Alberta public sector wages: 0% increase.

[kobe tai]

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Hence why, again, I don't understand how you can say this one individual position is over-paid considering the comparable professionalism, education requirements, and expectations.

Cause they're still drinking that UCP kool-aid and think our province is fucked cause of overplayed and inefficient public sector instead of decades of being raped by the conservative party and their corporate buddies.

[kobe tai]

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So they'll start to fuck up our kids if they get 0% raises for a while?

Nah our kids are gonna get fucked up by larger class sizes and lack of funding for resources.

[Buster]

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And, how does that compare to other 4-6 year educated professionals? We're trying to establish worth with data are we not? I'm happy to have a data driven discussion.


Edit:
How about I throw some of the first data out there then:

- Education, lets say teachers and engineers need the same education. I've established that isn't the case but we will go with it.
- Responsibility, financially and safety I know engineers are more. I do think there is some inherent responsibility to teach and not kill 28 little kids but I know this will be a sticky point about babysitting so I'll let this go. I'll give the point to the engineer here.
- Hours, I think I've shown that it is a split. You work much more defined and probably longer hours when you're there as a teacher. Where as (at least in my position) for an engineer (and our consultants I deal with daily) while there is crunch time at certain points in a project for the most part engineers are 9-5. So lets call it equal.
- Pension, most places have an RRSP matching or D.C. pension. Equal.
- Security, teachers definitely beat the engineers here.

So overall, I do agree the engineer should make more. The responsibility and 'worth' to the market is much more easily defined and financially a good engineer is worth more. Since APEGA is a bit hard to break down to one number, for 2019 salary recommendations I'll use those reported from the Consulting Engineers of Alberta.

Newbie EIT
Engineer
4 years education, 0 years experience, $74,000 a year recommended.

Teacher
4-6 years education, 0 experience, $59,188 - $66,200.

Winner: Engineer by 11%-21%


Now, lets arbitrarily pick 5 years out:

Engineer - would have P.Eng, probably deemed a 'project engineer' at that point no?

4 years education, 5 years experience, $104,000 a year recommended.

Teacher
4-6 years education, 5 experience, $76,550 - $ 83,580

Winner: Engineer by 20% - 26%

Now, lets arbitrarily pick 15 years out:

Engineer - probably a manager at that point no?

4 years education, 15 years experience, $127,000 a year recommended.

Teacher
4-6 years education, 5 experience, $93,914 - $100,960

Winner: Engineer by 20% - 26%


So my point again stands, on equal footing, the teaching scale is less than engineers. Compound that 10-25% earnings over a lifetime and I think you guys all see the same data I do. Hence why, again, I don't understand how you can say this one individual position is over-paid considering the comparable professionalism, education requirements, and expectations.


Sources:
https://www.rockyview.ab.ca/hr_benef...2016-2018/view
https://www.cea.ca/files/Rate_guide/...20Salaries.pdf

Engineers are willing to expose themselves to market forces.

Teachers have done almost everything in their power to avoid their labour rates being exposed to market forces. One of the downsides of the teachers approach is that their actual market rate is almost impossible to determine and therefor open to speculation and ultimately criticism.

If you want to hide outside of a market system you have to deal with the consequences of that with respect to optics.

[A790]

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Engineers are willing to expose themselves to market forces.

Teachers have done almost everything in their power to avoid their labour rates being exposed to market forces. One of the downsides of the teachers approach is that their actual market rate is almost impossible to determine and therefor open to speculation and ultimately criticism.

If you want to hide outside of a market system you have to deal with the consequences of that with respect to optics.

Couldn't we glean the market rate of teachers by looking at what private schools pay?

[The Cosworth]

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Engineers are willing to expose themselves to market forces.

Teachers have done almost everything in their power to avoid their labour rates being exposed to market forces. One of the downsides of the teachers approach is that their actual market rate is almost impossible to determine and therefor open to speculation and ultimately criticism.

If you want to hide outside of a market system you have to deal with the consequences of that with respect to optics.

OK this I can understand 100% have no idea how that should best be handled. I've often wondered similar about the same conversation about fire fighters and 'no comparable jobs' in the market. I agree teachers fit here. I think if I did understand this well I might have a lucrative job as an economist? Haha. I'd assume this is the same issue with most 'union' or 'government' jobs.

So I am curious then, would a fair precursor be the flood of people into (or away from) those jobs? So really basically if a job was attracting too many people, either the job itself pretty much has to be over-compensated (either benefits, time off, vacation) for the requirements? So the solution would be to increase the requirements or reduce the compensation?

