A Bad Bargain: How Teacher Collective Bargaining Affects Students' Employment and Earnings Later in Life.

ON THE EVE of the Seattle teachers strike in September 2015, the Seattle Times condemned the impending walkout, accusing the union of "stiff arming more than 50,000 kids and their families." Yet the teachers insisted that their strike was about children's education, not just teacher pay, and commanded widespread support from parents and the community at large.  Seattle teachers and administrators reached an agreement in one week, but the question of how unions affect public education is far from settled. According to the recent Education Next poll (see "The 2015 EdNext Poll on School Reform," features, Winter 2016) the public is divided as to whether teachers unions have a positive or negative impact on schools, and, until now, researchers have been unable to document the effects of collective bargaining on students' long term outcomes. Today, more than 60 percent of teachers in the United States work under a union contract. The rights of teachers to unionize and bargain together have expanded dramatically since the late 1950s, when states began passing "duty to bargain" (DTB) laws that required school districts to negotiate with teachers unions in good faith. Recently, though, states such as Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Tennessee have sought to weaken the ability of teachers unions to negotiate contracts in K 12 education. Advocates for these restrictions claim that unions have a negative effect on the quality of public education and, therefore, students' life chances. Those in favor of teacher collective bargaining, on the other hand, argue that unions make the education system more effective by empowering teachers who are in the classroom and by giving them a role in shaping their working conditions. Due to data limitations, however, empirical research has not credibly addressed the critical question of how teacher collective bargaining influences student outcomes. In this study, we present the first evidence on how laws that support teacher collective bargaining affect students' employment and earnings in adulthood. We do so by first examining how the outcomes of students educated in a given state changed after the state enacted a duty to bargain law, and then comparing those changes to what happened over the same time period in states that did not change their collective bargaining policies. We find no clear effects of collective bargaining laws on how much schooling students ultimately complete. But our results show that laws requiring school districts to engage in collective bargaining with teachers unions lead students to be less successful in the labor market in adulthood. Students who spent all 12 years of grade school in a state with a duty to bargain law earned an average of $795 less per year and worked half an hour less per week as adults than students who were not exposed to collective bargaining laws. They are 0.9 percentage points less likely to be employed and 0.8 percentage points less likely to be in the labor force. And those with jobs tend to work in lower skilled occupations.  In the first half of the 20fh century, teachers unions in the United States were predominantly professional organizations that had little say in contract negotiations between teachers and school districts. Starting with Wisconsin in 1959, however, states began passing union friendly legislation that either gave teachers the right to collectively bargain or explicitly mandated that districts negotiate with unions in good faith. Duty to bargain laws in particular give unions considerable power in the collective bargaining process, because they make it illegal for a district to refuse to bargain with a union, and because most of them require state arbitration if the two sides reach an impasse. The enactment of such laws led to a sharp rise in the number of teachers who joined unions and in the prevalence of collectively bargained contracts.