A statewide strike by teachers in West Virginia may well be justified by the failure of their salaries to keep pace with the cost of living, not that the same can’t be said about the salaries of many others. But the strike is unlawful. Teachers’ strikes are an old joke, where the penalty for engaging in an unlawful work stoppage is negotiated away with the settlement.
Of course, the week plus (thus far) of the strike means that students lose a week of education, and working parents are forced to find some way to deal with their children at home rather than school. That makes it hard for the teachers to fall back on their usual claim, “we’re doing it for the children,” when the kids suffer and, well, they’re doing it for the money.
The conflict arises from the niggardly raises offered teachers, and they were, indeed, pretty darn low.
He would learn something about workers’ dignity if he spoke with Katie Endicott, a 31-year-old high school English teacher from Gilbert, W.Va., whose take-home pay is less than $650 a week. She’s one of thousands of teachers who have been on strike for more than a week, shutting schools in all 55 counties of the state.
The state wanted to give 1 percent annual raises for five years to the teachers — who make less than those in all but three states — and have them pay more for health insurance.
The “he” referred to in the above quote is Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito, and the reason he’s the target of this object lesson is that Janus v. AFSCME was argued before the Court last week. The contention is that Alito should learn about “workers’ dignity” from the engagement in unlawful conduct by teachers.
Before he puts his name to a Supreme Court opinion that is expected to eviscerate public-sector unions, Justice Samuel Alito Jr. should visit West Virginia.
In considering issues in a case argued this week, Mr. Alito has said the fees that unions charge nonmembers for the expense of collective bargaining infringe on workers’ “dignity and conscience” by forcing them to fund a union whose political positions they might disagree with.
Of course, the Times’ editorial board distorts the issue. The issue at hand is not whether unions can charge for the expense of collective bargaining,” but for their political activities beyond collective bargaining.
A wag might suggest that the Times editorial board knows that its characterization of the issue is wrong, and yet deliberately mischaracterized it to make its point. A wag might call that “fake news.” A wag might contend that when an argument can’t be made without falsifying facts, then the argument fails. Who would be such a wag?
Public-sector unions have been the last bastion of worker strength.
Public-sector unions are a conceptual blight. It’s not because I’m unsympathetic with the plight of West Virginia teachers, though it never seems to dawn on anyone that the increases in salary have to come from somewhere, and the taxpayers (also known as “somewhere”) are sucking as much wind as the teachers. To say that teachers “deserve” better pay is unavailing. Lots of occupations deserve better pay. I will not question the value of teachers or education. I will not question whether the salary paid teachers in West Virginia is good enough.
Basic compensation theory dictates that a salary is insufficient if it fails to attract sufficient qualified people to the job. If it attracts more people than there are jobs, then the salary is too rich. This theory fails to take into account a great many relevant factors, however, so don’t rely too heavily on it as a means of determining the propriety of the raises being offered to West Virginia teachers.
But there is one additional element at play here, that teachers unions spend a lot of money on political campaigns of people they believe will be favorably disposed toward their desires. Their negotiations don’t take place only at the bargaining table, but in the voting booth and legislative offices.
Public sector unions will try to get people elected who will further their cause financially, and further their other political causes. This is the secondary bite of the political apple, so even if they can’t lawfully strike (stop laughing), they can spend their money on putting a compassionate butt in the chair on the other side of the table.
The union money, forcibly extracted from members and nonmembers alike, in a public sector union shop is what’s at issue in Janus, where the Times fears Alito won’t appreciate the workers’ dignity enough to keep the union ATM churning.
Despite Justice Alito’s hand-wringing over the right to free speech, the effect of the decision that is expected from the court would be to silence workers and sap their power. The West Virginia teachers are having none of that. While it looked as if the strike was settled this week when the governor agreed to 5 percent raises, the Legislature had not committed to that, and how much workers would pay for health care was still unsettled. So the teachers stayed out.
