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teachers union
This School Year, Let’s Recommit to Standing Up for Public Schools
We need unions that can make the case for the public good that public education provides, unions that are unabashedly of and for the educators.
Sep 06, 2023
Where does the spirit of Red for Ed, the teacher-led labor movement that began in 2018, stand today?
Red for Ed began that February when educators and staff at schools across West Virginia went on strike to demand better pay. Their direct action inspired strikes in other states, especially those with majority Republican legislatures (hence the name “Red for Ed”). Educators in Arizona, Kentucky, and Oklahoma went on illegal wildcat strikes to fight against the poverty wages and chronically underfunded schools that were resulting in both intolerable working conditions and learning conditions.
Since then, the movement has seen ebbs and flows. But that’s the nature of organizing. There is no straight line of progress, but instead waves that slowly and determinedly wash against the shores—little by little changing the landscape.
For those of us who will be in the classroom this coming year, we need the public to see what we see.
Of course, there have been other big waves too, such as the solidarity strike in Los Angeles in March of this year that saw members from United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) show up for support staff. The result was major wage gains for support staff, like bus drivers, teaching aides, special education assistants, and other workers who contribute to functioning schools. The strike also influenced a significant contract settlement for UTLA members as well.
Still, inflation, limited housing options, and political attacks against educators striving to just do their jobs have driven educators to leave the profession.
For those of us who will be in the classroom this coming year, we need the public to see what we see. Throughout my state of New Hampshire, public educators are confronting a new school year without enough guidance counselors, with support staff getting crushed by the cost of living, and with money that could be used to help our students being used to fund voucher programs. It’s the same scenario playing out all across the country.
The question now, it seems to me, is what do we do about all of this?
For one, we can’t stand idly by. We can’t believe that officials above us will save us. We must see opportunities to build something new, to create resilient communities, to strengthen relationships between educators.
We cannot close our classroom doors and expect the problems of the world to go away. We have seen too many times before that there is no stopping the downward slide of gloom unless we meet it with the kind of positive energy force that we bring to classrooms—we need a collective energy that exceeds the force of the push for privatization.
This energizing force can only come from one place and from one direction: from the grassroots.
It was the animating force of Red for Ed, it is the power of organized labor, it is the simple idea that everyday folks can come together to address the issues that they see everyday—issues that other folks don’t seem to acknowledge.
Each time teachers and support staff stand together to bring issues of working people to light, we bring meaning to the idea of a union as a collective working toward a common goal and sharing the same collective fate.
Unions, at their best, are built around a love for our fellow colleagues and our fellow workers. It is expressed when the voices of the seldom heard echo in the halls: the halls of schools, of board rooms, and ultimately, in the halls of power.
Voucher schemes in states like my own are evidence of the need to build stronger unions. We need unions that can make the case for the public good that public education provides, unions that are unabashedly of and for the educators who go the extra mile each day for kids, communities, and the common good.
We cannot ignore the ugliness of the status quo, with fear driving people apart, books being banned, and teachers training for active shooter drills. Each one of our students are too precious to turn our attention away from the work that we must do together to bring about change.
This school year, let’s recommit to the labor of love that is standing up for public schools, our students, and the communities we serve by building stronger and more inclusive unions. The movement for public schools isn’t dead. It’s just getting started.
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Give Them a Raise! Teachers Deserve Much More Than a Week of Appreciation
We must do more than take a week to say thank you. We must pay teachers for the work they do to support our society. The evidence is clear that we have been failing in this regard.
May 12, 2023
To this day, I have yet to meet a person incapable of naming a teacher who made an impact on their life. No matter if they attended an under-resourced or well-off school, nearly everyone has had a teacher who made them believe in themselves, taught them to love a subject they thought they were terrible at, or opened up their view of the world.
Whether it was the teacher of my Pastor Bernard in Oakland who taught him to read and write through lived experiences rather than textbooks; or my fiancé’s who recognized her potential and fast-tracked her into more advanced courses; or my history teacher who helped me believe in my abilities and cultivate my love of social studies—teachers change lives. They deserve to be paid fairly for their impact on all of us.
Teachers—alongside emergency responders, doctors, and the military—represent a profession that is critical to the lifeblood of society. Yet unlike these other professions, which provide sustainable salaries, our nation gives thanks to our teachers with a week of appreciation. Even then, the burden of that thanks is often placed on our kids or parents to bring them gifts.
