Throughout the United States, the union movement, strongly supported by President Joe Biden, has been pushing organizing efforts hard in both the public and private sectors. The Biden plan supports picketing efforts, extensive organizing efforts, investing in good union jobs, raising minimum-wage laws, and more. To Biden and his progressive defenders, any effort to expand union power confers an endless array of benefits without any apparent social costs. More specifically, the National Education Association grandly claims that: “Collective bargaining strengthens the economy, helps working families get ahead, and lessens racial and socioeconomic inequality.” It therefore strongly advocates increased union benefits for teachers across the board, on the dubious assumption that the stronger the union presence, the greater the public gain.
This sunny approach is being sharply tested in Chicago, where the five-year teacher contract with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is up for renewal on July 1. Without question, education within the city is grim. Careful research by the Illinois Policy Institute reports that the level of chronic absenteeism in Chicago public schools—defined as missing eighteen days of school or more—tops the nationwide chart at around 40 percent, with other progressive cities like New York (36 percent) not far behind. Not surprising, Chicago’s academic performance lags: only 26 percent of third- through eighth-graders can read at their grade level, and only 17.5 percent are proficient at math. These weak results spell trouble for the many kids who drop out of school, given that “Chicagoans without a high school diploma face poverty rates more than four times higher than those with bachelor’s degrees.” Youth crime rates have risen, moreover, after the CTU used its clout to force closure of Chicago schools in what is now widely recognized as a dramatic overreaction to COVID-19.
This massive disruption of Chicago’s educational system goes hand in hand with its chronic population decline. Today’s stark necessity is to undo these trends, by confronting both high taxation and strong unions that have driven the population exodus. But the political culture of the city is determined to see that this will not happen.
In April 2023, Brandon Johnson, an ardent unionist and CTU acolyte, won an off-year mayoral election against Paul Vallas, but now, after thirteen months in office, his popularity has plummeted because he has not delivered on his promise to help marginalized kids. Today, only about 20 percent of the population approve of his performance in office, public schools included. The decline of these schools is more pronounced given the relative success of the charter schools, whose population has plateaued given the strong opposition from the CTU, and whose shuttering, for which the mayor had advocated, has enraged their South Side beneficiaries.
It is therefore no surprise that the bad educational trends in Chicago have done nothing to moderate the CTU’s inordinate demands for its new contract. As reported in great detail in the New York Sun, the CTU is now conducting a major campaign to increase the already nation-high salaries and other perks for union teachers, in order to become the role model for public unions in other cities. Its immediate maneuver is a visit in numbers to Springfield, Illinois, the state capital, to secure an infusion of additional funds to allow the city to gain its “fair share” of state funding. The CTU insists that only “more” counts as a fairer share for Chicago, even if it cuts state support for other school districts within the state. The stated agenda for this massive increase in wages and benefits is “to shore up funds” to cover enormous pay hikes (9 percent per year is the target), teacher autonomy over sensitive subjects, and millions of dollars in home-buying and rental assistance for teachers. In addition, a leaked version of the union’s game plan reveals that it wants the teachers to control curricular decisions on such hot-button issues as “Black history, genocide, and Holocaust study, Disability Rights Movement, LGBTQ contributions, culturally responsive teaching and learning standards, Reparations Won.” The hard left turn would do no service to students by creating a heavily politicized curriculum that will drive out instruction that these children need most: a solid foundation in the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with the skills in science and computers that serve as the grounds for education in either the trades or college-bound subjects. This propaganda has to be fought at the federal, state, and local levels, lest it drive low performance levels even lower.
The progressive adventurism goes still further, as the CTU hopes to dictate electric buses and carbon-free schools by promoting, among other initiatives, a “climate and environmental justice week,” which presupposes that there is only one right answer to this question, even as there is ample evidence that similar demands for climate justice, such as Local Law 97 in New York, are met with high citywide implementation costs in the pursuit of minuscule global benefits. The dreadful situation represents a concerted effort to leverage union control far beyond the traditional topics of collective bargaining, at the cost of democratic accountability, parental control, and student wellbeing. Yet it appears that there is little or no pushback at the state or local level.
It becomes critical to note that the evident pathology of low performance and lofty ambitions can survive only if unions in either the public or private sector are given special protections to secure their bargaining leverage. In the private sector, that result is harder to achieve because the state and local governments find it difficult to prevent new entry by firms into a wide range of markets where those governments would like to exert state-monopoly and union monopsony dominance. Thus, a recent analysis by Veronique de Rugy points out that the Biden boasts about union dominance do not square with the full record when union defeats are set off against union victories. To be sure, the United Auto Workers union scored an impressive victory in its negotiations with the three major automobile manufacturers, but the long-term trends show a dramatic decline in UAW membership that reached its peak at 1.5 million workers in 1970, only to decline from 400,000 to 370,000 between 2020 and 2023. Imports and nonunionized manufacturers trimmed its victories.
Dramatic declines like these cry out for some kind of explanation, given that the legal obligation of both management and labor to negotiate in good faith has been a staple of American labor law since the Taft-Hartley legislation of 1947. Basic labor law has changed only at the margins since then. Yet union membership peaked in 1954 at about one-third of the private sector and is now down to about 6 percent today, with the recent slight increase under Biden. One insight has nothing to do with the deleterious effects of unions on the public at large—higher prices, stalled innovation, and disruptive strikes. Instead, it begins with the simple fact that self-interested workers will vote to join and to retain a union only if the benefits from membership exceed the costs of unionization. The two most obvious costs are union dues, which run typically between 1.5 and 3.0 percent of wages, and the added time that must be spent on union activities.
But the larger threats to unionization lie elsewhere. The chief attraction of union membership are the higher wages that the exertion of monopsony power is allowed to generate. But with these benefits come hidden costs. First, the higher rates reduce the number of workers who can claim these benefits, which paradoxically tends to reduce the size of union’s political base. In addition, unionized firms face competition from nonunionized firms, including new entrants from imports and nonunion domestic firms. These businesses can reap genuine gains because of their low wages and more efficient workforce, which is not handicapped by union work rules that prevent the efficient redeployment of labor and capital, and the contracting out of certain tasks to independent firms. And this is to say nothing of unions’ use of their members’ dues on partisan political expenditures, which often are at odds with the social beliefs of their employees. Thus, the hidden costs of union membership can lead to a massive loss in membership with the closure of unionized plants to the benefit of their more efficient rivals. Membership drives, such as that going on in the South, may dent this advantage in the short run, but the risks of overreach will lead to union defeats in elections and to the reduction in force even with union drives.
As should be expected, public education operates in a very different environment. First, it is harder for private rivals to enter the school market, given the adamant and effective opposition of unions to charter schools, religious schools, and homeschooling. Second, legislatures, as in Chicago, often are allies, not opponents, of unions.
But overall inefficiencies of union representation persist, which is why unions control only 6 percent of the private workforce—while holding onto 33 percent of public sector employees, with a slight downward trend in recent years. And that movement is far too slow. What is needed today is not some erosion in public union strength, but a legislative decision to disallow for public unions on the one side, which should be offset by a rule that requires local and county governments to compete with each other for workers’ services. Anything less will not foster a restoration of competitive forces, and ensures that the downward cycle so evident in Chicago will continue unabated.
