31-year-old teacher quit her job. Now she works at Costco—and boosted her income by 50%: ‘I've never been happier' (these are not feel good stories, this is sad)

Educated young people overthrow governments. You do the math.

The mess is allowing decades of union-busting to be effective. Teachers in my state of Victoria (Australia) are heavily unionised, so US$50k is the starting salary. You would absolutely be making what she is now, $64k, if you’d worked for 8yrs like she had.

Edit: And that’s just for public teaching jobs. Australia has way more private schools than the US and those pay even more. With 8yrs of experience it would be easy to get one of those positions and be making $70k.

I live in Oklahoma. I make $40k/year teaching. I can not afford the up front cost of moving to Seattle. Long term I’d love to end up in a corporate job, but because teaching is so shit and a lot of people are leaving, transitional jobs are difficult to find.

The headline is really misleading. She now works for Costco corporate doing marketing training. The typical store employee is still around $18/hour.

Downvoting you, because you are mischaracterizing the article content.

The first half of it describes how she started there and the regular positions she had, before she moved up and into the teaching position she has at corporate office, which is similar to the teaching position she had before; both are of a teaching.

From the article...

At first, I made $18.50 an hour — a little less than what I earned as a teacher. I put in 40-hour workweeks, five days a week, and got a $1-per-hour raise when I hit 1,000 hours.

Next line that you left off speaks to that...still.

"That's my position. We just haven't figured out how to do it yet."

That hits hard. Will we ever figure out how to do it here?

This might be the most memorable quote from the entire run of the West Wing for me. Our teachers are doing their job out of good will and our society is taking advantage of them because their value far outstrips what they are paid.

I was so annoyed in high school though, because I actually did have a biology teacher who was the opposite. That boogeyman anti-faith "evolutionist" strawman.

He openly polled the class and asked each student, row by row, if they were religious, and that they had to choose between "make believe" and science.

It pissed me off not so much because of what he did, but that he proved that there really were science teachers like that, and all the anti-science conservative families whose children took his class would be using that story as an example of the "evil anti-God agenda" of science educators.

I'm my state, substitutes don't need to have their credential. You get some rough candidates as a result.

You're 100% right. My wife has a masters degree in education and spent 7 years as an English teacher with 3 very different types of schools in different districts. She left to be an instructional designer (with zero experience in that field) and nearly doubled her salary overnight.

If America wants to take education seriously they need to stop screwing over teachers.

I work in a Costco. They treat me very well. Far better than the Walmart I worked at prior. Pay is far better too. As an example, I helped run the night shift as an Overnight Support Manager at Walmart. My topped out pay in that role was 50 cents an hour more than my starting pay at Costco. Now, 18 months later, I make more as a frontline grunt at Costco than I did in that management role.

3 years from now, as a frontline grunt, I'll be making more than the Assistant Manager I worked under at Walmart.

Everyone who can should shop there, max markup is 14%, they stand by their products, generous warrantees AND they treat their people very well

Any work reform, pro Union, ethical consumers out there should actively shun Walmart, shove a finger into Amazon's ass, and shop Costco when possible, support an ethical supply chain

I feel this story buries this: Costco above other stores is a step up from most careers

I have a close friend from high school who has worked there for 15 years now, she said she never thought Costco would be more than a summer job between college searching but she's happy there and they treat her well. Nothing wrong with that

Because it’s basically right wing propaganda very subtly pushing the message that we should privatize education and that corporations are good

Actually, 2/3rds. If she's earning 50% more, that means the previous wage was 100 and now is 150. 100 / 150 is 0.6666... or 66.66%, 2/3rds.

Sorry for the pedantism, but it's the kind of math that needs to be correct to avoid misunderstandings.

Still an awfully sad thing, tho. Teachers should be paid the same as doctors, IMHO.

You also didn't read the article, at all - clearly

While I'm one that normally would suspect such a thing myself, honestly, they wouldn't need to, they already have such a great rep in the states where they're located.

lemmy should ban corporate lobbyists

Florida's approach was just to give anyone with a police or military background a teaching license.

They won't up teacher pay. They'll just hire shittier teachers because the primary highlight of public education is that it is free daycare for their exhausted, working parents.

Nah, the only people that will still be teaching will be ideological extremists and people that want to hang out with children for other reasons.

There are definitely some benefits but when holiday prices increase by 4x the breaks become harder to utilise. Pension is great, but when the negatives outway the positives...

Whataboutism at it's finest. Your nation spends hundred of billions of dollars in military spending and you get to look at 300M~ sent to a nation that is fighting tooth and nails to defend itself against an aggressor.

Do you think that 300M~ could really make a difference if used to do a salary reform toward teachers? In 2018 US teachers were 3,652,000. Those 300M~ would add 89$ a year to each teacher salary. This instead of helping people who are fighting and dying under the fire of missiles to keep their freedom (isn't it a value dear to you fellow Americans?) beign taken away from an authoritarian state.

I invite you to reflect more deeply before making these populist comments. People are dying and are appealing to the values you marketed for years. They are literally imploring the help of the west, because they know what being oppressed feels like.

If you want to help teachers, go vote for people who promote a better welfare and social system that can benefit people doing a public service. You can help your people and make the world a better place at the same time my dude

The problem is living in a society that doesn't educate it's people.

Yeah, that's the advice. Just no one be a teacher. Great! Now what are all the kids going to do to get into their own fields?