Lucky To Be Here, Continued II | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Jon Guze, who is the Director of Legal Studies for the John Locke Foundation.

    One of the many things I like about North Carolina is a provision in the NC General Statutes that forbids collective bargaining by public employees. Thanks to that law, North Carolina public employee unions are, politically, relatively weak. In states without such laws, on the other hand, public employee unions are usually politically powerful, and they often use their power to promote policies that benefit state employees while harming the public they are supposed to serve.

    The California Teachers Association is a notable example. It wields enormous political power in the Golden State, and it uses its power to promote polices that many citizens, including many teachers, believe are harmful to students. Part of what makes the CTA so powerful is the fact that, under state law, all public school teachers are required to pay fees to the union, regardless of whether they are members and regardless of whether they agree with the policies it promotes.

    California is able to impose those fees on teachers because of the US Supreme Court's 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education. The Court held, in Abood, that teachers may not be forced to join unions and pay union dues — doing so would violate their Constitutionally protected rights to freedom of association and freedom of speech — but teachers may be forced to pay union "agency fees" as long as the fees are used for collective bargaining and administration rather than for lobbying.

    A group of California teachers have asked the Supreme Court to overturn Abood. As the petitioners in Friedricks v. California Teachers Association, they argue that, especially in the education context, collective bargaining is inherently political because the issues involved — things like teacher tenure, merit pay, and school choice — are not simply contract details, they are matters of educational policy. On these and similar issues, the petitioning teachers are opposed to the policies being promoted by the union, and they object to being forced to pay for the union's advocacy of those policies. Last week the John Locke Foundation joined a number of other state public policy research organizations in an amicus brief supporting the petitioners.


    In a recent review of Daniel DiSalvo's Government against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences, George Leef provides an illuminating discussion of this important topic:


    Paraphrasing DiSalvo, Leef describes several examples of public employee unions promoting policies that harm the public, including, as it happens, policies promoted by the California Teachers Association. Describing another particularly alarming instance from the Golden State, he says:


    Leef also notes that:


    Here in North Carolina there have been repeated proposals to change the law to allow collective bargaining by pubic employees, and there will no doubt be similar proposals in the future. To judge by the effect that public employee unions have had in other states, especially California, such proposals are, at best, misguided.