By helping educators help their students: Ohio English teacher Marjorie Punter made a shocking discovery on her first day of school two years ago: There were no books for her students. With 42 years of experience, Punter had a few tricks to get by—but she knew her students, enrolled in the special education program at Dayton’s Belmont High School, also needed books. She started with her principal. He tried. And tried. But no luck. “I went to my union and said, ‘Now what do I do?’ They said you’re going to file a grievance and we’re going to get those kids books.” And that’s exactly what happened—with no less than the enthusiastic support of the frustrated principal. “We took that grievance downtown and the whole district got special ed textbooks as a result,” said Dayton Education Association President David Romick. Reflecting on that experience, and the ongoing collaborative work between union members and Belmont’s administrators, Romick added, “We’re here to serve the students. That’s the bottom line and collaboration is the only way to get there.” Read more at NEA’s Priority Schools Campaign.
By mentoring new teachers: Nearly half of new teachers quit their profession within their first five years, according to James Rowley, an Ohio education professor. But research also shows that new teachers who have been paired with a mentor are more likely to stay, and more likely to improve student learning. Just ask Delana Hill, a student teacher in Kentucky, who told NEA’s This Active Life magazine in 2009 that her mentor, NEA-Retired member Kathy Drehmel, “Challenges me to think critically about things.” NEA-Retired’s intergenerational mentoring program currently pairs retired and novice teachers in 12 states—with 10 additional states in the planning stages. And it’s just one of the ways that NEA is helping to grow great teachers. Check out NEA’s three-point action plan to leading the profession for more.
By leading the charge for pro-public education laws and policies: In 2010, through the coordinated advocacy of NEA members who collectively sent more than 900,000 emails to Congress and made tens of thousands of phone calls, more than 500,000 educator jobs were saved by the national Recovery Act and Education Jobs Fund. More recently, union educators in Ohio, organized by the union-led We Are Ohio efforts, successfully shot down a law that would have eliminated collective bargaining and silenced the middle class. Collectively, union members have a powerful voice to advocate for themselves, their students, and their communities. And now, with the presidential election just a few months away, NEA members are mobilizing again to prevent anti-middle class policies from taking over the White House. Learn more about how to get involved.
By protecting educators’ rights: In 2009, Carol Stensvad was a well-respected, hard-working administrative assistant who absolutely loved her job at Mid-Plains Community College in Nebraska. And then one day her boss said, “I need to see you in my office, Carol,” and fired her for taking too much sick leave! At the time, Stensvad was rightfully using her federally guaranteed Family Medical Leave to take her husband, who suffers from kidney and bladder cancer, as well as Type II diabetes and deafness, to chemotherapy treatments 90 miles away. “My supervisor didn’t like it,” Stenvad recalls. “He told me to put Bob on the shuttle bus. I asked him, ‘How is that going to work? Bob can’t even hear!’ That day, when he called me into his office, he gave me 15 minutes to pack up 10 years of my life.” Fortunately, as a union member, Stensvad wasn’t alone in the fight for fairness. With the skilled help of the Nebraska State Education Association’s field representatives and attorneys, Stensvad recently won a $160,000-plus settlement. Read more.
By protecting educators’ retirement security: Do you think middle-aged Wall Street billionaires are tormented by the choices they face in retirement: Palm Beach or Aspen? Not likely. But recent legislative attacks on public-employee pensions means that educators surely will have a lot of worrying ahead. Can they keep the house they worked so hard to pay for? Can they afford to send their own child to college? And why are they being blamed for the greedy mistakes of Wall Street? Fortunately, NEA and its allies are advocating for the retirement security of their members—and they have successfully protected defined-benefit pensions from attacks in numerous states. Last spring, well-organized union faculty members in Florida successfully staved off a bill that would have cut their average yearly pension from $30,000 to $15,000. At the same time, a successful class-action lawsuit filed by the Florida Education Association proved lawmakers went too far when they unconstitutionally cut public educator pay by 3 percent and ended cost-of-living increases to their pensions. (Some advice to lawmakers: how about you look at corporate tax loopholes instead?) Sign the petition offered by the National Public Pension Coalition to stand up for public pensions.

By Cindy Long

Despite opposition within its own GOP ranks, and several national polls showing that the public supports collective bargaining, Republicans in Wisconsin, Ohio, and a growing number of other states around the country are determined to strip the rights of public employees under the guise of balancing state budgets.

