For many years, the National Right to Work Committee has pushed to overturn federal and state laws, and other policies, that empower government union bosses to wield monopoly-bargaining control over how civil servants are compensated and disciplined.
The primary reason for the Committee’s opposition to government-sector union monopolies is that they put public employees under powerful compulsion to join the union that effectively calls the shots in their workplace, even if they agree with the union about little or nothing.
But an important secondary benefit of stripping government union chiefs of their monopoly privileges is that it makes it substantially less difficult for elected officials and their appointees to allocate public resources to serve the interests of all taxpayers.
America’s overwhelmingly unionized government school districts, into which nearly 75% of our K-12-aged children are still being corralled today, are the most egregious example of how public-sector union bosses wield their extraordinary, government-granted power to feather their own nests.
From the 2000-01 through the 2020-21 academic years, the last two decades for which data are available, taxpayer-funded expenditures on K-12 government schools soared by roughly 32% after adjusting for inflation, to reach a total of $927 billion, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
Over the same period, show other NCES data, nationwide K-12 government school enrollment rose by just 4.6%.
And the primary reason why inflation-adjusted, taxpayer-funded spending on government schools grew roughly seven times as fast as enrollment is rapid-fire hiring of more administrative staff. Right to Work President Mark Mix commented:
“There is no credible evidence that K-12 government schools’ ‘staffing surge’ over the past several decades has benefited students academically.
“However, the hiring of additional K-12 employees clearly does hand teacher union bosses excellent opportunities to collect more dues money and acquire more political power.
“No wonder American Federation of Teachers [AFT] and National Education Association [NEA] union officials routinely wield their monopoly-bargaining power over K-12 employees to push for increased staffing.”
A January 2025 scholarly analysis coauthored by education-policy expert Corey DeAngelis and economist Christos Makridis furnishes compelling evidence that Big Labor bosses are a key source of the “educational bloat” that “now pervades schools in the United States.”
Drs. DeAngelis and Makridis sought to determine whether the recent dramatic increases in nonteaching staff in school district after school district reflect “genuine educational needs or the concentrated benefits of union advocacy at the expense of other stakeholders.”
Drawing on data from the NCES as well as the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the authors found little reason to believe the staffing surge actually benefits schoolchildren, parents, or taxpayers.
They simultaneously found that “union density,” i.e., the share of K-12 employees who are unionized, “is strongly associated with higher staff-to-student ratios and a disproportionate allocation of resources towards administrative staff.”
Specifically, a one-percentage-point increase in the share of a district’s teachers who are subject to union monopoly bargaining “is associated with a 1.044 increase in the staff-to-student ratio.”
Moreover, union density “is robustly associated with higher staff-to-student ratios across a range of specifications.”
In addition to suffering from more bureaucratic bloat than jurisdictions with less unionized or union-free educators, high union-density districts experience more rapid growth in their staff-to-student ratios, year after year.
Effectively that means the relative disadvantage of highly unionized districts in allocating their educational resources gets worse and worse over time.
How can a state whose schools are plagued by teacher union monopolists’ abuses get out of the downward cycle? According to Drs. DeAngelis and Makridis’s findings, passage of a state Right to Work law is very helpful.
Mr. Mix commented:
“Until the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark June 2018 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, a case orally argued and won by now-National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation Vice President Bill Messenger, teachers and other public employees in non-Right to Work states could be forced to pay union dues, or be fired.
“For decades, state Right to Work protections acted as an important check on teacher and other government union bosses’ abuses.
“And even today, nearly seven years after the High Court found that public sector forced union dues and fees are unconstitutional in all 50 states, Right to Work laws continue to rein in government union bosses’ excesses by curtailing the inordinate power of the entire Big Labor lobby.”
From 2006 to 2024, the entire period covered by the DeAngelis-Makridis study, districts in forced-dues states consistently exhibited “higher staff-to-student ratios,” with the gap “widening significantly after 2015.”
Districts in compulsory-dues states also displayed “substantial volatility” in their staff-to-student ratio, “including a sharp increase beginning in 2020 and peaking in 2022, possibly reflecting policy responses to shifts in resource allocation during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
In sharp contrast, Right to Work states have had a “relatively stable and lower staff-to-student ratio, with minimal variation over time.”
“Right to Work supporters across America should have the satisfaction of knowing that, by helping grassroots citizens increase the number of states banning forced union dues from 22 to 26 just since 2012, they have also been helping reduce harmful bureaucratic bloat in public education,” said Mr. Mix.
The fact is, the ample increases in government school staffing and spending that have occurred since the turn of the millennium, following on the heels of the even greater increases in staffing and spending that occurred in the second half of the 20th Century, haven’t improved U.S. schools’ poor performance.
“The path government education is now on is unsustainable, and, as the late economist Herb Stein once dryly observed, ‘If something cannot go on forever, it will stop,’” said Mr. Mix.
“That’s why I am hopeful that, over the next few years, more and more states will face reality by banning union monopoly bargaining in K-12 government schools and other public institutions.
“Unfortunately, Big Labor bosses remain determined to prove Herb Stein wrong by successfully fighting to retain, and even expand, their government-sector monopoly-bargaining privileges in states and localities across the country.
“Despite union lobbyists’ ferocious opposition, the Committee has helped grassroots citizens in a number of states chalk up important victories over union monopolists in recent years.
“One of the most significant defeats for government union kingpins to date occurred this year on Valentine’s Day, when Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed H.B.167, a measure prohibiting Big Labor from seizing monopoly control over public servants who work at all levels and agencies of state and local government.
“This victory for freedom-loving Utah citizens came about only after the Committee had mailed every state legislator and engaged 165,000 supporters via email to contact the governor and urge him to sign the bill.
“Of course, the overwhelming majority of states continue to authorize and promote union monopoly bargaining over civil servants.
“The Committee won’t rest until all such unjust, anti-taxpayer laws are wiped off the books.”
This article was originally published in our monthly newsletter. Go here to access previous newsletter posts.
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