Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

Hotel problems solved, I’m getting ready to head to Chicago for the National Education Association Representative Assembly. Stay tuned to these pages for all the ups and downs, but enjoy your Independence Day weekend.

I’ve begun posting the updated 2008-09 enrollment, staffing and spending data for each of some 13,600 public school districts in the United States. As I write this, the numbers for Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas and California are up, and I expect to add a dozen or so states today.

I hope to have them all done before I leave for Chicago – assuming I ever find out where I’m staying. Arrangements have been complicated by the fact that NEA won’t be using Hyatt hotels due to a labor dispute.

It took an extra few months, but here are NEA’s membership numbers for 2009-10. They don’t have a specific date, but traditionally they have been computed in May, in time for the end of the school year. Since most layoffs, retirements and “profession departures” occur during the summer, this represents a rosier picture than it would in September.

NEA’s retired membership is growing (up 9,200 in the last year) but it’s coming at the expense of active membership, that is, teachers and education support employees working in public school districts. NEA reports 3,204,185 total members, of whom 2,866,063 are active.

Here is the breakdown of each state’s active members, along with the percentage change from 2008-09.

ALABAMA – 75,590 (down 0.9%)

ALASKA – 11,567 (up 3.8%)

ARIZONA – 29,617 (down 5.2%)

ARKANSAS – 12,847 (down 4.4%)

CALIFORNIA – 309,714 (down 4.2%)

COLORADO – 36,991 (up 3.7%)

CONNECTICUT – 37,833 (down 0.6%)

DELAWARE – 11,037 (up 0.9%)

FLORIDA – 129,001 (down 0.9%)

GEORGIA – 33,109 (down 1.9%)

HAWAII – 12,439 (down 1.2%)

IDAHO – 11,608 (down 0.3%)

ILLINOIS – 130,875 129,841 (up 0.8%)

INDIANA – 46,275 (down 2.6%)

IOWA – 36,076 (down 0.9%)

KANSAS – 25,462 (down 3.6%)

KENTUCKY – 31,684 (down 1.6%)

LOUISIANA – 15,005 (up 4.4%)

MAINE – 20,606 (up 0.3%)

MARYLAND – 66,772 (up 0.3%)

MASSACHUSETTS – 99,162 (down 0.3%)

MICHIGAN – 124,076 (down 3.8%)

MINNESOTA – 74,310 (7 fewer members)

MISSISSIPPI – 5,244 (down 4.5%)

MISSOURI – 29,770 (down 0.1%)

MONTANA – 14,166 (up 2.3%)

NEBRASKA – 22,033 (down 0.8%)

NEVADA – 25,974 (down 3.9%)

NEW HAMPSHIRE – 15,899 (up 0.9%)

NEW JERSEY – 178,723 (down 0.6%)

NEW MEXICO – 8,261 (up 0.4%)

NEW YORK – 393,883 (down 1.5%)

NORTH CAROLINA – 44,970 (down 6.3%)

NORTH DAKOTA – 7,264 (up 2.3%)

OHIO – 119,237 (down 0.2%)

OKLAHOMA – 23,284 (down 2.9%)

OREGON – 41,404 (down 2.5%)

PENNSYLVANIA – 158,982 (up 0.3%)

RHODE ISLAND – 9,038 (down 1.1%)

SOUTH CAROLINA – 7,180 (down 10.1%)

SOUTH DAKOTA – 5,810 (down 0.1%)

TENNESSEE – 46,694 (down 1.2%)

TEXAS – 46,550 (up 5.7%)

UTAH – 17,687 (down 2.7%)

VERMONT – 10,872 (up 0.8%)

VIRGINIA – 53,913 (down 4.2%)

WASHINGTON – 79,143 (down 1.2%)

WEST VIRGINIA – 11,044 (down 4.6%)

WISCONSIN – 86,456 (down 1.5%)

WYOMING – 5,754 (down 1.3%)

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA - 323 (down 12.9%)

FEDERAL – 5,866 (up 3.0%)

HAWAII-UHPA – 3,130 (up 2.6%)

UTAH-USEA – 5,720 (down 1.5%)

DIRECT - 133 (down 14.2%)

NATIONAL TOTAL – 2,866,063 (down 1.4%)

UPDATE: Oops. Illinois was inadvertently omitted. Corrected now.

At the Huffington Post, Art Brodsky weighs in from the left on liberal and union support for the AT&T/T-Mobile merger:

But what’s in it for the (Communications Workers of America)? Remember that figure that allowing AT&T to buy T-Mobile will give 20,000 employees “a real opportunity” to form a union. What that number doesn’t tell you is that T-Mobile in 2009 was named “one of the 100 best companies to work for” by Fortune magazine, the first telecom company to be so included. Avoiding layoffs and having generous child care subsidies were the reasons they were included.

