Chaos at the NEA

The National Education Association (NEA) has a membership exceeding 3 million. Union dues for the NEA vary by membership type and state, ranging from $15 per year for a minimal aspiring educator membership to around $1,000 yearly for active professional members. With these compulsory union dues, the NEA collects around $400 million a year in revenue. Not counting the teachers that make up the union membership, the NEA is a major institution in its own right, boasting a hefty internal staff of around 500.

The average NEA employee is paid $125,000 a year, with Becky Pringle, the president of the NEA, making around $360,000 a year. In contrast, as of the 2023–2024 school year, the nationwide average public school teacher salary in the United States is approximately $69,000.

Why do I share all this? The National Education Association Staff Organization (NEASO), the union within the union, is on strike.

NEA Staff on Strike

In June, NEA union staff went on strike for the first time in 50 years, citing unfair labor practices. This strike is a predicament I never personally considered. What happens when the self-proclaimed saviors of workers’ rights, fair compensation, and representation have workers of their own who don’t feel these practices are being fulfilled within the organization? Well, of course, their workers do what they know all too well—they go on strike. Even with an average salary of $55,000 more than the teachers they represent, the workers at the NEA have asserted that the labor union doesn’t “practice what they preach” or “uphold union values.” Oh, the irony!

From the perspective of the workers, the points of contention in this strike are workplace related, including a denial of holiday pay and three unfair labor practice charges, with allegations against a manager physically assaulting a staff member and then retaliating for reporting the assault. NEA officials disagree with these allegations, downplaying the issues causing the strikes as simply a disagreement in ongoing contract negotiations, with a wage gap of $10 million between the two negotiating parties.

The uprising among the NEA workers was so disruptive that President Joe Biden canceled a planned speech at the annual NEA conference in Philadelphia. Personally, I’m unsurprised by this, as Biden is the first president ever to join a picket line with the United Auto Workers and has even touted that he is, “the most pro-union president in American history.” Biden had intended to speak on Sunday, but his campaign stated that the president strongly supports unions and will not cross the picket line.

According to the NEA, the strike and resulting picket line led to the abrupt end of the conference, causing the cancellation of the final three days of programming and leaving thousands of attending members stranded in their hotels waiting for their flights home. In retaliation for shutting down the conference, the NEA employees involved in the strike will be locked out of their work. In a statement, the NEA criticized staff for “abandoning thousands of NEA members from across the country who traveled to the representative assembly, many at their own personal expense, and depriving them of the opportunity to convene and deliberate the business of the union.” Oh, please! This is the same union that has supported countless teacher strikes across America, leaving our public schools scrambling for sub-par temporary educators, condensing classes, and cowering to the often ridiculous demands made by striking NEA member teachers. But shutting down their conference is a bridge too far? Talk about hypocrisy.

Union Hypocrisy

As fun as it is to watch the union leftists eat each other alive, bickering over their internal inconsistencies, the sad reality is that this is the largest teachers union in America, full of teacher members entrusted with educating our nation’s youth.

On the one hand, this labor dispute has revealed that the NEA is not true to the values it claims to uphold, at least in the eyes of its own staff.

On the other hand, those values of collectivism and union strikes, and so forth are nonsense. One could argue that the NEA staff are acting like spoiled brats, striking while making far more on average than the teachers they claim to represent. But such is the result of most labor unions. Power and wealth tend to accumulate on the top, while chants of equality ring at the picket lines.