But those membership losses didn’t have a commensurate effect on the unions’ bottom line. On the contrary, the National Education Association and its state affiliates experienced significant boosts to revenue during the shutdown year.

The combined income of NEA and its state unions reached almost $1.75 billion in 2020-21, an increase of $49 million (2.9%) from the previous year. Almost all union revenue is exempt from income and capital gains taxes.

This financial information is derived from the unions’ annual disclosure reports for the Internal Revenue Service, detailing their income and expenditures. These are public records, but delays in reporting and availability mean a long wait before it is possible to gather comprehensive data from unions in all 50 states.

NEA national headquarters collected almost $397 million in revenue. Its richest affiliates were California ($222 million), New York ($167 million) and New Jersey ($153 million).

These large-membership states are self-sufficient, but many affiliates require national subsidies to pay the costs of union offices’ professional staff. Nine state affiliates received more than 20% of their total revenue directly from NEA. The Mississippi Association of Educators and NEA New Mexico were the most reliant on national funds.

Union employees are the primary beneficiaries of the bigger bankroll. NEA employed 513 staffers in Washington, D.C., of whom 396 earned six-figure salaries. Across the country, more than 2,300 NEA affiliate employees made more than $100,000 in salary.

Member dues supply most income, although periodically some unions receive a cash windfall through other means.

Both the North Carolina Association of Educators and the South Carolina Education Association saw dramatic growth in revenue due to the sale of properties. The North Carolina union sold land it owned in Raleigh to a real estate developer for an estimated $20 million, while the South Carolina union sold its headquarters building to the state for a highway widening project.

That union also benefited from $112,624 due to the forgiveness of a Paycheck Protection Program loan from the federal government’s Small Business Administration.

Higher interest rates are a burden, but they did increase the value of the unions’ cash investments and greatly aided their financial ledgers in another way: by reducing pension and retiree health care liabilities.

Just like school districts and state governments, unions must be able to cover the future costs of their retired employees. These liabilities can grow to such a significant degree that in 2020, eight NEA state affiliates had a negative net worth. They were a combined $606.5 million in the red.

But the increase in interest rates allowed pension systems everywhere to recompute the discount rate, which is a method of expressing future liabilities in today’s dollars. Put simply, a higher discount rate means lower pension liabilities.

The change in the discount rate was large enough to push NEA affiliates in Connecticut, Michigan, Nevada and West Virginia into the black. Georgia, Illinois, New York and Washington reduced their liabilities by large amounts but remained in the red.

Any union that can add $49 million to its coffers while losing 70,000 members amid the near-total shutdown of work sites is not one that needs to fear diminished power and influence. NEA is too big to fail.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

In the report’s foreword, NEA’s research department warns that “it is unwise to draw conclusions based solely on individual statistics in this report.”

That sentence borders on the comical, since the primary purpose of Rankings & Estimates is to enable NEA to draw conclusions based solely on those statistics.

The union posted a Twitter thread to publicize the report, concluding that “educators across the board are underpaid” and “teachers earn 25% more in states with collective bargaining.”

“Equipped with our educator pay data, we are able to negotiate and advocate for the better wages and benefits that our educators deserve,” NEA stated.

The key point the union sought to drive home was that teachers “make thousands less than they did a decade ago,” when adjusted for inflation.

That makes a powerful sound bite but lacks context. For the first eight years of that decade, teacher salary hikes exceeded inflation by almost 2%. The entire decline in real wages occurred over the last two years.

The loss was hardly unique to teachers. The U.S. economy went from a 1% inflation rate to 8% in the last two years, as the federal government increased the money supply during the COVID pandemic. Tens of billions of those dollars went to public schools and are currently being added to teachers’ wages all over the country, bringing current education spending to $785 billion.

Despite the decline in real wages, overall per-pupil spending was still 13% above inflation over the last 10 years.

How is that possible? Two factors explain it: student enrollment and educator hiring.

The number of children enrolled in public schools declined 1.8% over the past 10 years, but the number of instructional staff — teachers, principals, counselors and other certified professionals — increased 5.2%.

In raw numbers, U.S. public schools had nearly 877,000 fewer students this year than in 2014 but 187,000 more instructional staff, of whom 62,000 were classroom teachers.

Just between 2020 and 2021, schools had 8,000 fewer students and 14,000 more teachers.

Put simply, the same amount of money spread over fewer students leads to higher per-pupil spending, but that money spread over more employees means lower average wages.

It may be desirable to hire more and more teachers, and pay them more and more money, to teach fewer and fewer students. But it’s just not sustainable in a nation already awash in historic debt.

NEA and the public schools are making hay while the sun shines, but the storm clouds are gathering. Teachers can’t enjoy double-digit raises when they’re out of a job.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

The settlement provides all teachers with a 10% salary increase retroactive to Nov. 1, 2022, plus a one-time payment of $5,000.

This was a strike with unusual features, but they will become increasingly common as teachers unions continue to win generous compensation packages and greater influence over district operations. School systems will be forced to deal with these tactics, not just in California but wherever state law allows them to be employed.

Unfair labor practice strikes

A standard teacher strike over wages and working conditions — otherwise known as an economic strike — requires a long administrative process. In California, this means formally declaring an impasse in negotiations, which is followed by analysis and a report by an independent fact-finder.

But there’s a loophole. If the employer commits an unfair labor practice, such as bargaining in bad faith, the union can legally walk out at any time.

The problem for school districts, and parents who want their kids in school, is that determining whether the union’s complaint has any merit cannot be made instantaneously. It may take months, or even years, before the state labor board can hear the case and render a ruling.

If there is no unfair labor practice, then the strike is illegal and penalties can be levied. But by then, it’s too late to matter, and the union has probably already won a settlement that ensures it will come out ahead financially.

So while the strike is ostensibly called to bring an end to specific alleged unfair labor practices by the district, its real purpose is to jump-start contract negotiations and bring about an advantageous settlement.

Union-friendly publications have articles on how to precipitate an unfair labor practice by an employer and so legitimize a strike. Among the suggested methods are to “pepper the employer with detailed information requests” or to cite employers for “refusing to bargain at reasonable times and locations.”

Since 2019, school employees unions have conducted two unfair labor practice strikes in Sacramento, two in Los Angeles and now, two in Oakland.

Bargaining for the common good

This term is used to describe union demands for contract provisions that are geared to benefit a wider community than just teachers and school employees. These include restorative justice, ventilation, affordable housing and even climate change. The Oakland union sought contract language regarding housing vouchers and use of vacant district properties for housing students’ families, as well as union input on facilities upkeep. 

Asking for such things allows the union to position itself as altruistic, seeking more than just better compensation for its members. It also increases the scope of its influence over district operations. Many of these items may, in fact, be beneficial.

But the union is the legal representative for teachers, not for anyone else. The public at large did not elect the Oakland Education Association to decide what was “good” to bargain for. Nor is the union accountable for the consequences that might arise from its demands. The school board is supposed to represent the public and choose between competing desires and needs within an available budget — which brings us to the most disturbing aspect of the Oakland strike and its settlement.

School board leverage

There has been a lot of media attention over the past couple of years about the politicization of school boards. Special-interest groups’ clout in politics is a problem as old as the Republic, but the situation in Oakland went well beyond the usual arguments over who funded whose campaign.

“The school board, which currently has six members, has been split on the issue of OEA’s common-good demands,” reported The Oaklandside during the strike. “Three members, Jennifer Brouhard, VanCedric Williams and Valarie Bachelor, have joined the union in urging the district’s bargaining team to discuss the common good demands with OEA, while other directors have said the demands should be left to the school board to discuss and implement, or left to OUSD to partner with other organizations on.”

It’s true that all three of the named board members received union campaign contributions, but that’s just a standard public policy issue. These three have unique relationships with teachers unions.

Bachelor is employed as a lead organizer for the California Federation of Teachers.

Brouhard is the former secretary of the Oakland Education Association and sat on its executive board at least through the 2021 school year.

Williams was elected to the California Teachers Association board of directors in October, after serving as treasurer of United Educators San Francisco and a member of the National Education Association board of directors.

The union went on an unfair labor practice strike despite having three teacher union activists on the school board. It claimed to be bargaining for the common good even though the common people were woefully underrepresented in negotiations. Lakisha Young, founder of the parent advocacy group The Oakland REACH, wrote in a recent newsletter that her organization “has organized and mobilized hundreds of district parents and none of us have been a part of the process.”