More to the point, T-Mobile now has about 40,000 employees. So CWA took half of them right off the top, assuming that their partner, job-killing but unionized AT&T, wouldn’t keep them around.

The bottom line: for a chance — just a chance –  to get 20,000 new members, CWA is willing to lead progressive organizations and Democrats into a world in which AT&T and the (nonunion) Verizon Wireless rule the air, creating  that almost duopoly, setting up a GSM monopoly, squeezing out smaller players and setting the stage for higher prices, fewer features on phones, and more stringent bandwidth caps. Or just about anything else those two companies want to do as their protectors in Congress (hint: not usually Democrats) will resist regulation to the bitter end claiming the “market” will solve all and that we couldn’t possibly have regulation.

It’s evident CWA is following an accepted path of enlightened self-interest. It’s not so evident why others who should know better follow them.

A must-read New York Times piece on public pensions has this bit about California:

It was 1999, and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, or Calpers, the large government agency that manages retirement benefits for more than 1.6 million public workers, retirees and their families, was lobbying the legislature to increase employees’ benefits. Calpers’s plan would lower the retirement age for some workers to 50 years, even as it raised pensions to as much as 90 percent of their salaries.

Lobbyists were arguing that the plan — which would ultimately create the largest pension increase in the state’s history — wouldn’t cost “a dime of additional taxpayer money.”

…When Calpers’s plan to expand pensions came up in the state Legislature, lawmakers from both parties voted for it. On the Senate floor, it passed after 45 seconds of debate with no dissenting votes.

Then there is this from Reuters:

U.S. state and local governments will need to raise taxes by $1,398 per household every year for the next 30 years if they are to fully fund their pension systems, a study released on Wednesday said.

Waiting on the first person to compare this to the price of a “a hefty latte and muffin.”

Themed protests, tent cities and capitol takeovers aren’t cheap these days, and so union dues will have to rise in many states.

We already know the Ohio Education Association imposed a $54 additional assessment to fund a campaign against SB 5. The Nebraska State Education Association also proposed a $10 oer member ballot initiative assessment in addition to a proposed $5 dues increase. In California, dues will rise $8 to $647.

Minnesota and Utah plan to hold the line, proposing no increase in dues for 2011-12, while Iowa and Arizona are asking for $2 more. Wyoming and Kansas proposed $4 hikes.

The Dakotas will see some of the largest increases, with South Dakota boosting dues by $10 and North Dakota by $13. Missouri will also ask for a $10 increase.

As reported earlier, national NEA dues are likely to increase by $2, but convention delegates will also vote on an additional $10 assessment for the ballot measure/legislative crises fund.

In the olden days – say, around 2004 – Democrats might wander away from the public employee union herd, but they were quickly rounded up and placed back under the yoke. And while there are still a significant number of Democrats who wouldn’t dream of saying “boo” to a union officer, anyone who has followed politics for more than a few years has to be staring goggle-eyed at the spectacle of unions and machine Democrats at each other’s throats.

Our first stop is New Jersey. The long-running NJEA vs. Gov. Christie show continues to play to sellout crowds, but the latest plot twist involves a group of legislative Democrats, including the senate president and the assembly speaker. They have cobbled together a bill that would require public employees to contribute more to their own pensions and health care premiums. This prompted one union official to refer to Christie as Adolf Hitler and the two Democratic leaders as his Nazi generals.

“I am mad as hell about politicians who were elected by the people but sell their votes to the powerful,” said NJEA president Barbara Keshishian, apparently without a trace of irony.

So the unions ran attack ads and held rallies and got themselves arrested, to no good purpose yet. “You saw the unions today do their best to intimidate people,” said Senate President Steve Sweeney. “But guess what? We’re in charge. I didn’t come down here to be told what to do.”

The unions got a troop of Revolutionary War re-enacters to lead a march across the Delaware to the state capitol in what they called “The Second Battle of Trenton.” You could almost hear George Washington say, “A bridge! Why didn’t I think of that?”

It’s a sad commentary on the knowledge of American history that in its story about the protest, the Newark Star-Ledger felt compelled to explain to readers what happened at the first Battle of Trenton.

Let’s move on to Chicago, where Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the school board canceled the scheduled four percent raises for teachers and proposed a longer school day.

“Teachers got two types of pay raises. People in public life got labor peace. Can anybody explain to me what the children got? I know what everybody else got,” Emanuel said.

Asked what she thought of the longer school day, Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis was her typically understated self, declaring, “I don’t believe in slavery on any level.”

While the anger is boiling over in several locations, it’s still under a lid at the national level – though it does seem to be percolating.

“We have to hold this administration accountable, but we will get a choice between President Obama and our worst nightmare,” said Lily Eskelsen, vice president of an organization that brags about its one million Republican members.

This infighting will have little effect on elections and campaigns, though that seems to be what everyone is worried about. It may, however, lead to some bipartisan coalitions on policy, and that will not be a good thing for unions.