This article was published in the Spring 2011 Southerner News Magazine.
Yes!
Written by Jack Kotnik
In Wisconsin, our democracy is being threatened. Led by Governor Scott Walker, the Republican party passed a bill that will not allow unions to collectively bargain, originally claiming that it would cut the state’s budget deficit by a large margin. A group that will largely be affected by this bill is a group we are pretty familiar with: teachers.
Outraged by the proposal and knowing that it was inevitably going to be passed because of the Republican majority in state Senate, the Democratic senators fled the state because the vote could not be passed unless enough members of the Senate were present. Meanwhile, each day, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the streets protesting the passing of the bill, many of them teachers.
Finally, the Republicans found a way to pass the bill anyway, by removing every aspect that didn’t have to do with funding. Now hold on, wasn’t the purpose of the bill to cut the deficit? If the bill isn’t a matter of funding, then the Senate wasn’t doing its job. The fact that hundreds of thousands of people are protesting the bill should send a big red warning flag to the GOP. The Senate represents the will of the people who elected them, and clearly they were not doing that.
The bill, which is on the verge of being unconstitutional, restricts the peoples’ ability to make sure they are treated fairly. The reason unions were formed in the first place was so that the workers could gather together and bargain with their employers, because their voices were not heard when they spoke out alone. Education is often first to be attacked when funding arguments come along, but this bill isn’t even about funding. This is about a bunch of senators deciding that the children of Wisconsin don’t deserve teachers who are happy and able to teach. The teachers of Wisconsin were more than happy to give up their benefits, but instead, they unwillingly gave up their rights as workers.
Unions protect teachers: their pay, their benefits, their jobs, their livelihood. During the debate that swept and is still sweeping our country, many in support of the bill claimed that teachers were overpaid, underworked, and downright bad. This message is doing nothing to help improve education, and only demotivates good teachers. Teaching can be one of the most stressful jobs, and, if anything, teachers aren’t paid enough. Of course, there are some bad ones out there, but that doesn’t mean we should blame every teacher.
The bill was outrageous in the first place, considering the history of the United States. During 1880s and on, the U.S entered a period of time known as the Gilded Age. During this time, a few wealthy people, such as Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller were on top, huge corporations dominated business, and eventually, because of their money, individuals gained power they didn’t deserve in the government. Then there was the middle class, dominated by commercialization. Finally, the lower class lived in tenements and shacks in crowded cities with terrible living conditions. Fed up, the lower class formed unions to advocate for their rights. If unions become invalid, the United States could fall into another gilded age, with corporations dominating the scene, or in this case, district workers who’ve never seen the inside of a classroom deciding what’s best for teachers.
“This is the right move for Wisconsin” said Republican Representative Jeff Fitzgerald on the floor of the Senate. In the background, you could nearly hear protesters shouting out their disagreement from the grass outside. You can clearly hear that the rest of Wisconsin does not agree with you, so how could you continue to sign the bill? When the bill was passed and signed by Governor Walker, observers from the balcony shouted “SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!” I am amazed at the ability of Walker to put his pride above the people and not admit he was wrong, or at the very least open a discussion.
Teachers, and all workers, deserve the right to get their voices heard. Unions let this happen. A good example is the teachers’ contract debate that was going on a couple months ago. The Minneapolis School District was withholding pay from teachers, and only after the union put up a long battle it was decided that the teachers deserved their pay. Imagine if there were no unions. Individual teachers are no match against the district, with all their fancy lawyers.
No!
Written by Hannah Garry
The way a business works is this: the company wants the best employees so they present the best employees with benefits and a salary that meets the market price. They reward better employees with an increase in pay and they eliminate worse employees. If schools ran more like a business, paying the market price for the best teachers would be possible.
