OT re labor
Do you know if US teachers (secondary or college) are represented by unions, typically or at all? (Things may be lefter here in the frozen north.)
I think this depends on the school, and I'd expect geographical variation along political lines just as with other trends in unionization. One feature to keep in mind is that the law of collective bargaining agreements is federal, so there is theoretically less variation than one might imagine might exist if every US jurisdiction could have separate law.
At the university level, though, I suspect profs are regarded as professionals (and thus management) rather than employees/labor. Medical trainees in residency programs only obtained the right to be represented by unions relatively recently (they were formerly regarded as students and not employees). It's not my area of law, so the limits of who legally can require employers to deal with a collective bargaining agent (a union) is a bit out of my league. I think much of the difference turns on whether a particular worker is (a) an employee or (b) management. Of course, managers generally are employees, but the theory seems to be that managers are "for" the employer rather than for labor (and thus can't be part of the employees' union), despite the obvious logical problem that they themselves are employees. With the rise of staff-model HMOs, the possibility of physician unions exists, which is rather interesting. Historically, physicians were their own bosses, but reimbursement trends has made that less true. Changes in the world's economic order will up-end a bunch of the assumptions underpinning the case law on the management/labor split, and I expect the future to hold a lot of litigation opportunities in this field.
Roni wrote:
Many college professors are unionized, particularly public college/university/community college faculty. I do not know the national percentage of union/non-union who are.
Most community colleges here in Oregon are, as are (I believe) all public 4-year faculty
I suspect the schools' internal governance plays a role. Where faculty are in effect management, it may not be possible to obtain legal treatment as unionable labor. Where faculty are clearly mere employees, this barrier may not exist. This probably explains why K-12 is generally a place one finds unions, while universities (where faculty may have actual power) often do not have unions outside support staff.
My experience at Duke University was that unions negotiated for a variety of support personnel (groundskeepers, food preparers, etc.) but that faculty were not represented by unions. Duke was definitely an example of an environment in which politics beat reason when it came to labor policy. Crazy contractual dances would make your head spin.
I go back to my position that in K-12 schools, the issue of employee discipline (whether among administrative bureaucracies or in the classroom) is governed not only by the union/non-union shops, but by private/public status. Employees of the state have due process rights under the 14th Amendment that do not apply to employees of private parties, so notice and an opportunity to challenge adverse employment actions creates a significant hurdle to solving problems that seem to emanate from some actually-identified bad apple. Once it's clear the bad apple can coast through life cashing paychecks without disturbance, nobody wants to be the "sucker" who works while co-workers sleep with impunity, and morale (and productivity) plummets. It's not as simple as I'm painting it, but the principle holds: you can't deprive students of their "rights" from the state education program without due process, you can't deprive ineffective state employees of their "interest" in their government employment without due process, and the result is that bad seeds that could be removed from an educational environment in the private sector are kept due to inertia in the public sector. There are people working their hearts out in the public schools, but they're being sandbagged by administrative inefficiencies, underperforming co-workers failing to prepare students for advancement and necessitating re-training of things that should have previously been learned, and no-good "students" whose only purpose on campus is to amuse themselves disrupting education (or using the captive population on campus to advance illicit business interests). I don't pretend for a minute that the bad seeds are in the majority (except maybe in administration ... what on Earth are they doing anyway?), but like shootings and other alarming incidents, they get a lot of attention. I rarely see "news" about people who had a great day at school and learned something important. The news programs people to see the whole thing as dismal and about to collapse.
A clever person might ask why a state doesn't "privatize" its public schools by delivering them to their teacher-owners (or some other identifiable responsible group, using a modern governance theory designed to align workers with the institution's stated educational mission) and then issue the legal guardians of school-aged persons a voucher for education redeemable at a school participating in the state's private education program (schools not formerly public would have to qualify to participate, possibly by agreeing to accept for a period a lower redemption value of vouchers, and proving capacity to serve students in accordance with some articulated standard). A governance system that made teachers as in-charge of the schools as university faculty now are would probably eliminate their eligibility for membership in unions (they'd be managers, right?), and the desire not to be competed out of existence by other suddenly quality-conscious formerly public schools would lead to an intense desire to eliminate inefficiencies (such as the administrative bloat characterizing so many school districts). Once the organizations were private, the due process rights would evaporate. The state's interest in the facilities could be protected by giving the schools not title, but a long-term el-cheapo lease and an obligation to maintain the facilities as schools.
Of course this sort of thing evokes all kinds of emotions: it's a scheme to destroy schools, it's a scheme to replace public schools with private schools, it's a scheme to undermine labor, it's a scheme to introduce government price regulation of private education, it's all kinds of things. It'll never happen. We'll keep drifting into the future with increasingly administratively-heavy public education that is increasingly out of touch with the basic demands of the real world, which is to say the need to prepare literate adults capable of managing a household budget in the era of ARMs and complex financing programs for consumer goods. In the era of Alexis de Tocqueville, Americans had very few years of average education but were quite effective at training people to think about important events -- or so thought this Frenchman. Today we have legal sanctions for not showing up for over a decade of school, and graduates can't read or speak standard English, and have no job skills (well, there's the "like fries with that?" skill, if it can be called a skill). Somehow, we've apparently managed through our development of public education to increase the time it takes to instill less knowledge in kids that by all accounts are just as capable as they were a hundred and fifty years ago.
Education is too important to consign to this dismal fate, but the alternatives seem so implausible at present that how to save our future from it is unclear. There's a lot of intertia behind the system, which is partly why it looks like such a train wreck in progress.
Take care,
--Tex.