She added, “OEA is replaying tactics Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) parents and students just experienced: say on repeat that the district is bargaining in ‘bad faith,’ avoid fact-finding, mediation, impasse and then strike!”

There is no limit to the range of matters that come up for debate and inclusion into NEA’s policies. Last year’s most contentious items were related to Palestinian issues. The internal running of the organization is often given short shrift, but here are two subjects that will occupy the assembly: 

Membership: After numbers dropped to levels not seen since 2005, NEA has seen a small bounce so far this school year. In January 2023, the union had 15,000 more members working in public schools than it had in the previous September.

While this was welcome good news, there were a few caveats. During that four-month period, local school districts added more than 195,000 employees, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That means NEA netted less than 8 percent of those new employees.

Additionally, some membership categories were weak. The union’s gains in working members were partially offset by the loss of almost 6,000 student members. And the “community ally” category — created in 2019 to allow people who don’t work in education to join NEA — holds a grand total of only 132 members.

The politics of convention sites: After being forced to conduct virtual assemblies for two years, NEA held a hybrid event in Chicago last July. Unfortunately for the union, attendance hit historic lows. Fewer than 5,100 delegates participated, with only three-quarters of that number physically present in the hall. This year’s convention will be entirely in-person.

Convention venues have become a sticking point for many delegates. NEA New Hampshire’s representatives boycotted the 2019 assembly because of what it saw as Texas’s discriminatory policies against undocumented immigrants and the LGBTQ community. Similar concerns weighed heavily in the union’s decision to move the 2022 convention from Dallas to Chicago.

Despite ongoing feuds with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state legislature, NEA will hold its event in Orlando this year. The union even asked delegates planning to demonstrate during their stay not to “go rogue,” but to clear their organized protests with NEA leadership first.

Further evidence that this is a hot-button issue comes in the form of a proposed bylaw amendment. NEA’s current rules forbid holding a national meeting “in any location where any delegates are likely to experience discriminatory treatment.” New language would specifically add “which shall include the denial of medical services due to a delegate’s ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, and/or reproductive status.”

In analyzing the possible repercussions of the amendment, the union’s rules committee stated that “because there are now several states in which routine medical services for women and transgender individuals are no longer provided or are more difficult to obtain, implementation of the proposed amendment will require consideration of additional legal information in making decisions about where the RA may be located. In addition, if the amendment passes, additional review of already contracted sites will be completed to determine if the RA can still be held in those locations.”

While politics may limit the choice of locales, the shrinking number of delegates widens the field to smaller convention centers. Future assemblies will be held in Portland, Indianapolis and Kansas City.

Two other contentious issues will be side-stepped by NEA procedures. They are:

Presidential endorsements: Some delegates have complained about NEA’s presidential endorsement process dating back at least to the 2008 battle for the Democratic nomination between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Those echoes reverberated last month when NEA endorsed Joe Biden for re-election the day after he announced he was running.

Many members are unaware that one person, the NEA president, chooses the candidate. The rest of NEA’s representative bodies can either concur or not. Since the union started endorsing U.S. presidents in 1976, no candidate brought forward has been rejected.

The approval for the Democratic Party nomination stops with the union’s political action committee council and the board of directors. Convention delegates get no say until the general election endorsement. But by then, of course, the choice is between a Republican and a Democrat, which for the liberal-leaning convention delegates is no choice at all.

Previous efforts to reform the process have been shot down, and the fear of a DeSantis or Trump victory will probably mute any attempts to make a change now.

Abortion: For most of its history, NEA avoided the abortion debate with its stance that it “believes in family planning, including the right to reproductive freedom.” This allowed NEA affiliates in red states to assert that the union had no position on abortion.

In 2019 that changed. Delegates approved a new business item that read, “The NEA vigorously opposes all attacks on the right to choose and stands on the fundamental right to abortion under Roe v. Wade.” Last year, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe, delegates passed a measure calling on the union to “publicly stand in defense of abortion” and encourage members to lobby and participate in demonstrations.

NEA’s actual actions in response to this item, according to an internal NEA implementation report, were to write a letter to Congress, and put an alert on its “action center” web page.

Now that the union is on record as favoring abortion rights, it sees no reason to spend any more time on it than it does with the hundreds of other issues it currently supports or opposes.

Delegates are always free to bring any issue to the floor for debate and vote, but execution is left up to the union bureaucracy. It’s important to keep an eye not only on what NEA does, but what it doesn’t do.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

On April 13, the district made what it called a “historic offer” of 19% in pay hikes over three years. The union promptly rejected it as inadequate but five days later accepted what it called a “groundbreaking” agreement with increases of 21%.

By January 2025, it will bring the average Los Angeles teacher salary to an estimated $106,000 a year.

The post-deal reactions from the district and the union were a contrast in styles.

“Proud of what we can do with our labor partners when we negotiate in good faith and come to an agreement that serves our hardworking employees as well as our students and families,” tweeted Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho.

“While Carvalho and the district spent the past year ignoring and undermining educators, students and parents, UTLA members fought for a fair contract that meets the urgent needs of today and builds a strong foundation for public schools,” read the union statement.

Carvalho is sanguine about the district’s ability to bankroll these deals. “The state has provided two back-to-back, very solid budget years with a cost-of-living adjustment that allowed us to compose these offers,” he said. Nevertheless, he made a trip to Sacramento earlier this month to lobby for more school funding.

It has been widely reported that the district has $5 billion in reserves, which, for a total budget of $14.2 billion, is excessive. Less widely reported is that half of the reserve is already committed or is one-time federal COVID relief money. The district has yet to release data on the total cost of the new contracts.

Los Angeles also has 35,000 fewer students than it did two years ago, and the district forecasts the loss of another 121,000 by 2030. Since state funding is based on enrollment, that is going to make it difficult to sustain the district’s spending levels.

Carvalho may think he bought himself at least a year of labor peace, as the support employees’ contract expires in June 2024 and the teachers’ contract in June 2025. But the unions don’t seem eager to beat their swords into plowshares.

“We still have a long way to go,” said SEIU Local 99 steward Jennifer Torres. “This is the foundation.”

“We have maximum power right now, and it’s going to keep evolving from this point on even further,” said teachers union Secretary Arlene Inouye.

So did Carvalho get “schooled” by the unions, as Politico believes, or — to further the metaphor — is he planning to “graduate”?

Carvalho is flashy and at ease in front of the camera. He has often been rumored as a candidate for higher office, and if he has any aspirations in California, he must at least hold the public employees unions at bay. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Carvalho is somewhere else when the district’s bills come due.

The implications for Los Angeles are only part of the picture, since other teachers unions may now see the last few months as a model to follow.

The Oakland Education Association is currently holding a strike vote, which would be an “unfair labor practices” walkout similar to the one that shuttered Los Angeles schools for three days last month. The state labor board has still yet to determine whether that strike was legal, and a faction with the Oakland union is planning a wildcat strike if the authorization vote fails.

Intentionally or not, Carvalho and the Los Angeles school board have reset the market for public school employees. But if the enrollment figures are any indication, parents will continue to take their business elsewhere.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

The district originally offered a two-year contract with raises of 3% each year, but the agreement is for four years, with across-the-board raises of 2%, 3%, 0% and 3.5%. There are additional bonuses and salary schedule restructuring that, according to the union, brings the total raises to 14.5% over the four-year life of the contract.

This is quite a bit less than other areas of the country are seeing. United Teachers Los Angeles, for example, is demanding 20% over two years, and L.A. teachers already make more than those in Hawaii.

This has led to some grumbling from the rank-and-file on the Hawaii union’s Facebook page. “Teacher’s Unions across the nation were able to get their members 10%+ raises and yearly raises after, and HSTA comes to us with a 3.625% raise?! It’s laughable at best,” wrote one commenter.

Teachers unions and school districts often have different interpretations of how much money is available for salary increases and other spending. In this case, the union appears to accept the state’s forecast of reduced future revenues.

“We had asked for significantly larger raises but understand that the state has less money to pay for numerous key priorities in addition to addressing teacher compensation, such as creating affordable housing, bringing down the state’s high cost of living and preserving our natural resources,” said President Osa Tui Jr.

