Government Unions Excel at One Thing: Politics

Monopoly Bargaining Bilks Taxpayers, Lowers Student Achievement

Since 1970, cost of living-adjusted spending per student in America’s heavily unionized K-12 government schools has ballooned by roughly 170%. 

Teacher union bosses and politicians who are beholden to them have wielded this huge infusion of cash, coming out of local, state and federal taxpayers’ pockets, largely to pad school districts’ payrolls with additional non-teaching staff. 

In a commentary published by the Daily Economy at the end of last year, prominent education reformer Corey DeAngelis, drawing on data from Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, observed that, just since 2014, public school employment “has increased by more than 600,000 people.” 

Meanwhile, “student enrollment in U.S. public schools” has dropped by roughly 750,000!

Padded K-12 Payrolls Enable Giant Teacher Union to Rake In Over $400 Million a Year

Binge hiring of taxpayer-funded “educators” who rarely, if ever, set foot in a classroom diverts resources away from programs that could actually help enhance student achievement, including higher pay for outstanding teachers and teachers who are adept in hard-to-fill subjects like calculus and physics.

But that doesn’t trouble union bosses, because the extra membership dues money they reap thanks to padded payrolls adds up, to quote Mr. DeAngelis again, “to hundreds of millions of dollars annually,” giving Big Labor “immense financial clout.” 

The annual revenues of America’s largest teacher union alone, the 2.8 million-member National Education Association (NEA), exceed $400 million.

By union officials’ own admission, less than 10% of that money is spent on representational activities. A far higher share of NEA revenues are “funneled into left-wing causes and Democratic campaign coffers.” 

Chicago Mayor: School Success Means Bilking Taxpayers For More Money

Increasingly, union-boss puppet politicians do not even pretend that their aim in grabbing more and more money from taxpayers for K-12 district government schools is to help children learn what they need to know to thrive as adults. 

An especially brazen case in point is Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who, prior to being installed as the Windy City’s chief executive in 2023 thanks to massive infusions of Big Labor money and manpower, worked as an operative for the power-crazed Chicago Teachers Union (CTU/AFT/AFL-CIO) hierarchy. 

In a 2023 speech before the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, Mr. Johnson bluntly stated that he measures education success “not in academic performance but by the amount of money schools receive.” 

National Right to Work Committee Vice President Matthew Leen commented: 

“Apparently, Mayor Johnson will never lose any sleep over the fact that fewer than one in three of the kids in Chicago’s government schools read at grade level, as long as he and his cohorts can keep jacking up their taxpayer-funded spending, which already comes to roughly $30,000 per student each year!”

Staffing Increases ‘Not Associated With Gains in Student Achievement’

Mr. Leen continued: 

“The anti-taxpayer K-12 ‘staffing surge’ documented by Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab is undoubtedly a nationwide problem, but a growing body of scholarly research shows the wasteful spending is far worse in states where the Right to Work is unprotected and union bigwigs have more coercive power. 

“Take, for example, a study published at the beginning of this year by the Reason Foundation and authored by Dr. Christos Makridis, an economist and an associate research professor at Arizona State University.”

The new Makridis study, titled “Staffing Surges and Student Outcomes,” investigates the “political and institutional drivers” of the substantial growth in K-12 spending and staffing over the past two decades despite “declining enrollment in many U.S. school districts.” 

Dr. Makridis concludes that K-12 staff growth “is concentrated in non-right-to-work states where union density is higher.” 

He also concludes that recent increases in K-12 employment are “further concentrated in non-teaching roles and are not associated with gains in student achievement.” 

“Fortunately for taxpayers,” commented Mr. Leen, “nearly eight years ago, Right to Work protections that were already on the books in a slim majority of states were extended to teachers and other civil servants nationwide by the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Janus v. AFSCME.

“In Janus, a case argued and won on behalf of an Illinois civil servant by then-National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation staff attorney and now-Foundation Vice President Bill Messenger, the High Court ruled that public-sector forced union dues and fees violate the First Amendment. 

“Thanks to Janus, teachers and other public employees nationwide now have a recognized constitutional right to refuse to support any union financially, and to cease forking over money to a union if they have been doing so. 

“Since 2018, the year Janus was decided, the actively employed membership of the NEA teacher union, which had previously been rising, has fallen every year. It is now roughly 160,000 below what it was in 2018.”

Repeal of Monopoly-Bargaining Laws Is Another Necessary Step

Unfortunately, the effectiveness of the public-sector Right to Work protections furnished by Janus has, to a significant extent, been diminished by dozens of state laws making teachers and other public servants subject to union monopoly bargaining on matters concerning their pay, benefits, and work rules.

As the late Thomas Harris, then a top-AFL-CIO lawyer, acknowledged back in 1962, the very fact that a union is legally empowered to “negotiate the contract which regulates the incidents of [a worker’s] industrial life puts him under powerful compulsion to join the union.” 

After Janus, the repeal of all state laws authorizing union monopoly bargaining in public workplaces is the next necessary step.

In 2021, with the Committee’s help, freedom-loving Arkansas citizens prevailed upon their lawmakers to pass, and then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson to sign into law, a measure barring Big Labor from seizing monopoly-bargaining control of public servants who work at schools, colleges, many state agencies and courts. 

This year, the Committee is assisting grassroots efforts to roll back government union bosses’ monopoly privileges in several states, including Idaho and Indiana, with the ultimate goal of eliminating those privileges.

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