The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, will cut its budget by $28 million, its president announced in a recent interview.
The announcement illustrates that public sector unions now expect to suffer large losses in membership and revenue in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision last week in the case Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
In their widely anticipated 5-4 ruling, the justices said it was unconstitutional for state governments to force nonunion public sector workers to financially support unions. This had until now been a common practice in labor contracts that was a major source of revenue for groups like the NEA.
“Knowing that’s happening now, we are bringing a budget to our members that cuts $28 million out of the budget. We’re going to do a lot more with electronic meetings. We’re not going to publish as much as we’ve published before, we’re going to put things online. We’re going to cancel some of our conferences,” NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia told Education Week in a late Sunday interview.
The cuts are necessary because the NEA’s budget projects a 14 percent membership decline over the next two years for the union, which currently represents three million people. Garcia characterized the move as strategic, saying the cuts were needed to refocus NEA’s efforts to maintain its membership. “We will prepare for the worst, and we will prepare for the best simultaneously, because what we didn’t cut out of that budget was the human-to-human contact, the information with members and potential members. There are no more nonmembers, there are only potential members,” she said.
Garcia said the union had been struggling even before the Janus ruling due to to campaigns by led by conservative groups such as Americans For Prosperity in states like Michigan that alert people to their rights to opt out under newly-adopted right-to-work laws. Like the Janus ruling, right-to-work laws guarantee that workers cannot be compelled to financially support the union that represents their workplace. Six states have adopted such laws since 2012, for a total of 28 states that have them on the books.
“What we saw in Michigan was a precipitous drop, especially with the new people coming in that have no idea what a union does, and they’re getting all of this information from Koch-funded organizations about why you shouldn’t join,” Garcia said, adding, “Michigan Education Association was not prepared to bring in their own voice to those new folks.”
Prior to Janus, public sector labor contracts commonly included provisions, dubbed “security clauses,” that required nonmembers to pay regular fees to the union. Unions defend the practice, arguing that they deserve to be compensated for collective bargaining on the workers’ behalf. Critics like plaintiff Mark Janus dispute that they received any benefit from union representation, and said they shouldn’t be forced to support an organization they don’t agree with anyway. The Supreme Court sided with Janus, ruling 5-4 ruling last week that the fees violated public sector workers’ First Amendment rights.
Unions have been bracing for the Janus decision for almost two years because the Supreme Court split on the issue 4-4 on a very similar case called Friedrichs v. California Teacher’s Association in 2016. Justice Antonin Scalia’s death that year prevented a deciding vote in the case.