If you’re from West Virginia and believe that teachers should be better paid, good on you. Write your legislator and include a huge check to pay for the salary increase you believe they should get, with the caveat that it’s not to be spent on anything else. But if you’re a teacher, and union dues are being taken from your paycheck to be spent on the union to promote political causes with which you disagree, you end up with that much less to feed your family and you’ve been compelled to pay for someone else’s beliefs.
Public-sector unions are bad enough, but they exist. There is no “worker dignity” to be found in forcing teachers to pay for union activities beyond the bargaining table. There is much to suggest that goes too far already.
Confession time: I met Sam Alito once in law school, when I was a member of that dreaded secret Illuminati organization called “The Federalist Society.”
I was too nervous to ask for a picture with the newly minted Supreme Court Justice, so it fell to my then wife to do the honors. He was kind enough to oblige, and while it wasn’t meeting the Notorious RBG or Justice Sotomayor, Alito was a good guy.
Excoriating him over an issue like this is only going to make the complainants look like assholes for those who know him.
When I crossed Justice Mark Dwyer, I found out the he was law school roomies with Alito. I also learned that Caleb Kruckenberg, when he worked in the appeals bureau of DANY, got Mark’s old desk chair. Somehow, that makes Caleb roomies once removed from Alito, so if you need another pic, he’s your go-to guy.
Given I look exponentially better now than when the original picture was taken, I’m going to bugger off and harass Caleb in his DMs until I get a new photo op.
So West Virginia teachers “make less than those in all but three states.” Oddly enough, the people of West Virginia broadly make less than those in all but two states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income
You would think the Times would have included that factual detail in its editorial, but then, including facts that undermine one’s position is not favored by the media these days.
The Times? Factual?
God, you make me laugh! 🙂
Dr. SJ stopped reading the Times because it made her pretty darn liberal head hurt, with its twisting of facts and confusion of editorial advocacy in news articles. But without it, what source is there for news? News is important, and if not the Times, who?
That’s one of the good things about the Internet. You can find a lot of newsy stuff. On any major story, you can easily check a wide selection of the nation’s major newspapers and broadcast networks, from coast to coast. There is no reason to stick with any one of them (especially once it becomes evident that everything it prints is devoted to some special ideological viewpoint).
Lots of “newsy stuff,” but what to believe? Quantity isn’t a substitute for quality.
The “what to believe” part has to come from the reader. Comparing reports in different sources can help to identify the parts that are objective details and those that are only the writer’s characterization. Where stories contain sloppy (or no) attributions to plausible primary sources, or every version is based on the same linked account of a single writer, skepticism is in order.
Here’s where we may differ: I want facts. I get filtered facts. One of the problems writing SJ has been a consistently degrading level of trustworthiness and detail in the news articles I rely on. I choose not to write about things because the stories either are so utterly lacking in detail that no serious sense can be made of them or what is said smells of bias.
I see stories constantly, and from all sorts of sources, that I would like to write about but just don’t trust sufficiently. It’s not a matter of sloppy reporting, but the sense that everybody is telling us what they want us to know. No more. No less.
Or only what they want us to think. I have likewise passed over a number of stories that might have made good posts at Commenteriat Commune, for similar reasons. Sometimes, one will be so glaringly phony that I post about it as an example of something glaringly phony. Most often, I just skip over them.
When you make a list of 50 anything, somebody’s going to be last, or 48th of 50. Does being 48th mean that a pay raise is automatically called for?
So if they get that raise and rise up to 47th, does the new 48th have dibs on a raise then?
It seems elemental, but when our friends at the NYT have to resort to this argument it’s hard to take the rest of it seriously.
It reminded me of every argument that relies on percentages without noting real numbers: the increase in X has gone up by 33% in one year!!! So it went from two to three? Got it.
Lawyer math again? An increase from 2 to 3 would be a 50% increase. From 3 to 4 would be 33%.
You guys are really beginning to hurt my self-esteem, you know.
Scott,
I may not understand something and since you are, among other things, trained in labor economics (I think) perhaps you will help me.
I thought it was clear that the public sector unions could not force state employees to contribute for purely political activity–like union PACs. But the unions (through state action) could charge every employee for the cost of collective bargaining and handling grievances or so-called “fair share” or “agency” fees
The issue in Janus, or so I thought, was this:
Can a public employee be forced pay for the costs of collective bargaining and the handling of grievances consistent with the First Amendment?
