Collective Bargaining in Education

In response to my email last week about the behavior of teachers unions, Andy Rotherham replied with some good stuff:

Good post, have you seen the book, Collective Bargaining in Education, that Jane Hannaway and I did on this?  http://www.hepg.org/hep/Book/5

It gets at some of this, especially the difference between private sector and public sector unions.  From the conclusion chapter:

….as Henry Farber discusses in his chapter analyzing distinctions between public and private sector unions, there are vitally important distinctions between collective bargaining in the private sector and collective bargaining by teachers.  Facile comparisons between bargaining by, for instance autoworkers or steelworkers, and bargaining by teachers fall apart under scrutiny.  The distinctions carry enormous import for formulating educational policy and understanding education politics. Most importantly, there is little external competition in public education reducing extrinsic incentives for management-labor cooperation.   Likewise, the public schools cannot go out of business or relocate elsewhere to do business which eliminates a key check on labor demands that exists in much of the private sector. 

In addition, in the private sector when management and labor sit down to negotiate a contract both sides are free to represent their interests and a healthy tension exists.  By contrast, because local teachers’ unions play such a significant role in school board politics and elections, and in shaping legislation through substantial lobbying efforts, the interests of management are often compromised in negotiations.   In essence, the governance arrangements for public schools allow the teachers' unions to often exercise leverage on both sides of the bargaining table because they play a large role in choosing who the management is in the first place and many of the rules of the game. 

Conversely, unlike private industries such as the automobile industry, teachers are more fungible than some other workers.  In most industrial fields, specialized skills mean specialized jobs are not interchangeable.  A highly skilled plumber still cannot, without retraining, install transmissions on automobiles.  In the private sector this specialization gives labor additional leverage because it constrains the available labor pool and assignment of workers.  However, although “out of field” teaching is frowned upon, in education management can, and regularly does, assign teachers to subjects outside their specialties.  The ability to do this can to some extent weaken labor's leverage in education. 

….asking teachers' unions to look after the interests of their members and the children they serve, is asking them to shoulder a responsibility exceptional in organized labor.  Unions were, and are, formed to look after the interests of workers.  To be sure, this does not mean, as some critics contend, that the actions of teachers’ unions are overall, or even predominantly antagonistic to the interests of children.  On the contrary, numerous positions generally supported by teachers’ unions benefit both teachers and students.  For instance, assuming a sufficient supply of talented teachers, efforts to lower class sizes in the early grades both improve the quality of instruction and ease the workload of teachers.  Likewise, efforts to increase public support and public resources for education also benefits students as well as teachers.

Yet while there is often a “dual-bottom line” that benefits teachers and students, it is naïve to think that the interests of teachers, as articulated through their union and codified in collective bargaining agreements, do not at times conflict with the best interests of students.  For instance, it’s hard to reconcile the practices that Paul Hill describes, common to many bargaining agreements, with the best interests of low-income youngsters.  The “single-salary schedules” in most bargaining agreements preclude using financial incentives as one strategy to attract teachers to hard-to-staff schools.   It is difficult to see how this restriction benefits students but easy to see how, despite its historical roots in education, it fits into an industrial model of labor-management relations.