Nearly six decades ago, labor-relations scholar and former autoworkers union official Kurt Hanslowe publicly worried that state policies authorizing union monopoly bargaining over civil servants’ pay and benefits would usher in a new era of government by collusion.
In the future, Mr. Hanslowe surmised: “[T]he individual citizen” may be “left to look on, while . . . his tax rate and public policies are generally decided by entrenched and mutually supportive government officials and collective bargaining representatives over whom the public has diminishing control.”
Over the next few decades, the Hanslowe nightmare scenario came true in the vast majority of U.S. states. But until very recently Right to Work Virginia was a steadfast exception.
Unfortunately, in 2020, Big Labor Democrats in the Old Dominion’s General Assembly and then-Gov. Ralph Northam rammed through a state law legalizing government union monopolies at the local level. The consequences of this power grab are now beginning to be felt by citizens across the Commonwealth.
For example, on June 10, a subsidiary of Virginia Education United (VEU), a confederacy of local affiliates of the mammoth National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT/AFL-CIO) unions, scored a coup in Fairfax County, America’s 12th largest school district.
After a six-month campaign, Leslie Houston and David Walrod, the duo of union bosses heading the Fairfax Education Unions (FEU/VEU) conglomerate, secured monopoly power to codetermine with county elected officials and their appointees how K-12 government schoolteachers and staff are compensated and managed.
“Based on their pro-Big Labor track records, Fairfax County politicians can be expected to acquiesce to many, if not most, of teacher union bigwigs’ demands,” said National Right to Work Committee Vice President John Kalb.
“For years and years prior to the legalization of local government union monopolies in Virginia, Fairfax County politicians were currying favor with union officials. For decades, they have even allowed union bosses who were also education employees to conduct union business while drawing their regular salaries from taxpayers.”
Mr. Kalb continued: “To guess what’s in store for Fairfax County schoolchildren, and parents and other taxpayers, consider for a moment the long-running conspiracy against taxpayers carried on by the Chicago Teachers Union [CTU/ AFT/AFL-CIO] and the Chicago Public Schools [CPS] system.
“The CPS system now faces a $391 million deficit that would be even worse were it not for the vast sums of ‘COVID-19’ bailout money it’s raked in from federal taxpayers since 2021. Now the CTU hierarchy is pushing for a contract costing taxpayers at least $10 billion more than the existing budget baseline over the next four years.
“The overwhelming majority of the added costs sought by the CTU brass are for items that clearly have no educational value, including expensive refurbishment of schools to combat ‘climate change.’
“With improving student outcomes at or near the bottom of the list of CTU objectives, Chicago schoolchildren’s reading and math proficiency fell by 63% and 78%, respectively, between FY2012 and FY2024, even as school spending nearly doubled!”
Sadly, despite the unconscionable costs foisted on taxpayers by CPS and the abysmal job the district is doing at educating children, cheerleaders for teacher unionism do not see CPS as a failure, because the CTU union and school officials work together very effectively to elect their favored political candidates.
“The best reason union-boss sycophant journalist Mike Elk could give for being excited about the FEU coup was that ‘the Democratic Party is likely to be strengthened in Virginia, with unions run by Democratic allies,’” noted Mr. Kalb.
“Swinging elections, rather than helping kids, is what teacher unions are all about. That’s why the Committee will continue to fight to restore the ban on union monopolies over workforces at government schools and other local agencies that prevailed for decades until Ralph Northam came along.”
This article was originally published in our monthly newsletter. Go here to access previous newsletter posts.
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