Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The recent Janus v. AFCSME (2018) decision has fundamentally changed the institutional context for US teachers’ unions by ruling that public sector unions cannot collect “agency fees” from non-members. Although teachers’ unions are largely considered the most powerful players in education politics, little evidence exists to help scholars and policymakers predict the consequences of the new labor restrictions in the Janus decision. Quasi-experimental work has tended to show that laws facilitating unionization decrease school efficiency, but this literature remains relatively thin, and only a few, recent studies have considered the effects of laws hindering unionization, focusing on teacher outcomes in a few states. To fill this gap, I examine the effects of three types of restrictive state labor laws in a differences-in-differences framework using a new, longitudinal data set with numerous historical measures going back to the 1940s.

To guide my research, I present three theories that emerge from the literature: teacher voice, rent seeking, and progressive coalition building. The teacher voice framework suggests that stronger unions improve school productivity by enabling teachers and their representatives to share valuable information with school leadership and state legislators. Consequently, to examine this theory, I look at the impact of restrictive labor laws on NEA membership, teacher salaries, per pupil expenditures, pupil/teacher ratios, and student achievement on NAEP tests. In contrast, the rent seeking framework suggests that teachers’ unions pursue teachers’ job interests at the expense of student interests and school efficiency. The aforementioned outcomes also help to examine this theory, but I also look at policies aimed at increasing school efficiency including charter school laws, private school choice programs, and Teach For America expansion. Finally, from the broader political science and labor economics literature emerges a progressive coalition building framework, which conceptualizes unions as organizers that can mobilize to pressure politicians to advance redistributive policies that might be unpopular with economic elites. For this theory I also examine the effects on state minimum wages, welfare benefits, and corporate tax rates, and I dig deeper into the effects on student achievement, examining subgroups of students experiencing marginalizing systems.

I first examine the present generation of restrictive labor laws, focusing on policies prohibiting agency fees for teachers’ unions (i.e., Right to Work). RTW leads to declines in teacher’s union membership, teacher salaries, per pupil expenditures, and increases class sizes. Further, RTW increases the likelihood of private school choice programs and decreases NAEP scores. A further examination using historical data going back to the 1940s and also examining laws prohibiting strikes and collective bargaining suggests that the combination of these laws produces compounding effects that tend to lead to even larger effects on union membership, salaries, expenditures, and class sizes. Historical models also show that laws hindering teacher unionization tend to reduce state minimum wages and welfare benefits. Given theses results, the findings are most consistent with an expanded teacher voice framework that considers how teachers’ unions affect classrooms through negotiating as well as how they influence state politics through mobilizing and lobbying.