Tournament: 2021 NSD CAMP TOURNAMENT | Round: 2 | Opponent: RatCha Selena Teng | Judge: David Herrera
1AC - Democracy
US Democracy is declining, reform is urgent
House 3/22’ Freedom House, 3-22-2021, "NEW REPORT: US Democracy Has Declined Significantly in the Past Decade, Reforms Urgently Needed," https://freedomhouse.org/article/new-report-us-democracy-has-declined-significantly-past-decade-reforms-urgently-needed
Today, Freedom House released a special report, From Crisis to Reform: A Call to Strengthen America’s Battered Democracy, which identifies three enduring problems that have undermined the health of the US political system: unequal treatment for people of color, the outsized influence of special interests in politics, and partisan polarization. This report comes in response to a decade-long decline in US democracy and is based in Freedom House’s global comparative research. The report concludes that these three major problems compound one another, creating a vicious circle of distrust and dysfunction, and that addressing them with urgency and conviction is crucial to restoring Americans’ faith not just in their government, but also in democracy itself. “Our democracy is in trouble,” said Michael J. Abramowitz, president of Freedom House, “and the strength of American democracy is important for people everywhere, not just here at home. Congress and the Biden administration must make it a priority to strengthen our institutions, restore civic norms, and uphold the promise of universal liberty on which our nation was founded.” “The state of US democracy has implications for freedom and democracy around the world,” said Sarah Repucci, vice president of research and analysis at Freedom House. “Democracy movements in other countries look to the United States for inspiration and support, and authoritarian leaders falsely point to America’s problems as proof of democracy’s inherent inferiority and as a sort of license for their own abuses of power.”
Teacher union legitimacy is key to strengthen democracy – multiple internal links.
Khalenberg 16 Kahlenberg, — Richard D. “How Defunding Public Sector Unions Will Diminish Our Democracy.” The Century Foundation, 5 Oct. 2016, tcf.org/content/report/how-defunding-public-sector-unions-will-diminish-our-democracy/?session=1. Richard D. Kahlenberg is director of K–12 equity and senior fellow at The Century Foundation. The author or editor of seventeen books, he has expertise in education, civil rights, and equal opportunity. Kahlenberg has been called “the intellectual father of the economic integration movement” in K–12 schooling and “arguably the nation’s chief proponent of class-based affirmative action in higher education admissions.” He is also an authority on teachers’ unions, private school vouchers, charter schools, community colleges, housing segregation, and labor organizing.dhsNJ
- Check government power
- Unions increase middle class which prevents wealthy from controlling politicians
- Create working culture that teaches people to be active in democracy. Statically proven since denser union member ship correlates to more voter turnout
- Teachers Unions lead to more educated students increasing informed voting
On January 11, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. The case pits the right of public employees to band together and form effective unions to pursue the common interests of workers against the free speech rights of dissenting public employees to abstain from funding collective bargaining efforts with which they disagree.1 A decision by the Court against the teachers association could not only significantly weaken public sector unions, but also endanger the nation’s core democratic values. In the suit, a public school teacher, Rebecca Friedrichs, argues that a state law requiring her to pay fees to the California Teachers Association (CTA) violates her First Amendment rights not to subsidize speech to which she objects. The CTA counters that in order to promote peaceful and orderly labor relations, and as a matter of basic fairness, the state may require Friedrichs to cover the costs of collective bargaining agreements, from which she benefits, preventing her from being a “free rider.” Union supporters worry that a decision in Friedrichs’ favor could devastate public sector unions across the nation. These unions, whose numbers were once small compared to the vibrant private sector union movement, now represent nearly a majority of unionized workers.2 The one bright spot in an otherwise deteriorating American labor movement, public sector unions are now under extraordinary legal and political assault. More broadly, many progressives see the Friedrichs case as an effort to defund the American left, given the financial support public sector unions provide a variety of liberal causes, from civil rights to raising the minimum wage.3 This report highlights an additional problem that should concern people across the political spectrum: defunding public sector unions could deal a substantial blow to a critical driver of American democracy. Public sector unions promote democratic values and practices in a variety of ways. They serve as a check on arbitrary government power and help sustain middle-class wages and benefits; serve as schools of democracy for workers; and, in the case of teacher unions, help support a public school system that promotes democratic values. These larger interests should enter into the calculus the Supreme Court uses to weigh free speech rights against state interests. Indeed, the whole idea of unionism is based on basic democratic values. The fundamental idea that duly-elected union leadership has the right to collect dues and advocate as the majority of workers wants is analogous to a democracy’s right to impose taxation in order to promote the common good. The 1935 National Labor Relations Act embodied this democratic vision. Section 1 provides: “It is declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection”4 (emphasis supplied). Subsequent state laws governing collective bargaining for public sector employees were modeled on the NLRA’s vision. The report proceeds in four parts. Part I analyzes the claims in Friedrichs under the current framework of balancing envisioned by the Supreme Court, and concludes that fair share fees are justified. Part II broadens the discussion to consider the state’s powerful interest in promoting institutions that strengthen American democracy. Part III considers an objection raised by supporters of Friedrichs: that public sector unions will do just fine if they lose the Friedrichs case. Part IV concludes. Balancing First Amendment Rights against the State’s Interests The current legal framework in which courts weigh cases such as Friedrichs is narrowly constrained, balancing the free speech rights of dissenting union members against the state’s