Do Unions Help Their Members? Emphasis: Public School Unions

Harassed by terrible working conditions and terrible pay, workers in the past organized into collective bargaining units. As a whole they could negotiate on a more powerful footing with their employers, demanding better wages, stable terms of employment, and respectable working conditions.

However, are their dangers to individual workers who take to collective action to right wrongs done against them?

Stopping abuse by the employer is a credible goal.Unions, now more than ever, represent themselves as separate political entities, independent of the individual interests of their workers, or the clients whom they serve.

For example, public school unions protect the widespread mediocrity of its members, whether they desire it or not. Many teachers have their wages garnished automatically, whether they wish to join or not. However, new teachers are under probation for a set number of years before attaining tenure, at which point they cannot be fired, except in the most egregious cases. Yet through it all, tenured teachers receive the full backing of their unions for no other reason that the union does not want to lose one more due-paying member.

In the midst of the infighting which has hassled school boards and communities, the conflict resolves ultimately on the extent to which school boards must be forced to accommodate the collective wrath of a polity of workers, and to what extent those workers will be allowed to retain their jobs apart from any merit or review.

Since school boards lack credible reason, or power, to challenge the status quo of the public unions, there is little incentive for them to challenge their demands.

This may bode well for many educators, who are content to do just enough or who do not allow the status quo to dissuade them from doing their best. But what about the teachers who seek to work exceptionally, who must struggle to work with staff who refuse to do their jobs, and who fail to prepare students one year, leaving them at a terrible disadvantage for the next?

In this case, unions harm their teachers more than help. Ineffective teachers deserve support and scrutiny, New teachers, who cannot rest in the security of tenure, fall prey to all sorts of political programs and challenges which plague all new members of the profession, yet who need support all the more. In the end, the students also suffer, for they must content themselves to receive a substandard education, which either disillusions them from education in general, making the task of dedicated teachers even harder.

Teachers deserve work-place protection. That need is now met in civil rights legislation, which protects workers from unlawful and unjust and politicized termination. Yet a sclerotic tenure system which embeds mediocrity into a profession is hastening the demoralization and demise of a profession which depends on innovation to secure the best and brightest for our future.

Furthermore, it is unconstituional, if not immoral, to require a teacher to pay dues, whether that person wishes to join the union or not. Beyond that, unions are permitted to spend the money as they wish, solidifying their power, sponsoring initiatives and candidates which support their political monopoly in the system, none of which improves the lot and standing of teachers, their students, or their schools.