Hypocrisy in Action
The Los Angeles teachers union this week joined a three-day strike by school service workers, such as custodians and cafeteria workers. This means 400,000 students were locked out for three days. Many of these students get their only square meal of the day at school.
It’s not a surprise that the teachers union put its interests above the students. What’s rich is that the teachers union contract is the reason the school district lacks resources to pay service workers more.
The service workers probably should get a raise, but why is the school district stretched so thin? Even a 25 percent raise for service workers would represent barely 1 percent of its budget of $20 billion ($24,000 per student). Faced with a squeeze, most companies would be able to find new efficiencies—such as consolidating underused facilities, taking advantage of Medicare and other public health plans, and reorganizing staff.
But the Los Angeles school district can’t reorganize itself to do any of these things. The 400-page teachers union contract forbids it. Virtually any cost-cutting idea is subject to union veto. David Crane of Govern For California calculates that merely requiring retired teachers to access Medicare and other public health plans would fund a $7,000 raise for service workers.
Teachers unions always want more. After 50 years of accumulated teacher union demands, many schools are unmanageable. The costs are borne not just by students, and by the taxpayers, but by service workers who have to fight for the leftovers.
What’s needed is to reboot legacy bureaucracies to let people in charge actually run things. If you would like to join this discussion, on April 19 Common Good is co-hosting a forum on “re-empowering human agency” with the Columbia University Center on Capitalism and Society. The morning forum will feature discussions among Nobel laureates Edmund Phelps and Paul Romer, philosopher Yuval Levin, historian Roosevelt Montás, educator Eva Moskowitz, political scientists Daniel DiSalvo, Paul Light, and Jennifer Murtazashvili, and other prominent scholars. Details and RSVP link are here. Our goal is to build awareness that structural change is essential, not just new leadership.
The Manhattan Institute’s John Ketcham reviewed Not Accountable for the Wall Street Journal, writing: “Mr. Howard’s civic-minded zeal for a well-functioning democracy—not to mention the appeal of his brisk, clear prose—should focus our attention on a vexing public problem and even inspire us to wrest back control of our government.”
On The Dispatch’s Remnant podcast, Jonah Goldberg and Philip Howard offered some “fiendishly nerdy ramblings on the nature of public sector unions” and “some hopeful thoughts on how America’s legal and legislative systems could be improved.”
For his Old Goats Substack, Jonathan Alter interviewed Philip about unions, his work on Al Gore’s “Reinventing Government” initiative, and what’s changed since The Death of Common Sense.
WSJ Editor Paul Gigot interviewed Philip for the Journal Editorial Report.