Senate Bill 5 testimony

Testimony before the Commerce and Labor Committee, Ohio House of Representatives, in Opposition to Senate Bill 5 Wednesday, March 16, 2011 Chairman Uecker, Ranking Minority Member Yuko, and members of the Committee, I want to thank you for this opportunity to meet with you on the topic of public employee collective bargaining. I presently serve the 33,000 members of the North Eastern Ohio Education Association as their Executive Director, and I have had the opportunity to meet some of you in connection with my work there. Before my employment by NEOEA, I was a teacher and local union president in two school districts in northeastern Ohio, both before and after passage in 1983 of Ohio’s present Collective Bargaining Law, and it is about those experiences that I would like to talk with you today. What I observed over and over again as a local president is that students are best served by teachers who can be creative, courageous, and enterprising, and that strong unions, due process rights, and effective evaluation procedures are the best way to encourage those qualities. In the school year 1976-77, I was president of a teachers union in southeastern Cuyahoga County. Presidents served for a year as president-elect before serving a year as president. Teachers and the Board had a Memorandum of Understanding which functioned as a Collective Bargaining Agreement, and we periodically negotiated amendments to its terms. In the spring of 1977, the school district had a large renewal levy scheduled on the May ballot, and in April, 72 of my members were nonrenewed. In those days, limited-contract teachers could be nonrenewed without the employer stating any reasons. It was widely assumed that the reason for the nonrenewals was financial uncertainty due to the pending levy and that the nonrenewed teachers would be rehired if the levy passed, but neither the school administration nor the Board would say that for the record. That refusal led to speculation that finances weren’t the only reason for the nonrenewals. The layoffs had nothing to do with seniority: more senior teachers were laid off while less senior, identically-licensed teachers were retained. Comparisons of administrative observations and evaluations established that teaching quality was not a factor. What was clear was that while the school district had nonrenewed about one-third of the teaching staff, the superintendent had selected all of my officers and about three-quarters of my Executive Committee for nonrenewal. We believed then, and I believe now, that the nonrenewals were a reprisal for union activity. Even though strikes in those days were illegal, our members set a strike date. The strike was averted when the president-elect and I met with the superintendent and hammered out an agreement in which the Board identified finances as the reason for most of the nonrenewals and provided a guarantee that they would be rehired if the levy passed. The levy did pass, and 70 of my teachers were rehired. The president-elect and I were not rehired, and each of us eventually found teaching positions elsewhere. Ladies and gentlemen, I recount these events not to rehash an old war story, but to draw some lessons from it.

  • First: Domination and intimidation of union leaders resonates throughout a staff. Our dismissal for union activities was standard operating procedure, not an isolated incident. Reprisals made that school system a fearful place, and teachers worked in an atmosphere of coercion and reprisal.
  • Second: A system that puts unchecked authority in the hands of one party is ripe for abuse. I don’t say that all supervisors, principals, and superintendents are vindictive; but experience teaches us that all people make mistakes and many people can be vindictive, and unilateral authority invites abuse. I suspect that few of us have ever seen a party to any relationship who could be neutral about disputes in that relationship.
  • Third: Clearly identified and mutually agreed-upon systems of due process, retention, transfer, and dispute resolution protect all the parties and make schools better places. While Senate Bill 5 does not completely eliminate collective bargaining for teachers, it would weaken unions as effective advocates for teachers.
  • Fourth: The working conditions of teachers become the learning conditions of their students. Intimidated, nervous, fearful people may be easy to manage, but they aren’t likely to be courageous, innovative, creative teachers, and their students pay the price. My president-elect and I moved on in 1977, but we left behind a school system in which morale was poor for both teachers and students.

Ladies and gentlemen, I do not argue that collective bargaining practices in Ohio are perfect. What I do respectfully suggest is what I have always seen at the negotiating table: that the best remedy for the problems of collective bargaining is not less bargaining, but more. Thank you for your kind attention.

