Across America, it is back-to-school time for students ... and teachers.
Within the next week or so, virtually all of the elementary and secondary schools on traditional schedules will be back into the classroom, and summer vacation gives way to a new school year for students and teachers around the nation.
In Michigan, teacher unions are confronting a perilous new reality, as a recently passed "right to work" law now gives individual teachers the ability to opt out of their unions. Predictably, a coalition of right-wing ideological and business groups have put maximum effort into their drive to crush the teachers unions:
With the teachers given a 31-day window in August to decide, representatives for the state's largest public-sector union are imploring them to stay or risk losing their clout in how schools are operated.
"If I don't stand up and stay in my union, then we don't have a voice," said Chandra Madafferi, a high school health teacher and president of a 400-member local in the Detroit suburb of Novi.
Meanwhile, conservative groups are running ads and publicizing the chance for teachers to "grow your paycheck and workplace freedom."
Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing front group bankrolled by the Koch brothers, are among the most active architects in driving the opt-out effort. They paid for a full page ad in the
Detroit Free Press with a preprinted form for opting out of their local union. Other groups are running ads trying to goad teachers into leaving their unions.
Please read below the fold for more on this story.
The unions here, lamentably, have little to fall back on besides appealing to their colleagues' sense of team. After all, most contracts will still be determined by negotiations with bargaining units, and the teachers that opt out will still be entitled to whatever salary and benefits the union negotiates for the district in question. This is what is known as the "freeloading" issue.
Unions could argue, correctly, that their clout is diminished (particularly in the political arena) with diminished resources. That is undoubtedly true, which is why business groups are so eager to push these measures and eliminate one of the few counterweights to their outsized political influence. But it is a tougher case to make to a membership base that may not readily understand the intangible values of union membership, particularly in the political arena.
As a result, the prospect of opting out, even at the risk of "freeloading," is likely to resonate with a particular subset of the teaching community. That would be especially true of younger teachers (who might prize the additional disposable income, and might also feel a lesser sense of loyalty to colleagues with whom they share less of a lengthy bond) as well as teachers frustrated with the recent years of lean educational budgets. Consider one representative case of the latter:
Novi special education teacher Susan Bank, 60, said she plans to save the money, having gone several years without a raise.
"What am I getting for the over $1,000 in union dues I'm paying?" Bank said. "Now that we have the new law, the rules of the game have changed."
Of course, with less clout in their districts and in terms of political action (which is one of the union activities hardest hit by these laws), teachers like Bank could look forward to years, if not decades, of stagnant or declining relative wages and working conditions, as money is siphoned off from education budgets and directed toward comforting the comfortable. Folks like the Koch brothers know this, which is why they are so eager to fund efforts like this one.