In the comments on the main page about teachers unions, DensityDuck asks “why teachers—who are most surely highly-educated persons with prized skills—need to be in a union at all,” to which Burt Likko responds “[b]ecause, for the most part, they are selling their labor in a monopsony market, which tends to drive the price of the commodity in question (here, the labor of teachers) down dramatically.” I asked Burt this question in follow-up, but I’m curious if anyone else has a good answer:
Burt,
Here’s something I’ve struggled to understand about that argument. We put the government in charge of building schools. Why? Because it is a matter of public policy entrusted to government. We put the government in charge of designing curricula. Why? Public policy, entrusted to government. We put the government in charge of designing school districts and administering school facilities, etc. Why? Policy, government. All other issues concerning public education are all set by government, all for the same reason: Government just is the body we’ve established to make public policy decisions of this sort.
So why, just when it comes to questions of teachers’ pay and benefits, do we decide government has suddenly become lousy and can’t be trusted to set public policy, and that special interests are the only way to fairly serve the public? The way I see it, if you’re going to make the argument that as to teachers, government is a monopsony and thus can’t be trusted to set good policy for educators, then you’d also have to make the argument with equal force that as to parents and children, government is a monopoly and thus can’t be trusted to set good policy for students.
I’ve made this point before, and the best argument I’ve heard in response is that smaller governments are less likely to be seen as reliably reflecting “public policy,” and are instead in competition with other local governments, thereby driving up the value of getting cheap services and driving down the value of setting good policy. Even if this were the case, is there any other response to the question in the case of unions that negotiate directly with the state rather than with local governments? I ask because I plan to reprise the above argument in my forthcoming piece on the California prison guards union.
> So why, just when it comes to questions of teachers’ pay and
> benefits, do we decide government has suddenly become
> lousy and can’t be trusted to set public policy, and that
> special interests are the only way to fairly serve the public?
Okay, scattered thoughts:
(a) measuring teacher performance is hard, and not very many people are good at it.
(b) measuring teacher performance across a large population of teachers is resource-intensive.
(c) measuring teacher performance is very popular, so people like to mess with the process every election cycle.
IMO, the right way to measure teacher performance is on special case basis: you have some sort of broad check (parents bitch about a teacher, a principal recommends one as exemplary) that has a moderate threshold, and once you pass that threshold you institute measurement, not before. Most teachers are going to be average, wasting resources to measure that is contraindicated.
That, of course, would likely be politically hard to sell.
But be careful about drawing comparisons from teacher unions and other public sector unions. I think being a firefighter is a hard job. I think being a prison guard is a hard job. But I don’t think the variance between a good and average and poor firefighter/prison guard plots similarly to the variance between being a good/average/poor teacher.
“(a) measuring teacher performance is hard, and not very many people are good at it.”
At the risk of getting too far off the topic of the prison guards union where I’m trying to stay focused while I finish this piece, did you see the Too Big to Fail movie on HBO? To me, it powerfully demonstrated how terrorizing it is that no one has a very firm grasp on how national and international finance economies work. The only ones who have a prayer of reading any of the tea leaves are the unelected egg heads like Paulson and Bernanke. To me, the movie was about the tail wagging the dog, about hubris, about, well, about the title of this blog—what happens when an impossibly complex system like high finance gets beyond the capacity of a structured, limited government of men to oversee and control. The lesson of the movie, of course, was we need more regulation, more oversight. Okay. But let’s not pretend that’s anti-democratic, since those regulators will be unelected and, for the same reasons as Paulson and Bernanke and Geithner, to a large extent unaccountable since laypeople and indeed most of Congress will simply be out of their depth to understand most of the rules they will make.
So your observation gave me that same basic fear. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps the people aren’t smart enough to make good decisions about teachers. But oughtn’t we have a strong bias in favor of keeping decisions, even complicated ones, in the hands of the people? No one ever said democracy leads to the best decisions. Is measuring teachers’ performance so complex that it justifies taking the decision out of the democratic process? And if we’re taking that component of school administration out of the democratic process, shouldn’t we consider taking the whole thing out? Does it make sense to do it piecemeal?