interests in promoting stable labor relations with its public employees. In the 1977 case of Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court reached a sensible compromise that properly balanced these two sets of interests by splitting union dues into two categories: those that support political speech, and those that support bread–and-butter collective bargaining. Because the First Amendment’s free speech clause provides a right to not be compelled by the state to subsidize speech with which one disagrees, dissenting public employees cannot be required by the state to join a union, or to subsidize the union’s political and lobbying efforts to promote certain positions of public concern.5 On the other hand, the Court recognized that the state, as an employer, has an interest in promoting harmonious labor relations. To discourage the formation of multiple unions with competing claims, the state has an interest in facilitating a single union negotiating on the behalf of all workers, whether or not individual employees choose to be a member of the union. Under an exclusive bargaining arrangement, the union has a duty to represent members and nonmembers alike. Accordingly, the Court held, the state may prevent employees from being “free riders” by compelling contribution to that portion of union membership dues that underwrite the cost of collective bargaining over issues such as wages and benefits. More recently, in Harris v. Quinn (2014), the Supreme Court was asked to apply the Abood principle to unionized home care workers. The Supreme Court rejected that extension, finding that home care workers, although paid with public funds, were only “partial public employees.” They work for individual patients in private homes and answer mostly to the patients for their work. The Supreme Court created a new test, as scholar Catherine Fisk notes, which suggests that fair share fees can only be justified when “the cited benefits” require imposition of such fees. “No such showing” was made in Harris, the justices held, noting that under Illinois law, the union negotiated a limited number of issues and had no role in enforcing contracts for nonmembers.6 Although Harris sustained the 1977 Abood holding, a majority hinted that it might be willing to overturn Abood in a future case.7 In Friedrichs, the petitioner explicitly seeks to have the Supreme Court overrule the longstanding Abood compromise.8 That would be a serious mistake, for reasons outlined below. Current Rules Balance Free Speech Rights The U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized that First Amendment rights extend beyond the right to speak to include the right not to be compelled to subsidize speech to which an individual objects. The lawyers for Friedrichs invoke Thomas Jefferson’s statement “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.”9 The state cannot require that, as a condition of employment, public employees must contribute to an ideological cause they may oppose. Friedrichs tries to argue that the distinction between political speech and collective bargaining for public sector unions outlined in Abood is illusory; that because collective bargaining over wages and benefits impacts state budgets, it is inherently political speech. But respondents point out that if this were true—that collective bargaining is a form of political speech—how could it be legal for states to ban it among public employees, as several states currently do? Moreover, the Abood Court noted that dissenting public employees are still free to express their disagreements with the union publicly and vocally. A “public employee who believes that a union representing him is urging a course that is unwise as a matter of public policy is not barred from expressing his viewpoint.”10 And, of course, if teachers such as Friedrichs are upset with union leadership, they can seek to have leaders ousted through periodic democratic elections of officers, or even run for office themselves. Countervailing State Interests Recognized in Abood Free speech rights are never absolute. Jefferson’s statement about compelled contributions, for example, cannot be taken literally. For instance, the government may, in fact, compel taxation from an individual who is opposed to the war in Afghanistan, and then use those funds to engage in speech to recruit soldiers for the war effort. Free speech rights must always be balanced against other considerations. In the case of public sector unions, the Abood Court noted the state has two major interests. The opinion, written by Potter Stewart, an Eisenhower appointee, identified one as labor peace and workplace stability, and the other as reducing the risk of “free ridership” and unfairness.11 In the United States, a single union normally represents all employees in order to promote “labor peace.” “The principle of exclusive union representation,” the Court noted, “is a central element in the congressional structure of industrial relations.” The National Labor Relations Act—and many state collective bargaining laws—provide for a single representative to avoid “the confusion that would result from attempting to enforce two or more agreements specifying different terms and conditions of employment.” The Court noted that the arrangement also “prevents inter-union rivalries from creating dissension within the workforce and eliminating the advantages to the employer of collectivization.” Finally, the Court observed, exclusive union representation “also frees the employer from the possibility of facing conflicting demands from different unions, and permits the employer and a single union to reach agreements and settlements that are not subject to attack from rival labor organizations.”12 In the context of public employee unions, the Court noted, “confusion and conflict” could reign, for example, if rival teachers unions held different positions on issues such as “class hours, class sizes, holidays, tenure provisions,” and the like.13 A second, related, state interest is to prevent what is known as the “free rider” problem in cases of collective action. Because of exclusive representation, unions have a duty “fairly and equitably to represent all employees . . . union and non-union.” Given this arrangement, in which employees benefit from collective bargaining whether they are union members or not, a classic “free rider” issue arises, the Court noted, whereby employees could “refuse to contribute to the union while obtaining the benefits of union representation that necessarily accrue to all employees.”14 Free rider problems exist in many organizations. Why donate to a religious institution if you can still attend and enjoy services whether or not you pay? To counter this, some groups can provide “special advantages” to backers—a leadership position in the church, for example. Unions cannot take this