LaborPains.org

The next time you see an advertisement for a pro-union Democrat, keep in mind where some of the money is coming from: the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees.

The 1.6 million-member AFSCME is spending a total of $87.5 million on the elections after tapping into a $16 million emergency account to help fortify the Democrats’ hold on Congress. Last week, AFSCME dug deeper, taking out a $2 million loan to fund its push. The group is spending money on television advertisements, phone calls, campaign mailings and other political efforts, helped by a Supreme Court decision that loosened restrictions on campaign spending.

“We’re the big dog,” said Larry Scanlon, the head of AFSCME’s political operations. “But we don’t like to brag.”

The 2010 election could be pivotal for public-sector unions, whose clout helped shield members from the worst of the economic downturn. In the 2009 stimulus and other legislation, Democratic lawmakers sent more than $160 billion in federal cash to states, aimed in large part at preventing public-sector layoffs. If Republicans running under the banner of limited government win in November, they aren’t likely to support extending such aid to states.

As the Center for Union Fact’s Sonny Bunch noted about teachers unions, a majority of public-sector employees probably vote Democrat. But 100% of public-sector employees do not. And yet the AFSCME’s members are forced to watch their dues bankroll a last-ditch blitz to save the Democrats’ congressional majorities.

According to Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute, the compensation difference between a state that has no public sector union representation and one that has the average number of government employees unionized is 8.1%. And James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation calculates that “Salaries and benefits – for identical jobs – are 30 percent to 40 percent higher in the federal government than in the private sector.”

Now the public is catching on. A recent Washington Post poll found that 52 percent of Americans think government employees are overpaid. Three-quarters believe that government workers make more than those in the private sector. And lawmakers like New Jersey’s Chris Christie have taken on public-sector unions and won.

Here’s an interesting essay from a teacher on the front lines. He’s a Republican teacher in New Jersey who is disgusted by the way union officials demand that teachers vote how they are told by union bosses. Writes the anonymous teacher:

I had the displeasure of being a NJEA member. Having been born to a father that was a Teamster and believing in unions all of my life, I was in for a rude awakening. After an election the union representatives at my school actually had the audacity to ask me, “Did you vote the way we wanted you to vote?”  It was understood that because I was a teacher I was a rubber stamp for the union team.  My response was, “Maybe I did, and maybe I didn’t.”  I was appalled at the openness with which they tried to sway my vote because I am a teacher. Not all teachers are Democrats. I worked with many teachers at this district who were closet Republicans.

You should read the whole thing.

I’m willing to consider the notion that teaching is a profession that is more likely to attract Democrats than Republicans. I am not willing, however, to buy into the idea that 93 percent of National Education Association members are Democrats. I find it even more ludicrous that the American Federation of Teachers thinks that 99 percent of its members’ dues deserve to go to Democratic candidates. Do these unions really think they are representing the makeup of their memberships?

The leadership of teachers unions don’t represent the rank and file. They act as little more than a conduit to funnel money to their friends and allies in Congress. It’s a ridiculous situation, and one that needs to stop.

Labor unions are allowed to “pressure” businesses with which they have a direct dispute. But what about companies that are completely neutral? Keith Eastland, a labor lawyer in Grand Rapids, wrote an op-ed explaining an unfortunate decision by the National Labor Relations Board.

Employers can expect the new board to grant much broader protections to union-related activity. An Aug. 27 board decision on “bannering” highlights this point. Bannering refers to the display of large signs, often containing misleading claims, at job sites belonging to neutral parties. It is a union tactic often designed to threaten and coerce neutral businesses to avoid dealing with non-union contractors or suppliers.

Although the law expressly prohibits unions from engaging in coercive or threatening actions toward neutral businesses, the new board has ruled that bannering is protected. Under this new rule, unions can now target your business or job sites with large banners — or use giant inflatable rats signifying the presence of “scabs” — even when you have no labor dispute with that union.

The case before the NLRB began in Arizona where representatives of the Carpenters Local 1506 (consisting of non-union temp workers  being paid to play the part of “picketer”) held 16-foot-long signs outside two medical centers and a restaurant. The signs read “Shame on…(the name of the establishment)” with the words “Labor Dispute” nearby. The catch? The establishments had no conflict with the union. The dispute was with construction companies doing work for the establishments’ owners.