> But oughtn’t we have a strong bias in favor of keeping
> decisions, even complicated ones, in the hands of
> the people?
Sure. But that’s the beauty of on-demand measuring. By default, you just assume that most teachers are doing a credible job. If people complain, there’s a method by which they start an audit process.
So we don’t waste time trying to figure out if every teacher is doing their job; as pointed out on the main page and in several studies (which I’ll admittedly just handwave away rather than looking up), most people like their school and/or tolerate their teacher. So don’t try to audit those people, it’s a waste of time.
It’s like trying to monitor every person who enters a store for shoplifting. Not one retail institution does this, it’s too resource-intensive and *most* people aren’t stealing stuff anyway.
If we can all agree to get off the “measurement of everybody for everything” bandwagon (which is flatly stupid), we can argue about the details of (a) how people institute an audit No one ever said democracy leads to the best decisions.
IMO, it generally, over time, in most areas, winds up leading to less pessimum decisions. Screw optimization, you’re never going to get there. Aim for “less suck” rather than “more awesome” 🙂
That should have said:
> (a) how people institute an audit and (b) what happens next
I think the questions in the second paragraph of your comment assume a lot that need be discussed more fully before the questions can be answered.
I have a hard time seeing the position that the principle of collective bargaining among teachers implies that government cannot and does not set pay and benefits policy for teachers. All that teacher collective bargaining necessarily implies is that teachers have a say in what those pay and benefits are.
In practice, and what probably bothers you, is the strong vested interest that teachers’ unions constitute when it comes to forming this particular public policy. It bothers me, too. But I’m not prepared, yet, to say that teachers ought not to have any collective voice when it comes to bargaining for pay and benefits.
I also don’t think that government, being (mostly) a monopsony when it comes to buying the teachers’ labor, cannot thereby “be trusted to set good policy for educators.” It might mean, however, that teachers’ unions might be an important check on the potential for abuse of this monopsony power.
Similarly, I don’t think that government being (mostly) a monopoly on education necessarily means that it can’t be trusted to set good policy for students. But I do think the government’s monopoly on education does mean that parents and perhaps even students ought to have some say in the setting of policy for students.
In either case, it’s not, for me, a question of whether government can be trusted to set policy, but to what degree it can or cannot be trusted. I also don’t see the argument for some collective voice for teachers as being necessarily antithetical to also arguing for some voice for parents and, potentially, students. However, I do share, I think, some of your ambivalence about teachers’ unions as they appear to work in practice.
“I also don’t think that government, being (mostly) a monopsony when it comes to buying the teachers’ labor…”
Why is it assumed that the only way to teach students is via government-organized and -run schools? Why can’t parents hire private tutors for subjects that are beyond their own competence to teach to their children?
Oh, wait, that’s right, because homeschooling is something that only crazy religious people do because they want to indoctrinate their children instead of teaching them, and it produces broken asocial autistics instead of functional human beings.
I don’t necessarily believe any of these claims about homeschoolers and I don’t necessarily believe that the only way to teach students is by government-organized and -run schools either.
I understand the concern, but let me try to compare and contrast how this “potential for abuse” works in the private versus the public sectors. A private sector industry exhibits a persistent pattern of abusing its workforce by paying them low wages and engendering dangerous and onerous working conditions. The workers have little to no power to challenge this state of affairs (e.g., they are unskilled and supply of labor is high). The public sees this as bad policy, and thus their representatives discuss ways to improve these conditions. They could regulate the industry: increase minimum pay for the type of work; eliminate at-will employment; require notice and hearings of cause for terminations; create stronger whistleblower protections, etc. However, this all gets complicated from a policymaking standpoint. More importantly, all these things might have to be reassessed a few years down the road: we still haven’t assuaged the “potential for abuse” if there are loopholes in our new regulations or if circumstances change. It seems smarter, then, to recognize that the root of these problems is unequal and inequitable bargaining power to ameliorate the potential for abuse. Fix the bargaining power inequality, and the rest will work itself out. And, with some unpleasant side effects, that basically seems to work.