Human Rights Violation

For the last few weeks, the Insurance, Banking, and Commerce Committee of the Ohio Senate has been considering Senate Bill 5, which would effectively end collective bargaining for public employees. Although this issue is sometimes cast purely as an economic and political controversy, it is also a social justice issue. Catholic teaching upholds the rights of workers to form unions. In his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), Pope Leo XIII upheld the right of workers to form unions: “. . . every precaution should be taken not to violate the rights of individuals and not to impose unreasonable regulations under pretense of public benefit. For laws only bind when they are in accordance with right reason, and, hence, with the eternal law of God” (section 52). In “Economic Justice for All” (1986), the American bishops wrote, “The Church fully supports the right of workers to form unions or other associations to secure their rights to fair wages and working conditions” (section 104). Other faith and secular traditions uphold this right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, declares (section 23) that “everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.” Furthermore, Senate Bill 5 is discriminatory. It does not attack the rights of all workers, but only those of that minority of workers employed as public employees. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963), Martin Luther King defined these sorts of discriminatory statutes as unjust: “An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself.” King cited St. Augustine’s statement that “an unjust law is no law at all” in his justification of civil disobedience, declaring that “one has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

Why Collective Bargaining Rights Matter

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

First, with regard to public employees in general, let’s be clear: Senate Bill 5 removes the right of state employees to bargain collectively. For other public employees like teachers, unions aren’t banned: they’re just neutered. This is a violation of the social justice teachings of many religions, including mine, and if passed it will be an unjust, discriminatory law that will impose on a minority what the majority will not impose on itself. So the bill is, quite simply, immoral, and that should be enough to say.
But many of my friends feel that they didn’t (or don’t) make use of their union membership when they were (or are) teaching, and they wonder what they would miss if this legislation were passed. Here, from a letter to the Cleveland Teachers Union from its attorney, is a list of things that would be removed by the stroke of a pen.
  • Tenure: SB 5 would eliminate the due-process rights of continuing contracts for all new hires and eliminate limited contracts of more than one year.
  • Compensation: SB 5 would eliminate the negotiated training and experience grids that school districts use to calculate salaries. Instead, it requires school districts to base compensation on “merit,” which remains undefined.
  • Health care: It would be unlawful for a school district to negotiate its employees’ health care plans or to charge less than 20% of the cost.
  • Seniority: It would be unlawful for a school district to base layoffs on seniority within certification area. School districts would be free to adopt virtually any other criteria they wished, and those criteria would not be a subject of bargaining.
  • Class sizes: It would be unlawful for a school district to negotiate any provisions regarding class size, including provisions for special education staffing.
  • Leaves: It would be unlawful for a school district to negotiate sick leave, maternity leave, or assault leave.

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

Senate Bill 5 has received so much negative publicity – and is so obviously overreaching on the part of its author – that we have a chance of defeating it or removing its more egregious provisions. But the unfortunate fact is that the current Governor and many (not all) of the members of the Republican majority have set the destruction of collective bargaining rights for public employees as a key goal, and this fits into a national movement fueled by components of the far right. These ideas won’t go away: even if we’re able to block SB 5, we’ll need to fight for our collective bargaining right for years to come.
I’ll close with this special comment for my Republican friends, especially those from Aurora: I respect conservatism. I began my political life as a Goldwater Republican, and I still believe in the principles of small government, individual responsibility, and fiscal restraint. But I also believe in public schools, and part of the Republican party doesn’t share that value. If you’re a teacher and also a Republican, you need to know that your party leadership has walked away from you. You need to call them back, and that’s something a Democrat or Independent can’t do. All of us who live in Ohio need to call our state senators; OEA has set up a hotline for this purpose at (888) 907-7309. If your Senator is a Republican and you’re a Republican, you really need to do this, and you need to make it clear that you are a Republican and you don’t approve of their attacks on public schools and the people who work there.