The bottom line for teachers unions*** Yet nowhere in this gusher of news and comment can you find the views of The Newspaper Guild, one of the nation's largest media unions and the one that represents reporters at the Times. Neither Google nor Nexis turns up anything -- not a single article or transcript or Web post -- quoting a Guild official on the scandal's significance. No one seems to care about the union's reactions to the Blair affair, or its recommendations on how to prevent such ignominy in the future, or what it thinks the episode says about racial preferences in the newsroom.
And that is as it should be.
Because like all labor unions, the Newspaper Guild exists for one reason: to promote its members' economic interests. Those include higher pay, better benefits, easier work conditions, and less discipline -- all of which rank higher on any union's list of priorities than tightening professional standards or advancing the public good. No one asks the Guild's views on the state of US journalism for the same reason no one asks the United Auto Workers to comment on federal transportation policy: Anything they said would be tainted by their vested interest in winning more money and better terms for their members. Unions are special pleaders; no one mistakes them for impartial observers or disinterested honest brokers. Except when it comes to teachers unions.
If the UAW proposed that domestic automobile manufacturers be paid a federal subsidy for each new employee they hired, everyone would recognize its self-serving aims -- to swell the ranks of auto workers and increase its own membership. But when teachers unions demand hefty increases in education spending or mandatory reductions in class size, they get a respectful hearing. Union officials are routinely quoted in the media and invited to testify before legislative committees. And yet their aims are no less self-serving and their interests no less mercenary than those of any other union. So why the difference?***
The probers and the NEA
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040330-090531-8720r.htm Earlier this month, news reports revealed that the Labor Department has been engaged in an investigation into the political expenditures by the National Education Association (NEA), the nation's largest union. The investigation began in April 2002, shortly after Landmark Legal Foundation filed its complaint, which documented that the NEA had spent tens of millions of dollars on political activity since 1994. The union, however, has failed to disclose any of those political expenditures in its annual LM-2 filing with the Labor Department.
It has been impossible for the Labor Department and any of the NEA's 2.7 million members to "determine from the NEA's LM-2s for any years since at least 1994 that the union has allocated any resources for political purposes," Landmark has said.
What makes such a situation unacceptable is the explicit acknowledgement by NEA General Counsel Robert Chanin that the NEA pursues a robust political agenda. Indeed, in a speech before the National Council of State Education Associations, Mr. Chanin bragged about the NEA's "political power and effectiveness at all levels." He also asserted that the national union and its affiliates "have the ability to help implement the type of liberal social and economic agenda that [our opponents] find unacceptable."
Mr. Chanin's chief adversary has been Landmark President Mark R. Levin, who has spent the last several years working to require greater accountability from the NEA. Yet, as Mr. Levin has declared on numerous occasions, Landmark isn't at all concerned about the NEA exercising its political power — as long as it does so within the rules that govern tax-exempt organizations. While the NEA is entitled to spend members' dues on political activity, it is required by federal law to pay taxes on those political expenditures. That might explain why the NEA has been so reluctant to reveal the cost of its extensive political activities, which are spearheaded by its 1,800 UniServ directors.
Operating in virtually every congressional district, UniServ directors are required, according to union documents unearthed by Landmark, to engage in "developing and/or executing local association political action." The NEA spends more than $75 million annually to fund UniServ activities. But it has refused since at least 1994 to acknowledge on its annual Form 990 tax returns that even a dollar of those expenditures have been politically related. After receiving extensively documented complaints from Landmark, the IRS last year launched an audit of the NEA's finances.
If the investigations bring about the transparency and accountability that have been lacking for decades throughout the union movement, they will have performed a great service, not only to the millions of dues-paying union members but to all taxpayers, who, it is hoped, will no longer be required to subsidize the political activities of Big Labor bosses.