“We’re staying focused on reducing the cost of government and making Ohio competitive, and the first place to start is with our own budgets,” said Ohio Sen. Shannon Jones, the Republican sponsor of SB5, which eliminates public employee collective bargaining.

But trying to blame public employee salaries and pensions for budget shortfalls is a red herring. Republican-controlled legislatures around the country, from New Hampshire to Arizona to Florida, are attacking collective bargaining by scapegoating public employees for budget problems.

The Real Cause of State Budget Deficits

“You can tell it’s not collective bargaining that is causing these deficits because some of the worst state budget problems are in the small handful of states that prohibit public sector collective bargaining, states like Texas and North Carolina,” says Joseph Slater, a University of Toledo law professor, labor historian, and author of Public Workers: Government Employee Unions, the Law and the State.

As to the real causes, Slater points to the economic good times, when many states passed tax cuts, often for those in the upper income brackets, on the theory that it would lead to economic growth and not hurt state revenues. It didn’t work out as they’d hoped, and after the big economic collapse of 2008, states experienced huge budget shortfalls as unemployment decreased revenues, and investments lost money.

The Real Cause of Pension Underfunding

“It’s important to remember that the vast majority of states don’t allow unions to bargain over public pension benefits,” says Slater. It’s also telling that states with some of the worst pension problems have virtually no public unions.

So what did happen to public pensions?

The economic downturn, combined with the stock market crash of 2008, hit pension fund portfolios hard—reducing the value of some funds by 30 percent or more. A few years ago, many public pension plans were in the black, but after 2008, everyone took major losses, including corporate pension plans, which lost $900 billion of their equity holdings.

Also, when the stock market was producing double digit returns and housing prices were soaring, state governments made optimistic assumptions to figure out how much money to put into the pension plans – they made assumptions about how much state residents and pension plans would earn in the booming stock market, how much property values would increase, and how tax revenues would grow. Those rosy assumptions led some politicians to put less money into pensions and divert the funds to their pet projects.

Eliminating Collective Bargaining Does Not Save Money

When states try to reduce public salaries and pensions by eliminating collective bargaining, they take an economic hit in the long term. The lower the wages of public employees, the less discretionary income they have to spend in the local economy. The higher the wages, the higher the reinvestment into the economy. And research shows that most public employees stay – and spend – within the state after retirement.

Also, more and more studies are showing that public sector workers generally don’t make more money than private sector workers when you compare similar workers with similar jobs.

So then the debate shifts to questions of efficiency, says Slater.

“If you take away collective bargaining, you take away worker voice and give management unilateral authority, and there’s no evidence that’s efficient," he says. “There’s also no evidence that public agencies that bar collective bargaining produce a better product.”

Collective bargaining allows teachers and other public employees a voice with which to share ideas about how to best do their jobs. Slater says that research shows that workers having a real voice can improve communication and increase trust and stability in the work force " qualities states need when facing difficult times.

Revoking Collective Bargaining Doesn’t Solve Problems, It Creates Them

Before states formally authorized collective bargaining, Slater says public-sector unions and employers met and came to informal agreements. Bargaining helped produce efficiencies and fairness because workers had input.

“In fact, there were many more strikes by public workers in Ohio before the bargaining law was passed than after,” Slater says. “This is because the law provides effective ways to resolve differences short of strikes. In this light, it's not surprising that the demonstrations in Wisconsin aren't over money, they are over taking away voice.”

Eliminating collective bargaining also shrinks the talent pool. Better employees are attracted by more rights and better conditions.

“Proposals in which workers would get less money and have fewer rights make jobs less attractive,” Slater says. “That’s something Republicans claim to understand about executive compensation but don’t seem to understand about teachers, police officers, or firefighters.”

Privatization Is More Expensive Than Collective Bargaining

The same political forces who are trying to weaken unions are also pushing for privatization. But privatization has a long history of problems, from political corruption in choosing contractors, to eliminating responsiveness to the public being served, to increasing fees for services.

“It sounds like a magic bullet – get some private company to do this instead,” says Slater. “But it can wind up costing the public more money than just doing the job in house.”

It’s all about politics and putting a new face on old-fashioned union busting. Collective bargaining is not the cause of problems in public-sector budgets.

"True fiscal leadership," said National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel, "requires creative solutions grounded in the most important needs of the community. So faced with crippling budget deficits, fiscally responsible governors should focus on reforms that create jobs and a long-term agenda for moving their states forward."

5 ways teacher unions advocate for students, educators

Behind the Right-Wing Attacks on Collective Bargaining