On a hike the other day, my friend asked me about my feelings about my teachers’ union, and I quickly discovered how difficult it is for me to defend my union. One would think that a strong union would mean good working conditions, yet things are not pretty in my district, I told my friend. Despite a recent state audit that told us to diversify programs for those who have special needs, our district continues to cut any program that looks anything like vocational instruction in favor of staffing the four “core” subjects. Our class sizes in the middle and high schools often approach 30, a number that very few districts in the country would consider enviable. The district is doing everything it can to cut costs because, even with these efforts, the budget keeps growing, to the point that some of the towns in this regional district had to approve an “override”, which requires that a town approve by super-majority (2/3) a budget that raises property taxes above a certain percentage, more and more a common occurrence in our state. This is a town without a lot of industry to boost revenue, and so the residents continue to shoulder the burden and watch their property taxes increase, despite the fact that their properties’ values are decreasing.
And where does our union stand? We demand continued yearly pay increases without changes in working conditions or health care contributions. And most of us have been in the district for more than 3 years, which gives us the almost complete job security of “professional status”, more commonly known as tenure. Despite that many of us are taxpayers in the district, what our union likes most is the security of knowing that same raise is coming every year, regardless of the quality of the jobs we do. And so we have done everything but strike this year, because we consider it an outrage that our raises are not rubber-stamped.
I know that many unions are fighting for more reasonable concessions from their districts. But in looking back to the origins of unions, we aren’t exactly fighting for livable working conditions and wages, we’re fighting for more comfort. And when I like at the national organization of our union, I think about how close we are to the AARP, the NRA, the tobacco companies, and the arms industry in lobbying for nothing but our own self-interest in the name of the public good.
So how do we fairly fund schools and pay teachers to ease the burden on towns and encourage excellence in teaching? Another day’s work…