This should have been a no-brainer for the NLRB. The National Labor Relations Act forbids conduct found to “threaten, coerce, or restrain” secondary businesses not involved in the primary dispute. But chalk one up to the labor-stacked NLRB, i.e. Craig Becker and Co.: They found a way to rule in the union’s favor.

To what extreme’s will unions take this new rule?

Recently the [United Brotherhood of Carpenters in Salt Lake City] has taken its bannering a step further by targeting companies that don’t do business with the Contractors. The banners are the same. But the handbills reveal that the company named is a potential tenant in a building where one of the Contractors is slated to perform work. According to the Union, the company being bannered is guilty of “thinking about profiting from unfair labor practices.” By this measure, most of the population might be subject to bannering.

A “potential tenant” where a company “is slated to perform work”? How far will bannering go? Could a union pressure the company that employs the aunt of the owner of a plumbing company that services an office building that houses a paper company that sells supplies to another company with which the union has a dispute? Or perhaps just thinking about selling supplies is enough to put a company in the unions crosshairs. Thanks to Craig Becker’s NLRB, it’s certainly possible.

This video drives home the point. Despite being about NFCW, not the Carpenters, it’s the same practice of creating a deceptive union picket line.

Talk about inappropriate comparisons! As reported by the National Journal, Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO and one of the heavy-hitters in the labor movement, came out swinging today and racked up yet another uncomfortable gaffe.

Trumka, the nation’s top union official, said that the anti-Obama views aired by conservative commentators like Glenn Beck constitutes “hate” in his mind and that he fears it could incite violence in these frustrating economic times.

“Our country’s been there a couple of times before, and with one exception, we’ve always taken the high road,” Trumka told National Journal. “You remember when John Kennedy got off the plane in Dallas, Texas, there were people on the airwaves talking about doing violence to the president. And what happened? That kind of stuff didn’t help our country, and we want to make sure that the anger gets turned into action, and it becomes unifying and not dividing and that we get hope and not hate.”

Go ahead and add that to Trumka’s Greatest Hits, which also includes a metaphorical threat to “burn” coal companies that replaced striking union workers, and accusing recalcitrant businesses of “economic treason.”

Of course, the real reason for Trumka’s desperation is that Congress failed to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, item number one on the unions’ wish list. And with Congress looking like it will be less sympathetic to Big Labor after the election, EFCA is as good as gone.

That is the headline of an excellent new op-ed from Eric Hanushek, one of the leading proponents of school reform. He makes a point that people sometimes miss: School reformers focus on teachers unions because they are an unambiguous impediment to reform. But it’s hard to focus your scorn on teachers unions without coming across as opposed to teachers of all stripes. Reformers like Hanushek don’t hate teachers. They dislike what the teachers unions are doing. As he puts it,

The typical teacher is both hard-working and effective. But if we could replace the bottom 5%-10% of teachers with an average teacher—not a superstar—we could dramatically improve student achievement. The U.S. could move from below average in international comparisons to near the top.

Teachers unions say they don’t want bad teachers in the classrooms, but then they assert that we can’t adequately judge teachers and they act to defend them all. Thus unions defend teachers in “rubber rooms”— where they are sent after being accused of improper behavior or found to be extraordinarily ineffective—on the grounds that due process rights require such treatment.

Bad teachers need to be removed from classrooms. This isn’t an anti-teacher stance: It’s common sense. But teachers unions are, by design, required to defend teachers good and bad. Hence their resistance to efforts to introduce objective evaluation standards: Without a way to judge people, they can argue that it’s impossible to tell who’s good and who’s bad, therefore no one should be fired. It’s an ingenious gambit in its own perverse way.

Though many had hoped that fiery school reformer Michelle Rhee would remain at the head of Washington, D.C.’s public school system in the wake of her boss’s loss to Vince Gray in the Democratic mayoral primary, it is not to be. Effective the end of this month, Rhee is stepping down. She will be replaced by Kaya Henderson, a deputy who shares her vision for reform, on an interim basis.

