Posted on 08/26/2015 7:11:04 AM PDT by MichCapCon
In 2005, the Michigan Education Association had 130,882 voting (active) members that were teachers and support professionals. According to recent disclosure documents, in 2015 the state's largest teachers union has 96,561 members, a decline of about 34,000 since 2005, or 26 percent.
The numbers on the most recent MEA membership came from the Portage Education Association’s website which cites MEA Secretary Treasurer Rick Trainor as its source. The numbers significantly differ from the MEA’s federal report from the previous year. The MEA didn’t respond to an email seeking comment on its overall decline in membership.
There are four main reasons for the decline.
1) Fewer students.
After 12 consecutive years of declining enrollment there are fewer students in Michigan public schools. The schools contained 1.75 million students in the fall of 2002. Over the next 12 years the number fell by nearly a quarter million, to 1.50 million in the fall of 2014, a 14-percent decline.
Fewer students means fewer teachers — unionized or not — are needed.
2) Fewer teachers.
Michigan saw a 9-percent drop in the number of public school teachers over the past six years. There were 111,419 teachers in 2007-08 and 101,338 in 2013-14, the most recent year for which data is available.
But the MEA teacher membership saw attrition from two directions. Not only are there fewer public school teachers overall, but a greater proportion of them are non-unionized charter school teachers. Charter schools have a different organization but are still public schools.
In 2005 there were 6,442 charter school teachers working in Michigan. By 2014, 302 Michigan charter schools employed 10,443, an increase of 62 percent. Charter schools are almost all non-union.
The number of active teachers in the MEA has dropped 22 percent since 2005, from 92,207 to 72,320 in 2015.
3) Privatization.
More schools have outsourced non-core services to private contractors, meaning the people who do that work are no longer MEA members. The number of public school districts that contracted out for food, custodial or transportation services rose from 31 percent in 2001 to 71 percent in 2015, according to an annual survey done by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
Correspondingly, the MEA has lost 37 percent of its membership among professional support staff. The union had 38,675 education support professionals in 2005, but only 24,241 in 2015.
4) Right-to-work.
In 2012, the state Legislature passed a Michigan right-to-work law, which means workers in unionized workplaces no longer have to financially support the union as a condition of employment. The MEA reported it lost 6,500 members in the first two years of right-to-work. Many school districts reached agreements with their unions to extend contracts for several years before right-to-work became effective which stopped employees from being able to opt-out. It's estimated as many as 25 percent of the teachers in the state are in such contracts.
Case in point:
I'm semi-retired, work 15-20 hours at a local grocery store which is part of the UFCW union (United food and commercial workers).
The first letter I received when I HAD to join the union was:
Welcome to the union, make sure you pay your dues ON TIME!
That was it, AND, because of 0bozocare and reduced employee hours, I'm considered a FULLTIME worker and have to pay fulltime monthly dues.
It's a scam to keep union boss's fat paychecks and to back socialist candidates.
Looking for other part-time work.
Since it's an article about education, may as well get the first sentence right.
I take it your state is not a Right-to-Work state.
Good start.
Wisconsin Teachers Choosing to Pull Out of Unions
By Elliot Jager | Monday, 20 Oct 2014 07:13 AM
Increasing numbers of teachers in Wisconsin are choosing not to remain union members now that they have a choice, Fox News reported. A 2011 law — unsuccessfully opposed by unions in the state Legislature, through a gubernatorial recall election, and in the courts — has resulted in a precipitous decline in enrollment.
Until the law was passed, teachers were compelled to be members of either the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) or the smaller AFT-Wisconsin. The educational system was obligated to withdraw union dues directly from teachers’ pay and pass the fees on.
Under the current law, unions need to seek annual recertification from teachers to establish that a majority still want it to represent them in collective bargaining, Fox News reported.
Since the law’s passage, WEAC membership has fallen by about 33 percent from some 100,000 teachers. The AFT-Wisconsin union has seen its membership fall by more than 50 percent from 16,000 in its heyday.
Supporters of the law said that unions were heavily invested in supporting the Democratic agenda and making contributions to Democratic candidates.
“It’s important to have a choice, because we are all professionals. We shouldn’t be pigeonholed into contributing to politics we don’t believe in,” said special education teacher Michelle Uetz, Fox News reported.
“As soon as I was given the choice, I left,” said teacher Amy Rosno, adding, “I realized that it was all political and not about teaching.”
http://www.newsmax.com/US/Wisconsin-teachers-unions-membership/2014/10/20/id/601715/
Has anybody published a dollar amount that the decline in members is costing the unions on a yearly bases?
How many teachers are still locked into union contracts? If you subtract those out..then I suspect the % of those who left the union, and were able to do so, is about 50%
Not enough!
Collective bargaining rewards mediocrity with tenure.
Michigan should study how Wisconsin got rid of collective bargaining.
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