Your Teacher Said What?! (26 page)

Now, nothing prevents individual businesses from accepting card check instead of a secret ballot, of course. But there is one big difference between a contract negotiated with a card-check union and one signed by an elected union: Under federal law, after an election, the union's membership can vote to decertify it only after the contract negotiated by that union expires; a union that negotiates a contract via card-check membership can—according to the NLRB, which ruled on this in 2007—still be decertified at any time. Which doesn't happen all that often: Since 2007, card-check unions have been recognized more than 1,100 times. Fifty-four times a vote was demanded, and in fifteen of those elections, the workers voted against the union.

Seems a pretty good batting average. But not good enough for the Obama administration, which has long supported a little bit of legislation called the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make a card-check union just as valid as one elected via secret ballot, a law that is so biased in favor of unions that George McGovern—
George McGovern!
—opposes it. Since most legislators agree with him, the only way to impose card check is via regulation.

Guess who's revisiting the 2007 decision? Craig Becker, who signed a pledge that he wouldn't deal with his former employer at the SEIU—and then said that he had only agreed to recuse himself from business with the SEIU's
locals
. The SEIU's former lawyer sees no problem ruling on issues affecting the
national
union.

Tired of hearing about the SEIU? Well, there's always the 1.4 million–member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, which spent $87.5 million to support union-friendly candidates in the 2010 midterm elections, more than any other outside interest group, and $10 million
more
than the United States Chamber of Commerce, a favorite bogeyman for Progressive politicians. That's when it's not campaigning for higher state taxes to pay for salaries and pensions that are already higher than those of the average taxpayer. AFSCME is the reason that local government is even more likely to be unionized than federal government—and far more likely to be influenced by unions, which have a lot more direct clout over the reelection prospects of a city council member than a member of the U.S. Senate.

In addition to the wonderful-for-unions phenomenon that governments have no competition and never go out of business is the fact that most government jobs, including police, firefighting, and teaching, are unavoidably labor intensive; unlike with manufacturing automobiles or calculating actuarial tables, it's hard to replace human with machine labor as its cost increases. However, there's another aspect of public employees that makes them even more formidable: The people they're negotiating with are elected officials—and the voters who elect them are the same people with whom they have to agree on wages and pensions. It's bad enough for government to be negotiating with its own employees; it's terrible to negotiate with a bloc of voters as well.
⁴⁰

The results have been predictable. And uniformly bad for every taxpayer who isn't a member of a public-sector union. And the
least
bad outcome is the wage premium now earned by government employees. At the same time that unions have become less and less a part of America's private sector, they have become a bigger and bigger part of the country's campaign-donation machine. Government employee unions contribute more money to congressional candidates than—to pick an example—the total contributed by oil industry political action committees, employees, and executives combined. And those candidates, who are overwhelmingly Democrats, have returned the favor, mortgaging the future of state after state with future pension and health-care obligations to their unionized workforces.

The poster child for this particular time bomb is the state of California, which now contributes more than $7 billion annually to its state pension fund—and is still more than $100 billion behind, in what are technically called “unfunded liabilities”: the amount of money that it would take to guarantee those obligations. By any measure, California and dozens of other states are technically bankrupt, entirely because of their long-term debts to their own employees. However, the solution available to bankrupt corporations—renegotiating these debts—isn't open to them because of laws that were essentially written by union staffs to prevent such renegotiation.

 

Unions are a problem for a free-market economy. Industrial unions are a bigger problem than craft unions. Public-sector unions are a bigger problem than industrial unions. And the biggest problem within the public sector is its single largest component—and the one that matters most to the Kernen family: teachers.

The notion that everyone's labor is equal in value to everyone else's is central to the whole idea of unions. In any particular region or company, every machinist, every drill press operator, every truck driver with the same number of years on the job is supposed to be paid the same hourly wage. As a result, unions reward mediocrity—or at least they don't punish it. Just in case you needed reminding, this is the reason that unions are so beloved of liberals and Progressives, who are reflexive in choosing collectivism over individualism. This belief costs the American economy hundreds of billions of dollars annually (and if you add in the money owed to union pension funds, more like trillions).

But at least these costs are “only” money. The belief that one teacher's labor is identical in value to every other's is costing a whole lot more.

 

“So . . . wait a minute.”

“What, Blake?”

“Are you telling me that Mrs.———can't get fired?”

“Not unless her boss is willing to spend months in court.”

“And she gets paid the same as Miss———?” (Names withheld on the advice of lawyers.)

“If they've worked the same number of years, then yes.”

“That's just crazy.”

 

Crazy, indeed. After decades of research trying to figure out the most important factor in educating kids, the evidence seems pretty clear: It isn't money per pupil or class size. It isn't more rigorous textbooks or more arts and music. In fact, once you control for income and education, and all those other advantages that affluent families give their children, what's left still matters, and what's left is the quality of the teacher. Some second-grade teachers do a consistently great job taking first graders and turning them into third graders. Most do a decent job. And some do a lousy job—year in and year out, with all kinds of kids. If America is serious about improving the education of the next generation of kids—of Blake and Scott and millions like them—there's nothing that would have more impact than just firing the poorest-performing 5 percent of America's primaryand secondary-school teachers.

Only we can't. And the reason is teachers' unions.