approach, however. As Justice Kagan noted in Harris v. Quinn, because “the law compels unions to represent—and represent fairly—every worker in the bargaining union, regardless whether they join or contribute to the union,” the collective action problem is “of far greater magnitude than in the typical interest group.”15 She referenced Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion in an earlier decision, making this point: “where the state creates in the nonmembers a legal entitlement from the union, it may compel them to pay the cost.”16 This principle, “there is no free lunch,” is something conservatives usually understand well. According to the counsel for Friedrichs, annual dues to the CTA amount to approximately $1,000 per teacher, of which nonmembers receive a refund of roughly $350 to $400 for expenses unrelated to collective bargaining.17 In other words, Friedrichs is happy to accept increases in wages and benefits the union negotiates hard to win, but does not want to pay the $600 to $650 per year that other members contribute in order to make those wage gains possible. Will she give back her raises, forgo health care benefits, give up the right to pursue grievances, and agree to teach larger classes that the union negotiated? The amicus brief of the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors put it well: there is no “constitutional right to a free ride.”18 Promoting Democracy Should Be Considered in Balancing Free Speech and State Interests In balancing the rights of free speech and state interests, Abood came to the correct conclusion—free speech rights can sometimes be curtailed to serve state interests in labor peace and avoiding free ridership. But these are only a subset of state interests. Indeed, the Abood court substantially understated the interests of states in preserving fair share fees. For example, amici in the case, such as the National Women’s Law Center and seventy other civil rights groups, note that there are myriad ways in which labor unions generally—and public sector unions specifically—improve the conditions of minorities and women, a vitally important state interest.19 All unions—including, and perhaps especially, public sector unions—also contribute to one of the most important foundational interests of the state: democracy. And they do this in many different ways. Unions are critical civic organizations that serve as a check on government power. They are important players in promoting a strong middle class, upon which democracy depends. They serve as schools of democracy for workers. And teacher unions, in particular, help ensure that our educational system is sufficiently funded to teach children to become thoughtful and enlightened citizens in our self-governing democracy. Democracies Need Unions to Serve as a Check on Government Power Alexis de Tocqueville famously marveled at the thriving civic associations that keep American democracy vitalized; and for the past century, unions have been a critical part of that framework. Recognizing the important role of unions in liberal democracies, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides in Article 23 that “Everyone has the right to form and join trade unions for the protection of his interests.” In 1980, President Ronald Reagan championed the role of Polish unions in challenging dictatorial rule by the Communist Party. Reagan declared in a Labor Day speech that year, “where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost.” Albert Shanker, the legendary president of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1997, saw a pattern in authoritarian regimes. “There is no freedom or democracy without trade unions,” he noted. “The first thing a dictator does is to get rid of the trade unions.”20 Public sector unions, in particular, have played an important role in bringing down dictators in countries such as Chile.21 In free societies across the globe, from Finland to Japan, the rights of teachers and other public sector employees to unionize are well established. Indeed, when the United States attempts to plant the seeds of democracy in other countries, free trade unions—for private and public sector workers alike—are critical elements of what we advocate. If such unions are to have the capacity to wield influence, they cannot be starved of the fees from workers necessary to play that role. Democracies Need a Strong Middle Class to Avoid Plutocracy Going back to Aristotle, it has been recognized that democracies are more likely to thrive when a vibrant middle class can support them.22 Large inequalities of wealth can undermine democracy. As philosopher Sidney Hook observed, “It is possible for people to be politically equal as voters, yet so unequal in educational, economic, and social opportunities, that ultimately, even the nature of the political equality is affected.”23 In highly unequal societies, large income gaps can give wealthy interests an outsized role in electing officials. Theodore Roosevelt warned of the dangers of having “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.”24 More recently, Nobel Prize–winning economist Michael Spence told the New York Times that we have seen “an evolution from one propertied man, one vote; to one man, one vote; to one person, one vote; trending to one dollar, one vote.”25 Strong unions helped build the middle class in America after the Great Depression, and continue to have a positive effect on ameliorating extreme inequalities of wealth. By bargaining for fair wages and benefits, unions in the public and private sector help foster broadly shared prosperity. Research finds, for example, that unions compress wage differences between management and labor. According to one study, “controlling for variation in human resource practices, unionized establishments have an average of 23.2 percentage point lower management-to-worker pay ratio relative to non-union workplaces.”26 By the same token, as the Center for American Progress’s David Madland has vividly illustrated, the decline in union density in the United States between 1969 and 2009 has been accompanied by a strikingly similar decline in the share of income going to the middle class (the middle three-fifths of the income distribution; see Figure 1). andnbsp;The middle class is hollowing out: in 1971, 61 percent of Americans were middle class, but a December 2015 Pew Research Center report found that a slight majority of Americans now live in low- or upper-income households.27 Although there are many reasons for middle-class wage stagnation—including globalization and the rise in technology—Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute finds that the decline in union bargaining power is “the single largest factor suppressing wage growth for middle-wage workers over the last few decades.” The International Monetary Fund, likewise, has linked decline