The National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and local allies such as the California Teachers Association are unions that teachers are required to join and support with dues in order to accept a job offer.
These are, in effect, government unions. That is, the teachers are employed by public school districts and soon protected by tenure from discharge.
The individual teachers may hate the union and all its works, but his or her paycheck is nicked each month in its support. The only exception is the cost of the union’s political activities, which is calculated and deducted for those who prefer. This exception was established by a decision of the Supreme Court four decades ago. It was deemed necessary to protect individual teachers’ speech rights under the First Amendment.
The accounting necessary is not so easy. The AFT used to give $200,000 each year to the United Farm Workers. In 1981, Cesar Chavez told me it kept him from supporting school vouchers. I wonder if Albert Shanker deducted this amount from the dues of resistant teachers.
The “right to work” without joining the union or paying dues is, for government workers, about to be tested in the Supreme Court once more in an appeal by a teacher named Janus. The name is appropriate and well worth remembering. The decision seems likely to go against compulsory dues for government unions. With Justice Gorsuch in place, it’s hard to imagine otherwise. The probable vote is 5-4.
I support that outcome, though there is credibility to the claim that the “scab” still gets economic benefit from the union in at least some of its activities. To that limited degree, the expected outcome will necessarily be a no-winner. Such is Janus.
The various teachers unions that I have known are in their very nature a far cry from the sort of unions that many of us grew up cheering on in the days of John L. Lewis.
Since the days of the great teachers union surge of the 1960s, voters have tended to confuse them with those union organizations in the private sector that appeared to us to have had various positive effects. The private sector unions — the CIO, the UAW, the UMWA — were and remain fundamentally different in nature, simply by being part of ordinary private business.
Such non-governmental organizations are a functioning part of a free enterprise economy — almost a natural part of any large business. Their behavior must in every case be as prudent as that of the employer. If the company fails, so does the union. Any union that drives its employees into decisions that make it non-competitive courts its own destruction. By contrast, in the case of public schools that enroll the poor, the employer cannot go out of business.
In the inner city, the union is further protected by the poverty of the families its employers, the public school districts, conscript. They cannot defect to a private school or head for Beverly Hills. They must show up at their assigned providers, further assuring the need for the already-tenured teacher.
The moneyed parent, by contrast, has a place of choice assured, either in public or private school. Indeed, it is a gross mislabeling to call the schools of many of our suburbs “public.” The customer family merely pays another form of tuition — the private of a house that is located to qualify for enrollment in the chosen school.
I am delighted that Janus is headed to the Supreme Court. Its argumentation and decision will be news appealing to the media, and in turn, all of us. Pray that the newsies get it straight. This is not a right-wing conspiracy. It is the deliverance of a million teachers from the odium of supporting what is for them a parasite and, for the nation, an unnatural monopoly entangling a vital industry.
