Group Claims Victory Over Teachers Union

Teachers unions have long wielded enormous power in the political arena, capitalizing on their numbers as well as their organizational expertise to support candidates and positions on issues that they believe will benefit their members.

And for just as long, political conservatives have complained that the unions chose only to marshal their forces in support of liberal causes and Democratic candidates.

Now, however, a Los Angeles-based conservative think tank has won a legal ruling it says will rein in the political activities of the California Teachers Assn., the state’s largest teachers union.

The ruling, rendered by an arbitrator in a routine hearing over the amount the union can assess nonmembers, involves whether the union adequately justified the amount it spent on political campaigns versus collective bargaining.

The financial impact of the decision is small. Each of 700 teachers in about 100 California school districts who objected to the fees the union charged will get a refund of as much as $150 above what had been proposed.

But it could loom large in the union’s future because the Individual Rights Foundation and its parent organization, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, plans to use the ruling as the centerpiece of an anti-union campaign.

“We want to take them out of politics, not just in California, but in every state in the union,” said author David Horowitz, president and co-founder of the center, which blames teachers unions for what it says is the poor quality of public schools and which supports allowing tax-funded vouchers to be used for private school tuition.

“It’s a precedent that has implications that go across the country and will change the political landscape,” Horowitz said.

Horowitz said the center will use the arbitrator’s decision as a springboard for a campaign to inform teachers of their rights to not join the union and to demand a full accounting of how dues are spent.

Under California’s “agency shop” labor rules, teachers who do not join a union may be charged a portion of the dues the union assesses its members, but only enough to pay for costs related to collective bargaining.

Horowitz said the CTA conducted overtly political activities in the guise of collective bargaining, and he compared the CTA and its parent organization, the National Education Assn.--which plans to spend $5.5 million this year to help reelect President Clinton--to “unregistered political parties.” He said last week’s ruling will force them to be more open about their political activities.

But attorneys for the CTA, which represents about 250,000 teachers, drew far narrower implications from the arbitrator’s decision. Nonmembers had been set to receive a roughly 25% rebate on the $625 in dues they pay to compensate them for the portion of the union’s costs that go toward political activities. But the arbitrator said it should be more.

CTA attorney Diane Ross said the arbitrator rejected the union’s evidence about how it calculated the rebate. But she said he agreed with the union on which activities are related to its role representing teachers’ broad interests in areas such as public policy and curriculum.

“It’s not a question of something being exposed or that our activities were anything different from what we’ve always said they were,” Ross said. “He didn’t find that activity we called collective bargaining was really political. He found that in a couple of areas we didn’t have enough evidence to support our case.”

The arbitrator, Reginald Alleyne, ruled that some of the $15 million the CTA spent in 1993 to help defeat Proposition 174, the school voucher initiative, amounted to an improper loan from nonmembers to support political purposes.

Among his other findings, Alleyne ruled that the CTA had to return to nonmembers money spent to support the union’s vaunted Sacramento lobbying organization. The union could not prove which of those activities were legitimately related to representing teachers because time sheets were inadvertently shredded, union officials said.

The attorneys for the nonmembers had objected to a wide range of activities, including a human rights conference opposing California’s Proposition 187, which restricts services to illegal immigrants, and a teaching conference on such topics as “Preserving Public Education--Challenges From Extremists.”

But the arbitrator ruled that those activities and many others called into question were proper and related to the union’s representation of its members.