in unions worldwide with rises in income inequality.28 Figure 1. chartDOWNLOAD International studies also connect the relatively low levels of U.S. union density (when compared with other nations) and the higher level of economic inequality found in the United States. According to a 2011 analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research looking at twenty-one wealthy nations, nine countries had more than 80 percent of their workers covered by collective bargaining agreements; nine had between 30 and 80 percent covered; and just three—the United States, Japan, and New Zealand—had coverage rates below 20 percent. Using data from the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook on levels of income inequality, my colleague Moshe Marvit and I demonstrate in Why Labor Organizing Should Be a Civil Right that the three nations with the lowest collective bargaining coverage also were among the four countries with the highest degrees of income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient.29 Defunding public sector unions will only accelerate the extreme economic inequality that threatens our political democracy. Unions Are Needed to Serve as Schools for Democracy Civic organizations that are run democratically can be an important mechanism for acculturating citizens to the inner workings of democracy. Unions are among the most important of these organizations, bringing together rank and file workers from a variety of ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds, and serving as what Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam calls “schools for democracy.” Union members learn skills that are essential to a well-functioning democracy: how to run meetings, debate one another, and organize for political action.30 Labor unions can also help create a culture of participation among workers. Being involved in workplace decisions and the give and take of collective bargaining, voting on union contracts, and voting for union leadership have all been called important drivers of “democratic acculturation.”31 In addition, union members routinely engage in civic activities, such as staffing phone banks and canvassing voters door to door. This involvement can boost civic participation among union members and nonmembers alike. One study found that for every one-percentage-point increase in a state’s union density, voter turnout increased between 0.2 and 2.5 percentage points. In a presidential election, a ten-percentage-point increase in union density could translate into 3 million more voters.32 Democracies Need Well-Educated Citizens, Which Teachers Unions Help Produce Democracies need well-educated citizens, and one important subset of public sector unions—those representing teachers—play a vital role in promoting that goal. Of the 17 million state and local government employees in 2010, 6.9 million were teachers.33 Most contemporary political rhetoric emphasizes the importance of education in creating a skilled workforce. But the original purpose of public education was to provide an educated citizenry that could make our ongoing experiment in self-governance work. Democracy requires a thinking people who are not easily swayed by demagoguery. Thomas Jefferson argued that public schooling was necessary “to ensure that citizens would know how to protect their liberty.” Nineteenth century educator Horace Mann, widely seen as the father of public education, put it more colorfully: “A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one.” At root, the idea of self-governance requires an educated citizenry because the people themselves rule. All nations, as historian Paul Gagnon noted, provide an excellent education to “those who are expected to run the country,” and that quality of education “cannot be far from what everyone in a democracy needs to know.”34 In the Friedrichs case, the lawyers for the petitioner try to make the case that teachers unions have a “detrimental” effect on education. Citing the Hoover Institution’s Terry Moe, the attorneys for Friedrichs argue, “there is strong evidence that, as union-negotiated agreements become denser with rules and procedural protections, student achievement falls, especially among minority students.”35 Critics such as Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas compare teacher unions to special interests like the Tobacco Institute. But the difference, of course, is that the latter is dedicated to getting more children addicted to deadly cigarettes, while the former represent rank and file teachers who are trying to help teach children to read and understand math and science.36 As the amicus brief of the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors points out, states with “fair share” collective bargaining provisions have higher academic performance on average than those who do not. Fourth grade math proficiency is 9 percent higher, while reading proficiency is 13 percent higher; and in eighth grade, by which time students have spent more time in school, the difference is more pronounced: 16 percent higher in both math and reading proficiency.37 (See Figure 2.) Figure 2. chartDOWNLOAD Of course, there are lots of other factors, such as poverty, that influence a state’s student achievement levels. But careful studies that seek to control for those additional factors tend to find higher achievement in states with strong teacher unions. A review by sociologist Robert Carini concluded that “there is an emerging consensus in the literature that teacher unionism favorably influences achievement for most students, as measured by a variety of standardized tests.”38 Carini’s 2002 review of seventeen widely cited studies observed that twelve found positive effects, and five found negative effects (see Figure 3). Moreover, the twelve concluding positive results were more methodologically rigorous than the five that found negative effects, because they were more likely to look at student level data (rather than using state or district averages) and to control for more variables.39 Figure 3. chartDOWNLOAD Union representation is plausibly connected to higher achievement, as Leo Casey of the Albert Shanker Institute has noted, because “the working conditions of teachers are, in significant measure, the learning conditions of students, and so, improvements in the working lives of teachers generally translate into improvements in the education of students.”40 Before Albert Shanker and his colleagues in New York City began bargaining collectively for teachers in the early 1960s, teachers were paid less than people who washed cars for a living.41 Subsequently, unions began bargaining for higher teacher salaries, which are likely to attract better candidates, and smaller class sizes, which can improve student learning. Unions also seek greater voice for teachers in school decision making, which can reduce teacher turnover.42 Indeed, one could argue that teachers unions provide a healthy enhancement to democratic decision-making on education policy because teachers, as much as any other group in society, serve as powerful advocates for those Americans who cannot vote—school children. As journalist Jonathan Chait has noted, politicians—who have short-term horizons—are prone to under-investing in education, and teachers unions “provide a natural bulwark” against that tendency. Since most voters do not have children in the public school system, those parents who do need political allies have their concerns heard. The interests of teachers and their unions do not always coincide with those of students, but on the really big issues, such as overall investment in education, the convergence of interests is strong. And evidence suggests that the alliance is working. In general, American society consistently under-invests in children outside of schools, compared with other leading democratic societies. