I took the long way around to get to this work. I was an animated film-maker …

… and a sheet metal worker and member of of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. I then spent almost eight years in the Air Force as a C-130 navigator.

To illustrate just how much technology has advanced since then, that box in the upper right corner of the photo contains a sextant, which was my primary means of navigating over water.

After leaving the service, I got my master’s in international affairs and began a freelance career as a .

I took work as a newsletter editor, back when the internet was a rumor, personal computers only did one thing at a time, and “cut and paste” meant scissors and glue.

My first article about a teachers union was published almost 30 years ago. For me, it was just another story, along with others I had written about California’s recycling program, or weird news I compiled and labeled “the outpost of the odd.”

But readers responded to the union story, so I wrote more, culminating in a 1994 long-form analysis of the California Teachers Association for the Golden State Center for Policy Studies. I called it “The Shadow Legislature.”

Three decades later, that’s still an accurate title.

Obviously, many things have changed in public education. When I started writing, charter schools were just a fledgling experiment and school choice an impossibility.

Unfortunately, many other things are almost exactly the same. I recently came across . It was about outcome-based education, and if you change some of the acronyms around and update the references, it could have been written last week.

Schrag described issues of textbook censorship, social engineering, performance-based assessments, phonics versus whole language and more. Then there is this paragraph:

“It’s striking how quickly our struggles about curriculum ideas escalate into quasi-religious controversies over social or moral absolutes. The right sees a conspiracy by the federal government and its secular humanist legions to strip parents of control over their children and inculcate them with relativistic values, witchcraft and satanism. The left looks at every parent who walks into a principal’s office complaining about a book or a school assignment as a tool of religious fanatics.”

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Schools are a political battleground, because everywhere is a political battleground. We can wish for things to be different, but we have to deal with the realities. My only goal for the past 30 years was to tell you the stories the teachers unions won’t. That’s all.

I couldn’t possibly list and thank all the folks who helped and supported me along the way. Some of them, on both sides of the divide, probably wouldn’t want to be mentioned by name anyway. But I do want to single out the good people, past and present, at this publication, ����Ӱ��. For the past seven years, they have been patient, kind and invaluable in making this column much better than it otherwise would have been. So thank you, Romy, Steve, Bev and the entire crew. I wish you much future success in your continuing mission to challenge the status quo.

Finally, thanks to you, my readers. All of you have made my long career, and now, happy retirement, possible.

God bless you all.

But at least in a relative sense, the past five years have not been to CTA’s liking. It spent $20 million in 2020 in a failed attempt to raise property taxes, and the Supreme Court’s Janus ruling in June 2018, which banned the collection of agency fees from non-members, has had a damaging effect, but not quite in the way most observers expected.

By the union’s own calculation, only about 2,700 teachers dropped their membership in the five years since Janus. That’s hardly debilitating to a union of almost 300,000 members. The hopes of Janus supporters and the fears of union supporters that Janus would lead to wholesale resignations did not come to pass in California.

However, it appears the ruling has been harmful to union recruiting of new members. According to internal union documents, in 2019 there were only 18,000 local public education employees who were eligible for CTA membership but did not join. As of the end of September 2023, the number of non-members had ballooned to almost 36,000.

Overall, the union ended the 2022-23 school year with 38,000 fewer members than it had when it began the first post-Janus school year in 2018-19. This chart, from internal CTA documents, shows the membership trends over the past 12 years.

CTA’s dues aren’t tied to membership levels, but to average teacher salary. Federal COVID relief money boosted that significantly, to the point where the union’s draft budget for 2024-25, obtained exclusively by Union Report, calls for a $30 dues increase. That would bring state level dues to $816. Coupled with national dues, every teacher belonging to CTA will pay at least $1,020 next year. Local dues will add to that figure.

The union estimates the increase will net it an additional $8 million, of which $3.3 million is earmarked for staff pay increases. Another $3.5 million is designated as “excess income over expenses,” which in another context would be called “profit.”

Overall, CTA is budgeting for $228 million, which is almost $40 million more than the national American Federation of Teachers received in dues this year.

The California union has several pots in which to place its income, many having to do with politics. CTA currently has $3.2 million in its candidate political action committee, $4.7 million in its independent expenditure committee, $8.4 million in its media fund, $15.3 million in its advocacy fund, and a whopping $38.9 million in its ballot initiative fund.

It is too early to list everywhere the union’s ballot measure spending might go, but it is already planning opposition to the . Scheduled for the November 2024 ballot, the measure would require majority voter approval for any tax increase passed by the legislature.