[Type_S1]

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https://data.oecd.org/teachers/teachers-salaries.htm

Average US Teacher Salary, 15 years experience: $64426
Average Canada Teacher Salary, 15 Years experience: $67301

http://www.nea.org/home/2017-2018-av...er-salary.html

Starting teacher salaries by state,low $30s to high $40s with New Jersey and DC being above the $50K mark.

Alberta's $58,500 average starting teacher wage would be at $44,800ish USD, putting new Alberta teachers in the top fifth in the US but behind: Alaska, California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Wyoming.

Could throw in a tax comparison if we really wanted to get into the nitty gritty of it but I think it's clear that the idea of 'teachers get paid double here' probably doesn't hold up all that much when talking in a broad sense. Some teachers here might get paid than some teachers there depending on location, experience, etc. Similarly a 15 year teacher in Massachusetts definitely gets paid double the starting teacher in Montana there are probably teachers in Alberta getting paid double of some teachers in the U.S as well.

You can’t do currency conversion and tax conversions to compare locations...this is just a laughably stupid exercise. The people in the US pay for all their goods and services in USD so converting to make your numbers “fit” your argument doesn’t work.

Alberta teachers are some of the highest paid in the world, there is no arguing this, it is simply facts. They may not be THE highest, but I would venture to guess in the top 5%.

Also - Calgary was rated one of the best cities to live in the world...pretty disingenuous for people to be saying nobody wants to live here.

[KrisYYC]

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Minimum wage used to mean minimum income to raise a family. Now, it isn't even a guarantee in some places to survive.

No it didn't. That was never the point of minimum wage. The expectation that minimum wage should be high enough for adults to raise a family is a very recent thing more commonly called "living wage". When I was growing up nobody was making a career out of entry level fast food jobs.

[Buster]

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Couldn't we glean the market rate of teachers by looking at what private schools pay?

We might. I'm sure this has been studied extensively, but I'm not familiar with the literature on it.

The problem is how dominant the public system is both in terms of labour and in terms of funding (ie public), and in terms of curriculum. If 99.9% of the teacher population works in the public system, I'm not sure how likely it is that the .01% in the private system (or whatever number it is) would have a dramatic impact on labour pricing.

Probably the bigger issue is how the gov't monopoly working in concert with the labour monopoly (teacher's union) removes the competitive pressure for quality as well. We really do get a double impact of the current system.

[A790]

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The problem is how dominant the public system is both in terms of labour and in terms of funding (ie public), and in terms of curriculum. If 99.9% of the teacher population works in the public system, I'm not sure how likely it is that the .01% in the private system (or whatever number it is) would have a dramatic impact on labour pricing.

Well, I don't think we're looking at the impact on the labour market so much as what the salary range for private teachers in AB would be. There are enough private schools out there that we'd be able to get meaningful data.

[kertejud2]

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You can’t do currency conversion and tax conversions to compare locations...this is just a laughably stupid exercise. The people in the US pay for all their goods and services in USD so converting to make your numbers “fit” your argument doesn’t work.

Alberta teachers are some of the highest paid in the world, there is no arguing this, it is simply facts. They may not be THE highest, but I would venture to guess in the top 5%.

How else would you compare the salary of a teacher in Alberta to a teacher in the U.S. or elsewhere in the world without standardizing their salaries to the same unit?

[Type_S1]

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How else would you compare the salary of a teacher in Alberta to a teacher in the U.S. or elsewhere in the world without standardizing their salaries to the same unit?

Again, you are being disingenuous. The buying power a $1 CDN in Calgary is likely greater then the buying power of $1 USD in many larger American cities. Why not compare what teachers make in Alberta to Kazakhstan? Teachers there appear to make well less then $10k/year CDN...if you directly compare these two places with conversion an uneducated reader would say “HOLY ALBERTA NEEDS TO CUT THEIR SALARIES”, because currency conversion does not equal buying power.

Again, Albertan teachers are some of the highest paid in the world. You can do all the mental gymnastics you want but if you argue against this you are trying to push a false narrative.

[kertejud2]

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Again, you are being disingenuous. The buying power a $1 CDN in Calgary is likely greater then the buying power of $1 USD in many larger American cities. Why not compare what teachers make in Alberta to Kazakhstan? Teachers there appear to make well less then $10k/year CDN...if you directly compare these two places with conversion an uneducated reader would say “HOLY ALBERTA NEEDS TO CUT THEIR SALARIES”, because currency conversion does not equal buying power.