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the child poverty rate in the United States is 21.6 percent, the fifth highest among the forty member-nations. Only Turkey, Romania, Mexico, and Israel have higher child poverty rates. Put differently, the United States is in the bottom eighth in preventing child poverty. By contrast, when the interests of children are represented by and connected to the interests of teachers—as they are on the question of public education spending—the United States ranks close to the top third. Among thirty-nine OECD nations, the United States ranks fourteenth in spending on primary and secondary education as a percentage of gross domestic product.43 There is little doubt that, without the voice of teachers, the United States would under-spend on public education as well. In her dissent in Harris v. Quinn, Justice Elena Kagan made a parallel argument about home care workers. Patients suffer when low wages induce workforce shortages and high turnover. “The individual customers are powerless to address those systemic issues,” Kagan wrote, but the unionization of home-care assistants helped doubled wages over ten years.44 There is a final, important way in which teacher unions can promote democratic citizenship: by modeling workplace democracy for children. In schools where educators have a voice, as my colleague Halley Potter and I noted in A Smarter Charter: Finding What Works for Charter Schools and Public Education, “teachers are not simply workers who implement the directives of principles but are active participants in decision making. Students see workplace democracy in action, underlining the lessons found in the civics books.”45
US democracy is the greatest international stabilizer and is key to stop extinction
Fried 20 Fried, Daniel. “America's Commitment to Democracy Must Prevail at Home and Abroad.” Atlantic Council, 6 Nov. 2020, www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/americas-commitment-to-democracy-must-prevail-at-home-and-abroad/. Daniel Fried is the Weiser Family distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council. He was the coordinator for sanctions policy during the Obama administration, assistant secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia during the Bush administration, and senior director at the National Security Council for the Clinton and Bush administrations. He also served as ambassador to Poland during the Clinton administration.
If any doubt remained, US President Donald J. Trump’s baseless and authoritarian November 5 statement from the White House, attacking the integrity of the 2020 elections, cleared it up: Democracy in America—the very essence of what has made us great at home and abroad—is undergoing a serious stress test. While former Vice President Joe Biden appears headed for a victory in the presidential election, the race has revealed a nation closely divided, with emotions so high that many Americans question whether the country can pull itself together. They’re not alone. America’s friends abroad are also asking whether the United States will be able, or willing, to resume its role as champion of an international system informed by rules and democratic values (as Biden has urged). To pass the existential test now before us, we Americans must not only hold fast to our best values at home, but also uphold our commitment to reflecting those values as we look abroad. America’s traditional values-based, outward-looking grand strategy comes from a deep source: Its uncommon national identity—not an ethnic state bound by blood, but rather, as President Abraham Lincoln redefined it during the Civil War, “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” This new kind of nation sought to play a new kind of role in the world. We Americans must not only hold fast to our best values at home, but also uphold our commitment to reflecting those values as we look abroad. The central idea of US grand strategy–articulated first by Lincoln’s former aide, Secretary of State John Hay, and President Teddy Roosevelt, and put into effect by President Franklin Roosevelt and President Harry Truman—was that America’s interests and values would advance together. Franklin Roosevelt found the key to defeating the Great Depression—the progressive reforms of the New Deal, the democratic alternative to fascism and communism—and applied that liberal confidence to his 1941 Atlantic Charter that outlined America’s vision of a post-World War II world: an open, rules-based international system that would favor democracy while generating sustainable prosperity. Those American leaders weren’t driven by mere “idealism” or “elitist” sentiment. The country’s grand strategy was based on a canny assessment that an open world would play to US strengths: industrial and technological advantage, plus agricultural abundance. The United States set out to make the world a better place—and get rich in the process. Such a system, however, would work for the United States only if it also worked for others. So the US also set up multilateral institutions—the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, now the World Trade Organization), NATO, the United Nations— designed (in progressive/New Deal fashion) to create rules and structures to avoid the chaos and rivalries that had generated two world wars, Nazism, and Communism. The resulting US-led system was far from perfect. It resulted in failures, inconsistencies, bad deals, and blunders. The United States made many of them. But it also produced three generations of great-power peace, the defeat of Soviet communism without general war, and growing prosperity for billions of people. Compare the results of American grand strategy not with an ideal, or even with the more extravagant US claims about it, but against the 20th-century competition. US grand