CTA’s financial involvement in local school board races is underreported. The state union recently pledged $100,000 to help elect Telly Tse and Neda Farid Faroumand to school board seats in the Glendale Unified School District, where CTA has roughly 1,300 members. Tse, coincidentally, .

The union also contributed $55,000 to in the Orange Unified School District.

There is no prospect for significantly diminishing the union’s role in state politics, though it appears CTA will maintain its position through ever-increasing funds collected from ever-decreasing membership levels. America’s industrial unions have survived decades with such a model. CTA may be on the wrong side of the slope, but the slope is shallow enough to ensure its continued influence for many years to come.

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

This is known as a time loop, and the states, “When memories of past circuits of a time loop are permitted, there is the possibility of transforming the imprisoning circularity into an upward spiral, a learning curve.”

But what is a possibility in science fiction is a futile dream in the world of U.S. public education. Those in charge of properly staffing schools, districts and state agencies seem incapable of escaping the same patterns of hiring and layoffs over a period of many years.

The cycle begins with alarms about teacher shortages. These claims go back decades and almost always focus on unfilled positions rather than the actual number of teachers employed and the actual number of students enrolled.

Legislatures then appropriate additional funding as an enticement. Much of this money goes to raises for educators already in the profession, but it also allows school districts to create openings for classroom teachers, specialists and support employees.

As an aside, when wealthy suburban school districts create openings, they attract not only new teachers, but experienced educators from poor urban districts. This leaves the poor districts with less experienced veterans and new recruits.

Eventually, something puts a stop to the accelerated hiring. The effects of the recession hit public education in 2009. Local school districts had added 84,000 employees between September 2007 and September 2008. By September 2009, 68,000 were gone.

Unions didn’t take these layoffs lying down. The National Education Association claimed without immediate action. This led to what was commonly referred to as the edujobs bill in Congress. Ultimately, the reduction in the public education workforce was held to .

There was no acknowledgement that many of the laid-off employees were the very same people who had been recruited into the profession just a year or two earlier. “Last in, first out” seniority rules sealed their fate.

The edujobs bill simply postponed the effects of the recession for a while. Staffing levels continued to fall through September 2012. But they picked up again every year thereafter, surpassing pre-recession levels by September 2019.

The cycle continued with the unexpected COVID pandemic in March 2020. With virtually all public schools closed, by September 2020 local districts were employing 550,000 fewer people.

This was quickly followed by an unprecedented $122 billion federal aid package. Hiring bounced back almost immediately. show local school districts now have more employees than in any other September in history.

This hasn’t gone unnoticed. While teacher shortage stories still dominate press coverage, analysts like , Marguerite Roza and tie the record number of school employees to the record drops in student enrollment and warn of the next crisis in the cycle: the so-called fiscal cliff.

The 2023-24 school year will be the last one for the federal COVID relief money, which means states and school districts will have to fund all those raises and new hires from their own budgets. Some will raise taxes to do so, while others will start to prune employees.

Considering that time loops are a fictional/theoretical condition, it is remarkable how much space on the internet is devoted to escaping one. Most solutions adhere to the “learning curve” method, in which the time loop captive escapes through trial and error, ultimately finding the way out. But it seems that those running the nation’s school systems agree with : “To escape the time loop, we must realize that we are all stuck in a time loop and there is no escape.” In other words, this is the circumstance that exists, and the time loop captive must make peace with it.

Which probably means that when the alien invasion of 3023 leads to layoffs in the public school system, an AI-integrated humanoid robot will be writing a version of this very same column.

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

This would be a triumph for AFT if it didn’t come with a string of asterisks.

The first is the issue of retired members. AFT members are members for life. When they retire, they are not removed from the rolls, nor are they required to apply for retired membership or pay any dues. A growth in retired members actually constitutes a loss in income for AFT.

In 2023, the union added more than 11,500 retired members, accounting for almost two-fifths of the reported gain in total membership. It now has 471,582 retired members — 27.5% of its total.

The other major event for AFT in the fiscal year was the . The AAUP has 44,000 members. Previously, about 20,000 AAUP members also belonged to AFT. Now, they all do, accounting for a further increase of 24,000 members to AFT’s total this year.

Mergers and new affiliations with existing unions are a fun way to pump up raw membership totals, but they do nothing to increase the share of the overall workforce that is unionized.

The new members from AAUP aren’t really a boon to AFT’s bottom line. A substantial number work part time, which is true of many AFT members as well. AFT reported 1,716,448 total members for 2023, but only 43% of them work full-time.

