Fair Pay for Teachers? Not Any Time Soon

For more than a year, we have witnessed the labor strife between the Orange Unified School District’s teachers union and board of trustees. Two months ago the board unilaterally imposed a new contract.

A crescendo rose, rich with all the percussion of a Tchaikovsky piece. It climaxed April 27 when about two-thirds of the teachers struck for a day. They demanded that the board revoke the imposed contract and resume negotiations. The board stood firm.

Amid rapid decrescendo, the union issued a face-saving statement May 5. It offered to abandon its demand for a pay increase if the board would give it more control over district affairs.

It is not the board’s prerogative to cede that control. Hence, the wage issue will be back in the news soon.

The teachers claim all they want is the pay they deserve. I want that for them too. After my father’s business collapsed, my mother supported six of us on the meager wages of a late 1950s Tennessee teacher, then about $5,500 per year.

Unfortunately, as long as teachers are government employees, they can never have what they say they want. Only customers can determine the wage one deserves because only customers can determine value. Value is established when customers surrender their own money in exchange for a product or service.

If Company A pays its employees below-market wages, it will first lose its good employees. Then it will lose customers to competitors, who will hire A’s former employees at market wages. The market is just.

Conversely, if Firm B pays its employees above-market wages, it will first lose customers. They won’t pay the higher prices B has to charge. B will then lay off employees, who may go to work for B’s competitors. The competitors, which pay less than does B, have job openings because they deliver their services at prices for which the customer is willing to exchange his/her money.

In both cases, the customer, via the market, established the wages. But the market mechanism cannot do that for teachers.

In public education, there is no direct exchange of money between customers (parents) and vendors (schools). That school revenues come via compulsory taxation further impedes the market mechanism. As long as these two conditions exist, the wages teachers deserve will be nothing more than someone’s best guess.

While salary surveys may reveal how teachers are paid relative to others, they are meaningless in terms of establishing the wages teachers deserve. Surveys can’t show which wages are above, equal to or below market wages.

Without the market, the wageteachers deserve is not only unknown, but unknowable. Thus the teachers’ demand for the wages they deserve is misguided.

Teachers who truly want to be paid what they deserve should be demanding privatization instead of railing at the school board. Only through privatization can the market do rationally what the union is futilely trying to do arbitrarily and contentiously.