FAILED
in the State House of Representatives
on April 8, 2015, by a vote of 70-73
. Purpose:The Lalonde amendment would have banned both teachers’ ability to strikes and school boards’ ability to impose contract terms. It would also have set up a task force to study less disruptive means of resolving contract disputes. .
Analysis: Those voting YES favored banning teachers strikes, citing the disruption such strikes have on communities, and the fact that 37 other states do not allow teachers to strike. Those voting NO supported teachers’ strikes, because, as Rep. Helen Head (D-South Burlington, chair General Housing & Military Affairs Committee, which opposed the bill) stated, “we are removing a system that we know and replacing it with something that we don’t know.” (VT Digger, 4/7/15) .
As Recorded in the House Journal, Wednesday, April 8, 2015:“Shall the report of the Committee on Education be amended as proposed by Rep. Lalonde of South Burlington and others? was decided in the negative. Yeas, 70. Nays, 73.*” (Read the Journal, p.976-985.) .
* The original vote was 71-72, but Rep. Komline (R-Dorset) changed her Yes vote to a No vote so as to be able to call for reconsideration of the legislation the following day.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” There’s nothing broken about collective bargaining and unions for teachers. The only ones who think teacher’s unions are a problem seem to be those with an ideological axe to grind–a blind commitment to free markets. History has shown that without unions the market in labor produces inhumane outcomes, as workers engage in a race to the bottom against each other in order to secure work. As any intro econ text will tell you, for markets to produce socially desirable outcomes there needs to be an equality of bargaining power between market participants. Unions equalize the bargaining power of the two sides, capital and labor, even when the capital being used is socially owned (i.e. a school building) and is managed by officers of the public (i.e. a school board). Unions also protect teachers from political interference with their work. If you want to intimidate teachers into not teaching evolution, for instance, you need to be able to fire teachers at will, for no cause, without a union process.
The Ethan Allen Institute is Vermont’s free-market public policy research and education organization. Founded in 1993, we are one of fifty-plus similar but independent state-level, public policy organizations around the country which exchange ideas and information through the State Policy Network. Read more...
July 24, 2020 By John McClaughry The Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal last week published eleven news stories about citizens using a firearm to stop a crime. Here are...
July 21, 2020 By John McClaughry Last Thursday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission finalized its updates to the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA), in what the majority...
July 17, 2020 By David Flemming Harper’s Magazine, a long-running monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, is hardly what you would call a ‘politically...
July 16, 2020 by John McClaughry “President Trump [last May] issued an executive order entitled ‘Regulatory Relief to Support Economic Recovery.’ The executive order includes a regulatory bill...
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” There’s nothing broken about collective bargaining and unions for teachers. The only ones who think teacher’s unions are a problem seem to be those with an ideological axe to grind–a blind commitment to free markets. History has shown that without unions the market in labor produces inhumane outcomes, as workers engage in a race to the bottom against each other in order to secure work. As any intro econ text will tell you, for markets to produce socially desirable outcomes there needs to be an equality of bargaining power between market participants. Unions equalize the bargaining power of the two sides, capital and labor, even when the capital being used is socially owned (i.e. a school building) and is managed by officers of the public (i.e. a school board). Unions also protect teachers from political interference with their work. If you want to intimidate teachers into not teaching evolution, for instance, you need to be able to fire teachers at will, for no cause, without a union process.