Teacher solidarity in West Virginia [Updated]

I expect all of us would agree that teaching is a profession, and that teachers are entitled to wages that befit a profession.  Catholic social teaching insists that employers have a responsibility to pay workers a living wage.  We also could note that there are few roles in society that have a greater impact on individual and social well-being and prosperity than that of teacher.

All of these are compelling reasons to pay teachers adequately.



Yet the range of teacher wages from one district to another, and one state to another, can be wide.  My own local high school district in suburban Chicago pays its teachers pretty well.   The district makes its wages public: I can go to its website and see the annual salary and supplementary benefits for each of my kids' individual teachers and coaches.  The average wage across the district, which includes six large high schools and over 800 teachers and administrators, is over $100K/year.  Some make substantially less and some make substantially more.  Even in suburban Chicago, $100K/year is a good living; in the eyes of much of the world, they probably would be thought to be rich, although I am sure that if you asked them, they would tell you that the cost of owning homes, cars, having children, paying off student loans and so on has them living paycheck to paycheck.

Our local elementary and middle school district doesn't publish wages for individual  teachers (at least I haven't been able to find them).  But according to the wage schedules in their union contracts, which are available online, their teachers earn between $40K and $110K per year.  The midpoint of that range would be $75K - not as much as the local high schools', but still one that would be considered a living wage.  And it is higher than the average wage for all households across Illinois, which is about $61K/year.

But not all school districts pay their teachers that handsomely.  The school district that serves the downstate village of Bluford, IL, the lowest-paying district in the state of Illinois, pays its teachers about $26K/year.  The so-called poverty line for a family of four is $24.5K/year, so the Bluford teachers just barely make it over the line.  But the poverty line almost certainly understates the wages that a family actually needs in order to achieve security for basic needs like food, shelter, clothing, transportation and so on.  I'd consider the Bluford teachers to be grossly underpaid.  The work they do is essentially the same work that the teachers in my suburban area do, yet some of the latter are making 5x the yearly wages that the Bluford teachers make.

These discrepancies in wages for doing the same work provides some context for a news development that made our local evening news a couple of nights ago: West Virginia teachers walked out en masse because of dissatisfaction with the raises that the state legislature was prepared to pay them.  Columnist Eric Zorn from the Chicago Tribune reports:

A dramatic and possibly illegal statewide job walk-off by 35,000 public school employees in West Virginia that began Feb. 22 ended Tuesday in a victory for the educators — a raise five times higher than what the state’s governor had first proposed and a promise to attempt to curb their rising health insurance premiums.

Zorn notes that West Virginia teachers are the third-worst-paid in the country, with an average salary a bit less than $45K/year.  The legislature had approved a 1% wage increase this year; the last time West Virginia teachers had any raise at all was 2014.

Zorn's column juxtaposes this stirring labor victory with a court case out of Illinois currently before the Supreme Court, the Janus case, that asks the Court to decide whether public school teachers and other public-sector employees must pay any union dues at all if they choose not to join the union.  Current law permits employees to not join the union if they don't wish to.  That can be a good financial deal for those who don't join, because in a unionized workplace, the workers in a given job role typically make the same union-scale wages, whether or not they belong to the union.   But non-members don't have to pay full union dues.  But current law allows unions to assess their non-members a portion of union dues, enough to cover the costs of these union services.  If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the plaintiff in the Janus case, that partial-dues requirement will drop away.

Zorn believes that such a court ruling will significantly weaken unions.  Perhaps he's right.  But the West Virginia teacher strike may give some reason to hope that it's premature to begin the union death watch.  According to Zorn, the West Virginia teachers organized their strike without the formal assistance of teacher unions, instead using social media and face-to-face gatherings to discuss the issues and get organized.  It seems that, whether or not there is a formal union in place, the need for workers to unite and show solidarity with one another hasn't gone away.  And there is a generational attitude shift in the public's view of labor unions.  Pew Research reports that

Young people are far more likely than older adults to view labor unions favorably. Three-quarters of those ages 18 to 29 say they have a favorable opinion of labor unions, while only about half of those 50 and older (53%) have a positive opinion of unions. 

That isn't surprising.  My observation is that employees aren't treated as well today as they were in the 1980s and 1990s, when I started my career.  Some of it is easily measurable: wages have been flat for workers for quite some time.  Some of it is harder to measure but still observable: workers aren't feeling as secure as they used to feel.  A job can be outsourced or offshored at any time.  And benefits are being chipped away, little by little.  Or so it seems to me.

Worker insecurity and worker exploitation are the core problems that unions were created to solve.  West Virginia teachers were being exploited by the state government.  So they did something about it.  They may not all have been members of a union, but what they did was, in a real sense, a united job action.   Workers who discover the virtue of solidarity can effect change. 

Employers, if you don't want their workers to unionize, don't give them a reason to unionize.

[I rewrote this post on 3/9/2018 to make it a little tighter.]