A little more than a quarter of teachers surveyed say their beliefs are well-represented by their union, while one-fifth say their union doesn’t represent their views at all.
That’s according to a survey of 1,000 public school and public charter school teachers released Wednesday by the nonpartisan nonprofit group Educators for Excellence. The data comes as union leaders anxiously await a Supreme Court ruling in the case Janus v. AFSCME, which could allow most public school teachers — as well as other public sector employees — to opt out of paying union dues.
The union’s leaders fear that masses of members would stop paying dues if they were allowed to, and the Educators for Excellence survey shows why. Only 28 percent that said their union’s stances reflected their views “a great deal.” Another 52 percent said the union only “somewhat” represented them, while the remaining 20 percent said it didn’t reflect their views very much, if at all.
The problem, said Educators for Excellence co-founder Evan Stone, is that for many teachers their unions focus too much on politics and not enough on collective bargaining.
“Salaries and benefits are clearly the top interests of teachers, which isn’t surprising given the teacher strikes that are happening, but they certainly want their unions to be prioritizing those issues and spending less time on politics,” Stone said.
He noted that 85 percent of all teachers said unions were either “essential” or “important” and even 74 percent of nonunion teachers had the same opinions. Overall, 86 percent said collective bargaining had improved things for them, but only 18 percent of teachers had attended a rally organized by their union.
Those numbers suggest the Supreme Court’s Janus case could cause serious problem for teachers unions heavily involved in politics. The case involves whether an Illinois state government employee can be forced to a pay his workplace’s union a regular fee even though he declined to become a member. Such fees — dubbed “security clauses” — are a common feature of labor-management contracts and were first approved by the court in a 1977 case called Abood v. Detroit Board of Education.
The court is widely expected rule narrowly to overturn Abood in a decision expected early next month. It split 4-4 on a similar case last year called Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association before the newest justice, Trump pick Neil Gorsuch, was confirmed. Nullifying Abood would allow teachers that oppose their union’s views to deny it security clause fees, a major source of their revenue.
According to the survey, just over a half of all teachers said they knew “nothing at all” about the Janus case. The unions just haven’t been talking about it.
“I’m not quite sure why some have chosen not to but it seems to me that there’s a fear that if teachers knew about Janus they might opt out of their union,” Stone said. “So there’s a fear that, if you talk about it, people could leave.”