The effect of all this is illustrated by AFT’s finances. Last year, the union collected close to $212 million in dues. This year, that number fell to $189 million — a strange phenomenon if it had actually recruited tens of thousands of new members.

But there’s no need to fear for the union’s finances. AFT is putting its money to fruitful use. It greatly increased investments in stocks, corporate bonds, mutual funds and U.S. Treasury notes, leading to a net growth of $28.2 million in its portfolio.

AFT spread its wealth around to its allies as well. The largest amounts went to:

— $1.5 million

— $816,000

— $600,000

— $520,000

— $500,000

— $500,000

— $500,000

AFT also donated $250,000 to the Amazon Labor Union, but since it spent more than $292,000 worth of purchases on Amazon, that looks like a wash.

Mostly, AFT spent its money on itself. Its payroll for 342 employees totaled almost $43.1 million, or an average of $126,000 each. The union spent an additional $18.7 million on benefits.

AFT President Randi Weingarten led the way, with a 2023 salary of $443,551, which was a 2% increase over 2022.

The National Education Association’s fiscal year runs from September through August, so its disclosure report won’t be available until the end of November. However, Union Report has already obtained internal union documents that indicate NEA lost 9,800 members during fiscal year 2022-23. Preliminary numbers for September 2023 show a continued decline of about 2,800 members, mostly from the ranks of school support employees.

It would be a strange circumstance if AFT were recruiting so many new members from non-union ranks while NEA was steadily losing unionized members. Both organizations are still powerful and influential, whatever their numbers, but the extent of their power depends upon which direction those numbers are trending. Politicians might be less likely to bind their futures to a sinking ship. This would open up a host of new possibilities for education reform.

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

“An investigative team from FBI Jacksonville executed a court-authorized search warrant today in furtherance of a federal investigation,” an agency spokesperson told the Florida Times-Union. “Because the investigation is ongoing, details about the search are not being released at this time.”

Local news reported that the investigation involves the . The presence of IRS agents at the raid supports this.

Union officers would not comment but released a statement that read, “We continue to be focused on upholding our mission of supporting our members and the students we serve. We are fully cooperating with authorities and anticipate a full and thorough assessment of the facts. To respect the integrity of the process, we will not discuss any further details.”

News crews spotted prominent Florida criminal defense attorney at the scene, but he would not reveal the nature of the investigation or whom he was representing.

With everyone involved mum, media outlets have followed suit. There hasn’t been a single update since the raid occurred.

Now, a raid is not itself evidence that a crime has been committed. It only shows that the FBI and IRS received enough information to convince a judge that further investigation was warranted. The presence of federal agents means the situation was beyond the scope of local law enforcement.

But the union’s finances aren’t a complete cipher. All unions and other tax-exempt organizations are required to file an annual disclosure report with the IRS. The covers the 2021-22 school year. It contains nothing that indicates criminal activity, though there is at least one curiosity.

I don’t have a definitive number for how many members the union has, though suggest it is in the vicinity of 7,500. The Duval union reported collecting more than $5 million in revenue in 2021-22, though that number is a little deceiving, since almost $2.8 million of it was forwarded to state and national union affiliates.

That left about $2.2 million for the local to run its operations. Its staff is small. The allows no more than seven people to be released to work for the union. It appears that is the number .

The union has two elected officers. The president, Terrie Brady, has held that position since 1999, and her executive vice president, Ruby George, since at least 2004-05.

That year, the union paid them $114,000 and $101,000, respectively.

Since then, their pay has fluctuated wildly. Brady’s salary ranged from $160,000 in 2006-07 to more than $326,000 in 2019-20. She received $251,868 in 2021-22.

George’s salary had a similar trajectory, though not always parallel to Brady’s. She received $134,000 in 2018-19 but almost $327,000 the following year.

It’s unusual for union officers’ pay to rise and fall that dramatically, unless they are constantly deferring compensation for tax purposes and then collecting it in later years. That may be the case here. But the amounts involved are also unusual.

For example, Brady’s taxable compensation for 2021-22 greatly exceeded the amounts paid to the presidents of United Teachers Los Angeles ($140,000), the Chicago Teachers Union ($155,000) and even that of the largest teachers union in Florida, the United Teachers of Dade ($217,000).

Duval Teachers United is similar in size to two other Florida teachers union locals, the Orange County Classroom Teachers Association and the Palm Beach County Classroom Teachers Association. Their presidents made $127,000 and $152,000, respectively, last year.