It’s hard to say what this means for reform. Gray was elected with a ton of help from the Washington Teachers’ Union and American Federation of Teachers, and this move is almost certainly payback for that support. Where does reform go from here? Will Henderson be able to pursue reform with the same vigor as Rhee? Is this a warning to others who might pursue similar reforms in other struggling systems?

The other question is what will happen to Rhee. Will she take her talents to New Jersey, where Gov. Chris Christie is in constant conflict with the teachers union? Will she step into the Obama administration? Will she run for office herself? If you’re interested, you can follow Rhee on Twitter, on Facebook, or at her brand new website.

It depends on what you mean by “work,” according to the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess in a new, long piece for National Affairs. It’s an interesting, mildly wonky essay that is worth reading in full, but one point stands out: It’s hard to say whether or not school choice is working because we haven’t really implemented choice in ways that would allow it to work. More specifically, if we allowed school systems to run as a marketplace might — where failing schools lose dollars if kids are pulled out — instead of promising a steady level of funding despite failures, maybe we would see more success. As Hess puts it:

[R]eformers should foster genuine competition by arranging markets so that there are real consequences for competitive failure or success. One simple step would be to ensure that all of the dollars spent on students follow children when they change schools (the notion implicit in efforts to promote “weighted student funding” systems). Such a reform would entail stripping school districts of their hefty subsidies and of their monopolies over local school facilities. It would mean overhauling contracts and statutes that protect teacher jobs and seniority-driven pay scales — practices that leave school and district leaders without the tools needed to reward good teachers and penalize mediocrity. Real consequences for enrollment loss could help push educational leaders to start taking enrollment and parental preferences seriously when evaluating employees and doling out bonuses.

There’s more interesting stuff in here as well, especially regarding the way we talk about school reform. Instead of treating it like a regulatory matter (as we did with the airlines, the phone companies, etc.) we are treating it as a matter of “rights.” This, Hess argues, is a mistake — a mistake that you see echoes of in the recent ruling in Los Angeles that changes how tenure works. There, it was argued that firing teachers solely based on the amount of time that they’ve spent in the system was wrong because it gutted schools in poorer neighborhoods, thus denying the children there the right of a stable education, or some such. This “solution” dances around the real problem: tenure itself. Eliminating tenure, however, is a regulatory issue, not an issue of rights, which makes it hard to discuss due to the way the education reform debate has evolved.

Anyway, you should read the whole thing. Hess is one of the smartest education writers around, and his piece is sure to stir up some debate.

Not quite. Rapturous headlines are claiming that the system of seniority is as good as dead in the Los Angeles Unified School District, one of our nation’s most disastrous school systems. Writes the LA Times:

The Los Angeles Board of Education approved Tuesday what would be a landmark court settlement that radically limits the traditional practice of laying off teachers strictly on the basis of seniority. The agreement would cap the number of those dismissals at virtually all schools in the nation’s second-largest district.

Hey, that’s great! What are the details?

The agreement does not scrap seniority as a factor in layoffs. Rather, layoffs based on seniority would be distributed evenly among district schools. No school would lose a disproportionate number of instructors.

This marks a significant change because inexperienced teachers tend to be clustered in schools in low-income neighborhoods, putting those campuses at a disadvantage during every budget crisis. [My emphasis]

Oh. So this “landmark court settlement” doesn’t really get rid of tenure at all. It just spreads layoffs around the district more evenly. Well, at least now maybe they can get rid of teachers based on how well they perform, right?

Like virtually every other district in the state, L.A. Unified does not consider job performance in layoff decisions.

Huh. The bottom line is this:

Under the plan, teachers with fewer than two years’ experience would still be vulnerable. On the other hand, veteran teachers at some campuses could be laid off even as younger teachers at other schools are spared.

I really fail to see how this is some sort of landmark triumph against the evil of seniority. On the one hand it’s good that a successful, young teacher at one school might get saved because an older teacher is laid off elsewhere. But what about the less-young, still-successful teachers at these other, better schools who are still lacking in seniority? Why should they be sacrificed just because their less-successful colleague has more years within the district?

I suppose this is an improvement upon the current regime, which is just a joke. But is this really a great success? We need to get rid of seniority entirely: Workers don’t deserve to hold on to their job just because they’ve managed to keep breathing for decades.