Even more unusual was the union’s willingness to not only post the entire agreement publicly before the ratification vote, but also provide its rationale for each provision the new deal contains.

This is commendable. Sharing full information before any ratification votes might not affect the content of collective bargaining agreements, but the public deserves to know as soon as possible what is being agreed to in its name.

The overall tone of the union’s communications with members about the contract is defensive, and we can expect some significant pushback from teachers about the size of the raises. Whether this sporadic muttering coalesces into a rejection of the contract when the ratification vote is held April 26 remains to be seen.

Members tend to give their unions the benefit of the doubt when it comes to tentative agreements and accept raises already in hand over the uncertainty of returning to the bargaining table. But Hawaii teachers have gone on strike twice in the past and come close on other occasions. When they do walk out, they don’t kid around: The 1973 strike lasted for 18 days, and the 2001 strike ended after 21 days.

Upsurges in teachers union militancy grab headlines and lead to speculation about it spreading elsewhere. Perhaps Hawaii can stand as an example of cordial negotiations leading to a reasonable and transparent settlement that everyone, including the public, can live with. We’ll know for sure after next week’s vote.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

In raw numbers, public-sector unions reaped a benefit from this hiring surge, adding some 83,000 members to their ranks. Though the percentage of government employees who belong to a union fell to a low of 33% in 2022, the new members were certainly a welcome addition.

Unfortunately for the unions, the good news was not widespread. In fact, the growth in membership was entirely due — and then some — to one state: California.

The Golden State added more than 250,000 government jobs in 2022, enabling its public employees unions to add more than 111,000 members. Twenty-eight other states added a combined 256,496 public-sector union members. But 21 states and the District of Columbia lost 284,517 members, for a net decline of 28,021 outside of California. New York and Minnesota were the biggest losers.

Each year, Barry Hirsch of Georgia State University and David Macpherson of Trinity University produce this data for their Union Membership and Coverage Database, posting it on their website Unionstats.com. Thanks to their work combing through Current Population Survey figures, I was able to create this table, which shows the total number of government employees and public-sector union members for each state in 2022, along with the change from 2021.

Public sector union membership by state, 2022:

Click here if you’re having trouble viewing the chart.

Examining data for all 50 states and D.C., there is a clear divide between states where unions are growing along with hiring and states where membership losses continue to mount.

This trend should not be surprising. Before the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that public-sector unions could no longer charge non-members an agency fee, growth in the government workforce led almost automatically to growth in union membership. Now, unions must actively recruit each new hire. It stands to reason that unions in some states will do this better than others, and that those efforts will be affected by local conditions.

We can’t use this data to draw any firm conclusions about teachers unions. When categorized by occupation, the numbers include both public and private schools, plus teachers unions include significant numbers of other types of workers as members. What the data does show is a drop in the number of unionized teachers.

The percentage of elementary and middle school teachers who belonged to a union fell slightly from 46.6% in 2021 to 46.3% in 2022. The percentage for secondary school teachers showed a steeper decline, from 49.6% to 47.1%. The percentage for special education teachers similarly tumbled, from 55.8% to 51.4%.

All this suggests that public employees unions will need even greater levels of hiring just to tread water. When this runs headlong into the loss of COVID relief money and/or a recession, there will be an unprecedented display of labor unrest in government. Brace yourselves.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

Of course, things didn’t work out as planned. United Teachers Los Angeles voted to boycott the extra days. Then, after negotiations, the district rescheduled them for winter and spring breaks, irking SEIU Local 99, the union representing school support workers. And whatever benefit the extra days might have brought was undone by the three-day walkout organized by both unions March 21 to 23.

One would think that, going forward, the district might try a different approach to adding instructional days, and that the teachers union might consider a different response.

But who are we kidding?

Last week, the L.A. school board approved the district calendar for the next three years. “The new instructional calendars address the need to mitigate learning loss by shortening the winter recess and extending options for summer programming,” Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said. The plan is to shorten the three-week winter break to two weeks.

The seven-member school board unanimously approved the changes, and the press release includes positive comments from five of them. It also states that the district “undertook an extensive process of gathering input through surveys, focus groups and presentations from families, staff and labor partners.”

Unfortunately for Carvalho and the board, those surveys, focus groups and input from labor partners all indicated an overwhelming preference for a three-week winter break.

The district justified the change on the grounds that three weeks off “creates challenges for our neediest families that must be considered in decision-making.” Also, most large districts in other states have a two-week break, as do most districts in southern California.

Not one to overlook an opportunity for activism, the teachers union immediately filed an unfair labor practice charge, created a Twitter hashtag and ramped up an organizing drive against the change.

“School calendar changes are mandatory subjects of bargaining and UTLA leadership immediately sent a demand to bargain to the district,” reads a statement on the union website. “This calendar move exemplifies Carvalho’s refusal to bargain in good faith and his willful disdain of worker rights. By openly disregarding labor law and ignoring the voices of parents and staff, Carvalho continues to prove that he is not a leader. The school board’s approval demonstrates a failure to hold Carvalho accountable.”

A district representative told EdSource that calendar dates are “at the sole discretion of the superintendent and the Board of Education,” and that the district held two meetings to discuss the calendar with its unions — but UTLA sent a representative to only one.

Carvalho and the board seem to have learned nothing from their previous encounter on this issue and are blithely waving the red cape in front of the charging bull. The union will gore them again, but one wonders how often it can continue to place itself on the side of less school versus more.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

So it went last week with Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho.

Carvalho was forced to shutter schools while the district’s 30,000 support employees, led by SEIU Local 99, went on a three-day strike. Members of United Teachers Los Angeles walked out in solidarity.

The day after the strike ended, Carvalho and the union announced a tentative agreement. The three-year deal raised salaries by a reported 30%. Carvalho called it a “precedent-setting, historic contract.”

It’s historic, in the sense that most of it takes place in the past.

The agreement contains a 6% pay hike retroactive to July 2021, another 7% retroactive to July 2022 and yet another 7% to take effect this July. In January 2024, the district will raise all support employee wages by $2 an hour. The district and the union both say this constitutes another 10% increase for the average employee.

Nevertheless, it’s not the amount that’s going to cause headaches for Carvalho, the school board, parents and students in the near future. The district and the union weren’t oceans apart on the money before the strike occurred. Where Carvalho went wrong was in the timeline of the settlement.

Lost in all the happiness and relief about the contract is that the strike supposedly wasn’t about wages and benefits. Such a walkout would have been illegal, since the union hadn’t completed all the procedural steps before calling a strike. SEIU did so to protest the district’s alleged unfair labor practices. 

SEIU accused the district of interrogating workers about union meetings and threatening to fire them if they walked out. The union even claimed that food service workers were locked in a cafeteria to prevent them from voting on a strike. Taking these accusations at face value, the district could not have prevented the strike, short of admitting it had committed these violations.

The strike might end up being deemed illegal anyway. An unfair labor practices strike is legal if unfair labor practices have occurred. These haven’t been adjudicated, and if they’re found to be baseless, the union will be penalized.

But it won’t matter. The reality is that the walkouts prompted Carvalho and the board to settle on the union’s terms. So what happens to the district’s future?

There isn’t going to be much of a lull. “Carvalho has been put on notice that he better move on our demands,” read an email from the teachers union to its members. “If that movement is not enough to settle the contract that UTLA members deserve, we will move to the next round of this fight.”

The union wants a 20% raise over a two-year contract. But the contract expired in June 2022, so the two years are this school year and next. It’s clear the teachers aren’t reluctant to strike, and SEIU Local 99 will be sure to back them up. So we might see a repeat of last week’s actions, only this time it will be the teachers union organizing an unfair labor practices strike, with SEIU striking in solidarity.

Carvalho might be able to head it off by caving early, but the reprieve would be only temporary. The new contracts would both expire in June 2024, right about the time all federal COVID subsidies will have run out. How much labor peace will Carvalho be able to buy then?

He seems unaware of his impending fate. “This agreement’s going to make a lot of superintendents very nervous,” he said. “And that’s a good thing.”

We’ll see who is the most nervous superintendent a year from now.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

The terminology is important, because a strike for economic reasons during contract negotiations has certain procedural requirements and time-consuming steps, including mediation and fact-finding. The two unions’ contracts also have no-strike provisions, which is why both notified the district they were terminating their expired contracts.

