If teachers unions were less politicized, they might not be facing the Supreme Court

Something that has surprised me over the years is how many teachers I’ve met who say they don’t like their union.

Politics can be part of it – try being pro-life and seeing your dues allied with Planned Parenthood – but there seems to be a greater feeling that teachers don’t benefit much as teachers because of their union.

This dissatisfaction with the aims and priorities of teachers unions is the undercurrent of a lawsuit, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, that’s being heard by the Supreme Court next week. Ostensibly it’s about whether unions can force non-members to pay dues just for collective bargaining.

Harlan Elrich, a 30-year veteran of public schools mostly in California who is one of those plaintiffs, writes in The Wall Street Journal he became a math teacher because “I was good at teaching and I really enjoyed it.”

The school district appears to have scrubbed any mention of him from its website, but I learned from the Internet Archive that Erlich was one of three teachers awarded $4,000 for their TV tutoring on the government-access program “Do the Math.”

He was even a union rep and has seen it all – much of which deeply offended his conscience:

When most teachers sought guidance, they wanted help in the classroom and on how to excel at teaching. The union never offered this pedagogic aid.

Instead, the union focused on politics. I remember a phone call I received before a major election from someone in the union. It was a “survey,” asking teachers whether they would vote for so-and-so if the election were held tomorrow. I disagreed with every issue and candidate the union was promoting.

Elrich is still complicit in political advocacy, just through collective bargaining:

For example, in my community, the union spends resources pushing for ever-higher teacher salaries. I’m in favor of a decent salary for teachers, but I think we are already well paid compared with everyone else in the Central Valley.

The area has endured hard times in the past few years. Parents of my students have been laid off, and many are still unemployed. Some have moved in with grandparents or other family members to stay afloat financially. Families struggle to make ends meet. …

The union also negotiates policies on discipline, grievances and seniority that make it difficult—if not impossible—to remove bad teachers. … One example that sticks with me involved a colleague whom everyone, students and faculty, knew was incompetent. All on campus knew that he was biding his time until retirement.

This system, unsurprisingly, weeds out talented younger teachers who are easily disposable under last-in-first-out rules – a result of the very collective bargaining that Elrich must pay for by law.

When the cops get replaced by rent-a-cops

For a different perspective, The Daily Caller covers a situation where a group of campus police officers claim they were fired last month because they were trying to unionize.

Dean College replaced the entire Public Safety Department with a private security firm, TeamOps, spurring the officers to file a National Labor Relations Board complaint and a former student to create a (poorly written) petition demanding their reinstatement, for the safety of students if no other reason.

The school claims the switch was an “upgrade,” which ringleader and former Sgt. Michael Carmody says is bunk. The timing is certainly suspicious, just four months after the college learned the officers had started organizing.

It’s interesting how the politics on police unions often diverge from the narrative. Progressives demand that officers be held accountable for escalating encounters with civilians without justification, and unions circle around those officers and claim (politically) that soft-on-crime forces are endangering the community.

At Portland State University, for example, progressive activists are howling about the school’s decision to arm a subset of its police officers, despite the fact that the campus is on the edge of downtown Portland, as we’ve reported.

There’s probably no way to take the politics out of unions completely. But perhaps they can earn goodwill from critics by focusing on their role in professional development and giving politics a backseat role.

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