The argument against that requirement is that collective bargaining and grievance handling is inherently political when it comes to state actors–think of the disastrous budget problems of Illinois that some lay at the feet of unions. Therefore, the compulsion to pay for benefit bargaining is compelled speech, so the argument goes.
Help?
All the best.
RGK
I try to avoid the underlying political questions, which aren’t relevant as far as I’m concerned, only to have a tricky judge try goad me into it anyway? Unions are tricky in their efforts to circumvent Abood, achieving disputable political goals under the guise of negotiating terms and conditions and grievance handling which they’re not theoretically allowed to accomplish openly.
While an argument can be made that everything done by, and funded by, the public is political, negotiating salary is a pretty straight forward and transparent thing. Negotiating against merit pay, on the other hand, is controversial. Negotiating coverage for sex reassignment surgery is controversial. Circumventing Abood doesn’t make it less political, or more aligned with the interests of agency-fee paying employees, than using their money to fund a PAC.
There have always been controversial choices made by unions, such as seniority (why should an longer-term employee be paid more than a better employee?), or the trade-off between salary and health benefits, when younger workers want higher pay and older workers want better health coverage? The reality is that within the collective bargaining group, there are very real differences of interest between workers, but that’s an inherently problem of unionism. When that extends into the realm of political choices, however, it’s no less the use of forced fees for political purposes than Abood would prohibit. Same deal, just a little bit more under the covers. Pretending otherwise, as if this was fair share for salary negotiations, doesn’t change it.
Edit: Oops, left out one thing. Money is fungible. Money attributed to the cost of fair share payments frees up money used to
bribeelect politicians.SHG,
Thanks.
As you know, Professors Baude and Volokh think the public sector unions have the better of the constitutional argument. That surprised me.* I don’t think their arguments–particularly their analogies–persuasive. I find the compelled speech argument persuasive despite the fact that my deceased brother, a local chairman for a railroad union, will roll in his grave at such heresy.
All the best.
RGK
* Please appreciate my judicious restraint regarding Cato snark.
I have the utmost regard for Professors Baude and Volokh, which entitles them to be admirably wrong from time to time.
If I had a nickel for every time you’ve said that …
The irony is when SJWs dismiss the Times as “trending Nazi.” It’s got to suck being on the editorial board these days, though not nearly as much as it sucks to be me.
Correlation does not imply causation.
(Sorry, resistance was futile.)
If the treatment of public school teachers in West Virginia is truly poor, teachers will have the incentive to join and support the union voluntarily. A union that is truly needed does not need to impose fees on unwilling members. The mandatory fees element is a symptom of successful unions grown concerned that they may have become unnecessary, so they have turned to looking out for themselves rather than for their members.
Generally true, that the incentives should be baked into the union. Then again, people being people, there will always be free riders trying to enjoy benefits on other people’s dimes.
And some of them are the union leadership. It’s just a good thing that damned few of the old Wobblies lasted long enough to see how the unions would come to be corrupted in their turn.
The other side of that is the people who don’t like being told what to do with their money and refuse to donate to an organization they don’t want to donate to.
Enough about what the wags! What would the scolds say?
What scolds always say. That’s why they’re scolds.
well, o.k. then i guess?
Perhaps it always takes an expat in Asia to do the underlying research, but the reality of union maintenance clause(s) in the collective bargaining agreement(s) in question within West Virginia is the opposite of what this blog post posits: public sector workers have no collective bargaining rights under WV law. This is at best (or worst depending on perspective) a wildcat strike, with no underlying rules except the assumption that WV also prohibits strikes (see the lack of bargaining permitted under state law).
The only way to change their lot is to try to force the WV legislature to write law that addresses how health care insurance costs are bankrupting public workers in WV (which appear to be the root issue in this state-wide walkout) and possibly increase salaries (the WV governor apparently offered 5%, but this has no force unless the legislature acts; the WV Senate reportedly is dragging its feet on even debating the proposed legislation).
