Is an upcoming Supreme Court case a strike for individual rights or a deceptive attack on teachers unions?
Sometime in the next few months, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association (CTA), a lawsuit with major implications for the future of organized labor. Those pushing the lawsuit say it is about individual rights. In this post, the author argues that both Friedrichs and a related case, Bain v. California Teachers Association, are deceptive attacks on unions. In the article below, Ben Spielberg — a Teach For America alum and former member of the Executive Board of the San Jose Teachers Association (a CTA affiliate) — explains how union dues and spending work in California and why he thinks both lawsuits are misleading. Spielberg blogs about a variety of social justice issues at34justice.com and has contributed previous articles about teacher evaluationand Vergara v. California to The Answer Sheet.
By Ben Spielberg
California public school teachers working in traditional school districts are by default members of their local teachers associations, which may be affiliates of either the California Teachers Association (CTA), which is the state branch of the National Education Association (NEA), or the California Federation of Teachers (CFT), the state branch of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). While teachers unions, like all other organizations, certainly aren’t perfect, they fulfill several roles that benefit students and teachers alike and are important, powerful advocates for low- and middle-income populations in general.
Despite these facts (or, perhaps, because of them), teachers unions have been under attack for quite some time. And the anti-labor movement, fueled by wealthy individuals and groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), has been alarmingly successful. Union membership reached a historic low of 11.1 percent in 2014 (6.6 percent in the private sector and 35.7 percent in the public sector), 25 states have adopted inappropriately-named “right to work” laws that deprive workers of bargaining power, and an inaccurate, misleading anti-union narrative has permeated public discourse.
Unions won a major victory in California in 2012 when we (I was a CTA election campaign lead at the time) beat back Proposition 32, but the news has been less stellar since, particularly for teachers unions. In 2014, Judge Rolf Treu sided in favor of the plaintiffs in Vergara v. California, amisleading lawsuit that attacked various aspects of teacher employment law. Though the weakness of both the plaintiffs’ argument and the decision suggests that the case may be overturned on appeal, it still represents a dangerous threat to important employee protections that could reverberate beyond education. Two more recent California cases, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association and Bain v. California Teachers Association, present related dangers for labor more generally, especially because the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Friedrichs early next year.
As was the case with Vergara, there’s a lot of misinformation floating around about both Friedrichs and Bain. The discussion below thus sets the record Is an upcoming Supreme Court case a strike for individual rights or a deceptive attack on teachers unions? - The Washington Post: