Human Rights Violation

For the last few weeks, the Insurance, Banking, and Commerce Committee of the Ohio Senate has been considering Senate Bill 5, which would effectively end collective bargaining for public employees. Although this issue is sometimes cast purely as an economic and political controversy, it is also a social justice issue.

Catholic teaching upholds the rights of workers to form unions. In his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), Pope Leo XIII upheld the right of workers to form unions: “. . . every precaution should be taken not to violate the rights of individuals and not to impose unreasonable regulations under pretense of public benefit. For laws only bind when they are in accordance with right reason, and, hence, with the eternal law of God” (section 52).

In “Economic Justice for All” (1986), the American bishops wrote, “The Church fully supports the right of workers to form unions or other associations to secure their rights to fair wages and working conditions” (section 104).

Other faith and secular traditions uphold this right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, declares (section 23) that “everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.”

Furthermore, Senate Bill 5 is discriminatory. It does not attack the rights of all workers, but only those of that minority of workers employed as public employees. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963), Martin Luther King defined these sorts of discriminatory statutes as unjust: “An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself.”

King cited St. Augustine’s statement that “an unjust law is no law at all” in his justification of civil disobedience, declaring that “one has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

Why Collective Bargaining Rights Matter

This blog is read by many friends who are current or former teachers. I don't know them all personally, of course, but the ones I do know are all great people, and they come from a variety of political persuasions. When I say that public employee collective bargaining rights are under attack, many of them wonder what that would mean.

First, with regard to public employees in general, let's be clear: Senate Bill 5 removes the right of state employees to bargain collectively. For other public employees like teachers, unions aren't banned: they're just neutered. This is a violation of the social justice teachings of many religions, including mine, and if passed it will be an unjust, discriminatory law that will impose on a minority what the majority will not impose on itself. So the bill is, quite simply, immoral, and that should be enough to say.

But many of my friends feel that they didn't (or don't) make use of their union membership when they were (or are) teaching, and they wonder what they would miss if this legislation were passed. Here, from a letter to the Cleveland Teachers Union from its attorney, is a list of things that would be removed by the stroke of a pen.

• Tenure: SB 5 would eliminate the due-process rights of continuing contracts for all new hires and eliminate limited contracts of more than one year.
• Compensation: SB 5 would eliminate the negotiated training and experience grids that school districts use to calculate salaries. Instead, it requires school districts to base compensation on "merit," which remains undefined.
• Health care: It would be unlawful for a school district to negotiate its employees' health care plans or to charge less than 20% of the cost.
• Seniority: It would be unlawful for a school district to base layoffs on seniority within certification area. School districts would be free to adopt virtually any other criteria they wished, and those criteria would not be a subject of bargaining.
• Class sizes: It would be unlawful for a school district to negotiate any provisions regarding class size, including provisions for special education staffing.
• Leaves: It would be unlawful for a school district to negotiate sick leave, maternity leave, or assault leave.

So, my friends, did/do you make use of your union membership? If you've received a negotiated salary, taken a sick day, have a continuing contract, received health care coverage, or been protected from arbitrary transfers, you have. Senate Bill 5's intrusion into the operation of local school districts is breathtaking.

Senate Bill 5 has received so much negative publicity - and is so obviously overreaching on the part of its author - that we have a chance of defeating it or removing its more egregious provisions. But the unfortunate fact is that the current Governor and many (not all) of the members of the Republican majority have set the destruction of collective bargaining rights for public employees as a key goal, and this fits into a national movement fueled by components of the far right. These ideas won't go away: even if we're able to block SB 5, we'll need to fight for our collective bargaining right for years to come.

I'll close with this special comment for my Republican friends, especially those from Aurora: I respect conservatism. I began my political life as a Goldwater Republican, and I still believe in the principles of small government, individual responsibility, and fiscal restraint. But I also believe in public schools, and part of the Republican party doesn't share that value. If you're a teacher and also a Republican, you need to know that your party leadership has walked away from you. You need to call them back, and that's something a Democrat or Independent can't do. All of us who live in Ohio need to call our state senators; OEA has set up a hotline for this purpose at (888) 907-7309. If your Senator is a Republican and you're a Republican, you really need to do this, and you need to make it clear that you are a Republican and you don't approve of their attacks on public schools and the people who work there.

Some Advice to Advocates

Now that the battleground has been staked out (see "The Beatings Will Cease When Your Morale Improves"), many of my colleagues and friends are preparing to engage our adversaries.

In this article, I'll offer some advice to those, especially public educators, who plan to talk with their legislators, whether with letters, email, phone calls, or committee testimony.

First and most important: Confine yourself to our issues. Of course you have opinions about other issues; we all do. But if you speak as an education advocate, talk about education and leave your other causes at home. As an educator, you know something about schools and students, and many people will value your observations on them. But you're probably not an expert on life and choice, gun control, the death penalty, or health care, and people generally don't value your opinions on those topics in the same way.

(A corollary to this principle: just because it's provided by a government agency, don't confuse public education with the government services enshrined in the liberal pantheon. Public schools aren't some New Deal or Great Society program dreamed up by a liberal Democratic President; they were enshrined in the laws of the early colonies over 350 years ago and incorporated in the Articles of Confederation. The Ohio Constitution language calling for a "thorough and efficient system of common schools" is over 150 years old. When you incorporate public education into liberalism, you don't gain any more support from liberals, and you lose the support of conservatives.)

Second: Stay within your experience. Chances are that you haven't memorized every fact about the topic. Generalizations tend to sound like conjecture after a while. Talk about how the issue under discussion affects your work, especially your students and their families. You know those best, and if you're honest you can't make a mistake. Tell your stories.

Some fifteen years ago, I testified on tenure before the Ohio Senate. I chose to emphasize the impact that I thought a proposed weakening of contract protections would have on the discussions I had with my principal about my annual evaluations and on the academic climate within my school. Because I was talking about something I knew well from my own experience, I was on pretty solid ground through the encounter. And that proved to be a good thing: following my three-minute statement (which of course I had been able to craft carefully), the Senators grilled me for eighteen more minutes (which of course I couldn't have prepared for). Staying within my own experience helped me to negotiate the traps some of them tried to set.

Third: Don't overreact. You and I probably agree that whatever bill you're opposing is clearly aimed at destroying our profession; but even the legislator who submitted it may not know that. Remember Hanlon's Law: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." He or she probably didn't actually write it and almost certainly doesn't know all its implications.

For all our sophistication, we have never devised a foolproof system for looking into a person's soul. The person you're dealing with believes in his or her position, even if it's hard to believe that any right-minded person could do so. Even the best people are sometimes wrong. Their being wrong doesn't make them less good, unless through pride, malice, or self-interest they cling to their error. But their being good doesn't make them less wrong either, and if their facts or reasoning are faulty, you have every right to correct them, perhaps vehemently. As you do so, remember that intemperate language only gives our adversaries an excuse to discount what you have to say.

Without exaggeration, I will say that we are embarking on the legislative battle of a lifetime. We didn't ask for it, but we can't shrink from it. If you're going to be a soldier in this battle, fight honorably, fight hard, and fight smart.