You compared teacher salaries here to your friends in the U.S. to what Canadian (Alberta) teachers did. I showed why that probably wasn't a great comparison because it turns out there's a good change they don't (or if they do, they get paid half of what other teachers in the U.S. as well, depending on where they live).

So you're going to try to pull this now, when you're the knob who brought up the comparisons in the first place. Then in the same post say something like this:

Again, Albertan teachers are some of the highest paid in the world.

like it is supposed to mean something? C'mon now.


Where do your teacher friends work in the U.S. and how much experience do they have and we can see just how skewed the situation is then. You brought it up, we might as well get to the bottom of this.

EDIT: some of the highest paid teachers and some of the best students would also seem like a pretty good trade-off as well

https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/alberta-...show-1.4713229

[Masked Bandit]

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We all make choices and sacrifices to achieve our end goals. I don’t pretend to not have chosen a career path that isn’t targeted towards my goals. Nor am I ashamed of it. My career also comes with an inherent level of risk associated with my compensation, risk that teachers do not take.

You guys are the ones arguing that Teachers are somehow altruistically immune from choosing to be teachers because it pays well above average and comes with a lifestyle they covet.

There's definitely risk with being a teacher, the risk being that your income is capped no matter what you do. You can be a complete rockstar at your job and your paycheque is still the same as the person down the hall phoning it in. And let's be honest here, $95K a year, while not chicken feed isn't exactly retire at 55 kind of money, not in Calgary anyway. Maybe if you live in Vulcan, AB or some such place I guess.

[msommers]

Stop making it hard on yourselves and compare Houston to Calgary in USD.

[kertejud2]

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There's definitely risk with being a teacher, the risk being that your income is capped no matter what you do. You can be a complete rockstar at your job and your paycheque is still the same as the person down the hall phoning it in. And let's be honest here, $95K a year, while not chicken feed isn't exactly retire at 55 kind of money, not in Calgary anyway. Maybe if you live in Vulcan, AB or some such place I guess.

The DBPP makes the 'retire at 55' planning a lot easier, though.

[killramos]

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There's definitely risk with being a teacher, the risk being that your income is capped no matter what you do. You can be a complete rockstar at your job and your paycheque is still the same as the person down the hall phoning it in. And let's be honest here, $95K a year, while not chicken feed isn't exactly retire at 55 kind of money, not in Calgary anyway. Maybe if you live in Vulcan, AB or some such place I guess.

Giving up upside for certainty isn’t risk. Might be hard to stomach, but it’s not risk.

[Masked Bandit]

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The DBPP makes the 'retire at 55' planning a lot easier, though.

Pretty tough to pull pension at age 55 (not impossible, just not common). The formula the CBE has (edit, I think it's actually ATA not just CBE) I like to call Magic 85. Your age plus your full-time contract years of service needs to equal 85. Most teachers are done school by age 24-25, spend a few years subbing, then a temp contract or two and are basically 30 before the clock starts ticking. Take a few years off with maternity leaves for kids and you're somewhere around 62 - 64 years old. Most men that go into teaching don't take a maternity leave but let's be honest, there are far more female than male teachers.

[Masked Bandit]

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Giving up upside for certainty isn’t risk. Might be hard to stomach, but it’s not risk.

There's only certainty once you're a solid 15 years into the project. Six years of schooling plus the first ten years of work. As mentioned above the first 3-5 years are usually filled with substituting and temporary contracts (covering maternity leaves for example). Once you get a permanent contract you're "guaranteed" a job but even that isn't as stable as you'd think. The junior teachers at a school often get "surplused" which means there's no job available at the school they're at, but the CBE has to put them somewhere so the next thing you know you've been reassigned to some shithole on the other end of town giving you an hour long commute each way. It's not like you come out of University, get a job at the school down the street and then stay there for the next 35 years.

[killramos]

Temporary contracts 100% count. My wife was on continuous by 25, that was early but her entire group of friends (6 of them) she graduated with all had cont within a year of her. So say 26.

It’s even easier to get cont if you are with Catholic.

[Masked Bandit]

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Temporary contracts 100% count. My wife was on continuous by 25, that was early but her entire group of friends (6 of them) she graduated with all had cont within a year of her. So say 26.

It’s even easier to get cont if you are with Catholic.

Probationary contracts count, not temps.

Edit: Hmmmm, now you've got me second guessing myself. Imma look into this, all I can find on the ATA website is that you're years count when there has been pension deductions taken off your cheque.