Rare News Desk
This hasn’t been a great summer for the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers.
Videos by Rare
From June’s California Superior Court ruling in Vergara v. California that effectively ends near-lifetime employment rules to the embarrassment of backing alleged plagiarist-cum-Montana U.S. Sen John Walsh and his replacement as Democratic standard-bearer, Amanda Curtis, the Big Two teachers unions have seen their declining influence slip even further.
The Big Two were likely hoping for a respite from the bad news with the start of the new school year, but no such luck.
Thanks to a decision this week by a Michigan administrative court judge allowing teachers to ditch their union membership any time they want, the unions can expect even steeper member declines. Especially as teachers come to the conclusion that membership isn’t worth the steep price of admission.
On Thursday, Michigan administrative law judge Julia Stern ruled that the Michigan Education Association, the NEA’s Wolverine State affiliate, must allow teachers to drop their membership (and stop paying dues) at any time during the year.
Finding that MEA’s policy of only allowing teachers to drop their membership once a year during the month of August violates the state’s right-to-work law, Stern opened the door for teachers tired of paying into the union’s coffers to quit doing so.
MEA has already announced it will appeal the verdict to the state Employee Relations Commission. It is unlikely to win. For one, the agency is dominated by appointees selected by Gov. Rick Snyder, who successfully convinced legislators to pass the right-to-work law two years ago.
The law itself was upheld earlier this year by the Wolverine State’s Supreme Court. The only hope the union has is that Snyder himself loses his re-election bid in November. While the popular governor is in a surprisingly close race, he is likely to retain his office.
For MEA, which is struggling with $165 million in unfunded pension and retiree healthcare costs, the ruling couldn’t have come at a worse time. Between 2010 and 2013, the union’s rank-and-file membership declined by four percent. This week, it announced that it lost another 5,000 rank-and-file members (or nearly five percent of its membership) in August thanks in part to the Mackinac Institute, which, unlike the union, kindly reminded teachers that they had one month to drop their membership.
This, in turn, will force NEA to increase the subsidies it provides to its Michigan affiliate in order to help it stay afloat. Over the past four years, the nation’s largest teachers union has backed MEA to the tune of $25 million. Without NEA’s deep pockets, the union would have tallied losses every year.
The membership losses has also weakened MEA’s bargaining power with school districts it used to muscle around. Mackinac Institute notes that in Detroit metro area alone, 66 districts either had contracts that were expired or about to (as of the last school year). With fewer of its teachers in unions, reform-minded districts can strike harder bargains with the union – or none at all.
Meanwhile the woes of MEA are adding to those of its parent union. Thanks to school district layoffs, along with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s successful effort to end collective bargaining, and Michigan’s right-to-work law, NEA’s officially-reported membership declined by 6.2 percent between 2010 and 2013, according to an analysis by Dropout Nation.
Things aren’t going to get better. NEA’s own official numbers predict that it will lose another 116,000 members by 2016.
The long-term fear for NEA is that more states will either right-to-work laws and abolish collective bargaining, or be forced to by lawsuits filed by teachers tired of paying into their coffers. There’s also the fear that the U.S. Supreme Court will soon overturn its 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, effectively ending the ability to force teachers not in the union to pay into its coffers. The ruling has essentially allowed the NEA (and the AFT) to coerce teachers otherwise uninterested in becoming union members into their fold.
What the NEA (and the AFT) are finding out the hard way is that more teachers are realizing the high price of the decades-long bargain they struck with the unions.
Over the past two decades, NEA and AFT have been weakened politically by the nation’s school reform movement (with the help of presidents such as George W. Bush and Barack Obama). As a result, they can no longer assure teachers that their profession will remain the most-comfortable and most-insulated from performance management within the public sector.
For Baby Boomers in teaching, in particular, neither union can assure them that they can keep their jobs.
Younger teachers, who now make up the majority of rank-and-file members, are unhappy that both unions ignore their concerns, including its support of last hired-first fired layoff rules that put them on unemployment lines while keeping veteran teachers on payrolls. Their desire for professional associations that focus more on helping them improve the profession puts them in direct conflict with the industrial union model that the NEA and AFT have long embraced.
Meanwhile the fact that the NEA and AFT spend more money and time on politics than on improving the teaching profession has many teachers up in arms. For both more-conservative and even moderately left-leaning teachers, the alliances the unions form with progressive groups with which they disagree is extremely irksome.
The AFT’s New York City local, the United Federation of Teachers, found this out the hard way this week when teachers wore t-shirts supporting the Big Apple’s police officers after the union teamed up with Rev. Al Sharpton on a campaign against police brutality after 24-year-old Eric Garner was choked to death by an officer during an arrest. While the UFT may be correct in supporting Sharpton on this issue, teachers are right to be irked that the union is using their money to subsidize political activity with which they disagree.
If NEA and AFT don’t change course – and soon! – they may find they have collectively bargained themselves right out of business.