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho pledged to negotiate around the clock to avert the strike, then requested an injunction from the state labor relations board — all to no avail. The two unions had no inclination to call it off.

I believe the timing and length of the walkout is a calculated effort on the part of the unions not only to apply bargaining pressure to the district, but to undo Carvalho’s signature effort to address the effects of lengthy pandemic school closures: acceleration days.

In April 2022, Carvalho and the school board proposed adding four instructional days to the school calendar that would be optional for both students and teachers. Teachers who participated would receive additional pay, and students would receive additional instruction.

The teachers union filed an unfair labor practice complaint and called for a boycott of the first acceleration day, asserting that changes to the school calendar were a mandatory subject of collective bargaining.

After negotiations, the union agreed to the four days, to be held for two days each during winter and spring breaks. This didn’t please SEIU Local 99, which preferred the original plan of four Wednesdays spread throughout the school year.

The final two acceleration days are scheduled to be held April 3 and 4, but they are hardly acceleration days anymore, due to the unions’ decision to hold deceleration days this week.

Holding a strike on a Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday almost certainly guarantees that a large number of students (and school employees) won’t show up Friday, either. There go your four days of additional instruction.

The district could add make-up days to the calendar, but as UTLA reminded its members, “they will have to negotiate that with us as a union.”

The unions seem unperturbed by school closures of any sort. The teacher strike in 2019 closed schools for a week. Unions were largely responsible for in-person instruction being delayed until late August 2021. Both SEIU Local 99 and UTLA are ready for traditional, open-ended strikes unless significant raises and other demands are met.

As showing up at school has taken a backseat to other concerns among district employees, many students have followed suit. Enrollment has fallen dramatically, and chronic absenteeism continues to be a problem.

Teachers union President Cecily Myart-Cruz notoriously claimed, “There is no such thing as learning loss.” She’s wrong. The only thing kids learn from closed schools is that neither they, nor the schools, are important.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

The leadership of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City engineered a major shift in retiree health insurance by voting to move its members from traditional Medicare into Medicare Advantage, a parallel system in which private insurers provide coverage.

The Municipal Labor Committee, the umbrella group representing the city’s 102 public-sector unions, approved the change for all retirees in a weighted vote, with UFT’s concurrence crucial to the result. However, 25 unions voted no, 10 abstained and 14 didn’t vote. Opponents have vowed to go to court to block the move.

The city’s unions were bound by a 2018 agreement to find health insurance savings, and so drastic action was required. Some retirees oppose the change because they believe Medicare Advantage is a form of privatization. Others simply feel traditional Medicare provides superior coverage. However, it seems unlikely that the teachers union will effectively go to war with its own retired members without hope of some substantive gain from the city.

This gain will probably not come in the form of large salary increases. The teachers’ contract expired in September, but wage expectations are limited by New York City’s system of pattern bargaining, meaning that one union’s contract establishes a pattern the rest must follow. This year, District Council 37 approved a five-year contract with a total of 15.25% in raises. This means UFT will be hard-pressed to achieve much more than 3% per year.

So in what way will the teachers union improve its lot? UFT President Michael Mulgrew is playing things close to the vest but suggested in an interview that increased funding for teacher recruiting and retention will be a major focus of negotiations. This would make sense under the circumstances. If you can’t get much higher pay for your members, you might as well try to get more members.

Whether this will mollify angry retirees is an open question, but despite organized internal opposition, Mulgrew’s slate has a stranglehold on power within the union, and that’s unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

On the other coast, United Teachers Los Angeles emerged from a period of relative inactivity to help organize a massive demonstration March 15. Both UTLA and SEIU Local 99, the union representing school support employees, are in the midst of contract negotiations.

SEIU is demanding a 30% raise across the board, while UTLA is calling for 20% over two years. The Los Angeles Times reports the two unions are planning a joint three-day strike later this month.

The teachers union has a long list of demands, which includes class size reduction across all grades and school types, more staff of all types and a freeze on school closures (despite collapsing student enrollment), elimination or dramatic reduction of standardized tests not required by the state or federal governments, systematic inclusion of social-emotional learning in all curricula and stronger limits on and regulations of charter schools.

The union’s demands come in the context of the district holding more than $3 billion in unrestricted surplus funds. However, that money is short-lived, as federal support will end in 2024. The union has a solution for that: It wants the district to “publicly call for and take action to support federal COVID relief monies becoming permanent as of 2024.”

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho dealt with a union in his previous position in Miami, but he has never faced anything like this. Will he take a hard line or assuage the union with imaginary money from the federal government?

Meanwhile, in Chicago, a proxy war over the mayor’s office is underway between the city teachers union and progressives on the one hand, and business interests and mainstream Democrats on the other.

Former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas and teachers union organizer Brandon Johnson took to the debate stage last week in their mayoral runoff. According to the Chicago Tribune, Johnson accused Vallas of “wanting to raise property taxes, enacting policies in the 1990s that caused lasting harm to the city and school district’s financial position, and working with Republicans to damage the pension system. Johnson also said Vallas doesn’t want to teach Black history and claimed he does not support women’s abortion rights.”

Vallas, who is ahead in the polls, opted not to respond in kind, saying he left a surplus during his time leading the district and supported reproductive choice, though he was personally opposed to abortion.

Johnson also downplayed his ties to the teachers union. “I have a fiduciary responsibility to the people of the city of Chicago, and once I’m mayor of the city of Chicago, I will no longer be a member of the Chicago Teachers Union,” he said.

Johnson relies highly on union support, having secured the endorsements of SEIU Healthcare and AFSCME Council 31. But Vallas has labor allies as well, with the backing of the Fraternal Order of Police and the plumbers union.

Putting one of its own in the mayor’s chair would be a coup for the Chicago Teachers Union, and perhaps a turning point for its fortunes. A Vallas victory would extend the reign of teachers union adversaries that began with Mayor Richard Daley in 1989.

These three teachers unions are using three different methods to achieve their aims: inside influence in New York City; strikes and rallies in Los Angeles; and electoral politics in Chicago. Which, if any, will succeed remains to be seen, but the results will determine the direction of public education in those cities for the immediate future.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

In a Feb. 11 letter, NEA President Becky Pringle urged President Joe Biden to nominate Julie Su, currently deputy secretary, to replace Marty Walsh, who is leaving to become executive director of the National Hockey League’s players union.

It is common for interest groups to support their favorites for cabinet offices and other high-ranking federal positions. But I can find no previous occurrence of NEA publicly endorsing a candidate prior to his or her nomination — not even when one of its own, former NEA President Lily Eskelsen García, was being considered for education secretary in December 2020.

NEA’s change in tactics may have its roots in that time period, when newly elected President Biden was forming his first cabinet. Su was on the short list for labor secretary, but Democrats were divided over several candidates. Walsh was selected because of his union background, his close relationship with Biden and endorsements from the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Teachers.

Though it is the nation’s largest union, NEA did not back a candidate.

When Su was passed over, it disappointed her supporters, most notably Asian-American advocacy groups. Biden’s cabinet does not contain anyone of Asian-American descent. Being the deputy secretary, Su is an obvious choice this time, and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus is among those lobbying hard on her behalf.

There are other contenders for the job, with powerful people in their corner. Rep. Nancy Pelosi reportedly wants former New York Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney. Sen. Bernie Sanders likes Sara Nelson, president of the flight attendants union, or former Labor Secretary Robert Reich.

NEA’s decision to publicly support Su this time may have to do with cabinet diversity, or the desire to show itself as a driving force in organized labor. But what appeals to the teachers union about Su herself isn’t entirely clear.

In her letter to Biden, Pringle lists among Su’s accomplishments as deputy secretary being a “skilled messenger,” overseeing the workforce “tactfully and with kindness” and traveling across the country “promoting the work of the Department and Administration.”

And while NEA considers teaching experience a prerequisite for being education secretary, it doesn’t hold the same standard for labor secretary. Su is a former civil rights attorney with no union experience.

Almost two-thirds of Pringle’s letter is cribbed from a March 8, 2021, letter from Marc Egan, NEA’s director of government relations, to the Senate, urging a yes vote for Su’s confirmation as deputy secretary.

Not that it will matter, but California Republicans are squarely against Su, due to her tenure as the state’s labor secretary. During her watch, California paid out an estimated $32.6 billion in fraudulent unemployment insurance claims.

