For Teacher Union Elites, It’s Always About Empowerment – of Themselves
The current presidential election season has produced a startling data point. On Sept. 18, the Teamsters dropped the results of an electronic poll of its 1.3 million members – and revealed that 60% wanted the union to endorse Trump, with a mere 34% for Harris. A separate follow-up poll found a similar margin of 58% to 31% in favor of Trump.
More than a perceived GOP embrace of Teamster priorities, the poll likely reveals that the odor of contempt from the left has gotten too strong for union members to ignore. And yet the union bosses couldn’t bring themselves to endorse Trump.
It should come as no surprise that the Teamster leadership chose to ignore the overwhelming support of its members for Trump and made no endorsement. But there you have it, the true dynamic of Big Labor: Union members are pawns to be played at will by political elites.
The great American labor leader and founder of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, once observed that "Socialist publications, Socialist organizers and propagandists spread the poison of hatred and discontent, thus weakening confidence in the integrity of the officers of the union.” Gompers clearly understood that a union used as a political tool weakens the solidarity of the membership.
Nowhere are the consequences of ignoring Gompers’ warning more apparent than in the national teacher unions.
As I observed back in 2019, it is telling that the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest and most powerful union, changed its own rules to prevent local unions from escaping its top-down, corporate structure. Five years ago, NEA leadership made several changes to their bylaws to restrict local unions from disaffiliating – or breaking away – from the parent union.
The first requires locals to give 60 days’ notice of plans to disaffiliate, allowing the NEA to gear up a defense. Locals must also give NEA officials time to speak at a membership meeting. A two-thirds majority is now required to leave the national union, not the simple majority required to affiliate in the first place.
The second restriction allows the NEA itself – not only state affiliates – to establish trusteeships over local unions. Trusteeship permits the NEA to invalidate any attempt to disaffiliate and to conduct what amounts to a hostile takeover, directing the local’s books, funds, actions, and officers.
The NEA’s approach is, in a sense, un-American. The temptation toward centralization goes back to the days of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. But, compared to other countries, Americans have kept the tendency at bay through the vision of Jefferson and Madison, who embraced decentralization and subsidiarity as a means of preventing tyranny. (That’s one reason why, for instance, every state has equal representation in the Senate.) The principle of subsidiarity holds that the best governance is generally that closest to the people, that the greatest possible power should be placed in local authority rather than distant overlords.
The NEA’s position embraces the opposite view, a centralizing tendency where direction and even political beliefs are enforced from on high and local entities are deprived of power whenever possible. In this arrangement, local teacher priorities will always play second fiddle to the national union oligarchy. That oligarchy throws its political spending overwhelmingly behind one political party and embraces extreme ideological views that fail to approximate the more moderate views of teachers.
During the past half-century, the national teacher unions and their corporate big labor model have been a driving force behind public distrust in educators and public education. They have inserted themselves between teachers and their employers, leaving communities to suffer the consequences of an often distrustful and adversarial relationship with their local schools. They have besmirched the teaching profession by conflating teachers at large with union oligarchs with their grift of union dues and promotion of far-left ideologies in the classroom. As institutions, national teachers’ unions have zealously enlisted as aggressors in the culture wars that are tearing our national fabric.
Fortunately, teachers who wish to cut ties with Corporate Big Labor have another option. Across the country and in at least seven states, teachers have created independent locals and voted out the incumbent, NEA affiliate. As a former teacher, I’m privileged through my work to help teachers with this process. Once they’ve thrown the national unions out of their districts, I’ve seen these teachers enjoy greater flexibility in setting their priorities. They’re able to restore good relationships with their district leadership and their communities. They have greater control over their financial destiny and that of the independent local. And they don’t have worry about their union dues being spent to advance peripheral political agendas that clash with their values.
This is the essence of subsidiarity. This is the way forward for independent-minded teachers. This is the American way.
Keith Williams was a public high school teacher for over twenty years and now serves as Sr Vice President of the Center for Independent Employees. CIE is a legal defense foundation that provides free legal representation and aid to independent employees who are opposed to union oppression in their workplaces.
