Illinois Public Employee Unions

I heard my first commercial today in the war on Illinois' public employee unions. Now that Wisconsin has been resolved, the feeling seems to be, let's move on to Illinois. The commercial implied that the reason the state is in financial difficulty is that teachers and other public employee pensions are exorbitant. "Public pensions creating millionaires - and we pay for it" the commercial states.  As a public employee pensioner, I wrote a strongly worded letter to my congressman asking him what happened to my millons. I guess I'm not doing this pension thing right. In truth, the average pension paid to Illinois teachers is $40, 798 according to the audited books of the Illinois Teacher Retirement System (TRS). That is higher than the national average, but so is the percentage Illinois teachers pay to TRS each year they are working - 9.4%. As a comparison, employees in the Social Security system pay 6.2% of their salary for Social Security and 1.45% for Medicare hospital benefits.  And unlike what I hear people tell me on the radio, Illinois teachers do not receive any social security benefits for their teaching salaries. Let me say that again because I hear an awful lot of people tell me differently. Illinois teachers do not receive ANY social security benefits for their teaching salaries. They can receive medicare, but they have to pay in to medicare while they are working, just like everybody else does.     

The subject of union busting in Wisconsin (and coming soon to Illinois, it sounds like) was addressed by an article in the New York Times by a name from the past - Stanley Fish. When Nathan decided to go to University of Illinois - Chicago, I asked my English Professor brother Alan if he knew anyone at UIC. Stanley Fish came to his mind. The opinion column in the NYT is a discussion between Fish and another UIC English prof named Walter Benn Michaels entitled "We're All Badgers Now." In the article, Fish , a fairly conservative professor, describes his reversal of opinion on unions and the granting of tenure to college professors, but his reasons for the reversal are equally important for K-12 teachers.    

Fish writes:    

"It has not seemed compelling to those who see an ill fit between what is essentially a meritocracy (the question asked in tenure and hiring meetings is always “Who is the smartest?”) and the tendency — or so it is said — of unions to protect members who are marginally competent. If academics opt for unions and “a belt-and-suspenders security,” Naomi Schaefer Riley warns (in her op-ed piece that Fish is responding to), we might “expect that even the laziest, most incompetent or radical professor won’t get fired.”  

Fish goes on, "It is when I read a sentence like this one of Riley’s that I come to my senses and recognize what’s going on. “Lazy” and “incompetent” go together; they point to deficiencies we don’t want our teachers to display. But “radical” is a political judgment. What Riley fears is that if colleges and universities were unionized, teachers with far out, discomforting ideas couldn’t be fired. It’s hard to imagine a better argument for unions (and also for tenure). The autonomy and independence of the academy is perpetually threatened by efforts to impose an ideological test on hiring and firing decisions. The goal is always to create a faculty that has the right (pun intended) partisan hue. Riley makes no bones about it. Letting the unions get a foothold “could . . . make the environment more left leaning.” The message is clear: keep those unions out so that we can more easily get rid of the lefties."

Although the issue in K-12 education is not so politically charged, the loss of union support of teachers and the loss of tenure would be exactly the same. Teachers who pushed the boundaries, who asked questions about why we are doing this or that initiative, or who had an unusual teaching style would be gone fairly quickly. Why would principals or department heads make life harder for themselves by tolerating those teachers if it is easy to get rid of them? In some schools, the answer would be, "Because often they are the best teachers." Unfortunately, in many districts, that is not enough of a reason to keep a teacher around. A new teacher would be cheaper, and we can mold them to our way of thinking. And so it goes. When I ask my friend who is an excellent school superintendent how many teachers he would get rid of because they are bad teachers, he tells me 4 or 5 out of 200. When I ask my business friend how many truly bad (not just difficult, but horrendous) employees he has to work with in his nationally recognized Fortune 500 company, the answer is well over 20% of the employees he knows. When people tell me they wished the schools were run more like a business, that's when I really get scared for public education. I don't know if you've noticed lately, but the American business model is not a shining example of quality. What business would you like public education to emulate: Enron, British Petroleum, Phillip Morris, Halliburton, Bank of America, or JP Morgan? Let's be thankful that public education is not run like business. And lets not get caught up in the fear and the propaganda we hear on the radio. Do you know who is paying for those commercials? Let me give you a hint - it's not middle class workers from the private sector. Here is the "R" section of the member list of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, which is sponsoring the Illinois is Broke campaign which states in big letters that Illinois' fiscal problems are primarily due not to deregulation and suspect banking practices, but to teachers' pensions:  

BRUCE V. RAUNER

Chairman - GTCR Golder Rauner, LLC

J. CHRISTOPHER REYES

Chairman - Reyes Holdings, LLC

LINDA JOHNSON RICE

Chairman & Chief Executive Officer - Johnson Publishing Company, Inc.

LARRY RICHMAN

President and Chief Executive Officer - The PrivateBank

JOHN W. ROGERS, JR.

Chairman & Chief Executive Officer - Ariel Investments, LLC

PHILMER H. ROHRBAUGH

Vice Chair and Office Managing Partner (Chicago) - KPMG LLP

IRENE B. ROSENFELD

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer - Kraft Foods Inc.

JOHN W. ROWE

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer - Exelon Corporation

JAMES T. RYAN

Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer - W. W. Grainger, Inc.

PATRICK G. RYAN

Chairman Ryan Specialty Group

 I picked the "R" section at random. Any other section would be similar in membership. A fairly good sampling of middle class America, wouldn't you say?  These are the people who think public pensions are, and I quote, "CREATING MILLIONAIRES." Maybe it's because they can't stand the thought of a mere teacher being a millionaire like them. They wouldn't be as worried if they had paid closer attention in their math class:   40798 is somewhat less than a million.