Tennessee Teachers Union Stung by GOP Effort to End Collective Bargaining

photo credit: Old Sarge

One proposed bill would abolish collective bargaining, a right teachers have had here since the late 1970s.
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Other bills would give TEA appointments to the state retirement system’s board of directors to House and Senate leadership, and block governments from deducting dues from groups that engage in political activity or donate to political action committees.

The most fiercely fought of the proposals will be HB130, which eliminates collective bargaining, making teachers at-will employees not covered by contracts. It is sponsored by Republican Caucus chairman Debra Maggart of Henderson at the request of Tennessee School Boards Association.

Generally speaking, I oppose the idea of disincentivizing–or outright criminalizing–political participation. But we’ll talk about that more in a moment.

Roberts also grabbed a quote from Tennessee Center for Policy Research president Justin Owen:

“When you have collective bargaining, you have a middle man between teachers and school boards, and of course, they take a cut, which means teachers receive less pay and there are fewer resources for students,” he said.

I don’t think Owen goes far enough. Teacher unions do lobby for higher wages, and they do take a cut, but there aren’t fewer resources because unions are deducting dues from payroll. There are fewer resources because private property owners have done a damned good job of lowering their obligations to the county over the years–as well they should–and teacher unions have been aiming to take bigger bites of a shrinking revenue pie for a lot longer than 40 years, and they too have been successful.

On their faces, collective bargaining agreements are sometimes necessary–even desirable. This is nowhere more evident than in college towns, where a new college or university is (usually only for a time) the only employer for miles–that is, the only purchaser of labor supplied to the market by workers in the area. As such, the sole employer has tremendous price-setting power, and so a collective bargaining arrangement becomes necessary to reset the price of an hour of labor to equilibrium levels.

Of course, at other times, collective bargaining agreements set non-price barriers to entry/exit (with intimidation tactics) and they collude to price competition out of the market. These are certainly bugs of the collective bargaining process. But this isn’t why Tennessee should be ending collective bargaining practices of public employees.

The NEA propelled Jimmy Carter to the White House, and because of that we have a Department of Education.

Read that again. A teachers union elected a president and got a Cabinet-level bureaucracy created for them.

The problem with public sector unions–particularly teachers unions–is that they can cobble together effective political organizations and can continue to wield great influence over legislative and executive power. In essence, left unchecked, public sector unions can vie for and seize control of the public trust. What’s worse is that they shield themselves with children–everything is “for the children”–while they grow in strength. And that is what people should be worried about. The budget issues will come and go, but political coalitions span generations–so does their influence.

For more on education reform policy, including teachers unions, check out Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom.

Hat tip: TCPR