Union Matryoshka

posted at 1:40 pm on September 16, 2011 by

The big-time blogosphere is fascinated not just by the National Staff Organization’s boycott of hiring at the Wisconsin Education Association Council (first reported here, I might add), but by the fact that union staff unions exist at all. The story appeared on Hot Air, Instapundit and Megan McArdle with a “how about that?” tone in each.

Cornell law professor William A. Jacobson, in his blog Legal Insurrection, asks this question:

Isn’t that great, education union employees have their own union? Is there a union for employees of education union employee unions?

Professor Jacobson is joking, but the question is almost reasonable. I refer you to this item from the EIA Communiqué of February 9, 2004 – item #7:

Union’s Union Has Labor Problem. Labor unrest is a perpetual problem, even for unions. But the latest hilarity from DC shows that no one is immune.

Long-time EIA readers are fully aware of the fact that teacher union employees themselves belong to a union – normally referred to as a staff union. The staff union negotiates a collective bargaining agreement with the teachers’ union (who act as management). As a short trip through the EIA archives will illustrate, the relationships between the unions and their staffs are often divisive.

The latest dispute goes to another level entirely. The National Education Association Staff Organization (NEASO) represents about 400 staffers who work at NEA headquarters in Washington, DC and in various regional offices. NEASO collected more than $327,000 in dues in 2002. This staff union is big enough to require, well, its own staff. To oversee NEASO affairs, the staff union employs a staff of two: an executive director and an executive assistant. In 2002, the executive director, Deborah Leahy, earned $73,940.

Last fall, NEASO dismissed Leahy for undisclosed reasons. Last week, NEASO informed its members that Leahy has retained an attorney and is considering suing the staff union for breach of contract.

If only Ms. Leahy had belonged to a union! She could have formed the National Education Association Staff Organization Staff Organization (or NEA-SOSO). Or she could have sought the help of EIA’s now-dormant staff union: EIEIO.

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The interesting thing is that not one of the jobs — teacher, union staffer, union-staff-union staffer — produces anything necessary to life.

We agree that teachers have a use in society, but it’s not related to the fundamentals of feeding, clothing, and housing ourselves. It’s an extra. And the whole army of managerial and support staff incident to that extra could be called a network of extra-extras. They generate no profit; they are pure overhead.

The more such forms of employment there are, the further each unit of profitable or survival production has to go. Everything else is paid for by material production, retail, transportation, and the services necessary to operate them (e.g., accounting). Everything. Private household maintenance, the armed forces, police and fire, schools, public streets, private and public charity — everything else is made possible by the fact that we build homes, make goods, drive them around from place to place, and sell them.

310 million people can live just fine, for 85 years each, without teachers union staff or union-staff-union staff. It’s the builders, manufacturers, farmers, truckers, and Wal-Mart workers we actually have to have.

J.E. Dyer on September 16, 2011 at 3:52 PM

Unions once performed a valuable service, but as they gained power, they became corrupt and greedy. Now they’re a liability to a healthy economy and exist only to benefit their leaders. The very notion that workers should be treated collectively rather than on individual merits smacks of Marxism and leads, like Marxism, to the lowest common denominator of performance and ambition. That teachers are unionized is largely responsible for the decline in education, both because they’re not accountable for their poor performance, and because they view administration as the path to prestige and higher pay.

NNtrancer on September 16, 2011 at 7:10 PM

I bet that they don’t get the irony.

DAT60A3 on September 16, 2011 at 11:19 PM

This post has been promoted to HotAir.com.

Comments have been closed on this post but the discussion continues here.

Ed Morrissey on September 17, 2011 at 5:42 PM