The largest local affiliates of the Florida Education Association have a of problems with the law and their own parent unions. The state and national unions have not commented on the Duval raid, but neither have they initiated a trusteeship over the local, as far as I can tell.

“There’s more to come, I’m sure.”

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

And then there are the polls.

Since 1936, Gallup has asked Americans if they approve of labor unions. Every year but one (2009), a majority approved. This year, , down slightly from 2022.

Further results from the poll are entirely positive for the labor movement. Large majorities support unions over management in disputes. Most respondents say unions are good for everybody and think they will become stronger in the future.

, showing similar results, with support strongest among those under the age of 30.

The AFL-CIO had to to get these outcomes, but it makes sense that since most Americans are employees, they would more closely identify with the status of workers than with employers.

Let’s not begrudge unions their day in the sun, because it inevitably leads to their winter of discontent.

That’s because every January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its . And unfortunately for unions, the graph of the percentage of American wage earners who belong to a union looks like this:

It’s a pretty steady decline throughout the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden years, which suggests that changing politicians doesn’t change union fortunes.

How to reconcile the support for unions with the falling membership levels?

Last year, Gallup took this question head-on, asking non-union workers to express their level of interest in joining a union. This is how they responded:

This seems to be human nature at work. Saying you support something is a lot easier than doing something about it. But as discouraging as this result is, it actually understates the problem for unions.

Joining a union is not a difficult process for most workers. Sign a card and pay dues. The hard part is forming a union in your workplace for the specific purpose of collective bargaining with your employer. Doing so is akin to starting a nonprofit charity or small business. It’s a big job, and most people aren’t interested in pursuing it unless they are very, very unhappy at work.

Claiming, as the AFL-CIO does in its survey, that we would all be better off if we just fell in with union wishes is also a hard sell, considering the disputes major national unions are having with their own employees.

is a union of professional staffers who work for the National Education Association. They have been without a contract since June 1 and .

Staffers of the Service Employees International Union headquarters have authorized a strike against the union, as they have been .

Even workers at AFL-CIO headquarters are working under an expired contract. The AFL-CIO managers want to reduce employee retirement benefits.

It’s hardly a ringing endorsement for unions when the people who work for them can’t get a contract.

So enjoy the latest spate of , and calmly await the spate of excuses when reality doesn’t conform with dreams. It’s the circle of union life.

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

Parents and the public are represented by superintendents and school boards, but at school sites they rely on principals and other supervisors. However, in many of the largest districts, these school managers are also union members.

Having seen the gains teachers unions made for their members both in salary and working conditions, administrators unions would like to copy that success.

There are 92,000 principals working in the public schools, and another 100,000 assistant principals. The vast majority have long backgrounds in teaching. The average principal had 12 years in the classroom before moving to an administrative role.

In many states, public school teachers are banned or restricted from bargaining collectively, and the hurdles are even higher for administrators, who can be viewed as both labor and management.

Principals unions were originally formed along with teachers unions in the 1960s and 1970s, but it wasn’t just superintendents and other district managers who found the event problematic. The passed a resolution in 1977 demanding the ouster of school administrators from the AFL-CIO, with which both are affiliated, citing their managerial responsibilities. AFT also claimed the administrators would “subvert collective bargaining achievements of organized teachers” and “cast teachers in an anti-union role.”

Despite these differences, principals unions mirrored AFT in policies, structure and composition. is the national umbrella union for five state chapters and 85 local affiliates. It’s small, with a budget of just $1.5 million, and acts primarily as a federal lobbying arm. The union’s priorities are very similar to those of the teachers unions.

Last month, union President Leonard Pugliese , calling on him to “develop and implement a Marshall Plan for public education.” This is something both and have advocated.

supported legislation to mandate an assistant principal in every public school and to integrate social-emotional learning concepts into pre-K-12 education.

Naturally, it wants to expand its membership as well. “In districts without school leader unions, the workload has increased, but the compensation hasn’t moved accordingly. We need to help organize the unorganized school leaders, so they can protect themselves, too,” said Pugliese.

As with the AFT, by far the largest portion of federation membership works in the New York City Public Schools, represented by the . The New York City administrators account for more than 63% of the national union’s 22,000 members.

The council has an additional quirk that may be unique among all labor unions: More than 53% of its total membership are retirees. While the national union operates on a shoestring, the New York City branch collects $18.4 million in dues, and its president was paid more than $287,000 in 2022.