The problem is not with our children bringing tokens of thanks; the problem is with the policies we have allowed to underpay teachers, and thus, undercut the entire value of the teaching profession.
Now this is not to discredit those gifts. I still have the homemade gifts from my students when I was a teacher in Hawai’i. The problem is not with our children bringing tokens of thanks; the problem is with the policies we have allowed to underpay teachers, and thus, undercut the entire value of the teaching profession.
We must do more than take a week to say thank you. We must pay teachers for the work they do to support our society. The evidence is clear that we have been failing in this regard.
Even before the pandemic made teaching even more difficult, teachers were leaving the classroom at harrowing rates. More than half cite low compensation as what is driving them out the door. In California, which has the largest number of public school students in the US, 80% of districts reported a shortage of qualified teachers in 2017-2018. The problem is compounded by the fact that we can’t fill these spots with new teachers as enrollment in teacher education programs fell by 35% between 2009 and 2014.
\u201cTalk is cheap. It\u2019s high time we show teachers our appreciation by giving them a well-deserved raise. #AmericanTeacherAct\u201d— Rep. Frederica Wilson (@Rep. Frederica Wilson) 1683663898
Teachers are so undervalued in America that 62% of parents do not want their students to become teachers, citing low-teacher salaries as the number one reason why.
We have the power to show teachers that they matter. This starts by paying them a minimum nationwide salary of $60,000. There is a bipartisan bill in congress right now that can help make this a reality. We should not be a society where the correction officer who is responsible for keeping people in jail gets paid more than the teachers who can help keep the kids out of jail.
While paying teachers a minimum national salary of $60,000 is far from the silver bullet that will fix teacher shortages, it is an integral improvement that can help demonstrate to teachers that they matter and are deeply valued.
Let’s make Teacher Appreciation Week mean something more. Let’s use the week as a time to call on Congress to pass meaningful legislation that shows just how much we support and appreciate teachers.
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Ron DeSantis Delivers Corporate America's Anti-Union Wish List in Florida
Greedy titans of industry have a plan to keep working people down and the Republican governor and likely 2024 presidential candidate is more than happy to oblige.
Mar 25, 2023
Florida’s 2023 legislative session has kicked off with a pair of bills chock full of new labor regulations long sought after by anti-union activists.
The bills—SB 256 and HB 1445—would deliver huge wins for Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who called for virtually all of their provisions in his anti-labor wish list released in January.
While they bear DeSantis’ imprimatur, many of the bills’ specifics, both large and small, are lifted directly from the anti-union playbook of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a pay-to-play operation in which state legislators and corporate lobbyists meet behind closed doors to write model legislation.
The bills also have the backing of billionaire-bankrolled conservative think tanks that anti-worker lawmakers often call on for support, including Charles Koch’s astroturf group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and State Policy Network (SPN) affiliates the James Madison Institute and the Freedom Foundation.
If passed, the bills would empower the state of Florida to decertify public sector unions, prohibit automatic deductions for union dues, mandate universal language on union membership cards, and impose considerable annual reporting requirements.
“Gov. DeSantis says he supports ‘teacher empowerment,’ but this bill does the exact opposite,” the president of the Florida Education Association, Andrew Spar, said in a statement. “It’s an attack, pure and simple, on educators’ basic freedoms and rights.”
Perhaps the most consequential provision of the proposed legislation is its introduction of a new membership threshold for union decertification. The bills would require public sector unions to report their membership numbers to the state annually, a process that would lead to the potential decertification of any unions in which membership drops below 60% of eligible workers.
Under current Florida law, a decertification vote can only be triggered if at least 30% of a bargaining unit’s eligible workers file a petition calling for the vote.
The exception is teachers unions. Since the passage of a 2018 law, Florida teachers are the only public sector union members who are required to report their membership numbers annually. If their membership falls below a minimum of 50% of eligible workers, the union is forced to hold a decertification election.
The new legislation would impose these annual reporting requirements and the 60% membership threshold on all public sector unions, with the exception of those of police, firefighters, and corrections officers.
ALEC has long advocated for increasing the membership threshold for unions. The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has previously reported on ALEC’s model Union Recertification Act, which requires decertification of a union if membership drops below 50%, and also requires a secret ballot election every two years.
