Unions Protect the Worst

I don’t think I could either be classified as pro-union or anti-union (as a whole, I have been rejecting the idea of binary distinctions lately). I certainly recognize the roll unions have played in our history – the 40 hour work week, child labor laws, safe working conditions – the list goes on. But at the same time, I recognize their significant flaws. Above all, their goal is to protect their workers, but in executing this they frequently rely on an adversarial, and unproductive, relationship with management, and worse spend much effort defending poor-performing workers.

When I was an undergraduate, I had a part-time job on campus driving some of the trades workers around campus to perform their duties. Almost all of the workers were excellent and competent. There was one, the electrician, who was notoriously slow, lazy, and adept at hiding and avoiding work. He refused to carry a radio so that he could not be found and dispatched to his next assignment – and in other ways ensured that he would have maximum time between tasks and thereby accomplishing a minimum. Every time management tried to confront him, he filed a grievance and the union defended him. In a small way, the campus would have functioned better if it could have fired the electrician and hired someone willing to work hard for the pay and generous benefits offered by the university.

I see teacher tenure in the same way. In K-12 I see no reason that tenure should exist – in academia I see that it is meant to protect professors and allow them to conduct research that may be unpopular. Teachers unions though protect tenure with all of their effort. In my mind, a system of teacher tenure only protects the low-performing teachers. As a product of public school, I can remember a few teachers who had either long since lost their ability to reach the students, or quite possibly didn’t have it in the first place. The school should have had the ability to fire these teachers if they weren’t effective. Instead, every year 25 students (more or less) had to suffer through a class with this teacher.

This is the fundamental problem I have with unions – their desire to protect the worst employees instead of the best. I am sure the logic is that by protecting the worst, they are protecting all – but I don’t see it that way. I have seen how employee moral can be affected by lazy employees who are never disciplined. What makes me really angry is that the unions want to increase their grab to cover charter schools as well. The idea behind charter schools is to make them closer to their private school counterparts, with more flexibility in curriculum and staff management (hiring and firing teachers, hours and responsibilities, etc). Forcing them to unionize only makes them more like public schools - cumbersome and slow to evolve.