strategy had (and has) critics from all sides. Those on the left have called out the United States for its hypocrisy and occasionally condemned the strategy as mere scaffolding for cynical American domination. Critics on the right and some in the center (from isolationist or realist schools of thought) have argued that the United States has no business leading a rules-based global system in the first place. Doing so, some have maintained, only leads to over-militarization and over-extension, or the US getting suckered into bad trade deals by wily European or Asian countries. Policymakers always need skeptics whispering in their ear about risks and limits, especially when they seek to accomplish big things. The critics have often had a point, especially about bad choices made within the framework of a larger strategic design. No grand strategy, even the best, will protect against dumb policies. But the Vietnam War, to pick one of the dumbest, did not prove that US Cold War strategy was a failure. It proved instead that even solid theory (containment policy) is no guarantee of success in particular situations. Instead what’s essential is realism, care, caution, and a proper estimation of assets and liabilities. Policymakers always need skeptics whispering in their ear about risks and limits, especially when they seek to accomplish big things. But the alternatives that many critics of US grand strategy have suggested don’t look especially promising. If the United States weakens or dismantles alliances like those with NATO or with South Korea (as Trump has suggested in unfiltered moments), are we likely to be happy with the consequences? Is the United States more or less likely to manage China’s predatory trade policies if we spend our time trashing trade relations with Asian and European democracies? Or eliminating multilateral norms to which we might wish to appeal? It may be unfair to ascribe to more thoughtful realists Trump’s more extreme expressions. But Trump’s posturing didn’t come from nothing. It reflected ideas circulating as alternatives to US grand strategy as it has existed since 1945. Value-free spheres of influence, much admired by certain kinds of realists, actually don’t tend to be stable, if centuries of European history are any guide. In such an arrangement with China or Russia, what principles and which friends would the United States abandon? And how would the United States benefit from such a deal? One thing I learned in forty years of diplomatic service is that policies should be judged not by their well-crafted justifications but by their impact on the ground, where it counts. Lines drawn on maps in far-away meeting rooms have consequences. The United States is best off sticking to the pursuit of its interests through the advancement of its values. But it needs to do so in new ways to meet new challenges. In a broad sense, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman applied the New Deal’s domestic principles to their global strategy: strengthening democratic governance through new regulatory norms and systems to redress destructive social and economic imbalances. In that sense, the New Deal led to the Marshall Plan.Today, as then, democratic and social renewal at home can inform a rebooted US grand strategy abroad. What might that mean? Facing a worsening pandemic, the United States must build international solidarity to develop and share vaccines and therapeutics. Facing the threat of global depression, the United States should lead its democratic allies in a massive effort to reignite economic growth, with benefits more widely shared. Facing massive income disparities (that have reached pre-New Deal levels in the United States), the United States needs to find the balance between nurturing capitalism that creates wealth and safeguarding the rights of citizens to enjoy common prosperity. Facing new challenges from authoritarian powers, the United States and its democratic allies need to join forces to contend with Russia’s destructive aggression and with China’s exploitation of the international trading system from which it has gained so much. Facing waves of nativism and nationalism, the democratic world should recommit to its best civic traditions; the United States needs to remember and live out Lincoln’s redefinition of the American nation. Facing threats to the global commons from climate change and environmental degradation, the United States must once again assume its share of global responsibilities, including the development of new clean-energy technologies (in true Yankee fashion, making good money as it does so). In 1941, on the verge of international leadership, the United States articulated its aims in the Atlantic Charter. That was a document for its time, signed by the leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom. An incoming Biden administration could benefit from a better, broader charter of principles to reboot US foreign policy as the democratic world seeks to emerge from the coronavirus era and as the US emerges from the Trump presidency. As a candidate, Biden called for a summit of democracies. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has suggested strengthening the “D-10” group of leading democracies. Many European governments have made clear that they don’t like the prospect of a world without US leadership and are willing to enlist in efforts to foster a new, democratic solidarity. Given the damage inflicted by the Trump presidency, a fresh start will be needed. With this in mind, in 2019 the Atlantic Council organized a group of foreign-policy leaders from all continents who issued a “Declaration of Principles for Freedom, Prosperity, and Peace,” inspired by the Atlantic Charter but broader in scope to reflect 21st-century challenges. Its seven principles sought to balance concerns of the political left and right: “freedom and justice,” “democracy and self-determination,” “peace and security,” “free markets and equal opportunity,” “an open and healthy planet,” “the right of assistance,” and “collective action” to advance these principles. The Declaration was an invitation and a sketch for democratic leaders around the world willing to push back against forces of aggression and destruction, and to address the problems that have generated the dissatisfaction fueling Trump and leaders like him. It draws on the best traditions of the United States from the 20th century, starting with the recognition of the link between values and interests at home and abroad. It attempts, as did the Atlantic Charter, to state what the world’s core democracies stand for. This is the time to recommit to these principles and, thus inspired, fix past mistakes. The challenges won’t get better on their own. US retreat—from our best values at home or abroad—won’t help anyone, least of all Americans. So, we’d better learn fast.