NEA may get its wish and see Su installed as labor secretary, but it will take more than any efforts on her part to reverse decades of union decline. Membership losses have continued unabated through both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations. Biden’s will be no exception.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

To put this in its proper perspective, one in every five union members belongs to NEA — two of every five public-sector union members.

Private-sector unions often run major organizing drives, as we have seen recently with campaigns at Amazon and Starbucks locations. But has NEA been adding to the universe of union members over the years?

At first glance, the answer seems obvious. Back in 1998-99, NEA had 2,436,157 members, and at the end of the 2021-22 school year it had 2,871,908. That’s almost 436,000 more members and 18% growth.

But those numbers are very deceiving because of mergers.

After NEA delegates rejected a national merger with the American Federation of Teachers back in 1998, a handful of NEA state affiliates merged with their AFT counterparts. When that happens, both national unions count the other’s as new members.

The first instance will illustrate. The Minnesota Education Association merged with the Minnesota Federation of Teachers in 1998. As a result, NEA added almost 25,000 AFT members to its total. But AFT added almost 55,000 NEA members to its total. That appears to be a combined gain of 80,000 members, but since everyone involved was already a union member, it was a net gain of zero for unions as a whole.

In 2000, NEA and AFT affiliates in Florida and Montana merged, and NEA picked up more than 55,000 new members.

Then, in 2006, New York State United Teachers merged with — or, more accurately, absorbed — 41,000-member NEA New York. NEA added 350,000 NYSUT members to its ranks.

North Dakota affiliates merged in 2013, and the merged Montana union merged again with an independent public employees union, bringing in 6,300 more members.

Add together all these members acquired through mergers over the years, and you get 437,290, which accounts for all of NEA’s growth over the past 23 years.

During a period when the United States added 346,000 teachers, along with hundreds of thousands of support employees eligible for union membership, NEA netted zero non-members and added nothing to the ranks of America’s labor unions.

With mergers removed from the equation, NEA’s state-level numbers paint a picture of a union split almost evenly between haves and have-nots. Of the 45 non-merged NEA state affiliates, 24 have fewer members today than they did in 1998-99.

This raises a couple of questions. NEA may be the largest union, but is its strength among education employees overrated? And can this tenuous equilibrium it has achieved between its growing and shrinking state affiliates hold?

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

In the last five years, teachers unions have taken a double hit. The first was the Supreme Court’s Janus ruling in June 2018, which eliminated the practice of charging agency fees to nonmembers. The second was the COVID pandemic that shut down schools in March 2020.

The effects have been detrimental to teachers union membership across the country, but perhaps nowhere more so than in the ranks of the California Teachers Association.

That union’s roster reached its apex at the time of the Janus decision, with more than 326,000 active members working in the state’s public schools. It has been a slow downward slide ever since.

The first big blow was the loss of 19,000 members when the California Faculty Association seceded from the state union and the National Education Association.

The Janus decision did not lead to the mass exodus of members that its supporters had hoped for and unions had feared. CTA internal documents indicate that only 2,631 school employees have dropped their membership in the last four years.

The union hoped to mitigate further losses by successfully lobbying for legislation that requires school districts to allow unions to make a 30-minute membership pitch during new teacher orientations. It is difficult to measure the effectiveness of this measure. In the last 10 months, school districts have hired 3,700 more employees who are eligible to join, but the union has 1,727 fewer members.

Just as the union was coming to terms with the post-Janus world, COVID hit and schools shut down. The union once again won relief from the California legislature, as districts were forbidden to lay off teachers until July 2020.

Nonetheless, membership continued to dwindle to the present day. At the beginning of March 2020, the union had 304,509 members. Internal documents show that figure dropped to 293,444 as of Jan. 13, 2023, a loss of 11,065 members.

Comprehensive numbers for the union’s 995 local affiliates are of less recent vintage, but official as of Aug. 31, 2022. I have constructed a table based on those statistics, culled from internal union documents. I included the comparable membership figures for Aug. 31, 2019, and Aug. 31, 2018. The figure for United Teachers Los Angeles is a best estimate, due to the difficulty of reconciling the numbers of members affiliated with NEA and those affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers Local 1021.

Losses appear to be indiscriminate across all local sizes. Eight of the state union’s 10 largest locals lost members between 2019 and 2022, while overall, 587 locals lost members during that period.

The cure for the union’s ills, once again, lies with the state legislature. The union will work to ensure funding is made available for as much hiring as possible, so membership will grow even if the percentage of new teachers who join isn’t what it used to be.

The health of the California Teachers Association and other large state affiliates is critical to the overall health of the National Education Association. Their membership dues help subsidize the continued existence of sickly state affiliates in the South. If California losses continue, it will have a domino effect across the country.

Ingrid Gant was the president of the Arlington Education Association from 2016 to 2022, a period during which, police say, she “provided herself with multiple bonuses and used debit cards for unauthorized purchases” in the amount of $410,782.10.

Gant and her entire executive board were removed from office by union members in early 2022 after they failed to submit a budget or file required financial reports with the Internal Revenue Service.

The board had also reportedly voted to disaffiliate from the Virginia Education Association and the National Education Association. This decision was reversed by a vote of the Arlington union’s building site representatives. NEA established a temporary trusteeship over the local until new leaders were elected.

The new officers hired accountants to audit the union’s finances. Investigators reportedly discovered that Gant awarded herself $350,000 in bonuses and used union debit cards to purchase gas, food and other personal items.

Virginia Education Association President James Fedderman told Arlington teachers last year that the local owed the state and national unions $732,000 in back dues.

Gant ran against Fedderman for the state union’s presidency in February 2020. She made national headlines in December 2021 for sending a letter to the district superintendent that was filled with grammatical errors.

The Arlington Education Association issued a statement saying it “is pursuing all legal channels to recoup any lost funds and hold those responsible accountable” and “has already implemented stronger financial controls and transparent reporting practices to ensure sound operation.”

Gant was released on bond and did not respond to requests for comment.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

Just 6% of private-sector workers belonged to a union, along with 33% of public-sector workers, both down from 2021. Even local government employees, a category that includes most public school teachers, fell to a record low of 38.8%.

While those numbers have declined almost unabated for more than a generation, unions are doing their level best to convince the public otherwise, and are having some success doing so.

“With the resurgence of union organizing and unprecedented federal investment in job creation, the labor movement is poised to grow significantly in the coming years,” tweeted the AFL-CIO after the bureau’s report was released.

The National Education Association touted a report by the union-financed Economic Policy Institute that claimed “in 2022 more than 60 million workers wanted to join a union, but couldn’t.”

Where did the institute get that number? It took a single 2017 survey of 3,915 self-selected respondents, 48% of whom said they would join a union if they could. From this, the institute concluded, “While 2017 is the most recent year the survey of nonunion workers was conducted, we presume that the share of nonunion workers who would like to unionize was at least 48% in 2022, if not higher. Assuming that to be true, that means that more than 60 million workers in 2022 wanted to join a union, but couldn’t.”

You know what happens when you assume.

Last Labor Day, unions also lauded a Gallup poll showing that 71% of Americans approved of unions. They conveniently ignored the additional finding that 58% of America’s nonunion workers were not interested at all in joining one.

Despite the bad news, unions have been able to sell a resurgence narrative for for more than 20 years. Just a few weeks prior to the release of the bureau’s report, ABC News, CBS Pittsburgh, NJ Spotlight News and The Miami Times all ran stories touting a union comeback. Bloomberg Law posted a piece doing so even after the numbers came out.

Let’s add some context to the current situation for unions.

• The overall picture is probably worse for unions than the statistics indicate, since they exclude the 16.5 million self-employed American workers. I cannot find even estimates of what their unionization rate might be, even though I’m one of them. But I would be astonished if it is an appreciable number.
  
• The number of union members working in the private sector in 2022 was roughly the same as it was in 2011. During a period in which the U.S. economy added 15.6 million workers, unions added zero members.
  
• Even if unions were able to recruit every single worker of the top 10 U.S. employers — that is, every employee of Walmart, Amazon, Home Depot, FedEx, Target, Kroger, UPS, Starbucks, Berkshire Hathaway and UnitedHealth Group — it would get them to only 10.2% of the private sector, which is where they were in 1996.

