Amid Teacher Strike Trend, the Least OR Lawmakers Can Do Is Bring Union Negotiations Out of the Dark

Ben Straka is a research and government affairs associate for the Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit organization that works to promote individual liberty, free enterprise, and limited, accountable government.

Better yet, lawmakers could finally fix the problems in existing state law that allow the negotiations between government officials and labor unions to be conducted in secret. Not only do Oregon’s open meeting laws generally allow the negotiations to occur behind closed doors, they also permit a separate workaround whereby the negotiations aren’t even considered “meetings” under the applicable laws to begin with.

Now’s the time to make it official.

Even more telling, though, was the NEA’s endorsement of teacher strikes not as a last resort but as a strategic weapon to pressure state officials into allocating more taxpayer funding their way. After all, why settle for concessions from the school district when you can go straight to the source?

No doubt defenders of the unions involved, all of which belong to the largest teachers union in the country, the National Education Association (NEA), would have you believe the strikes are a regrettable but necessary “last resort.”

But it could also be because the NEA is encouraging affiliates to use strikes offensively.

Yet they’re becoming increasingly common, even where — in Massachusetts, for example — strikes by teachers are strictly against the law.

Either way, it’s time for transparency, and not even the NEA and friends should object.

Obviously, negotiations between public schools and teachers unions—which involve some of the most important decisions impacting education—should adhere to these same values.

Whether you feel they’re justified or not, school-shuttering strikes shouldn’t be the norm. Teacher walkouts are illegal in most states, for the obvious reason that most policymakers favor placing hard constraints on the dispute resolution process over shutting down public schools.

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