It’s not just the unions that are the problem. We have, in California, one of those silly programs for educating young children. This one’s called “First Five California” and the intent is to teach pre-schoolers to read. I guess the attitude is that they’re not going to learn to read in school, so we should teach this when we can, even before. Anyway, Los Angeles has its own local branch of this organization, and they hired a woman to run it at an exorbitant salary. She did a crappy job, losing a bunch of money which neither she nor anyone else could account for. We’re talking hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. As a result, after some time her supervisors decided to get rid of her, but didn’t quite have the nerve to out-and-out fire her…they just demanded that she resign. That’s all well and good, but she petitioned a state administrative law court, claiming that since she hadn’t voluntarily resigned on the one hand, and hadn’t actually been fired on the other, she’d actually been laid off. The result: the county had to pay her $1.5 Million in severance, as per her employment contract with her employer (us).

So she was incompetent, cost us a bundle of money, and the solution is to pay her $1.5 Million to go away. Does anyone want to bet that her replacement will be no more competent, but that the bosses will avoid firing them for fear of another fiasco like this one?