Big Labor often relies on the power to call a strike in order to cow employers into expanding employee pay and benefits. That can create serious problems for companies and workers alike, as we saw in recent years with U.S. auto companies that had to have huge government bailouts, in part because worker compensation packages had become unsustainable.
But Ohio’s biggest teachers union, the Ohio Education Association, is finding out what it’s like to be on the other side of the picket line.
Scores of members of the Professional Staff Union, which works for the teachers’ union, recently walked off the job – even though most of the striking workers earn more than $100,000 per year.
Labor talks between the teachers union and the Professional Staff Union collapsed, The Columbus Dispatch reported.
“OEA officers and managers need to practice what they preach,” the president of the Professional Staff Union told the Columbus newspaper. “It’s a pretty high form of hypocrisy for OEA officers and managers to be giving us this treatment when they expect us to protect OEA members from the same treatment out in the schools.”
We wonder whether the teachers union in Ohio will eagerly boost the pay and benefits of the workers who are picketing against it – as it would want a school district to do when the teachers union’s own workers go on strike.