Carte Blanche: Police And Teachers' Unions Should Be Abolished

krisanapong detraphiphat/Images by Steve Skinner Photography

The past year has been as chaotic and divisive as any other in America, mainly due to the pandemic, but also because of racial tensions stoked by the murder of George Floyd. Democrats and Republicans seized on the opportunity to politicize both COVID-19 and police brutality, boiling these nuanced issues down into simple choices you had to make to be on their respective teams.

Clearly all cops aren’t bad, but there are too many “bad apples” that commit horrible acts with intent. Therefore, the people have a right and duty to change the system accordingly through the democratic process. The same applies to COVID-19 – we can address shortcomings in government’s response via the ballot box. Although we can’t make definitive judgements yet on the efficacy of mask mandates or lockdowns, one aspect we can look at is how public school students in many states are still not back to in-person learning, despite the historically cautious CDC saying it is safe.

What brings these two issues together is their main antagonists – public unions. Police and teachers’ unions have too much power, and unfortunately it takes crises for the public to realize the extent of it. They selfishly protecting their own interests at the cost of the public’s interest, and it drives disparities in education and safety based on race and class.

Teachers Unions

According to Institute of Educational Sciences, as of March 2021, 55% of 4th grade public school students in the United States had the option of attending school in-person, compared to 91% of their private school counterparts. Breaking it down further, about half of all White students were attending full-time in-person school in January, compared to 28% of Black students, 33% of Hispanic students, and just 15% of Asian-American students.

These numbers are an unfortunate reflection of unions driving education gaps based on race and class, and has nothing to do with health or safety. According to a Brookings Institute study,

“Pandemic severity, as measured by the county COVID-19 hospitalization rate, had no relationship with the probability of in-person reopening. Instead, the other strongest predictors of an in-person reopening during fall 2020 included political partisanship (the share of Trump voters in the county) and demographics (the percentage of white students in the school district).”

Furthermore, those schools that haven’t opened are overwhelmingly in large metroplexes, where unions wield more power and benefit from left-leaning pro-union politicians. Again, this has nothing to do with science or safety – teachers were among the first to be eligible for vaccines and adolescents with coronavirus have less than 0.01% chance of death – but has everything to do with unions taking advantage of a crisis and leveraging their power to get extra benefits, at the expense of everyone else (students, parents, and tax-payers).

And here in-lies the systemic dilemma with public unions – they are powerful forces that serve to influence politics rather than protect teachers’ rights. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the two largest teachers’ unions - American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Educators Association (NEA) – are both in the top 20 organizations for historical political contributions. But 99.6% and 95.2% of AFT and NEA’s respective contributions over the past 30 years were to Democrats. This is not representative of members’ political views. According to a study by Education Week, about 41% of teachers describe themselves as Democrats, compared to 30% independent and 27% Republicans.

Last summer, the Los Angeles teachers’ union’s demands for reopening schools included defunding the police, that “millionaires and billionaires finally pay their fair share” of taxes, halt funding for charter schools, and Medicare for All. None of these have anything to do with COVID-19, of course, but in their own words, “Normal wasn’t working for us before… We can’t go back.” They are openly holding hostage the students’ ability to return to normalcy in order to change policy.

Police Unions

Police unions are arguably more sinister in their intentions than any other public union. They not only fight to protect their members from being held accountable for misconduct, but they also fight to keep laws that infringe on our civil liberties. They rig the game for overly-combative officers, who often win disciplinary cases based on generous appeals processes and provisions like qualified immunity. Unsurprisingly, studies show that unionized police forces are much more likely to be subjects of excessive-force complaints than their non-unionized counterparts, and more likely to beat those complaints.

According to a 2017 Washington Post investigation, 45% of officers in DC that were fired for misconduct since 2006 had been rehired on appeal. That share was 62% in Philadelphia and 70% in San Antonio. This are striking figures, especially considering that these officers are potential dangers to the public. In the private industry, when employees are fired for misconduct, they don’t get rehired. They also normally don’t have guns and a license to kill with the state’s blessing.

Police unions’ political contributions tend to be reactionary to calls for reform in practices or the laws they enforce. For example, after calls from progressive Democrats to “defund the police”, the National Fraternal Order of Police donated ten times more to Republicans in the 2020 election cycle than it did in 2018. Police unions have been some of the harshest opponents of liberalizing drug laws, especially marijuana. When drugs are legalized, police departments lose revenues from property forfeitures and federal grants. Of course, their streets become safer when drugs are taken out of the black market, but that also makes it harder to generate revenue.

Conclusion

By lifting the veil on how teachers’ and police unions have worked against the American people in the past year, we can see how their existence can threaten the will of the people. Some union proponents would point to private sector unions and the rights that they have protected for workers, but this is comparing apples to oranges. First of all, private companies don’t have the ability to raise revenue through taxation or cheap borrowing that government does, so private workers unions are much more subject to the business cycle. Second, civil service laws make it much harder for public sector employees to be fired or otherwise disciplined. Finally, public sector unions can directly influence the other side of the negotiating table (the government) through political donations and advocacy. They often are negotiating with the politicians they helped get elected.

These unfair advantages in collective bargaining power that public sector unions enjoy ultimately stem from one thing – that the government has a monopoly on the use of force over its people and their property. When a public union demands a bigger piece of the pie, it can influence elections so they are negotiating with politicians who will increase taxes if need be. Those taxes are involuntary, so tax-payers have no choice but to surrender their property to the demands of the unions. This also extends to policy. If citizens believe their rights are being violated so they want a law to be changed, but that change would have negative financial consequences for the public sector union, they will always leverage their power to fight the will of the people. This inherent structural problem is why the only solution is to completely abolish all public sector unions.