Why This Teacher is Rooting Against the Union

Written by Will Barrett on Saturday March 12, 2011

Like most conservatives, I’m excited that public sector unions are, for now at least, on the ropes. But there's a catch: I'm also a teacher.

Like most conservatives, I’ve watched the recent events in Wisconsin with great interest.  I’m as excited as the next GOP voter that public sector unions in Wisconsin and other states are, at least for the time being, on the ropes.  I’m also a little nervous.  That’s because I’m a teacher.  I’m not nervous about losing bargaining power, because I teach in Alabama – a right-to-work state with no collective bargaining for its public sector unions.  Of course, my fellow teachers don’t call it a union.  It is, they remind me, a “professional organization.”  And in Alabama, these professional organizations have money to spare - enough to target specific candidates for election or defeat in either party, and only a small handful of teachers ever bother to say “no” to union membership.

My path to secondary education was unconventional.  I don’t even have a degree in education.  After giving up on a PhD, I found a teaching job through a state program that allows people holding degrees in a specific subject – history, in my case – to get a job on a three year contingency plan that requires the teacher to take a handful of education courses.  The courses are easy enough and I managed to take almost all of them online.  I teach at a small high school that is like most in Alabama – not quite rural, but not quite suburban.  My coworkers are, for the most part, typical Red State voters – evangelical, middle-class and suspicious of big government.  What is not typical, however, is their uniform deference to the state teachers unions on all matters related to education.

Alabama is a right-to-work state, as I said, and so I have been able to politely decline membership in both the Alabama Education Association and Alabama Federation of Teachers, state syndicates of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, respectively.  The union representatives stop by around once a month to meet with their members and give out free snacks.  I always take a free candy bar, but I try to avoid prolonged conversation.  The reps talk with the teachers about any problems they might have, and those conversations, as best as I can tell, usually break down into gripe sessions about a lack of funding or paying an extra premium on health insurance.  Part of me always hopes that the union rep will ask me why I’m not a member, and I will gleefully respond that if I wanted to donate to the Democratic Party, I would simply write it a check.

Of course, up until a month ago, members of AEA and AFT didn’t write checks.  Their dues were handled, just as they have been in Wisconsin, through payroll deduction.  Passed in December and currently under review by the Justice Department, a new law bans payroll deduction for union dues.  Instead, members will have to do something very difficult and tiresome.  They will have to actually write a check to the union to cover annual membership, or they can provide the union representative with a check to set up automatic deduction from the member’s checking account.  That strikes me as reasonable enough.  If you want to join the union, you should do more than check off a box for payroll deduction; the least you could do is write out a check.  To hear the AEA tell it, this is tantamount to the Stamp Act.  After the bill was signed into law by former Alabama Governor Bob Riley, flyers showed up all over school – not just in the teacher’s workroom, mind you – suggesting that this measure was only the first step in a diabolical plot to take away benefits, tenure and deferred retirement plans.

The deferred retirement plan is the current maelstrom down in Montgomery. The state senate voted this past Monday to end new enrollment in the state’s DROP plan on April 1.  In both cases – payroll deductions and DROP – the prevailing attitude among educators in Alabama is a slightly milder mannered version of what we’ve all seen in Wisconsin.  My fellow teachers see the whole business as an “us versus them” battle.  Teachers believe they are the working class, and no data pointing out how much we all earn relative to our number of days worked will change that.  There’s a reason for this attitude, and I don’t think it is one that can be overlooked.  While Alabama doesn’t have the pro-union heritage of the Upper Midwest, we’ve got a long history of union activity, especially among coal miners and steel workers.  While both of those industries have tapered off in recent decades (though they’re still active), the state’s teachers see themselves as part of that tradition.  The Republicans in the state house are the same as the factory foreman or the coal company.  Like their fathers in the coal mines, my fellow teachers believe they are deserving of every benefit the state can throw their way, and the taxpayer be damned.

I heard a few murmurs in the hallway this morning, but it wasn’t students whispering about Facebook gossip or cheerleading tryouts.  Instead it was talk about Wisconsin from men and women who normally can’t be bothered to peruse a newspaper.

Did you hear about that deal up in Wisconsin...That’s what they’re going to do to us before it’s over with...What do those Republicans down in Montgomery have against us…”

It’s not too hard to be a conservative in Alabama, but if you’re a teacher, Alabama might as well be, er, Wisconsin.

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Categories: FF Spotlight News Tags: education unions