When a major teachers union cares more about homelessness policy than educating children, it shows this branch of big labor has abandoned its proper purpose.
The Fresno Teachers Association in California appears set to strike, keeping children from classrooms. After most children at public schools fell behind during COVID-19 shutdowns, this further denial of classroom time would be unconscionable.
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Yet the union adds insult to injury. While it moves toward a child-harming strike, it demands that high school parking lots be opened as campsites for homeless families. Seriously. The proposal, costing $500,000 for added security alone, is one of several “societal things” union President Manuel Bonilla has included in his association’s demands. The union, viewing the school system as a catch-all social service provider, also wants it to offer free laundry, 24-hour access to mental healthcare, and free yoga classes on weekends.
These demands come on top of astonishingly extravagant ultimatums on salaries and benefits — the normal bones of contention in labor disputes. The school district says its offer would put an average teacher salary above $100,000 annually, but the union says that isn’t enough! The six-figure salary would be for a job entailing only 185 workdays. In other fields, full-time jobs usually entail more than 240 workdays. The median household income in California is some $20,000 below what the school district is offering, and the national average salary is about $40,000 lower.
The teachers also want their job evaluations to be no longer based on student achievement in their classes. They insist on a plethora of other supposedly nonnegotiable “working conditions” involving small class sizes, paid “mental health days,” increased incentives for early retirement, and more.
Such unreasonable demands are standard from education unions nationwide, even as most contracts make it nearly impossible to dismiss incompetent or misbehaving staff. In his book Not Accountable, the famous centrist reform advocate Philip K. Howard notes, for example, that in a recent 18-year period in Illinois, an average of only two teachers a year out of 95,000 statewide were dismissed for poor performance.
Howard posits the big problem underlying the outlandish power of education unions is the same one afflicting all public-sector unions. Unlike private-sector unions, “government bargaining has few market constraints. Government can’t go out of business, so unions can demand ever more — a kind of one-way ratchet that never stops raising public costs.”
The reason is simple: Public-sector unions can leverage voting power and use quasi-mandatory dues for political contributions to make elected officials their vassals. Unlike in the market economy, in which management is answerable to stockholders, in government, elected officials depend on the unions with which they are “negotiating.” There’s no effective counterweight to public-sector union power, so union demands keep getting more exorbitant.
Even longtime AFL-CIO President George Meany said, “It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government,” and famously liberal President Franklin D. Roosevelt said unequivocally that “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”
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Howard argues that public-sector unions violate the Constitution and are inexorably detrimental to the public good.
In the case of Fresno teachers, it isn’t corporate chieftains whose interests are being held hostage to teacher greed and their bosses’ social-justice demands. Instead, the hostages are the children schools are meant to serve. When teachers threaten to empty classrooms unless parking lots can be filled with homeless people, teachers’ priorities merit a flunking grade.