As a “right-to-work” state, Florida allows teachers and other public sector workers to avoid paying union dues while benefiting from the better pay and working conditions that the union negotiates, which undermines the ability of unions to build their membership.
A CMD analysis of information provided by Florida’s Public Employees Relations Commission (PERC) demonstrates what’s at stake if the higher membership threshold in the proposed bills passes. In fiscal year 2021–22, there were 44 public teachers’ unions in the state with a membership density between 50 and 60%. Under the new legislation, the unions covering these workers—114,854 public school teachers, which amounts to 62% of the entire statewide unionized public teacher workforce—would be forced to petition PERC for recertification and hold time-consuming new elections, or else risk being decertified.
Although the Senate’s fiscal analysis considered the density of teachers’ unions, it appears that it did not take into account the density of other public sector unions.
The Senate bill would also prohibit the automatic deduction of union dues. This provision—which in ALEC’s articulation has taken the form of the Public Employer Payroll Deduction Policy Act and is continually recycled in other model bills, such as the Public Employee Freedom Act—would require public sector employees to grant permission every year to allow their dues to be deducted from their paychecks.
The proposed legislation would also mandate that each public sector union card include anti-union language acknowledging that Florida is a right-to-work state, that union membership and dues payment are voluntary, and that “no employee may be discriminated against” for not joining a union. This idea—along with most of the language in the bill—parrots ALEC’s model Public Employee Rights and Authorization Act.
Under current Florida law, the state does not stipulate that membership cards include any specific information or statements.
While ALEC’s model bill calls for this information to be “written in bold and in all caps” and printed in “a font that is equal to or larger than any other font found in the body of the form,” the Florida bill stipulates that it be printed in “14-point type.”
Coordinated Efforts to Undermine Workers
Last but not least, the bills include substantial annual reporting requirements. Each union will be required to provide an “annual audited financial report that includes a detailed breakdown of revenues and expenditures,” audited membership lists, all bylaws, officers’ salaries, and other information. This provision draws heavily from ALEC’s Union Financial Responsibility Act, a model bill that requires public sector unions to file extensive financial and operational reports every year.
All in all, the Florida House estimates that its bill will cost the state an additional $903,238 each year to enforce, according to its internal fiscal analysis.
The proposed legislation—which carves out exemptions for law enforcement officers, correctional officers, and fire fighters—has drawn intense criticism from workers’ rights advocates. An overwhelming majority of the public attending a House committee meeting on March 16—102 of the 112 non-legislators in the room—were opposed to the bill.
The handful of attendees who were proponents largely represented conservative think tanks. Among those speaking in favor of the legislation at the House committee meeting were Sal Nuzzo, a vice president at the Madison Institute and chair of an ALEC task force, and Christopher Stranburg, AFP’s state legislative affairs director in Florida.
Representative Spencer Roach (R-79), who voted in favor of the House bill in committee, is ALEC’s Florida state chair, and a handful of other legislators who have moved the bill out of committee have ties to ALEC.
Registered lobbyists for the Senate bill include AFP, the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), and the Foundation for Florida’s Future, Jeb Bush’s pro-charter school 501c4. Lobbyists for the House bill include representatives from the Opportunity Solutions Project, the action-arm of right-wing think tank Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA); the Washington-based Freedom Foundation; the Center for Worker Progress Action (related to the Mackinac Center in Michigan); and additional lobbyists from NFIB and AFP.
FGA, the Freedom Foundation, and the Mackinac Center are state affiliates of SPN, the web of right-wing think tanks and tax-exempt organizations pushing far-right policy agendas throughout the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. AFP and NFIB are associate members.
An internal SPN document provided by CMD to The Guardian in 2017 revealed SPN’s plan to work to “defund and defang” public sector unions. As articulated by SPN’s President and CEO Tracie Sharp, the goal is “permanently depriving the left from access to millions of dollars in dues extracted from unwilling union members every election cycle.”
State Senator Blaise Ingoglia (R-11) and State Representative Dean Black (R-15) sponsored the bills, and committee votes in both chambers have been almost entirely along party lines. A single Republican state senator, Corey Simon (R-3), voted against the Senate bill.
The Senate bill was debated as a high-priority “special order calendar” item on Thursday, and will be taken up again when the Senate returns on March 29. The House bill is being reviewed by the State Affairs committee. Given the Republican’s supermajority in the legislature, the bills are expected to become law.
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