The same analysis can be made with respect to the public sector, but with some important differences. First, it’s only somewhat problematic for the government to meddle with private economic relationships. It is, depending on your point of view, somewhere from nominally important to absolutely fundamental to safeguard economic liberty against government encroachment. But everyone realizes it’s a fact of life, for better or worse, for government to adjust relationships of economic actors. It’s deeply troubling, however, for the government to give away the sovereign power to set policy in order to achieve the relatively base result of adjusting bargaining power in purely economic relationships with government employees.
Second, and given the drastic shift in sovereign power that happens when government allows its own employees to unionize, it becomes far more compelling to revisit the first approach described above. If a benevolent sitting legislature is worried that a future legislature will be less benevolent and might give state employees a raw deal, it can pass new laws or constitutional amendments to curtail the potential mischief. It can set minimum salaries and tie them to a national average, establish stronger whistleblower laws, provide stronger administrative remedial processes, etc. These laws may have to be revisited from time to time, but so do union contracts. And though there is still a “potential for abuse” in that future legislatures may repeal those laws, it would take some doing.
Finally, and in part for the foregoing reasons, “potential for abuse” in itself is simply not a compelling reason to allow government employees to unionize. It is easy to imagine the “potential for abuse” in the private sector: treating employees badly is often a quick way to realize additional profits. And if conditions are right, you can continue treating them badly for higher long term profits. The private sector doesn’t have any other built-in objectives other than to realize profits.
Not so for government. Keeping taxes and spending low is only one of its many objectives. There is no shortage of things government spends money on that make no sense from a “bottom line” perspective, but are nonetheless untouchable simply because it is government’s job to set what it sees as good policy. Is there a potential that, from time to time, it will shirk its duty to set good policy and focus myopically instead on getting cut-rate deals to serve the bottom line? Of course. But there are much better and less drastic ways to approach this intermittent danger than to lop off a limb of the people’s sovereignty.
Again, with teachers, I don’t know what the right answer is, since there are many local governments involved, which probably drives up the “bottom line” factor and drives down the “public policy” factor. But is there any reason for state prison guards to have a union? They’ve had one for 50 years, and what’s been the result? Extremely generous treatment of the workers, and extremely bad—unconstitutional, in fact—prison conditions. Both of these, of course, are the result of the public sector union. It’s shocking proof of the danger in taking the sovereign’s power to set good policy for all, and giving away a substantial part of it to a union.
The basic question is, why don’t we trust the government to bargain “fairly” in this situation, and my answer is, “I think the government will bargain fairly.” The problem comes in what a “fair” barganing really is.
In a two-party negotiation, “fair” barganing does not consist of giving away the farm, it consists of negotiating for the best price you can get under the available circumstances. I expect my negotiating partners to use their strength as leverage in negotiations. I base my own negotiating tactics upon that assumption, and upon the assumption that my negotiating partner will, in fact, negotiate. I expect my negotiating partners to be self-interested and not aim at some sort of nebulous Pareto optimum result, and if they do, the greater fools are they! The Pareto optimum is, I trust and take as a matter of faith, what will result from that process.* And, I expect the government to be tightfisted with my tax dollars, because, damnit, they’re my tax dollars. So if the government convinces teachers to take pennies on the dollar compared to what they would get in a fully privatized education market, that’s to the advantage of the public fisc.
But, I don’t think a lot of people going in to public employment have the same lawyer’s attitude about negotiation that I do. I think they expect that “the law” will have pre-determined a “fair wage” since salaries on civil service schedules are not subject to individual negotiation. That’s what they think “fair” bargaining by the government is. So, they take what they are offered, expecting that what is on the table is both not negotiable and, when they pause to consider such things, the optimum price to balance the public good of education and the price paid to procure it. Since this is how they behave in practice, the union provides a negotiating adversary to (in theory, albeit probably not in practice all that often) get the price point to something approaching that optimum.