The task of firing incompetent teachers is not for the faint of heart, mostly because of the collective bargaining agreements that make firing a teacher, even for the most ridiculous behavior, as hard and as exhausting as changing the mind of an IRS auditor. For years, teachers in the New York City school district who were so bad that even their own principals needed to get them out of the classroom spent months, even years, pulling down full salaries while spending every school day in a “rubber room” in downtown Manhattan.

The Obama administration is so friendly to unions that it is on record supporting card check, whether by legislation or—via Craig Becker—regulation. But that's still not good enough for the National Education Association, which sees the president's support for paying good teachers more than bad teachers and—horror of horrors!—making it possible to actually fire bad teachers as something akin to a crime against humanity.

Part of the reason for teachers' extraordinary job security is the incorporation of something called tenure into union contracts. If the precise meaning of the term is a little fuzzy to you—it was to me—you should remember that it has morphed quite a bit from its origins. Tenure began more than a century ago as the custom of offering what is essentially lifetime job security to the highest-ranking scholars at colleges and universities. It may still have some justification there—the original reason was to guarantee that scholarship would be free of political or economic pressure—though you can certainly find a lot of academics who disagree. But the concept has been redefined in a particularly idiotic way when it is offered to elementary-school teachers as a matter of course after two or three years of work. This has happened in dozens of places, but the one that matters most to me is the state of New Jersey.

From 2000 to 2010, student enrollment in the Garden State grew by 4 percent; during that same period the total number of school employees increased more than three times as much (and we're not alone; New York added fifteen thousand teachers during the same period—when student enrollment
fell
by 121,000). For most of that time, the Kernen family has been sending its children to New Jersey public schools: Blake and Scott both attend schools in the Millburn Township School District, which hasn't had to worry overmuch about either tenure or salaries during the six years that at least one of them has been in school.

But when New Jersey elected a new governor in 2009 and saddled him with a deficit as large as the GDP of Iceland—
before
its bank meltdown—and he started cutting the state budget, New Jersey's schools were a prime candidate.

Governor Chris Christie, who had been elected specifically on the promise to get state spending in general, and education spending in particular, under control, proposed cuts of $800 million in the New Jersey school budget. He did hold out a carrot: If the state's teachers agreed to take a one-year pay freeze and contribute 1.5 percent of their salaries—an average of $65 a month—to medical, dental, and vision benefits (as opposed to the nothing they currently pay), then no cuts would be needed.

Governor Christie is a regular guest on
Squawk Box
, partly because he's smart, mostly because he doesn't mince words. As he told me (and our national audience), the problem with most union benefits is simple arithmetic: “The actuaries tell us that the current system is $34 billion underfunded—and if we made all the payments we're supposed to, in fifteen years it will be
$85 billion
underfunded. I keep telling all those union members who are angry with me that they'll be sending me Christmas cards in ten years thanking me because they'll
have
a pension.”

To most New Jersey residents, Christie's offer seemed a reasonable solution, given that we were in the worst recession in decades. To New Jersey's teachers, however, the governor was about as welcome as a smallpox epidemic—and that's how they tried to depict him. Christie then offered the same deal to individual districts (New Jersey has more than six hundred, each with its own administrators, school boards—and union locals), reminding them that if the New Jersey Education Association, which currently demands a little more than $700 a year in dues, agreed to survive without those dues for a year, then
it
could pay for the teachers' insurance. They refused.

I told him that the unions would eventually beat him into submission. His response: “It doesn't work anymore, Joe. No one thinks that teachers must have free health care from the day they're hired until the day they die. And no one thinks that has anything to do with educating our children. No kid is going to come home and tell you, ‘I can't study because my teacher has to pay 1.5 percent for health benefits.'”

Our own school district was one of the ones that decided to maintain teacher salaries, with their guaranteed raises for 2010, instead of renegotiating. As a result, some thirty staff members—all of them nonunion—have been fired.

Blake doesn't understand everything about unions. But in the one area of her life where she deals with adults in their workplaces, she sees their most important aspect, which is to take care of themselves at the expense of everyone else.

Long ago, when Blake was very small, I remember reading her a story. The details are a little fuzzy, but I remember it was about a sleigh riding through a blizzard, pursued by wolves. Every so often, the people in the sleigh would pick out a passenger and throw that passenger out of the sleigh, in the hope that the wolves would take him or her, but not them. I have no doubt that the sleigh was driven by union teamsters.

It's sometimes easy to forget that a free-market economy depends on a free market in labor, just like everything else. I'm no purist about this: America is rich enough to afford some level of price-fixing by labor unions, particularly those that provide something valuable, like a guarantee that your electrician knows how to keep your house from burning down when you turn on a light switch.

So I'll pay a little extra for that union label—sometimes. But that's my choice. When unions insist on laws that require everyone—Democrat or Republican, Progressive or free-market conservative—working for a particular company or industry or, worst of all, for the government itself, to join up, and especially to kick in money for political candidates they may despise, well, I
choose
not to.

One of the aspects of this project for which Penelope and I will have to answer in the next life is our decision to spend eighteen months—from the inauguration of Barack Obama in January 2009 to the middle of 2010—discussing the daily editorials in the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
with Blake. Our goal wasn't punishment, though it's possible Blake might disagree. The idea, instead, was to see how the same economic story or public debate was handled by the two papers. Our only defense was that there is no better place to observe the battle lines in the fight over the future of free-market capitalism, from climate-change policy to the regulation of the nation's financial system to the “reform” of the health-insurance industry.