OPINION-EDITORIAL

August 27, 2003

Labor Day: A day of expression . . . or exploitation?

Marsha Richards | Evergreen Freedom Foundation
Gone are the "glory days" of the labor movement. The determined optimism that prompted the creation of a national holiday to celebrate hard-working Americans has, for too many modern labor officials, degenerated into self-seeking opportunism.

More than one hundred years after the first Labor Day, many union officials now seem to embody the very "strife and discord for greed and power" that AFL-CIO founder Samuel Gompers decried in other celebrations. The day is no longer marked by bold examples of voluntary worker expression, but by clandestine examples of involuntary worker exploitation.

Consider, for example, the telling disparity in salaries between the average working man or woman and their union officials. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the National Education Association, our nation’s largest teachers’ union. The NEA’s president, Reg Weaver, will earn $237,967 this year. Yet the union’s own data says the average teacher salary nationwide is in the neighborhood of $40,000.

This disparity is present at the state level as well. Officials of the Washington Education Association fought hard for a rigid salary structure that would guarantee all teachers in the state the same level of pay regardless of ability or cost-of-living. Meanwhile, the average WEA staffer earns $103,146 in salary and benefits each year—about $45,000 more than the average teacher in our state. A 1995 memo circulated to WEA officials noted that the union's salaries "if widely known by the membership, would cause significant unrest within the association."

The WEA’s self-serving agenda is not limited to salaries. In recent years, union officials have made headlines hundreds of times for breaking state laws, threatening illegal strikes, and suing anyone who stands in the way of their ambitious political goals. The union’s claim to be working on behalf of teachers is almost comical in light of its many activities to the contrary. Consider just a few examples:

• When voters passed Initiative 134 in 1992 and gave teachers a choice about supporting the union’s political action committee, 87 percent of the union’s members declined to voluntarily contribute even a dollar a month. So union officials levied an annual "community outreach" assessment of $12 per member and illegally channeled the money into their political fund.
  
  
• When two teachers, Barb and Cindy, started publishing a homemade newsletter to inform colleagues of the state laws governing the union’s political activity, the WEA sued them. These teachers worked under the shadow of this lawsuit for nearly a year-and-a-half before union officials dropped charges.
  
  
• WEA officials have argued in court that they have "no fiduciary duty" to members -- meaning they can spend teachers’ money however they want.
  
  
• The WEA is suing the U.S. Department of Labor to prevent enforcement of a rule that would require them to file annual financial disclosure reports.
  
  
• Union association is a condition of employment. If teachers don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars to the union each year they don’t have to . . . but it’ll cost them their jobs.
  
  
• As a disincentive to leave the union, WEA officials withhold liability insurance from non-member teachers, even if those teachers pay full fees. Teachers in Washington pay an average of $745 in dues or fees each year to the local, regional, state and national affiliates of the WEA. The insurance policy costs the union about $4 per teacher.
  
  
• Low beginning teacher salaries have been the WEA’s favorite crisis for years. Now that the legislature has provided a pay increase for beginning teachers, WEA officials are threatening to sue the state to block it.
  
  
• In spite of clear court rulings and statements from the governor and attorney general, WEA officials continue to threaten and carry out illegal strikes against parents and children in school districts that don’t give in to their demands.
  
  
• Union officials have little respect for teachers. Robert Chanin, general counsel of the WEA’s parent organization once said in court: "It is well recognized that if you take away the mechanism of payroll deduction you won’t collect a penny from these people, and it has nothing to do with voluntary or involuntary. I think it has to do with the nature of the beast, and the beasts who are our teachers . . . [They] simply don’t come up with the money regardless of the purpose."

Clearly this is not a union with the interests of its members at heart. Rather, it is a union that has been hijacked by individuals willing to exploit teachers in pursuit of their own goals: more money and more political power.

Teachers deserve better this Labor Day. They deserve a union that truly represents them. They deserve the kind of choices that will bring accountability to the union. And they deserve strong enforcement of laws that will protect their rights.

Until then, who’s really having the Happy Labor Day?

Marsha Richards is Communications Director for the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a non-profit public policy research organization dedicated to individual liberty, free enterprise and accountable government.

Contact: Marsha Richards | Communications Director | 360.956.3482

Evergreen Freedom Foundation P.O. Box 552, Olympia, WA 98507 Phone: (360) 956-3482, Fax: (360) 352-1874 Email: effwa@effwa.org