The public sector is what has kept the labor movement alive. Its membership rates were remarkably steady until about 2014. Now, government unions are following the trajectory of their private counterparts, and only massive political intervention will rescue them from the same fate.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

Virginia

This week, public school teachers and staff began voting on whether to make the Prince William Education Association their exclusive bargaining representative. According to the rules set by the school board, more than 50% of employees must vote, and the union must receive a majority of those votes.

Teacher collective bargaining in the state was enacted in 2021, and the Virginia Education Association hopes that it will revitalize a membership that has been steadily dwindling since 2007. Its Prince William affiliate has had troubles of its own, which led the state union to establish a trusteeship over it in October 2021.

Connecticut

In February 2022, NEA released a survey stating 55% of teachers intended to leave the profession earlier than planned because of the pandemic. It received massive press coverage and is still being cited almost a year later, despite a lack of evidence that the teachers actually left.

But state unions got the message that such claims would lead to sympathetic media play, and so many began releasing their own survey results. The latest to do so is the Connecticut Education Association, which claims almost three-quarters of its members are more likely to leave the profession or retire than a few years ago.

The union’s solution is to raise teacher salaries, a policy that its survey says is supported by 83% of the public. Respondents were not asked if they knew what teachers are currently paid, which is about $80,000 on average, according to NEA.

Michigan

The Michigan Education Association released its own survey. It didn’t mention a teacher exodus, though it did assert a need for increasing public expenditures on salaries and benefits.

Fifty percent of voters responding expressed support for a hypothetical ballot initiative for “a modest tax increase to provide more money to public schools.”

Ohio

The Ohio Federation of Teachers accused the KIPP chain of charter schools of engaging in a “union-busting persuasion campaign.” Teachers at the KIPP school in Columbus are seeking to unionize, but KIPP filed a legal challenge with the National Labor Relations Board, which has delayed any representation election.

“We believe that unfair labor practices have occurred, and we may file formal charges on that,” said union President Melissa Cropper. Of the 318 charter schools in the state, nine have unions affiliated with the state organization.

Texas

The state has a $32.7 billion surplus this year, and the Texas State Teachers Association wants it spent on pay increases for school employees. That’s not unusual, but the union is also lobbying for state funding to be based on student enrollment, rather than average daily attendance.

“Just because a handful or more students don’t show up, we lose that money,” said union President Ovidia Molina. “But we still have to pay the bills for that school district.”

The union is actually behind the curve on this. There are progressive proposals to stop funding based on enrollment and instead base it entirely on need. The problem, of course, is that enrollment and attendance numbers are definite and objective, while “need” is in the eye of the beholder.

Idaho

You won’t often find a teachers union praising a Republican governor’s education proposals, but the Idaho Education Association did just that.

Gov. Brad Little’s budget plan would give every teacher in the state an estimated $6.300 raise.

Calling the proposal “an extraordinary commitment to the future of this state,” state union President Layne McInelly offered “deep thanks to Gov. Little for his continued commitment to Idaho’s public schools and leadership in driving education policy that make our public schools the best they can be for our students.”

Utah

Gov. Spencer Cox made a similar proposal, presenting a budget that provides each teacher with an additional $4,600 in salary and $1,400 in benefits. The union response was positive but more subdued, because Cox’s plan has a string attached.

The compensation increases are attached to a bill that would also establish a school choice program for any K-12 student in the state.

“The Utah Education Association applauds Utah Governor Spencer Cox for making teacher salaries a top priority in his proposed budget,” said union President Renée Pinkney.

However, Pinkney wants the two issues decoupled. “It feels a bit disingenuous to put a salary increase that the governor is asking for with a voucher bill,” she said.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

School X has 10 teachers and 100 students. Two teachers quit and seven students graduate. School X then hires three new teachers and enrolls five new students.

Does School X have a staffing crisis?

One would think it is an easy question to answer. School X ends up with more teachers and fewer students. It’s simple arithmetic. But even though this example reflects what is happening in the U.S. today, the story persists that education hiring is failing to keep up with a wave of employee exits.

Fortunately, the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Labor Statistics provide extensive databases of numbers on K-12 student enrollment and employee hiring, firing, resignations and retirements. Their historical data go back a long way.

From 2001 through 2017, state and local government education agencies hired an average of 1,676,000 employees a year, while 1,634,000 employees left, either through their own or their employer’s action. That’s 43,000 additional employees above replacement every year for 17 years.

The year 2020 was an aberration due to COVID, as hiring fell precipitously and separations grew. But schools were closed in most places for the entire year, so it could hardly be otherwise.

Nevertheless, staffing for the years 2018 through 2022 shows that public education still managed to add more employees than it lost.

During the last five years, state and local government agencies hired an average of 1,961,400 education employees a year, while 1,955,400 left. In the last two years, schools have been on a record hiring boom, adding 706,000 more employees than they had at the end of 2020.

Hiring isn’t done in a vacuum, or at least it shouldn’t be. The number of teachers, administrators and support workers is supposed to be related to the number of students served. However, while the education workforce is expanding, student enrollment is shrinking.

The center reported there were 49.4 million K-12 students in 2020 and projects that number to fall by a further 2 million students by the year 2030.

It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see where this is heading. Schools will continue to use the available COVID relief money to hire more employees, until it runs out in 2024. There will be fewer students when that happens, leading to school closures and a major political push to raise tax revenues to replace the expired federal funding.

It will also lead to layoffs, and thanks to seniority rules, those who will be laid off are the same people being hired now.

There seems to be no end to this cycle, so keep it in mind during the 2024-25 school year, when instead of banner headlines about the educator hiring crisis, they will be about the educator layoff crisis.

Groups of retired New York City employees are fighting their own unions over a plan to move them from their current health insurance coverage into a Medicare Advantage plan.

Retirees have filed lawsuits, lobbied the City Council and protested outside the headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents New York’s public school employees and retirees. They are trying to upend an agreement between the city and its labor unions designed to control rising health insurance costs.

The details are complex, but the gist is that many retired city workers are enrolled in traditional Medicare, which is managed by the federal government and covers about 80% of health care costs. New York City’s administrative code requires the city to cover the remainder for all its retirees and their dependents. The city is responsible for paying the insurance expenses of more than 1.2 million people.

Over the last decade, the costs have begun to drain the city’s health care fund, leading former Mayor Bill de Blasio to negotiate reduction targets with the Municipal Labor Committee, the umbrella group representing the city’s 102 public-sector unions, including the teachers union.

In 2014, the two sides agreed to measures to save $3.4 billion over four years. This was evidently successful, and a successor agreement in 2018 sought to save an additional $1.1 billion over three years. This agreement included the establishment of a Medicare Advantage option.

Medicare Advantage plans are required to provide similar coverage to that of traditional Medicare, but they are administered by private health insurance companies. To draw business, they often offer additional benefits, such as dental and vision care or prescription drug coverage. The main disadvantage is that a retiree can be limited to the insurer’s health care provider network. Currently, almost half of Medicare recipients are covered by Medicare Advantage.

What has some retirees up in arms is that the city’s health care fund “is effectively out of money,” according to the arbitrator in the Medicare Advantage negotiations. And in the rarest of events, the city, the labor committee, the UFT and the arbitrator all agree that the only way to maintain premium-free health insurance for retirees is to move them into a Medicare Advantage plan.

Retirees who want to stay on traditional Medicare will be able to do so, but they will have to pay a premium, currently computed at $191 a month.

This did not sit well with a significant number of them, who formed the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees and sued the city. A judge issued a temporary injunction in October 2021, ruling that retirees had not been given enough information.

This prompted the teachers union to issue talking points about the proposal, including “7 things to understand about Medicare Advantage and NYC retirees.” The organization responded with “7 Lies the UFT Spews about Medicare Advantage and NYC retirees.”

In March, a state Supreme Court justice ruled that the Medicare Advantage plan could go forward, but retirees who chose traditional Medicare couldn’t be required to pay premiums. However, he also said the city was not obligated to provide more than one coverage option for retirees.

This further complicated matters and led to the current showdown. According to the court’s interpretation, the city had the right to force all retirees into Medicare Advantage. To prevent this, the committee wants the City Council to amend the administrative code to allow retirees to keep traditional Medicare (and pay premiums) if they so choose.