Instead, we have unions. Unions reward teachers, not for being the best at connecting with students or teaching the material, but for paying dues, showing up, and not getting arrested. They set limitations on which teachers can teach, and where. Unions are responsible for tenure which allows teachers who have been teaching longer-even bad teachers- to continue teaching, while less experienced teachers who may be more qualified/competent/excited-to-teach are denied jobs.
Unions used to make sense. They protected employees from unhygienic working conditions and inhumane hours. These days, The Department of Labor, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Fair Labor Standard Acts have made unions irrelevant. They protect workers. Meanwhile unions continue to exist even though they have no purpose.
Or rather, they have a purpose, and that purpose is collecting dues from their members and giving it to Democratic candidates. The National Education Association has 3.2 million members and in 2007 they collected about $400 million from their members. It is not a matter of which political party they give money too, but rather that they give money to any political party at all.
Despite this, Americans have a very romantic idea of unions. Working folk banding together to protect each other from their corrupt employers? It’s all very American, like apple pie but angrier. What our idealistic minds are failing to realize is that unions are making money too.
Unions are looking out for teachers by making sure that their members get jobs and continue to have them. There is nothing wrong with this, if you are a teacher who is a member of the union. As a student however, I find fault in this. What teachers feel is fair for them isn’t always what’s good for kids.
I’m sure everyone who has ever been a student has had a teacher that they disagreed with. In my own experience, I know that I’ve had teachers who I felt just shouldn’t be teaching, teachers who just aren’t that good at what they do. If schools ran like companies do, the best teachers would continue teaching and the worst teachers would not continue teaching. But unions make sure that this is impossible.
The private sector is moving away from unions. Twenty-five years ago, anyone working for a private company probably had a pension. Today, this isn’t true. Private employees have to do their own saving for retirement. Teachers and other unionized workers, however, have a pension and benefits.
This is not to say that teachers get payed an outrageous amount. Teachers work hard and some teachers get payed very well while some teachers get payed very little, just like some plumbers are payed very well an some plumbers aren’t. The main difference between unionized teachers and workers in the private sector are the benefits.
If the swirl of political rhetoric and heated debate that took place in Wisconsin this winter was a hurricane, then teacher benefits were the eye of the storm. While those in the private sector today generally have very small benefits, the teacher’s union has negotiated-through collective bargaining-very generous benefits for their members. The Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, was not willing to negotiate. He sought to get the state’s budget under control, and his chosen path was to ensure that teacher benefits would not be raised any higher. But how could he ensure this if he was forced to negotiate with the unions?
Many have criticized how Walker eventually passed the collective bargaining bill. With the democratic senators AWOL, thus ensuring that any funding bill cannot be passed, the bill was stripped of anything to do with funding. Critics will say that this exposed Walker’s true intentions, to tyrannically strip hard working Americans of their rights. But I ask you, what was Governor Walker supposed to do? His senators had run away. Just sit there and twiddle his thumbs until they decided to return? Walker did the most logical thing he could do without giving in to the will of the protesters.
In Wisconsin teachers pay nothing for their benefits. Tax dollars, your parents tax dollars, someday your tax dollars go towards paying for these workers benefits. If public sector unions are to continue, someday (unless you are a union worker) you will pay for your own health benefits as well as the teachers’ in your public school district.
If there were no unions there would just be the government and the workers. The taxpayers would decide what is important to them (like small class sizes, which Minnesota tax payers do pay for) and the government and the workers would work together to achieve that. Despite what we may hear, loosing unions would not mean the end of America as we know it.
I am not trying to say that teachers do not have a very difficult, demanding job. This is not meant to demean the work that teachers do, which I personally think is very important. However, teaching is just like other jobs, hard and unforgiving at times just like being a lawyer or a doctor or a restaurant owner. There are good teachers and bad teachers just like there are good doctors and bad doctors.
And by no means am I trying to say this issue is a simple one. The information we get- from the media, our peers, and, on occasion, even teachers- is often very black and white. The straightforward arguments we hear are not all there is to see, and this issue is much more complex than some make it seem.