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Just as some public schooling defenders like to caricature their opponents as self-important, money-grubbing ”corporate reformers” or malevolent destroyers of “public education,”
there is a tendency on the other side to attack teachers unions as the
root of all evil. They aren’t. They are a natural symptom of a
government monopoly that, because it is a monopoly, strongly favors the
monopolization of labor. One employer, one employee representative.
Unless someone has compelling evidence to the contrary—I’ve never
seen any—teacher union officials and members are no different than
anyone else: they are simply trying to get the best deals for
themselves. What separates them from non-unionized workers—and
unionized workers in the private sector—is not their desires, but that
their employment comes from a system into which ”customers” must pay,
and which is controlled completely by politics. Public-sector unions
have big advantages in politics, where organization, numbers, and
motivation—millions of people advocating for their very
livelihoods—translate into power.
That brings us to today’s Wall Street Journal piece on
union political spending. That spending is huge, and manifested in far
more ways than contributions to candidates. Between 2005 and 2011 the Journal
estimates unions spent $3.3 billion on political activities, which
beyond candidate donations included everything from trying to persuade
members to vote a certain way, to supplying bratwursts to demonstrators
in Wisconsin.
There would be no major freedom issue if all of this were spending by
unions with completely voluntary membership, and which operated in
truly free markets. There would, then, be no compelled support of
politicking. But this is absolutely not the case when it comes to
teachers unions and other public sector unions.
For one thing, teachers often are, for all intents and purposes,
forced to join unions as a condition of employment, even when they are
required to ”just” pay big “agency fees” to cover collective
bargaining. Moreover, the ultimately taxpayer-supplied dues money is
used to get more dough out of taxpayers who have no choice but to be
schools’ “customers.” And we’re not talking pocket change here:
according to the Journal‘s numbers,
between 2005 and 2011 the National Education Association spent $239
million on politics and lobbying, and the American Federation of
Teachers spent $138 million. And that doesn’t include the outlays of all
their state and local affiliates.
Despite those power-wielding expenditures, the members and leaders of
teachers unions still aren’t evil. They are normal, self-interested
folks. The effects of their actions, however, are to compel people to
fund political speech and activities against their will, and often
against their personal interests. But we shouldn’t attack unions for
that. We must attack the government schooling monopoly.
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