Collective Bargaining Repeal: The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Wisconsin Schools
The repeal of much of Wisconsin’s
collective bargaining law with regard to many of Wisconsin’s public
employees has not been adequately explained. This repeal will do more to
improve the quality and lower the cost of Wisconsin government than
anything else we’ve done. There are approximately 275,000 government
employees in the state of Wisconsin. About 72,000 work for the state,
38,000 for cities and villages, 48,000 for counties, 10,500 (full time
equivalent) for technical colleges, and 105,229 for schools. Only half of state employees are unionized, but almost all school employees are.
As you can see, the biggest impact
will be on Wisconsin’s schools. Since my office has received the most
complaints from school teachers, let’s look at how collective bargaining
affects both the cost and quality of our schools.
Under current law, virtually all
conditions of employment have to be spelled out in a collectively
bargained agreement. Consequently, it is very difficult to remove
underperforming school teachers. It may take years of documentation and
thousands of dollars in attorney fees to fire a bad teacher. Is it right
that two or three classes of second graders must endure a bad teacher
while waiting for documentation to be collected? Just as damaging is the
inability to motivate or change the mediocre teacher who isn’t bad
enough to fire. Good superintendants are stymied when they try to
improve a teacher who is doing just enough to get by.
While most teachers care about their
students, some only “teach to the contract.” An elementary school
teacher’s contract may require just seven hours and forty-five minutes a
day in school. If the principal wants to have a meeting after school to
discuss curriculum, or requests a meeting with parents of a troubled
student, a teacher could say that this is not in the contract. Recall
the recent flare-up when Fond du Lac teachers objected to having to work
eight hour days.
Another problem affecting our
schools’ quality is that payment for individual teachers is not based on
merit but on a union negotiated pay schedule. A mediocre teacher with a
master’s degree and additional college credits gets more money than a
superior teacher who doesn’t have as many college credits. This is
clearly unfair, and destroys healthy incentives that would encourage
teachers to be more effective.
If enrollment drops, teachers must
be let go. In practice, this means that collective bargaining causes the
better teachers with less seniority to be laid off. If that’s not bad
enough, a teacher who has never taught third grade may get to move ahead
of a good third grade teacher because of union bumping rights. You also
have to ask the union for permission to “share” a teacher with another
school district if you want to give students more options. If you want
to borrow another district’s teacher for a day to offer Mandarin
Chinese, you must ask the union to sign off. The same could be true of
offering new electives online for particularly gifted and talented
students.
It has been well reported that, under
collective bargaining, districts have been stuck with the teacher union
insurance company which can cost $3,000 or more per teacher than a plan that is virtually identical
to that which another company is willing to provide. Switching to
Health Savings Accounts like the private sector is out of the question.
The teachers union must agree to changes in the schedule. If
a school district wants to set their schedule so that it is the same as
private schools to save money on school bussing, the union must sign
off.
A teacher may be entitled to 13 paid
personal days. All this for employees who may only be required to work
190 days a year in the first place. There is also the cost of time spent
negotiating seventy page contracts.
Clearly, collective bargaining
penalizes schools and students, costs an exorbitant amount of money, and
lowers the quality of education in Wisconsin. The same story could be
told for tech schools, cities, counties, and the state. Tech schools may
have to pay the same amount for teachers in very different fields. If
such a school needs to offer a good salary to attract talented teachers
for dental hygiene or tool and die, that’s understandable. Must
Milwaukee Area Technical College, however, pay well over $100,000 to
teach someone how to pass their GED? The compensatory problems that are a
problem in our K-12 system hurt our tech schools, in my opinion, even
more.
Counties or cities may want more
flexibility to transfer employees between departments. Why should a
local government not be able to switch people from roads to parks?
Racine County was sued by the union for using jail inmates to do
landscape work on medians. Volunteers have been unable to help out
because of union contracts.
The removal of collective bargaining
in prisons will also save money. Under collective bargaining, guards
could call in sick on first shift and work overtime on second shift.
Similar to counties, you could not shuttle people back and forth between
job descriptions. If a prisoner must go to the hospital, the prison may
have to send a transporter who is on overtime to take the prisoner to
the hospital rather than an extra prison guard who is not in the prison
at that time.
Franklin Roosevelt originally said
that unions and government do not mix. After reviewing some union
contracts, I can see why. Jimmy Carter, a Democrat backed by a
Democratic Congress, greatly reduced collective bargaining for federal
employees via the Civil Service Reform Act. Even President Obama has not
tried to restore these rights. Massachusetts Democrats recently passed a bill divesting government employees of the power to collectively bargain most health-care benefits.
While we did not eliminate collective bargaining, we certainly reduced its scope in Wisconsin. As a direct result, the cost savings are significant at all levels of government.
(Cost savings to schools from having school employees pay a small part
of their health insurance and pension costs more than offset the mild
reduction in education funding.) But, the most important benefit will be
an improvement in the quality of our schools as efficiency, personnel
decisions, compensation decisions and methods of teaching children will
not be subject to union meddling and obstruction.
