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Elizabeth New - Should Striking Teachers Get Unemployment Checks?
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Washington Policy Center’s Elizabeth New joins Lars to discuss Seattle teachers threatening to strike as students head back to school. Should taxpayers fund unemployment benefits for teachers who choose to walk off the job?
Welcome back to the Lars Larson Show. Well, theoretically, Seattle kids are supposed to be back in school classrooms tomorrow. Are their teachers going to show up, or are those teachers going to go on strike and while they're on strike, collect unemployment payments as well? I thought we'd talk about that. And I'll get to your phone calls and emails in a moment at 866-HLars. That's 866-439-5277. Send your emails to talk at LarsLarson.com and join me in welcoming Elizabeth New, who's director and policy analyst at the Washington Policy Center. Elizabeth, welcome back to the program. And are we going to see striking teachers cheat the kids out of a day of education tomorrow and collect unemployment checks at the same time?
SPEAKER_01
I don't think so. And I'll tell you why in a minute. But they are negotiating down to the wire on this strike. And the school union said there was promising progress overnight, which is encouraging, but there's still no agreement. So about 50,000 students and their families are waiting to learn whether school will actually open tomorrow and if parents can go to work. It's ridiculous. Public employees should not be holding families hostage or threatening to deny a taxpayer-funded service. And there are other ways to negotiate pay and working conditions, clearly. As for the UI pay, Washington's new law does allow striking workers to receive up to six weeks of unemployment benefits, but I don't think teachers will be doing so. Benefits cannot begin until the second Sunday after a strike begins, and then a claimant must satisfy the ordinary one-week unpaid waiting period. So Seattle educators, if they only strike for a few days, as happened in 2022, there could be no strike uh payout at all.
SPEAKER_00
Okay, and and in the case of the teachers, I don't understand why they're going on strike at all. Because, correct me if I'm wrong, their contract ran out yesterday, but under the terms of the contract, they can continue to bargain. They can continue to get paid their regular paychecks while bargaining goes on. And if and when they negotiate a raise, the raise will be retroactive and will cover this period in time. They could do that and not cause all this damage to families and leave families hanging, you know, on the day before, you know, the second of September, wanting uh wondering are kids going to be in school tomorrow or not. They they don't have to do this, and yet they're doing it anyway. So what does that tell us?
SPEAKER_01
Well, it's not about the kids. And you're exactly right. They could keep working under their current contract and receive any retroactive pay that uh was negotiated. Uh, but you know, this gives them, they think, a better platform to work from. They're using they're using schools and families and special ed kids, for God's sake, as bargaining chips in this process.
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, they're saying that they're trying to advocate for special ed kids. Isn't the head of their labor union actually uh under there's their questions about her treatment of special ed kids?
SPEAKER_01
True. There uh she was under district investigation for physically harming one of her students when elected to the position. She denies the allegations, however, and I say due process is warranted, but it's weird. Super weird.
SPEAKER_00
It's very weird. And and what they're demanding, I mean, they voted 91% to authorize a strike. They're currently making for a part-time job, they're making almost $120,000 a year plus benefits on top of that. And they say the district has offered them a cumulative almost 9% raise over the next three years, and the teachers have apparently said not good enough.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the Seattle Public School Superintendent actually released really revealing numbers uh I think two days ago, and it showed how much not only contract pay, but then the additional pay days that they get added up for most teachers who are trying to get this uh pay negotiated, $142,000 a year. You know, and it it's just here's the thing that frustrates me most is you know, there are other ways to bargain, whether you agree that compensation should be higher or you don't, there's other ways to do this. You know, the WFSE, the state employees group, they just held a walkout yesterday on workers' own time, as I understand it at lunch breaks or other breaks. There's no reason teachers have to be denying school to kids and their families.
SPEAKER_00
No, and in fact, it is a part-time job. And I guess the part that I always get back to is this, Elizabeth, if they were actually producing a good result, then I'd say, well, then maybe they're deserving of a raise. That's the way most of the rest of the world works. It's if you're doing a really good job and you can go to the boss and say, hey, boss, look at the kind of job I've done the last year. Don't I deserve a raise? In this case, the teachers could only come to the public and say, hey, by the way, you see the kind of job we're doing? More than half the kids don't know how to read, write, or do math. Uh, so you should give us a raise. And if you do, we'll promise to do a better job. But right now, the job we're doing sucks, isn't it? It doesn't it?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you know, outcomes are poor, and we shouldn't keep pouring money into a failed uh outcome. However, I do in in uh educators' defense, you know, there's a lot of kids coming to school that are not ready to be there, who are not cared for properly by families. But at the same time, schools are not expecting anything from families either, and they keep taking over more and more things that families should be handling. We're offering far more than a basic education, despite what unions will say.
SPEAKER_00
Well, aren't the Seattle school kids coming to class and and you can say they're you know the parents have never been better educated than parents. If you went back 50 years, would you say the average family was better educated uh than than they are today? Because I don't know that that's true. I don't think it is. I don't think facts back that up. And I know the teachers always want to say, it's not really our fault that we can't actually educate your kids. It's your fault. It's the parents' fault. Except that the schools, as you said, they keep pushing the parents farther and farther out of the process and telling them you have not you have no right to say anything about how we educate the kids. Just shut up and pay your taxes.
SPEAKER_01
Right. I I think there's plenty of life to go around, and I do think people are more educated today than 50 years ago, like you, but I'm not sure the behavior is better than it was 50 years ago. You know, I've substituted in classrooms a little bit at my kids' school, and I can tell you uh there are a lot of behavior problems that distract from the school day, from the teaching, from students trying to learn.
SPEAKER_00
You know what, Elizabeth, every time I hear that from a teacher, I say you have the most powerful union in America. Can you go in and demand that you have better discipline in classrooms and say, Because you demand everything else. You demand paychecks, you demand curriculum, you demand hours and everything else, demand better discipline in the classroom and say if our parent, if our members cannot get a well-disciplined classroom backed up by management, then we can't do our jobs. Except you never hear the teachers ask for that. They want to warehouse the kids and then be paid as though they're educating them and say, no, it's really not our fault the kids aren't learning because we don't have good discipline in the classroom. We can't control the classroom. Well, then demand that at the next bargaining session instead of just saying, pay us more money and we'll fail for another three years. Elizabeth, thanks so much. That's Elizabeth New from the Washington Policy Center. Back in a moment. I'm going to tell you about a sob story that the Seattle Times is saying about a poor illegal alien.
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