That is where the situation stands now, but the retirees group rejects all these arguments. It doesn’t want the code amended, nor does it want changes to the traditional Medicare coverage retirees have had for years. And it lays the blame firmly at the doorstep of the labor committee and UFT.

“For our former unions and the City of NY to strip benefits away from us, automatically enroll us in a private Medicare plan, violate the contracts that were in place when we left, is a disgrace,” reads a statement on the organization’s website.

Opposition caucuses and dissident members within UFT are lambasting the union for its role in the health insurance proposal.

“At a minimum, the argument for collusion between key union leaders and the city is frankly more realistic than the alternative,” reads a post on the New Action caucus blog.

Union activist Jonathan Halabi sees collusion among everyone involved. “I have made the case before: [UFT President Michael] Mulgrew, [Municipal Labor Committee President Harry] Nespoli, [District Council 37 Executive Director Henry] Garrido, the whole MLC, [arbitrator] Martin Scheinman, [Mayor Eric] Adams and the city’s financial administration, starting with the [NYC Office of Labor Relations], plus the insurance companies — they are all working in concert. They are colluding. And they leave the evidence all over the place,” he wrote in a Dec. 15 blog post.

And longtime UFT retiree and gadfly Norm Scott has been covering all aspects of the controversy, blogging out “The Adams/Mulgrew/MLC/OLR/Dracula team have found a flunkie to intro a bill to change the admin code.”

But it isn’t just internal dissidents who are riled up. The Professional Staff Congress, which represents 30,000 faculty and other employees at the City University of New York, is also campaigning hard against the Medicare Advantage plan.

“We believe in the long run, a single-payer health insurance program is necessary, but we also recognize the urgency of the moment and believe that the city must not place the burden of saving $600 million annually on the backs of municipal retirees and their dependents by forcing them into a Medicare Advantage plan or into premiums for opting out,” wrote President James Davis in a Nov. 7 letter to members.

The City Council vote to change the administrative code, and negotiations with Aetna, the insurance company awarded the Medicare Advantage contract, are supposed to take place this month. But the specter of more lawsuits looms over the entire process.

“We will litigate this as long as I’m breathing. And I’m sure if something happens to me, someone else will be litigating it right behind me,” said Marianne Pizzitola, the retirees’ organization president.

It may be a while before this all gets resolved, and while health insurance costs keep piling up, New York City’s taxpayers are on the hook.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

10. “I understand that we have elections, but at the end of the day, we need politics out of schools.” — Randi Weingarten, president, American Federation of Teachers (Feb. 7, Politico)

9. “Anybody who believes this teachers union is merely a union hasn’t been paying attention. They believe themselves to be a political movement or political party, and that is the lens through which we have to view every one of their actions.” — Lori Lightfoot, mayor of Chicago (Jan. 5, Politico)

8. “And it’s going to get worse, as more and more people look at other ways of educating their children, particularly with the Hope Scholarship, and getting money for that. You’re going to see decline in all the counties.” — Dale Lee, president of the West Virginia Education Association, discussing declining public school enrollment and staff cuts, referring to the state’s school choice program. (May 23, WCHS-TV)

7. “What I know from my experience with these negotiations is 6,000 educators stood behind every word in this contract.” — Uti Hawkins, vice president of the Seattle Education Association, commenting on the agreement reached after a week-long strike. Only 4,000 members participated in the ratification vote, and of those, 29% voted against it. (Sept. 28, KOMO News)

6. “In fact, there is little evidence in data from the Ohio Department of Education, the retirement systems or our membership suggesting a mass exodus. To the contrary, most of our colleagues are staying.” — Scott DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association (December-January Ohio Schools)

5. “Greco recalls a recent conversation with a teacher who said, ‘I live 13 miles from here, and I’m ready to leave, and I’m on top pay. The road construction on the turnpike is ridiculous, there’s no parking.’ Says Greco, ‘These external factors are forcing people to leave. I’ve heard that from many, many people.’ ” — Ron Greco, president of the Jersey City Education Association (Nov. 16, Jersey City Times)

4. “We will not celebrate scraps when thousands of educators in this city are struggling to afford to live doing the job they love.” — Arlene Inouye, secretary of United Teachers Los Angeles. The district has offered a 23% increase in compensation over the next two years. (Sept. 10, Hey SoCal)

3. “National Education Association President Becky Pringle doesn’t use the term ‘learning loss’ because she said students are always learning, even if not in the ways policymakers typically measure.” — from WTTW, Chicago’s PBS station, on June 30

2. “Yes, educators, we should be starting at $100,000 and then moving up that scale.” — Danette Stokes, president of the United Education Association of Shelby County, Tennessee (Oct. 26, Fox13 Memphis)

1. “Our power only matters if we organize to create the kind of conditions in our schools that will retain and recruit the next generation of union educators. This includes a minimum six-figure salary — now. It includes fully paid health care without caps. And it includes a fully paid retirement where we don’t have our members having to contribute 10% or more of their salaries.” — Joe Boyd, executive director of the California Teachers Association, in a May 2022 speech to the union’s State Council (May 22, YouTube)

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

Because NEA has private-sector members, it is required to file an annual financial disclosure report with the U.S. Department of Labor. The latest report details membership totals and virtually all expenditures the union made during the 2021-22 school year.

NEA collected $374,720,347 in dues and spent it in roughly equal amounts on three things: 1) grants to state and local affiliates; 2) overhead and administrative costs for its headquarters in Washington and offices elsewhere around the country; and 3) salaries and benefits for its officers and employees.

Most of the money sent to state and local affiliates is in the form of UniServ grants, which helps pay the salaries and benefits of the collective bargaining specialists each affiliate employs. In exchange for the funding, the affiliates agree to send those staffers, at NEA’s request, to other states for up to 10 days to assist with “representational challenges, collective bargaining crises, training programs and/or other special needs situations.”

Affiliate spending also includes funding ballot initiatives in various states. Sometimes the money goes directly to a campaign, as with the $3 million NEA sent to Fair Share Massachusetts to help pass a millionaires’ tax last month. Sometimes it goes to a state affiliate, which then relays it to the initiative campaign. Here’s a list of where NEA sent money specifically for ballot measures or legislative actions:

• AFL-CIO — $424,000
• Citizens Who Support Maine’s Public Schools — $165,000
• Coloradans for the Common Good — $300,000
• Fair Share Massachusetts — $3 million
• Florida Education Association — $150,000
• Georgia Association of Educators — $175,000
• Michigan Education Association — $1.7 million
• Missouri NEA — $70,000
• Arizona Education Association — $453,556
• Idaho Education Association — $500,000
• Kansas NEA — $893,520
• Kentucky Education Association — $45,000
• Montana Federation of Public Employees — $183,000
• Montanans Organized for Education — $20,000
• South Dakota Education Association — $605,960
• Win Minnesota — $250,000
• Yes on the Children’s Amendment — $180,000

The “overhead” category includes spending not just on building maintenance, supplies and travel, but cash grants to friendly organizations. Many of these are political in nature, such as a $500,000 contribution to Building Back Together, which “advances the policy agenda of the Biden-Harris administration and effectively communicates the positive impacts of these policies to the American people.”

Other grants went to the State Engagement Fund ($6 million), the For Our Future Action Fund ($2.5 million) and the Democracy Alliance ($270,000).

Smaller grants were given to organizations that could be expected to produce content that supports NEA’s agenda. These included the Economic Policy Institute ($200,000), the Independent Media Institute ($50,000), The American Prospect ($25,000) and the Network for Public Education Fund ($25,000).

Also included in this category would be the $13.3 million the union devoted to the NEA Advocacy Fund, a political action committee responsible for making independent expenditures on behalf of candidates and issues at the federal level.

The final third or so of NEA’s revenue went to three executive officers and 526 employees of the national headquarters. Working for the working class has propelled most NEA staffers into the highest income levels.

In 2022, NEA’s base payroll was more than $69.2 million. That’s an average annual paycheck for an NEA employee of $131,646. More than three-quarters of NEA employees made six-figure salaries, and 42 of them earned more than $200,000.

NEA President Becky Pringle was paid $343,443 in base salary and another $82,657 in taxable cash allowances. Executive Director Kim Anderson was close behind, with a $335,615 base salary and $84,157 in allowances.