The alternative to democracy is violent civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and genocide--- best research confirms
Cortright 13, David Cortright is the director of Policy Studies at the Kroc Institute for Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Chair of the Board of Directors of the Fourth Freedom Forum, and author of 17 books, Kristen Wall is a Researcher and Analyst at the Kroc Institute, Conor Seyle is Associate Director of One Earth Future, Governance, Democracy, and Peace How State Capacity and Regime Type Influence the Prospects of War and Peace, http://oneearthfuture.org/sites/oneearthfuture.org/files//documents/publications/Cortright-Seyle-Wall-Paper.pdf
The classic statement of Kantian peace theory applies to interstate conflict and focuses on dyadic relations between states. This leaves out the most common form of armed violence in the world today, civil conflicts and one-sided violence within states. In recent years, researchers have found evidence that the democratic peace phenomenon applies within states as well as between them. Regime type matters not only externally but internally. Mature democratic governments are not only less likely to wage war on each other, they also experience fewer armed uprisings and major civil wars and are more reluctant to use armed violence against their own citizens. As the studies below indicate, the evidence of a democratic peace phenomenon within states is strong and compelling. Walter observes a direct relationship between levels of democracy and the likelihood of internal armed conflict. In her examination of the problem of war recurrence, she finds that countries characterized by open political systems and economic well-being—i.e., developed democracies— have a much lower probability of renewed civil war than autocratic countries with low levels of economic development.91 Walter measures the degree of political openness and democratic ‘voice’ by using Polity and Freedom House indicators. High scores on these indices correlate directly with a reduced risk of civil war. She notes, as other scholars have observed, that major civil wars do not occur in mature democratic states. She concludes: It may be that liberal democracies are really the only types of regimes that can truly insulate themselves from violent internal challenges. This suggests that citizens who are able to express their preferences about alternative policies and leaders, who are guaranteed civil liberties in their daily lives and in acts of political participation, are less likely to become soldiers. Offering citizens a real outlet for their concerns and having a government that is open to democratic change considerably reduces the likelihood of a civil war.92 Civil conflicts within mature democracies are not only less frequent but also less lethal. Bethany Lacina assesses the severity of civil conflicts by measuring casualty levels according to several variables: regime type, state capacity, ethnic and religious diversity, and the impact of foreign military intervention. She finds that the political characteristics of a regime correlate significantly with differing casualty levels and are the strongest predictor of conflict severity. Democratic governments experience much lower casualty levels during civil conflict than autocratic states. Lacina’s analysis finds that civil wars occurring within democratic states have less than half the battle deaths of conflicts in non-democracies.93 State-sponsored violence against civilians is also less likely to occur in democracies than in autocracies. In his important book, Death by Government, Rudolph Rummel assembles mind numbing data and numerous examples demonstrating the myriad ways governments kill their citizens—directly through genocide and mass terror and indirectly through starvation and repression. He finds a stark contrast between the behavior of autocracies and democracies. Autocratic governments readily “slaughter their people by the tens of millions; in contrast, many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute even serial murderers.”94 Through statistical analysis, Rummel shows that genocidal killing is directly associated with the absence of democracy, holding constant other variables such as regime type, ethnic diversity, economic development level, population density, and culture.95 The lack of democracy is the most significant indicator of the likelihood of mass repression again the civilian population. As Rummel documents the appalling litany of governments murdering their own people, he is unequivocal about what he considers the necessary remedy—“The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom.”95 Barbara Harff’s research on genocidal violence comes to similar conclusions. She examines 126 cases of internal war and regime collapse between 1955 and 1997 to identify the factors that led to genocidal violence in 35 of these cases. Her results match the findings of other studies. Autocratic regimes facing state failure are three and a half times more likely to experience genocidal violence than democratic regimes facing such failure.97 She finds that genocidal violence is more likely in regimes that advocate exclusionary ideologies, an approach that is rare in mature democratic states. Harff observes that the lowest levels of mass killing occur in states with a high degree of economic interdependence, which is characteristic of mature democratic regimes.98 Her conclusion is that states are less likely to employ genocidal violence when they have inclusive democratic systems and trade extensively with other countries. As Steven Pinker notes, these findings fit well with the Kantian triad of democracy, cosmopolitanism and trade— “another trifecta” for liberal peace theory.99
1AC – Plan
Thus, the plan Resolved: The United States ought to recognize teachers’ unconditional right to strike.
Shanker 73’ SHANKER, ALBERT L. “Why Teachers Need the Right to Strike.” Monthly Labor Review, vol. 96, no. 9, 1973, pp. 48–51. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41839103. Accessed 21 June 2021.