One can object to public sector collective bargaining (or CB is general), but WV 2018 appears to be a case study in the effects of NOT having underlying negotiated rules rather than the evils of unions (I cannot fathom how one separates discomfort with public collective bargaining with the same in the private sector).
A wildcat strike is a strike unauthorized by the union. An unlawful strike is one unauthorized by law. Strikes can be both, but there can be no lawful strike in WV, regardless of whether it has union authorization. There is no entitlement to a govt job, no entitlement to the salary level or benefits you deem “fair.” If the pay and benefits suck, get another job. If they can’t find enough qualified teachers willing to work at that salary level, they will have to raise pay or suffer the wrath of voters for providing inadequate education.
To understand the problem (as revealed by your last parenthetical) requires an understanding of the dynamics of union/mgmt. Govt isn’t profiteering off the backs of workers. They have a captive market. They tax citizens for their money. There are no strikes, no lockouts, no incentives to run more efficient enterprises, no bankruptcies, none of the factors that apply in the private sector. Taxpayers have no option to note “buy” the product if it costs too much or sucks. Govt has no option not to deliver the product if the law requires it to do so. The union model fails on every level in the public sector.
If the teachers want to improve their lot, they should get a private sector job. But if they choose to be public school teachers, they don’t get to strike.
It seems to depend where you look. In some states (CA) public employees get the keys to the kingdom, but in others (WV being an example) they are the pissing post of society.
Dear Papa,
Your anti-unionism might not help you after the revolution. Unions are flawed conceptually and public sector unions even more so, but they support workers where nothing else does. A proper union understands this, but a proper union also would want its own undoing. It’s the undoing of the present state of things, including unions, that’s the ultimate goal. That’s a bit more radical than salary and benefits increases, but too bad for hunger and illness.
The inequity between employer and even a small group of employees is so vast, that advocating on the basis of class is the employees’ only resort, but compelling the speech through forced dues isn’t democratic. It’s still a shame that some lick boots and say they enjoy the taste. Lose the chains, stand up, smell the coffee.
Where is my One Big Union? Maybe automation will help.
Best,
PK
I’m not lacking in empathy, PK. It would be wonderful if everyone was fabulously wealthy, loved their job, was incredibly attractive to whatever gender they desire and had superhero powers. But somebody has to pay for it.
Lawyers are earning less than teachers, despite an extra three years of educational and opportunity costs. Who will they strike against? If teacher’s salaries are awful (and, if there is some absolute basis to make such a determination), they should get jobs in the private sector that pay what they prefer. Not so easy? Well, sure, but that’s true of everyone who is looking for a job and wants more money. It doesn’t grow on trees, and they don’t give it to you because you want it.
It’s unfair? Yes, terribly unfair. The taxpayers of West Virginia who aren’t teachers aren’t sitting home eating bon bons and counting their gold bullion. Life is unfair to them as well. Remember when mom told you life was unfair? She was right.
C’est la vie. It might not have to be forever, though.
That poor teacher’s take home is $650? Fuck, I guess this PD needs to STRIKE.
I’m sorry if my client’s hearings will need to be continued, their lawyer needs more money.
We should all make much more than we do. And all the kids at Lake Wobegon are above average.
The more I’m thinking about it, when I wake up in my silk sheets, it’s horse shit there isn’t a rainbow outside my mansion’s balcony.
STRIKE STRIKE STRIKE
Some of them support workers, and others just feed off the workers, like the jobbers of bygone days.
Employers by definition feed off the workers. At least some unions support them. The One Big Union would even if these fractures wouldn’t. Solidarity, comrade, solidarity.
If employers didn’t feed off the workers, there would be no reason to have workers. That’s the nature of the relationship. Otherwise, employers would be charities and the workers could stay home, eat bon bons and cash their paychecks.
You’ll call me utopian, but there are ways to operate without exploitation. Worker ownership is a simple example. The value the workers produce then goes back to the workers.
While that doesn’t apply to public schools, no one is stopping workers from starting up their own google as a worker’s cooperative. Heck, the farm went well, so why not?