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Which kind of person are you?


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I'm a chemist with a graduate degree from IIT, but I may never have called anything un-ionized, though it's a good word. I just called it neutral!  Water, etc. can be deionized. But a solution that isn't ionic is generally called nonpolar or nonelectrolytic.

On the other hand, since I spent most of my working career as a public school teacher, I was unionized and spent some years as my school's union rep.

In Maryland, teachers do not have the right to strike and when, in the '80's, the state pointed out the State Teachers Pension was too high to be sustainable, the teachers unions quickly voted to reduce the pension benefits going forward.  Now, with the teachers and local systems contributing 14.65% of salary to the pension, it's said that if an incompetent manager ran the fund, it wouldn't run out of money for at least 40 years. We also get no benefits from the pension - low-cost but near-Cadillac retiree health insurance is subsidized by the working teachers taking a hit in pay when contract negotiations are done. Working teachers will never stop supporting it because they know they'll get the same huge-company-low-rate and subsidized insurance when they retire, whereas states that pay such benefits could decide to stop them. So our system works for me!

So we don't have as much confrontation between the teachers unions and the school boards and governments in Maryland compared to most states except in some places where the pay is particularly low - like Baltimore City where teaching is so stressful that they can't find enough applicants and 10%-15% of the teachers are recruited from the Philippines.  They should all get combat pay there.

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