Apparently at one point in Fahrenheit 9/11 when a newspaper headline is shown, the "headline" was heavily edited by the filmmakers. Quelle surprise. Story at Pantagraph.com, the offended newspaper.

Alberta teachers went on strike in 2002 because of large class sizes, poor working conditions, and oh yeah, they wanted an 11% pay raise. The strike lasted three weeks and was settled by an arbitration panel which gave the teachers a 14% pay raise over two years.

I found someone writing in unequivocal support of the 2002 teachers' strike. But it was marxist.com so maybe it's not really mainstream.

Alberta teachers and school boards were recently in negotiations on a ten-year contract which would include indexed pay increases and (surprisingly) an offer by the provincial government to pay the unfunded liability of the teachers' pension fund (about $1.8 billion). The talks fell through on July 5, with no particular reason given.

According to this CBC article, the unions claim that mediation fell through. The school boards claim that the unions walked away. And Education Minister Lyle Oberg has apparently withdrawn the $1.8 billion offer.

So -- teachers' strike again this year? We'll see.

(An unintentional Vonnegut reference)

I haven't been hanging around here much, and I haven't been responding to e-mail much either. What have I been doing?

In 1996, Bob Dole resigned his Senate seat to run against then-President Bill Clinton. He got creamed, which is what everyone expected.

Obviously, Dole was ready to retire from the Senate, and since then he's made a living as a talking head and as a commercial pitchman -- promoting, among others, Viagra, Pepsi, and Britney Spears. So it cost him little to resign from the senate in 1996 instead of '98 or '00 or whenever his term would have expired.

But I wonder if part of the reason he resigned was to give the Republican Party ammunition the next time a Democratic Senator ran for President. Certainly the Republicans have made much of the fact that John Kerry has missed over 80% of his Senate votes while campaigning, and it would have been harder to do that had Bob Dole not resigned his seat -- the Democrats would have thrown Dole back in their faces. As it is, they're throwing Bush.....

Kaija said "buh" the other day while Danielle was modeling pointing to a ball in a book and saying "ball". But she won't repeat it.

She's mostly stopped making signs. I'm not sure if this is because we haven't been diligent in modeling them to her, or if she's getting confused between spoken and sign language, or what.

Neal Whitman just started a weblog on linguistics, more or less. Here's a couple of his posts on his child's pronunciation of /l/ as [y] or [w]. It's something my nephew did for a while, and it drove my father-in-law crazy... Anyway, Whitman describes the pronunciation pattern and gets a possible explanation for the distribution of [y] vs. [w]. Interesting work!

I've been thinking over the strike thing some more, and it makes me madder and madder the more I think about it.

Basically, strikes are most effective when the striking laborers are giving up much less than the employer is -- that is, when the employer's costs in having their factory/hotel/convention center/port/whatever sit idle are much larger than the strikers' costs in lost wages.

In other words, strikes are most effective against the sorts of businesses where labor is adding the least value to the enterprise.

Hypothetically -- the ideal situation for a striking worker would be a business where, say, 100 million dollars worth of capital are tied up in a fancy machine -- a wonderful machine that earns a 10% return on capital when it's working. But in order for the machine to work, the worker needs to push a button. Suppose that for performing this task, the worker is paid a "mere" $100,000 a year.

One day the worker decides that $100k is not enough. He wants $250k. He wants benefits. He wants a six-month-long all-expense-paid vacation in Hawaii, every year.

What does he do? He forms a union -- ButtonPushers Local 137. They get out the signs and walk the picket line until their demands are met. And they're met. Sure they're met -- the business is losing $9.9 million a year as long as that button is not being pushed.

When the labor costs are a large fraction of the business's expenses, a strike is pointless. In fact, at the point where the labor is very skilled, it was probably expensive to acquire the necessary skills and certification, so effectively the worker owns some of the capital which is not being employed -- in that the worker "owns" himself. So progammers don't strike; doctors don't strike.

Longshoremen strike. What are you going to do, build another port?

Commercial pilots strike. Is that because they usually (at least in the US) don't pay the cost of their training? In any case, expensive planes sit around, rusting, while the airline has to make the lease payments.

And those are just the businesses where the opportunity to strike is intrinsic in the nature of the business because the business is capital-intensive. What about strikes where the strikers get leverage because they have a government-granted monopoly? Air-traffic controller strikes. Garbage strikes. Teachers' strikes.

Here in Canada, the nurses sometimes strikes. The EMT's strike. Ambulance drivers strike. I've never heard of such a thing in the States. (They do happen, apparently.) But I suppose strikes by health workers are just another cost of state-paid health care....

We got back in today. More random thoughts from the road-

Gasoline. Is it possible that US gasoline is less energy dense (measured by fewer km per liter) than Canadian gas? This is not an entirely stupid question, because oxygenating additives such as MTBE and ethanol (which are mandated in at least California) probably reduce the overall energy density in addition to increasing the price. What's the benefit? Less CO and more CO₂ in the exhaust stream. Is it worth it?

Strikes. Strikes are only effective bargaining tools for laborers when the total payroll expense is a small fraction of the total operating expense of the concern. This gives the laborers lots of leverage (literally) in that the employer doesn't have to pay wages but still has to pay the rest of the operating expenses. If wages are say 20% of operating expenses, each day of the strike costs the employer four times as much as it costs the laborers.
This helps explain why programmers don't strike.

Teacher strikes. When teachers go on strike, the school district has to bear the cost of depreciating the school, the textbooks, etc. But the real pressure comes from the costs borne by the parents - missed work days staying at home with the children, windfall daycare costs, etc. The teachers, by striking, force the parents to care for their own children between 8 and 3; and this inconvenience to the parents causes the parents to pressure the district to concede. Not to mention the damage to the economy from lost work days, and the concomitant hit to tax revenues. The solution? Eliminate mandatory schooling. It's the only way to be sure.