How much money do teachers unions really need to collect from their members to represent their interests with their employers?

One way we can find out is to see how much money the various branches of the national and state teachers unions have left over after paying the people who work directly for the unions themselves, whose jobs are to represent the member teachers at their school districts and perhaps also to represent their interests at the state and national level as well.

With that in mind, any money collected from mandatory union dues that sharply exceeds the costs of compensating the union's own employees or the costs of operating the union itself, such as rent for office or meeting space for the union's employees, would have to be considered to be excessive. If excessively excessive, the amount of dues above that basic level would constitute gouging on the part of the union bosses, who set the level of their represented teachers' dues, as they would be collecting far more in dues than what is genuinely necessary to represent their members' at their employers.

The dynamic table we're presenting below takes data compiled by the Education Intelligence Agency from the National Education Association (NEA) and its state affiliates. You can sort the data presented in the table according to the category given in each of the column headings, either from low to high or from high to low by clicking the column heading a second time. If you're accessing this table from one of our RSS feeds, you'll need to click through to our site to take full advantage of the dynamic table's sorting capability.

Observations

The key data in the table above is found in the Surplus Revenue [Percent of Member Dues] column. Here, the mean and median "surplus" percentage was 22.1% and 22.4% respectively.

Using these mean and median figures as a baseline value, we identify any union affiliate with a surplus percentage of member dues greater than 25% of the total member dues collected as potentially having set their member dues in excess of that required to legitimately represent the interests of teachers at their employers. We've shaded the rows of the table where the union affiliate's surplus dues exceed this level.

We also note several union affiliates that appear to have been substantially mismanaged in 2008-09, in that their expenditures for compensating their direct employees exceed the revenue collected by dues imposed upon their union's member teachers. The states that fall in this category include Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, Oregon and Washington. The rows for these states have been shaded red in the table above.

But to answer the question we asked at the outset, some teachers are indeed being gouged by their union's bosses - the ones whose state legislatures were controlled by the Democratic party in 2008-09 and whose union bosses are sending the member teachers' money. The amount of the gouging would be approximately the amount in excess of 25% of each education union affiliate's total revenue from their members' dues.

We see that at the national level, where surplus member dues exceed 63% of the total member dues collected. Using our 25% threshold as the cap for "legitimate" union representation expenses, this suggests that the portion of teachers union dues that go to the national affiliate of the NEA could be reduced by 40% without impacting the ability of the teachers to have their interests effectively represented at this level.

The states whose education unions are most gouging their teachers members include Hawaii (with surplus member dues of 66% and 34% for the state's two NEA affiliates), California (54%), New Jersey (52.1%), Ohio (50.7%), Florida (42.0%), Nevada (41.6%), Massachusetts (37.6%) and Wisconsin (35.6%). At a minimum, teachers' union dues could be reduced by anywhere from 10% to 25% in these states without impacting the union affiliates ability to just represent the teachers at their employers.

Finally, we note a significant divergence between states with legislatures controlled by members of the Democratic party and those states whose legislatures are either controlled by the Republicans or are split between the two major U.S. political parties.

Here, after adding up the amount of surplus revenue remaining after the union affiliates employees compensation has been subtracted from the total member dues collected, we find that states with Democratic legislatures account for $237,616,324 of the total surplus dues collected, or 70.7% of the $335,937,045 of the total surplus member dues collected in 2008-09 for the NEA's state affiliates.

By contrast, union affiliates in states with divided legislatures account for $66,067,598, or 19.7% of the total surplus collected, while union affiliates in states with legislatures controlled by the Republican party have surplus member dues collections of $32,253,123, or 9.6% of the total surplus collected among all states.

We should note that these figures might be even more disproportionately weighted toward states whose legislatures were controlled by the Democratic Party, if not for the five states where the teachers union affiliates operated in the red.

There are some different ways to interpret what this divergence means. First, it could indicate that teachers in states with legislatures with at least one division of the state legislature controlled by the Republican party are happier with that situation, as it indicates that the teachers aren't massing funds to support a prolonged strike in those states. That would also mean that teachers in states with Democratic-party controlled legislatures are less happy with that situation, and that they were preparing to support massive walkouts in 2008-09.

Yes, we laughed at that idea too! More likely, what's going on is that the teachers unions in states with Democratic party-controlled legislatures have been effectively captured by Democratic party members, who are using the surplus member dues to fund their party's political candidates at all levels in those states.

But we'd love to see the reaction of the state union bosses with high levels of dues gouging if anyone ever asks them if the reason why union dues would seem to be so much lower in the so-called Republican-controlled states is because Republicans are better at keeping unionized teachers happy!

Elsewhere on the Web

Marginal Revolution's Alex Tabarrok highlights some interesting quotes by former teacher's union boss Albert Shanker in pointing to an article by Joel Klein in The Atlantic on the failure of American schools.

Previously on Political Calculations

• How Much Do Public School Teachers Really Make Compared to Private School Teachers?
• The Math They Forgot or, More Likely, Were Never Taught
• Ranking School Smarts by Major, Updated
• The Educated and the Unemployed
• The Contribution of Student Loans to the U.S. National Debt
• U.S. Spending for Higher Education Since 1962
• Forecasting the Cost of College
• Correlating Federal Spending and College Tuition
• Who's Behind the U.S. Higher Education Bubble?
• Visualizing the U.S. Higher Education Bubble
• How Much Money Will You Earn in Your Lifetime?
• What Kind of Job Can You Hope to Get With Your Education?
• Does It Pay to Go to Law School?
• The Eureka Experiment
• Milking the Cash Cows of College
• Should You Send Your Child Away to College?
• Highly Questionable Higher Education Costs
• Subsidizing Low Value Majors
• Keeping the Cost of College Down
• Does Financial Aid Drive College Costs Up?
• Math, Science, Students, Teachers
• Your Student Loan
• The Transformation of Student Loans Into Taxes
• Saving for College

Notes for the Table

[1] Total Revenue combines member dues with investment gains or losses.

[2] Compensation includes the cost of wages, payroll taxes, pension contributions and other benefits paid on behalf of individual employees. Travel and similar tax-deductible expenses are not included. We should also note that the Education Intelligence Agency indicates that some union affiliates (e.g. Michigan) would appear to have included retirees and/or others in their employee compensation totals.

[3] Surplus Revenue is calculated by subtracting Employee Compensation expenses from Revenue from Member Dues.

[4] The political party in control refers to the political party with majorities in the state or national legislature. This information was obtained from Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball web site.

Labels: education, jobs, politics

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