The union also allocated $43 million for employee pensions, health insurance and retiree health care.

With working membership shrinking, NEA must rely on higher dues to maintain these levels of spending. And since dues are tied by a formula to average teacher salaries, NEA has an internal financial incentive to seek higher pay specifically for veteran educators, as new hires at the bottom of the salary scale tend to bring down the average.

NEA is in no danger of financial distress — its net assets would allow it to operate for a full year with no new dues money at all. But belt-tightening doesn’t come easily to the union, so it will exert all its influence on school boards, legislatures and Congress to avoid it.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

That decline comes after an 82,000-member loss the previous year.

School district staffing levels were not to blame. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that local schools added 95,000 employees between September 2021 and September 2022. Nor were the membership losses confined to specific areas of the country. Every state affiliate but one that was required to file a disclosure report lost working members.

NEA ended the school year with 2,496,627 working members, down 40,107 from the previous year. The national union is at its lowest membership level since before the 2006 merger between NEA New York and New York State United Teachers.

AFT had 1,189,904 working members in 2021-22, a loss of 19,078. It’s worth noting that only 43.5% of AFT’s total members work full-time.

Five state unions are affiliated with both NEA and AFT. One (North Dakota United) is not required to file a disclosure report. The other four all lost working members.

New York State United Teachers — 411,811 (down 4,384)

Montana Federation of Public Employees — 18,692 (down 1,274)

Education Minnesota — 73,008 (down 732)

Florida Education Association — 129,445 (down 4,682)

Two AFT state affiliates reported unexplained membership totals. For the last six years, AFT New Mexico has reported it has zero members. AFT West Virginia reported this year it has about half the members it had in 2021.

The Ohio Education Association was the lone NEA state affiliate that reported a gain. It added six members. The others affiliates were:

Pennsylvania State Education Association — 137,885 (down 1,458)

Illinois Education Association — 122,167 (down 1,267)

Michigan Education Association — 79,839 (down 1,065)

Maine Education Association — 17,987 (down 324)

Vermont NEA — 11,366 (down 206)

NEA Rhode Island — 9,360 (down 456)

Federal Education Association — 4,617 (down 96)

Most NEA affiliates are not required to file a disclosure report because they are composed solely of public-sector members. But at last look, the California Teachers Association was also suffering significant membership losses. If there are states where teachers unions bucked the trend, the evidence has not been forthcoming.

The bright spot for unions remains the unspent COVID relief funding from federal and state governments. Most of this will go to hire new personnel, giving the unions a greater pool from which to recruit new members. But these anticipated gains may be short-lived, because when the funds expire, the newly hired will be the first to go.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

That investment seems to have mostly paid off. California election results take weeks to finalize, but union-backed candidates are leading in 35 of the 52 races in which the state union spent the most money.

The biggest winner was Rocio Rivas, running for a seat on the Los Angeles Unified School District board. The union contributed more than $330,000 on her behalf.

The union supported Shana Hazan and Cody Petterson with $145,000, and they won seats on the San Diego Unified board.

In Sacramento, $123,000 in state teachers union spending helped Tara Jeane, Jasit Singh and Taylor Kayatta complete a clean sweep of school board races.

The only apparent defeat in the areas where the state union spent six figures was in Long Beach, where Nubia Flores trails by 5 percentage points.

In much smaller school districts, even a little spending had its effects. The union has only 39 members in the Placer Hills Union School District, but a $1,500 infusion helped two candidates to victory. The Big Pine district has only 155 students, but it now has two union-backed school board members.
Post-election press reports have focused on the fate of school board candidates supported by national conservative political action committees. It would be educational to compile a similar accounting of those largely financed by teachers unions.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

The National Education Association concluded that “voters rewarded candidates who articulated a clear, positive message about public education.” 

The American Federation of Teachers echoed that sentiment. “These results show a deep reservoir of support for public schools and for the sustained investment that parents want to help their kids thrive,” said President Randi Weingarten in a post-election statement.

Both unions could point to clear victories, but they also ignored those places where things didn’t go according to plan.

On the AFT side, New York State United Teachers touted its role in the re-election of Gov. Kathy Hochul and other statewide officeholders but omitted mention of its record in House races.

NYSUT backed 15 House candidates. Ten of them won, but all were incumbents in safe seats. The union’s candidates lost two open seats, and two others were Republican flips.

NEA, AFT and their Florida affiliates were the largest contributors to the campaign for Charlie Crist to become governor of Florida. Crist chose Karla Hernandez-Mats, president of United Teachers of Dade, as his running mate. But he lost statewide by almost 20 points, and even lost Miami-Dade County by 11 points.

What’s more, all the school board candidates supported by Gov. Ron DeSantis won their runoffs, bringing his victory total to 25 of the 30 that he backed.

Sweeping victories by conservative school board candidates were rare elsewhere in the country. Reports from California and Michigan show most were defeated, while in Minneapolis, the site of a three-week teacher strike in March, union-backed candidates won four of five seats.

Nevertheless, national groups formed to place conservative majorities on school boards trumpeted their victories, though many of these were in right-leaning areas.

“From November 2021 to November 2022, the 1776 Project PAC has flipped 100 school board seats across the country,” tweeted the 1776 Project PAC. “The parents’ revolution is winning across the country.”

Parent advocacy group Moms for Liberty celebrated wins in New Jersey, Indiana, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida. However, as one news outlet reported, “Victories have not been shared in the 11 other states Moms for Liberty had its eyes on.”

“This election made it abundantly clear that when it comes to key education issues, parents and educators across the country turned out to support leaders running to strengthen public schools and expand opportunities for all students no matter their race, place, or background,” said NEA President Becky Pringle.

But exit polls by NBC News and CNN reveal that parents with children under the age of 18 voted Republican, 51% to 47%.

Future election outcomes may be unforeseeable, but NEA’s post-election message is entirely predictable.

“Now that this election is over, it’s time for all of our leaders to focus on providing our students with the resources and support they deserve, respecting and adequately compensating our nation’s heroic educators and public employees, and strengthening public education as the cornerstone of our democracy and our communities,” said Pringle.

Federal COVID relief funds for public schools will expire before the 2024 elections, so to the extent that education plays a part in the results, the debate will center around budget cutbacks and layoffs of all the school employees districts and states are currently in such a rush to hire.

At least, that’s my prediction.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

The CTA/ABC statewide PAC funds candidates for all state and legislative offices, but it also provides the bulk of campaign contributions for local school board candidates.

This November, CTA is funding 287 board candidates in 125 school districts — from Los Angeles, with 430,000 students, all the way down to Big Pine, which enrolls 155 students. The state union dispensed more than $1.8 million for those candidates.

CTA designated $330,600 for Rivas’s campaign. But that’s not the sum total of the union’s largesse. CTA has a rule that the state union cannot contribute more than 65% of the total campaign budget. In other words, if the state union is spending $1.8 million, its local affiliates are adding a minimum of $970,000, and perhaps much more.

In the case of Rivas, United Teachers Los Angeles must spend at least $178,000 of its own money, and probably more.

As the largest school district in the state, a Los Angeles school board race is expected to receive a lot of state union attention. But even tiny campaigns will see outsized contributions. CTA sent $1,500 to the American Bear Education Association for two school board candidates. That’s not much, but that school district has only 750 students, and the local union has only 39 members.

Money can be decisive in any election, but it’s just part of how teachers unions can affect school board campaigns. For one thing, they can turn out volunteers and can call on the expertise of the experienced staffers on the union payroll. Plus some school board candidates are people they already know well as colleagues.

In his new report for the Manhattan Institute, Michael Hartney found that about one in 10 school boards in California have educator majorities. So far this year, union-backed school board candidates in the state won 70% of the time.

At the risk of stating the obvious, school boards are supposed to represent the public at-large, not just school employees. Representing employees is the union’s job.

LA Unified is used to seeing well-funded challengers to union candidates, thanks to the presence of wealthy charter school advocates. But it is an anomaly in the rest of the state and the country. This may be starting to change. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis endorsed 30 school board candidates this summer, and 19 of them won, with 6 more making a runoff. Conservative groups have also formed PACs to contest school board elections in a number of other states.

The prospect of yet another partisan battlefield is regrettable, but it should at least be viewed in the context of the current situation, in which the teachers unions mostly have their way.