Short and Sweet Blog

I generally like unions which are formed by the workers of a single enterprise. It gives people who have worked at a job for some time a voice vis-a-vis management. It also binds the workers to being realistic and to avoiding outrageous demands which could make the business uncompetititve and cost them all their jobs. The discipline provided by such a one-on-one arrangement obviously does not apply to public sector unions which are hardly competitive with anyone.

Why are public sector workers usually barred from striking? There are several reasons. First, their jobs are usually vitally important and have to do with public health and safety. Second, their jobs usually amount to monopolies, i.e. police, firemen, air traffic controllers, etc. Third, there is no competition or limited competition between private sector and public workers and hence no recourse in the event of a strike. With public employee monopolies or near monopolies the right to stop work amounts to a right to extort the public and such a situation is even more dangerous because it includes the taxing power to collect the extorted payment.

What’s up with public school teachers in Wisconsin? Public school teachers, under Wisconsin law, are denied the right to strike. Notwithstanding this legal technicality they have staged a ‘sick in’ and have arisen from their sick beds to go to the capital to protest what appears soon will be the law in their state. The rotunda of the state capital has, from time to time, been filled with thousands of ‘sick’ teachers who are taking their complaints to the government. They are asking their government to redress their grievances. They are exercising their political rights to try to get the best darn pay and benefits deal that they can. Yay.

The public teacher unions are protesting passage of a bill which will refuse teachers the ability to collectively bargain about anything other than salaries. This would mean that benefits and work rules would no longer be fair game for collective bargaining. The public school teachers’ voices as to the education of our kids would no longer drown out the voices of the rest of us. A system excluding non-wage bargaining would have the effect of preventing a political deal where local elected leaders could strike a bold stance on limiting the growth of salaries while providing them the wiggle room to promise future benefits to be paid for by people who may not even be current taxpayers and voters, i.e. pensions, retiree health benefits and prospective work rules.

I propose a compromise with the public teachers’ unions which would be in the form of a quid pro quo. Public school teachers would agree, in exchange for regaining full bargaining rights, to the implementation of a primary/secondary school voucher program. The program would be simple. It would allow, upon reasonable notice, any parent to receive a voucher to educate their child. The voucher would be paid out from the funds of the local school district in the amount of 50% of the per pupil average cost in that district, excluding the debt service on buildings already built. After full implementation of this voucher system the ability of public school teachers to collectively bargain on every issue, including fringe benefits, would be reinstated. Plus, in this deal, they would gain the right to strike.

My plan would effectively increase the funding for public education since the voucher would represent no more than 50% of the average per pupil funding in any given district. For every student who moves out of the public system and into the private one, 50% of the funding for that student would remain in the public schools. In that way with people supplementing the voucher with additional funds in order to place their child in the private institution of their choice, the total amount of school funding (the sum of both private and public funds) would increase. This, in turn, would make more funds available per pupil for paying public school teachers’ salaries and benefits. It would also introduce an economic element to the competition between schools which has been sorely lacking. And finally it would end the monopoly or virtual monopoly which public school teachers have had on the taxes paid by the public for education of the young.

In short, public school teachers would be given the right to collectively bargain and strike in return for giving up their virtual monopoly on the public funds used for educational purposes in Wisconsin. Simple and straightforward. Everyone is a winner.

This entry was posted on February 20, 2011 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Law, Political Economy, Taxes. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.