Could California Follow Wisconsin’s Teacher Union Jail Break?

If CA becomes a right-to-work state, a seismic political shift may ensue.

Last week Mike Antonucci reported that the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the National Education Association’s Badger State affiliate, is down to fewer than 50,000 members (40,000 currently employed) from a high of over 100,000 in 2009. This precipitous loss is a result of Governor Scott Walker’s Act 10 which became law in 2011. The law limits collective bargaining for teachers (and other public employees), requires annual votes for union certification and prohibits employers (taxpayer-funded school districts) from collecting union dues. Wisconsin, having become a right-to-work state in March, is sure to see those numbers fall even more in the years to come.

As Wisconsin’s MacIver Institute points out, it isn’t just individual members who are leaving their unions, “…an increasing number of teachers’ unions were being decertified by their members all together.” And over a 100 public school unions in Wisconsin have voted to do just that in the last two years. In addition to worker freedom, MacIver reports that Act 10 has saved taxpayers over $3 billion.

Needless to say, unionistas are furious with Walker, infusing their disdain with Marxist rhetoric and on any given day comparing him to Hitler. But is Walker really bad for workers? Hillary Clinton sure thinks so. Right after Walker announced that he was running for president, Clinton went off on him.

Republican governors like Scott Walker have made their names stomping on workers’ rights, and practically all the Republican candidates hope to do the same as president. I will fight back against these mean-spirited, misguided attacks. Evidence shows that the decline of unions may be responsible for a third of the increase of inequality among men, so if we want to get serious about raising incomes, we have to get serious about supporting union workers.

But the statistics tell a very different story for workers. Deroy Murdock points out that since Walker has become governor, Wisconsin has outperformed the country as a whole using a variety of metrics including unemployment rate, labor-force participation rate, inflation-adjusted, median household income, etc.

While California has no Act 10, it would become a right-to-work state if Friedrichs v California passes muster with the Supreme Court next year. And if teachers and others public employees are not forced into paying dues, what would the ramifications be for the Golden State? A political earthquake is imaginable.

The California Fair Political Practices Commission shows that by far the biggest political influence peddler in CA is the California Teachers Association, which spent over $211 million between 2000-2009 on candidates, ballot measures and lobbying. It’s no secret that CTA will fight any education reform measure that diminishes its influence; charter school proliferation, vouchers and reasonable teacher evaluation methods are but a few examples. But CTA also spends oodles on non-education issues, all of which swerve sharply to the left. As Troy Senik writes in City Journal,

Among these causes: implementing a single-payer health-care system in California, blocking photo-identification requirements for voters, and limiting restraints on the government’s power of eminent domain. The CTA was the single biggest financial opponent of another Proposition 8, the controversial 2008 proposal to ban gay marriage, ponying up $1.3 million to fight an initiative that eventually won 52.2 percent of the vote. The union has also become the biggest donor to the California Democratic Party. From 2003 to 2012, the CTA spent nearly $102 million on political contributions; 0.08 percent of that money went to Republicans. (Emphasis added.)

The second highest spender was another public employee union, the California State Council of Service Employees, a branch of SEIU, which spent over $107 million on politics during the same time period. California Common Sense, an organization that is dedicated to opening government to the public, reports that CSCSE spent broadly across various state-level positions in 2013, “focusing on Governor’s ($4.9 million), State Senate ($1.4 million), and State Assembly races ($1.2 million). Like most unions, CSCSE opposed Republican candidates in almost every case.”

The results of union largess in the Golden State have been devastating for Republicans, who have been marginalized in Sacramento for years. After a few crucial GOP wins in 2014, the Los Angeles Times wrote,

California Republicans scored a rare victory in Tuesday’s election by denying Democrats a two-thirds legislative supermajority that would consign GOP lawmakers to virtual irrelevance in the state Capitol.

For a party sharply diminished by two decades of relentless setbacks in California, it passed as a major achievement for Republicans to capture more than a third of the seats in the state Senate and possibly the Assembly as well.

Clearly the unions don’t deserve all the “credit” for the pathetic GOP results, but to be sure, they have played a huge part. If California experiences a 50 percent Wisconsin-type drop in union members, however, the Democrat’s stranglehold in CA could be eased considerably. CTA’s position as “the co-equal fourth branch of government,” would be history. Not having an endless supply of cash, it would have to pick and choose its political recipients much more judiciously. Also if teachers and others aren’t forced to pay the union for the right to work, the unions would have to become more of a political big tent in order to entice workers to join. And Democrats, who regularly carp about “getting big money out of politics,” will – to some extent – finally get their wish.

Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.