In February, Iowa passed a new law limiting the collective bargaining rights of teachers and other public employees. AFSCME, which represents public employees, sued right away; now the Iowa teachers’ union is suing over the law’s unequal protections:
Tammy Wawro, president of the Iowa State Education Association, which represents 34,000 education professionals across the state, announced the suit Tuesday at the Iowa Capitol. She said in particular the union is taking issue with a provision of the law that exempts public safety workers from the law’s broadest changes.
“Currently, a fire marshal is able to bargain ways to keep the inside of a fire house safe,” Wawro said. “Why can’t a teacher bargain ways to keep the inside of a schoolhouse safe? A dispatcher in some locals are able to bargain his or her health insurance, including family coverage. But members of our unit are no longer able to do that. Why are the dispatchers’ children more important than ours?”
She said that by exempting one class of workers from the changes, it violates Article 1 Section 6 of the Iowa Constitution which guarantees equal protection under the law.
“We simply wish to be equal and have our rights restored,” she said [Brianne Pfannenstiel and William Petroski, “Teachers Union Sues to Challenge Iowa’s New Collective Bargaining Law,” Des Moines Register, 2017.04.04].
This lawsuit could have implications for South Dakota’s latest whack at labor rights. Recall House Bill 1184, which struck the collective bargaining rights of all vo-tech school workers. Apply Wawro’s reasoning—why should K-12 teachers, police, and municipal workers be able to unionize but not vo-tech staff?—and you have equal-protection grounds on which to challenge South Dakota’s new arbitrary punishment of vo-tech employees.
Hmm… vo-tech teachers and support staff, care to make that argument at the Hughes County Courthouse?
Cory: “—why should K-12 teachers, police, and municipal workers be able to unionize but not vo-tech staff?”
I agree wit the thrust of your argument, that this is clearly an attack on unions and the ability of collective organization, however, this is not a prohibition on unionizing. The vocational schools’ employees (as the school workers in Iowa) can still join a union. The attack is in the value of what a union can provide. I suppose even the most right-wing of the right-wing knows that there everyone – even workers – has a right to assembly, so the way to destroy unions not to prohibit people from joining, but to limit what a union can do for its members.
As a right-to-work (for less) state, SD unions are required to provide services to non-union members (services that are paid for by union members) in an attempt to 1) lower the perceived value of union membership and 2) increase the uncompensated expense of representing collective bargaining units for unions. Right-to-work doesn’t ban unions, it just makes union work much harder. Likewise, not allowing collective bargaining doesn’t ban unions, it limits the scope of what a union can do, thereby hoping to limit the unions’ value to potential members.
This is about those in power working to silence any and all (even potential) voices of dissent. Preserving and facilitating the disparate trend of income concentration to the top is the REAL motivation behind this anti-union movement. Efforts to remove the voice of the engine that created the middle-class does not bode well for this nation or this state.
Let’s hope they do.