Between 2000 and 2010 the Los Angeles Unified School District tried to fire just seven teachers; of those LAUSD successfully fired four and the rest received hefty settlements or were reinstated. If you thought this might cost taxpayers a reasonable amount you are wrong (and probably not from the U.S.). According to LA Weekly the settlements cost a whopping $3.5 million. Imagine how high your tuition would be if Pepperdine had to foot a bill like that to fire your least favorite professor!
Such is the result though of your elected officials consulting with teachers’ unions like the National Education Association before they enact hiring and firing policies. Intent on maintaining huge memberships (the NEA boasts 3.2 million) teachers’ unions take full advantage of the government’s bottomless purse to boost job security and to increase already costly pensions. This means outrageously lengthy hearings and convoluted procedures for doing something even as basic as firing a teacher.
You can also blame teachers’ unions for most of the policies that remove incentives to teach well. For instance most teachers are paid more not for teaching well but for staying at your old high school forever — in other words on the basis of seniority.
Seniority also holds in hiring and firing. The newer teachers are out first regardless of how much better they teach than the ancient instructor down the hall who can barely remember his or her own birthday much less judge whether his or her test reflects the course’s content.
Unions have also successfully brought down the number of days in the school year to a pitiful 180 in lieu of laying off or decreasing wages for incompetent teachers.
Furthermore in case you thought that we couldn’t pay any more than the $3.5 million mentioned to remove bad teachers note that any teacher waiting to be reassigned after being laid off or who is in the midst of disciplinary hearings for posing a danger to students will continue to receive their usual compensation in the meantime.
Unfortunately it isn’t just the teachers’ unions that get away with poor policies like these. While the newly elected governor of New York Andrew Cuomo promised to “rightsize the state government for today he will face a battle, not just from teachers’ unions, but from every union that represents any bureaucratic agency.
To chart the size of the bureaucracy, let’s take a look at the differences between public sector and private sector unions within the American workforce. Benefits in the public sector, including pensions, are notoriously generous. According to the Economist, only 20 percent of private-sector employees have generous benefit packages, compared to 90 percent of public employees. (In negotiating with unions, politicians favor increased benefits to increased wages, so as to maintain the look of fiscal responsibility in the yearly budget.) Wages for entry-level workers in the public sector are also higher on average than wages for similar positions in the private sector. Finally, as noted above, rules enacted with the advice of unions have made it nearly impossible to fire public-sector employees.
Public-sector unions derive their power from their tactful cooperation with the government. Public-sector unions barter with an entity that has a near-unlimited supply of money, and they know it. Whereas private-sector unions usually moderate their demands, recognizing that privately owned businesses are constrained monetarily and could be crippled by outlandish policies, public-sector unions know no such boundary.
Additionally, public-sector unions have more bargaining power than their private-sector counterparts; if a public-sector union declares a strike, for example, services of vital importance could be suspended for a considerable chunk of the population. No politician messes with the unions if he wants to be re-elected. (Luckily, Arnold Schwarzenegger ran out of terms before he could try.)
These crucial differences explain why public sector unions continue to hold so many members. A study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that by 2010 membership to private sector unions fell to 6.9 percent of private-sector workers; meanwhile, public sector unions still represent a whopping 36.2 percent of public-sector employees.
In light of these difficulties, the path to austerity and fiscal responsibility will be a difficult one for the newly elected governors of the country. Unions will try to persuade them to enact superficial reforms that only decrease or maintain this year’s spending, and they will have to consistently withstand pressure from the unions and work diligently to cut back profligate spending.
Only with a steadfast dedication to objectives like Cuomo’s will the long-term stability of the economy as a whole be guaranteed. After all, any government that spends $3.5 million to fire seven employees from its bureaucracy probably won’t get away with managing a robust private sector for long.