MARY KATHARINE HAM: Teachers union bosses put themselves first, teachers and students last
Randi Weingarten is "spitting mad." The head of the American Federation of Teachers is raging, not because American students just put in the worst performance on the national report card in decades, not because chronic absenteeism and behavioral problems in the wake of COVID-19 school closures are crippling teachers’ ability to bring those grades up, and not because record-breaking numbers of students are below basic proficiency.
Nah, it’s because some government employees might lose their jobs.
For people like Weingarten, bureaucrats are always the No. 1 priority. She’ll talk a good game in op-eds about her concern that Department of Education cuts mean students with the fewest resources and greatest needs will pay the highest price, (which is perhaps something she should have thought about when AFT was suing Gov. Ron DeSantis to keep school closed in 2020, but I digress). If you check AFT’s current lawsuit, you’ll find the first line is about federal workers, not students or teachers.
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Many parents learned this lesson during the pandemic. For the first time, they saw that union leaders weren’t just working for their members, but actively against people like them, who simply wanted their kids in the schools they paid for.
Teachers’ unions are just one kind of many public employee unions that are literally negotiating against you. When a private union uses collective bargaining, they’re negotiating with a private company that creates a product and profits, from which they argue they should take a bigger share to pay for better benefits.
When public employee unions negotiate, they’re doing it with the government, which creates nothing. All they can do is take your taxpayer money and use it to give public employees benefits and job security many regular workers will never see.
President Donald Trump just signed an executive order banning the kind of collective bargaining private unions do for most public employee unions. In doing so, he’s aligned with none other than Democratic Party hero and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who famously wrote to a public employee union president in 1937 expressing the danger of such practices used against the employer when "the employer is the whole people."
The Trump administration has also ordered public unions to report how much time they spend on union activities on the job, just as it did in his first administration.
President Joe Biden shut down that data collection during his tenure, but the Washington Examiner "managed to get data from 2019… and according to a report by OPM, government union employees spent a total of 2,606,390 hours that year performing union tasks on government time at a cost of $163,327,235." As DOGE and a Republican administration audit more agencies, they’ll find more.
That’s right, these unions use the majority of the money they bring in (your money!) to pay for political activism, funding candidates and causes to the tune of hundreds of millions and even billions, and they do it on the clock. Some 90+% of that money goes to the Democratic Party, no matter what rank-and-file union members or taxpayers want.
Just recently, Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst uncovered $3.3 million in taxpayer money, and 87,000 hours spent at one agency alone over just two years that went to thousands of hours of union-related activities instead of the American people.
Elsewhere, the IRS union is negotiating for its members to show up only once a week in person and retain a bunch of generous bonuses. An unwelcome April surprise, just like your tax bill!
For generations, this type of bargaining — or worse, public labor union strikes — have been "intolerable," as Roosevelt put it, to important leaders of both parties.
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When 13,000 air traffic controllers went on strike in August 1981, newly elected President Ronald Reagan fired more than 10,000 of them and decertified their union, on the grounds that striking as a public employee union was illegal.
The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization demanded a 32-hour work week and a $10,000 raise, but their striking members ended up being banned from federal service and striking a blow against public employee unions instead. In the ensuing years, the number of strikes and work stoppages in the country went down significantly.
Today, public employee unions are using your money to launch a raft of lawsuits against the administration, arguing — you guessed it — they can’t get fired. Even probationary employees must stay, apparently, the dictionary definition of "probationary" no match for the entitlement of government union leaders. Must be nice!
Reagan’s move "unsettled those who cynically believed no President would ever uphold that law," Alan Greenspan later said, reflecting on the legacy of that fight, and it tamed some of the most aggressive tendencies of organized labor for years to come.
Today’s public employee union leaders cynically believe their priorities should override the priorities of their bosses, the American people. But polling shows the bipartisan agreement on this remains. Seventy percent of Americans want public employee unions out of politics, and the record of this administration shows it won’t shy away from taming them.