Principals unions tend to form in large cities. AFSA has locals in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, Oakland, San Diego, Denver, Seattle, Portland and Washington, D.C. Los Angeles also has an administrators union, but it is independent.

While some of these unions have existed for many years, they can’t all bargain collectively. The Chicago Principals and Administrators Association

Acting alone, administrators unions have no more power or influence than any other small advocacy group. But when they act in concert with teachers unions, they can leave school sites with all labor and no management. Without it, parents and the public lose much of their influence over their schools.

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

NEA made that opposition the focal point of the gathering, joining a protest organized by Florida for All on July 1 and then outside the convention center July 5. Its themes were “Freedom to Learn” and “Teach Truth.”

“As this nation’s largest, most powerful union … we will protect our democracy [and] preserve public education,” said Pringle.

But the union’s commitment to these principles did not extend to its own operations during the convention. It stage-managed every aspect of the proceedings and saw to it that no shadows were cast across its self-image as the progressive defender of democracy.

NEA bills its representative assembly as “the world’s largest democratic, deliberative body.” But just how democratic and deliberative is it?

The delegates spent most of their time at the four-day convention introducing, debating and voting on “new business items.” These are proposals for the national union to take a specific and finite action. They are paid for through NEA’s contingency fund, which totals $3 million.

The NEA annual budget approaches $375 million, which means the delegates are devoting almost all of their attention to less than 1% of the union’s operations.

The delegates do vote on the total budget at the end of the convention, but they cannot add, amend or delete anything from it — only approve it or reject it as is.

Which new business items were approved and which were rejected? Neither the public nor the non-attending members of NEA have any idea. The union put the proposals and actions behind a firewall, and very few individual delegates saw fit to pass along the information.

Education Week — the only media outlet to cover the convention — reported that the delegates , at a cost of more than $580,000. New Business Item 69, which had , passed by 20 votes out of more than 4,500 cast.

New Business Item 53 proposed that NEA instruct local affiliates on how to become “strike-ready.” The delegates voted to refer it to committee, which upset the sponsor of the item, Deb Gesualdo, a delegate from Massachusetts, because she felt it left the decision to act or not in the hands of a few higher-ups, instead of the large representative body.

, she claimed the “NEA board steering committee began to organize against it” and that her item “upset a handful of state presidents who are interested in hoarding information and hoarding power.”

Another delegate also sounded a bit disillusioned. “I sat with some teachers from different states at one point. What did we talk about? Our working conditions, our pay, our workload, student behavior … things that were not talked about during the [representative assembly]. Our [new business items] had little to do with teaching,” .

While the public, the press and most NEA members were in the dark about the proceedings, at least the delegates in attendance could witness them. But even delegates present at the assembly were mostly unaware of what actions NEA officials took just outside the hall.

NEA staffers represented by the Association of Field Service Employees have been working without a contract since June 1. In an attempt to move negotiations along, a group of them showed up at the convention center to hand out leaflets and hold signs.

This didn’t sit well with NEA executives, who, , sent convention center security and a sheriff’s deputy to have them removed from the premises.

The staff union also claims it was prevented from joining the Freedom to Learn rally, and that NEA urged delegates not to interact with the staff union.

“On a day when NEA professed the ‘freedom to learn,’ AFSE members and NEA members were denied their freedom of speech,” .

Its demands include the usual pay increases and benefit improvements, but the association also of increasing members’ workload while shrinking staff and relying on temporary employees, which it calls “an anti-union, exploitative practice.”

The association received strong support from its sister unions of NEA employees, the and the , which has its own gripes with NEA management.

The staff union placed that accuses some NEA leaders of prejudice and racism. “At NEA Headquarters there is a persisting culture of mistreatment and disrespect of our Black staff that has continued to go unchallenged,” the post reads.

There are legitimate concerns about whitewashing history, covering up errors and misdeeds, and promoting only a positive, glowing image. NEA’s own actions during its representative assembly demonstrate the union is not immune from such urges.

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

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. to a real estate developer for an estimated $20 million, while to the state for a highway widening project.

That union also benefited from $112,624 due to the 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 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.

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 “” or to cite employers for “.”

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 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,” . “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 .

Brouhard is the and sat on its executive board at least through the 2021 school year.

Williams was 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, 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 “,” 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 . 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 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 but five days later accepted what it called a “” agreement with increases of 21%.

By January 2025, it will bring the average Los Angeles teacher salary to an estimated .

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,” 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,” .

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,” . 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 . 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 . 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,” . “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, , 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 , 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.

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 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: .

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. , 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, “.”

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. , and continues to be a problem.

