to me. Just curious what our NDP friends think.

[04Terminator]

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I had a discussion with my father some time ago. He was a teacher for 30 years before taking early retirement. I know that he didn't make a lot - I made more my first year working in the oil patch in the field. This would have been around the early 1990's. Have teachers wages relative to others risen at a greater rate? Just curious is all. The discussion I had with him was regarding cutting the size of government. In business - especially an oil business - you go through cycles of growth and decline during which you adapt. My father was of the opinion the government shouldn't cut during a downturn as it would put even more workers on the street. And there is some merit to his argument. However, if you don't cut government when times are tough and you don't cut government when money is flush when do you cut? Never? Is government the one entity that should be allowed to grow and grow with no end in sight? Seems like a formula for disaster to me. Just curious what our NDP friends think.

You are confounding government and public sector. Do you mean one, or the other, or do you think they are the same?

[Misterman]

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You are confounding government and public sector. Do you mean one, or the other, or do you think they are the same?

They pretty well are the same. You're splitting hairs to say otherwise.

[davidI]

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I had a discussion with my father some time ago. He was a teacher for 30 years before taking early retirement. I know that he didn't make a lot - I made more my first year working in the oil patch in the field. This would have been around the early 1990's. Have teachers wages relative to others risen at a greater rate? Just curious is all. The discussion I had with him was regarding cutting the size of government. In business - especially an oil business - you go through cycles of growth and decline during which you adapt. My father was of the opinion the government shouldn't cut during a downturn as it would put even more workers on the street. And there is some merit to his argument. However, if you don't cut government when times are tough and you don't cut government when money is flush when do you cut? Never? Is government the one entity that should be allowed to grow and grow with no end in sight? Seems like a formula for disaster to me. Just curious what our NDP friends think.

I'm no friend of the NDP nor UCP but my take is that the public sector should have consistent, if not counter-cyclical, spending.

They're not selling consumer products that fluctuate with economic cycles. If anything, health care and social services are pressed more in the downturns due to the issues that arise from economic decline.

While the NDP's tenure was atrocious, a lot of blame needs to go to the Tories who were not running surpluses and socking funds away when times were good. Given the economic situation in Alberta the last decade, it probably made sense to run some deficits, but not in the manner the NPD did. I haven't seen any tangible benefits to the extra spending other than a larger public workforce.

Teachers, nurses, doctors, social workers, etc. deserve to be well-compensated for the work they do. The jobs they do are challenging and require high-levels of knowledge, attention, and effort which would be well-rewarded in the private sector. At the same time, union workers need to accept that their job-security, pensions, and other benefits factor into their overall compensation and thus their salaries may be less than those of private-sector workers who do not receive the same benefits.

I just wish any level of government could come up with a 10 or 20-year plan and more or less stick to it, with minor adjustments made to address changed variables, rather than repeated promises to "overhaul" the way things are done which just seems to waste funds without adequate improvement to the outcomes.

[04Terminator]

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They pretty well are the same. You're splitting hairs to say otherwise.

ABSOLUTELY they are not the same. If teachers and nurses were government, we wouldn't have stupid UCP games.

[davidI]

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ABSOLUTELY they are not the same. If teachers and nurses were government, we wouldn't have stupid UCP games.

So the executives and employees at Microsoft work for different companies?

[speedog]

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Weren't the NDP supposed to release a shadow budget 2 months ago? Not like the UCP are the only ones running late.

That was supposed to have been done by the FTE they got rid of.

On a more serious note, I am one of those dumb boomer UCP voters and for me, it was the lesser of two evils. Is there going to be pain, sure as hell there will be. At some point some Alberta governing body was going to make some difficult decisions and it as quite apparent that the NDP most likely was not going to do that any time soon. The only thing I hope doesn't happen is spending our way out of a mess like the one Klein created.

On a side note, someone had made mention of the wages line cooks and such might be making under union contracts, well sometimes those menial positions might be worth paying a bit more but in the end accounting practices will always trump paying smart people a decent wage. Case in point, TELUS used to have very well paid warehouse employees and while they cost a pretty penny, they also saved the company money that paid for their wages many times over.

One example I can remember is a huge amount of large lead acid batteries TELUS had to throw out a number of years back because those batteries went stale on the shelf. Now when TELUS did their own warehousing and had their own warehouse people, well these people actually were smart enough and cared enough to know that these batteries had to be cycled so it was always a Last In Last Out situation. Pain in the ass really because these were huge batteries used in their central offices and it was a lot of work to remove batteries from the shelf, put the new ones at the back and the older ones out front.

Fast forward to after TELUS ditched all of their warehouse people and got rid of their warehouses, contracted the whole mess out. Well that contracted company didn't bother with cycling stored batteries and after a few years TELUS ended up tossing out millions of dollars of batteries because they went stale on the shelf. I suppose it's not a big deal because it's easier to write off a capital line item than an expense line item but the logic of it all is completely stupid. And btw, it is still happening.

[rage2]

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I had a discussion with my father some time ago. He was a teacher for 30 years before taking early retirement. I know that he didn't make a lot - I made more my first year working in the oil patch in the field. This would have been around the early 1990's. Have teachers wages relative to others risen at a greater rate? Just curious is all. The discussion I had with him was regarding cutting the size of government. In business - especially an oil business - you go through cycles of growth and decline during which you adapt. My father was of the opinion the government shouldn't cut during a downturn as it would put even more workers on the street. And there is some merit to his argument. However, if you don't cut government when times are tough and you don't cut government when money is flush when do you cut? Never? Is government the one entity that should be allowed to grow and grow with no end in sight? Seems like a formula for disaster to me. Just curious what our NDP friends think.

Teacher salaries are public information.

https://cbe.ab.ca/about-us/budget-an...isclosure.aspx

There's 2 lines there for teachers:



I believe the first line is base teachers, and 2nd line are teachers that have various allowances.

Based on my teacher friends, they do get paid half decent, it's roughly 5 years FTE grind to hit 6 figure if you can tack on any allowances, with the max $140k salaries being principals at the top of the grid if my above assumption is correct.