Burt,
This is interesting, and maybe I have to think about it more to understand the argument. I think you’re saying that, even assuming the government will “fairly” negotiate, the employee comes to the negotiating table with a fundamentally different approach than if he were coming to the table with another private actor. The employee just assumes the government’s offer is fair, and takes it without negotiating. And with negotiating, there’s no reason to assume the government’s offer is “fair,” or Pareto optimal, and thus we have to reject that entire system. Instead, the employees need a union to break the spell the individual employees are under, and to actually and vigorously negotiate for “fair” and optimal compensation.
I haven’t heard that argument before. I’ll have to think on it.
In the meantime, I do disagree with this statement: “So if the government convinces teachers to take pennies on the dollar compared to what they would get in a fully privatized education market, that’s to the advantage of the public fisc.” The government most certainly has other objectives other than the public fisc. If they are getting lousy educators, it stands to reason they’ll figure out sooner or later they’re not offering enough to attract good ones. After all, if the public fisc were all our officials were concerned about, they’d have privatized the school system by now, along with scads of other public services.
Bear in mind also that I’m not convinced of the need for a teacher’s union in the first place, for reasons similar enough to those you mention.
I’ve lived in places (California) where teachers as a rule make pretty good money, and in places (Tennessee) where a teacher is only paid a pittance of a salary. Unionization does not, by itself, increase either teacher compensation or teacher performance. When skilled workers believe they need additional support (health insurance, retirement benefits) and marketplace power (job security as well as raw salary), unions do help them achieve those objectives.
The missing footnote to the above:
* When this does not happen, we sometimes call that “market failure” although the market has not, in fact failed; rather, that label represent a normative distaste with the results of the market process and likely a desire to intervene to alter the result of the unaltered “natural” market process. We all wish and hope for this from time to time and yet many of us call ourselves “libertarians,” which I suppose to be a facet of human nature.
Teacher’s unions are not just about the financial parameters. In general, the financial parameters are closely constrained by COLA and other peer schools. Much of the contract negotiations are about working conditions: about drawing a bright line between what teachers can be required to do.
One important role of teacher’s unions that has not been discussed is to stand as a bulwark against the administration of schools, which is politically accountable to parents. And parents often are of the belief that just a bit more effort on the part of teachers will make the difference for their child. Teachers are pressured to come in earlier and stay later and, as staff are cut, to assume other roles in the school (after school, on the playground, in the cafeteria, etc.). The union enables teachers to push back against the administration that, otherwise, will buckle to parent’s demands.
Furthermore, many people are under the misapprehension that there are “good teachers” and “bad teachers” and if we could just get rid of the bad ones, all our problems would be solved. There is not, however, a unidimensional axis of teacher quality. Good teacher evaluation is difficult and expensive. Unions can push back against administrations that would otherwise use whatever cheap, available data is at hand, and force them to conduct genuine, fair evaluations.
Steven,
Thanks for your comments. Do you know if the problems you describe in your second paragraph also exist in the private education market?
The short answer is “yes”, although it’s hard to compare publics and privates directly. The biggest difference is that the privates tend to serve comparatively small, homogeneous, self-selected (and wealthier) populations. These change the nature of the pressures on the schools and how the lines of accountability are drawn. But, in the end, the forces work out much the same.
I haven’t worked extensively in private schools, however in a previous life, I did educational astronomy assemblies with a portable planetarium and visited hundreds of schools around the country (in the mid-west, east-coast, and west-coast). We often saw the extremes because poor schools couldn’t afford a field trip to a planetarium, but could afford our fees while rich schools could have both the field trip *and* bring us in too.
I remember one non-unionized private school where teachers did not get to have lunch and the administration was quite ungracious about following our contract that required that we be given time for lunch. I remember a unionized public school where the administration wanted to have us doing our program in half of the lunchroom (while lunch was going on), but where the custodial staff refused to clean half the lunchroom due to union rules, which stipulated that the lunchroom was to be broken down and cleaned only once, after the lunch was over. In both cases, the administration was trying to violate our contract and jam more students through the program than could fit in a single day (but were too cheap to pay for a second day.
The exit option for, eg, a contractor is much stronger than for a teacher.
I guess that’s the same as saying monopsony problems are less present for the other ed related purchases.