Teachers union President Cecily Myart-Cruz notoriously claimed, “.” 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. . 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 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 . 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 two unions are planning a joint three-day strike later this month.

The teachers union has , 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. , 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.

Paul Vallas was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools from 1995 to 2001, after the district had been placed under mayoral control. He is supported by the city’s Fraternal Order of Police and business interests.

Brandon Johnson is a former middle school teacher who was hired as a Chicago Teachers Union organizer in 2011. He still holds that job and was elected as a Cook County commissioner in 2018 and 2022. The teachers union endorsed Johnson even before he announced his candidacy for mayor, and was the main source of his campaign finances in the first round of voting.

The runoff occurs on April 4, and we can expect four weeks of fireworks until then.

Vallas is a moderate Democrat who has directed school reforms not only in Chicago, but in subsequent positions as superintendent in Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Bridgeport, Connecticut. How this will play out in the campaign is best exemplified by : “Incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot is out and voters now face a choice between former public school teacher Brandon Johnson and corporate education reformer Paul Vallas.”

Johnson wasted no time attacking Vallas’s record. “As head of the Chicago Public Schools, he ran the teachers’ pension fund into the ground, closed neighborhood schools and punished students who were in need,” . “After Hurricane Katrina, Paul went to New Orleans and privatized three quarters of the city’s public schools, which caused the largest decline of Black educators. He left similar messes in Philadelphia, Connecticut and, of course, right here in Chicago. This is the truth about Paul Vallas.”

, “No CPS schools were closed while Vallas was in charge.”

Johnson was carried into the runoff by a massive union effort. In addition to , he also benefited from an army of .

His dedication to the union was evident when he was asked to name one issue on which he disagrees with the Chicago Teachers Union.

“If you’re asking me if I do not believe in public education, what kind of question is that?” .

Johnson doesn’t see any conflict of interest between being mayor and being a union employee. In , he encouraged delegates to run for public office.

“Run, until there is an AFT member in every single level of government, from the city, to the county, to the state, to the White House,” he said to loud applause.

The key to the race may end up having little to do with education. The focus of the electorate appears to be on the city’s crime rate. Vallas’s police backing helped propel him to the lead. But the endorsements of the failed candidates in the first round will go a long way in telling us whether the runoff will be close, or a blowout.

Mayor Lightfoot finished third, and her volatile relations with the Chicago Teachers Union make it unlikely she will support its candidate. She doesn’t seem a good fit for Vallas, although Vallas did endorse her in 2019 after he lost in the first round.

Fourth-place finisher U.S. Rep. Chuy Garcia might lean Johnson’s way, but he lost the teachers union’s endorsement to Johnson this year after securing it during his failed mayoral campaign in 2015.

It would be ironic if a union employee captures the mayor’s office just as control of the city’s schools is transitioning back to an elected school board — something for which the union lobbied for years. Nevertheless, we will soon see if Chicago voters want to give the teachers union even more influence over the city’s policies, and whether voters in other large cities will want to follow suit.

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

, 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, 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 .

There are other contenders for the job, . 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 , 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 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, , 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 with the Internal Revenue Service.

The board had also 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 and used union debit cards to purchase gas, food and other personal items.

Virginia Education Association President James Fedderman 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. for sending a letter to the district superintendent that was filled with grammatical errors.

The Arlington Education Association 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 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,” after the bureau’s report was released.

The touted a report by the union-financed Economic Policy Institute that claimed “.”

Where did the institute get that number? It took a of 3,915 self-selected respondents, 48% of whom said they would join a union if they could. From this, the institute , “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 .

Despite the bad news, unions have been able to sell a resurgence narrative for . Just a few weeks prior to the release of the bureau’s report, , , and all ran stories touting a union comeback. 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.

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,” 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 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 “.” The organization responded with “.”

In March, a state Supreme Court justice ruled that , 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. , 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,” .

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,” .

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,” .

And longtime UFT retiree and gadfly Norm Scott has been covering all aspects of the controversy, “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,” 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,” .

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.

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 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 , 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 ($2.5 million) and the ($270,000).

Smaller grants were given to organizations that could be expected to produce content that supports NEA’s agenda. These included the ($200,000), the ($50,000), ($25,000) and the ($25,000).

Also included in this category would be the $13.3 million the union devoted to the , 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 “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,” 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, 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 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 and show most were defeated, while in Minneapolis, the site of a three-week teacher strike in March, .

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,” . “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 , “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,” .

But exit polls by and 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 . 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 .

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.

, 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.