About 90% of the nation’s charter schools are non-union. The charter owners want it that way. It enables them to hire and fire at will and to make unreasonable demands on teachers, like a 9-hour or more work day. Some charters routinely expect teachers to work 50 or 60 hours a week. Unions get in the way of the owner’s control over the lives of teachers. Owners also like high turnover as they can constantly replenish their staff with those at the bottom of the salary scale and never have pension obligations.
The AFT announced that teachers at a few charters have voted to unionize. It is a drop in the bucket. But an important drop. Factory owners fought to keep unions out 100 years ago. Workers rebelled. Will teachers? Or is there an endless supply of college graduates ready to work two years and move on?
Here is the AFT press release:
AFT Welcomes Charter School Educators in Michigan, California and New York
Washington—American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten released a statement welcoming charter school educators into the AFT family following victories in Michigan, California and New York.
“More than 200 charter school educators and school employees in Michigan, California and New York will walk into their classrooms Monday morning with a stronger voice for their profession and for their students. I congratulate the educators at Detroit’s Cesar Chavez Academy, Los Angeles’ Ivy Academia and Ithaca, N.Y.’s New Roots Charter School on their efforts to win a union voice, and I welcome them to the AFT family.
“Their strength and determination—in the face of enormous odds—demonstrates their commitment to each other and the children they serve. And they will now have the support of 1.5 million AFT members beside them in their continued effort to strengthen their schools.”
Background
On Feb. 7, in the shadow of Michigan’s recent passage of so-called right-to-work legislation, teachers and counselors on the four campuses of Detroit’s Cesar Chavez Academy won an election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board after a five-month effort. Cesar Chavez is the largest charter in Detroit and is the second-largest charter in Michigan. The Detroit victory was the first election conducted by the NLRB since a December ruling that charter schools may be considered private sector employers.
In the same week, teachers at two other charter schools successfully won access to the path toward certification under their states’ public sector labor laws. In Los Angeles, teachers at Ivy Academia received voluntary recognition of their union after 54 of 56 faculty members signed a union petition. United Teachers Los Angeles now represents more than 1,600 educators at independent charter schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Also, on the East Coast, educators at New Roots Charter School in Ithaca, N.Y., recently received voluntary recognition of their union at the end of January.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Charters also won’t pay for Teacher Librarians and many don’t even have a library. And if they do, they don’t put a teacher in it. This is the case in Los Angeles and I’m pretty sure most charters follow suit.
LAUSD has about 260 charter schools and in the entire County of L.A. with 88 school districts there are only about 340 charter schools. Why is LAUSD authorizing more charter schools when the recent DOE OIG study on the total lack of accountability of charter schools in Florida, Arizona and California with LAUSD being a named district. Recently, at Roosevelt High School, one of mayor Villaraigosa’s PLAS schools, PLAS has admitted that they made a fatal error using small schools and now that their 5 year renewal is up they are trying to make 5 years of failure and breaking almost every part of their MOU and Matrix which are legally required to meet to continue management. The community wants to take that school back themselves since LAUSD has been a loser for them and then LAUSD and PLAS together have been total failures. Recently, you can see this on George1la, Marshall Tuck, the CEO of PLAS, stated that Roosevelt had $9,000/student and LAUSD according to the MOU pays for maintainence and special ed. We were just given a small school budget and it was for $4,027/student. Marshall Tuck could not answer the question as to where is the other $5,000/student. Ask yourself “Where did the money go?”
The NJEA has a unionizing initiative in place for charters. They even have a staff dedicated to this endeavor. My first reaction was that this was akin to supporting charter schools, but if more charters become union shops all around this country, perhaps the reform movement will lose some of its momentum toward promoting a dual system. At least the union-busting political arms of the movement will be discouraged from forcing bad policies on schools in an effort to privatize education.
Another option for teachers is charters is to form a cooperative, with teachers in a school being the majority of the board that runs the school. While visiting Minnesota, Diane recently was informed of this option. There are now more than 30 charters in this and other states where this approach is being used.
What would be the same, and what would be different if the teachers who worked there were the majority of the board that set salary and working conditions?
“Some charters routinely expect teachers to work 50 or 60 hours a week. ” Only 60 hours a week. That is still less than than the hours I routinely work at my unionized public school (IEP’s, data analysis, grading, after-school, before-school and lunch-time tutoring, etc. )
This will pose a conundrum for the anti-union, pro-charter group, won’t it? Should be interesting to see how they still support charters while bashing unions. . .