Support for organized labor tends to fall along partisan lines. Liberals embrace the existence of labor unions wholesale while conservatives reject it. My own views (based on personal experience and reinforced in the wake of the Market Basket saga) are more nuanced: Organized labor is essential in the private sector, but a curse in the public sector.
Organized labor won the Market Basket war; it was not a formal union, but it certainly was “organized labor.” In contrast, just about everywhere we turn, when we see the results of organized labor in the public sphere, we see disaster—not for the workers, but for those who are supposed to be served by vital public institutions and services.
Why this disconnect? Well, in the private sphere, there are two sides bargaining, each with its own money at stake. In the public sector, the two sides have the same interest – maintain the status quo so that we all keep our jobs, and to Hell with the taxpayers’ money and interests.
While we see examples of excess in public sector unions in the public safety arena (mainly police and firefighters), I’m talking primarily about teachers’ unions. I first saw the differences between private and public sector labor unions when I became a public school parent in Cambridge in 1982. My son was lucky enough to be in the Martin Luther King, Jr., Open School (“KOS”) program at a time when a local genius and Harvard-educated philosopher by the name of Robert Moses asked the Cambridge school authorities if he might teach an experimental algebra course, at no charge to the school system, for the fifth graders. The school authorities appeared skeptical that algebra could be taught to children so young, but Dr. Moses insisted not only that they could learn algebra, but that algebra was a gateway skill to an enormous variety of other academic disciplines.
We parents were ecstatic at this opportunity for their children to be taught by the legendary Bob Moses. He had been, after all, the field secretary of the fabled Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that helped integrate the South in the 1960s. And he held a doctorate from Harvard. But under pressure from the local teachers’ union, the Cambridge School Committee resisted Dr. Moses’ offer, in part, they said, because Dr. Moses did not possess a teacher’s degree and certificate. (I encountered a similar objection when, in the mid-1980s, I offered to give lectures on the Bill of Rights to Cambridge high school students.) The parents pushed back. In the end, a compromise was reached: Dr. Moses would be allowed to teach his experimental math course (later dubbed The Algebra Project), but only very early in the morning. Dr. Moses accepted the conditions, and the challenge.
The program was hugely successful; a very large percentage of Dr. Moses’ students went on to attend college and to have great careers, and The Algebra Project went national.
But I became very curious as to how a teachers’ contract could have been negotiated so that it was rigid and inimical to the best interests of the students and worked so strongly against educational innovation. I decided to attend the upcoming teachers’ contract negotiations, which at the time any parent or citizen could attend if he got a letter to this effect from two members of the School Committee. I obtained the necessary permissions and showed up to the first negotiating session. When the head of the union saw me, she announced that the union would not bargain while I was in the room. The teachers’ negotiating team walked out. My letters from two School Committee members were soon revoked, and the contract negotiations proceeded comfortably in private. All of the contract provisions that had enabled the union to make life hard for Dr. Moses’s algebra course were retained.
It was at that moment that I became an opponent of public sector unions. Why? Because, it suddenly occurred to me, the public interest was not represented at the contract negotiations. The teachers were arguing for their own self-interest in terms of work conditions and compensation, as was to be expected, but the School Committee and school administrators were dealing with the taxpayers’ money, not their own. And it was in the pols’ political interests for there to be labor peace. The children and their parents figured very little in the whole enterprise. And so an outrageous number of provisions found their way into the contract year after year, seemingly all of them more protective of the teachers’ wallets and comfortable work-schedules – and the School Committee members’ elective prospects – than of the educational interests of public school students.
Ever since, I’ve remained an opponent of public sector labor unions, but an equally ardent supporter of private sector unionization. The latter is an essential adjunct of a democratic society and a vital counterweight to overweening oligarchic power (not to mention the inherited power held by the under-employed but overly-pampered heirs of entrepreneurs), while the former threatens to undermine an element essential for the success of democracy – an educated citizenry.