INSTEAD of talking about alternatives to strikes, we ought to be talking about trying to strike in the pub-lic sector. It has not been tried. In the private sec-tor, we have paid a price for strikes. We have paid a price for the process of collective bargaining, be-cause the only alternative is an unfree society—and the price that we pay for strikes is one that we generally are willing to pay. Collective bargaining has never been sold as an ideal answer to anything, but it is the lesser of a number of evils that exist in the private sector and, in a somewhat modified form, in the public sector. Management and labor have to go through some sort of messy process to find a way of agreeing with each other for a period of time, and the only alter-natives are unilateral determination by management —which leads to exploitation—or arbitration—which leads to the imposition by a third party of his views. There are some differences in the public sector, but these are not adequate justification to abolish or modify the bargaining process. The notion, con-stantly stated, that in the public sector there is no profit motive is in a sense true. But in a sense it is irrelevant, because there is no question that the public employee bargains just as hard, if not harder, than the private employee. The question of being reelected, the fear of being accused of throwing away public money—"giving it away" to public employees —and also the very fact that he is involved in a public activity in many ways makes it more difficult for public management to bargain than for private management. No one fought a tougher battle against labor unions than philanthropists who were involved in donating their own time as managers in hospitals in the City of New York. They spent many hours in getting many billions of dollars to see to it that these hospitals could be made viable. But when it came to providing an effective union for employees earning $24 or $25 a week, they felt that those employees should donate their time, too, since the philanthro-pists were. This happens frequently in public sector management. Another issue in the public sector, somewhat more difficult to resolve, is that top public manage-ment is elected by the people, put there in order to effectuate public purposes. We do run into a con-flict in the question of bargaining and it is just that—who is making these public decisions? Can public management make the decision on the basis of their platform, on the basis of their promises? Or will elections become-relatively meaningless, be-cause whatever the politician says he's going to do, eventually he's going to the bargaining table and be forced to do, not what the people or the general public want him to do, but what he is compelled to do. Who's really running the city, the Board of Education? the Department of Sanitation? Is it the people in a democracy, or is it the unions—here viewed as a greedy and private interest, compelling government to do for its purposes rather than those of the people. These are some of the issues in this sector. As we look at alternatives, it is important to acknowledge that strikes originally were widespread in obtaining recognition for unions. No one has mentioned that the majority of States still do not recognize any form of collective bargaining for pub-lic employees. Here in California there is an ineffec-tive "meet and confer" law, which does not result in binding written agreements or anything resem-bling collective bargaining. Instead of talking about alternatives to the strike in the public sector, I would say that the teachers and other public employees in the State of Cali-fornia, and the majority of other States in the United States, would be wise to follow the trends of teachers and other public workers in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and elsewhere—because if they do not in fact exercise the right to strike, the government may never create the machinery that employees have in other States. It is not accidental that in States in which public employees have engaged in strikes the legislatures have found it possible to create mecha-nisms for collective bargaining.
Definition of unconditional right to strike:
NLRB 85 National Labor Relations Board; “Legislative History of the Labor Management Relations Act, 1947: Volume 1,” Jan 1985; https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=7o1tA__v4xwCandrdid=book-7o1tA__v4xwCandrdot=1
Edited for gendered language
As for the so-called absolute or unconditional right to strike—there are no absolute rights that do not have their corresponding responsibilities. Under our American Anglo-Saxon system, each individual is entitled to the maximum of freedom, provided however (and this provision is of first importance), his their freedom has due regard for the rights and freedoms of others. The very safeguard of our freedoms is the recognition of this fundamental principle. I take issue very definitely with the suggestion that there is an absolute and unconditional right to concerted action (which after all is what the strike is) which endangers the health and welfare of our people in order to attain a selfish end.
Empirics confirm right to strike improves teacher union legitimacy
DiSalvo, Daniel, and Michael Hartney. “Teachers Unions in the Post-Janus World.” Education Next, 2 Sept. 2020, www.educationnext.org/teachers-unions-post-janus-world-defying-predictions-still-hold-major-clout/ Daniel Disalvo
Professor and Chair of Political Science at the City College of New York Michael Hartney is assistant professor of political science at Boston College./dhsNJ
- Increases solidarity proven by survey
- Provides incentive to join union which increases member count
- Positive press coverage that empirically increases public support
It is probably not a coincidence that public-school teachers began engaging in strikes and work stoppages soon after the Janus decision was handed down. In 2018, teacher walkouts occurred in the Republican-leaning, weak-union states of Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Colorado. Of these, the largest work stoppage was by the Arizona Education Association and involved 81,000 teachers. The second-largest strike, by the Oklahoma Education Association, included 45,000 teachers. Overall, the 20 major teacher strikes of 2018 involved the highest number of workers—485,000—since 1986. Aside from forcing local workplace issues to the bargaining table, strikes can also serve as a union recruitment and retention strategy. Calling a strike enlists the rank-and-file in a collective enterprise and thereby enhances union solidarity. Because only union members can vote to authorize a strike, union leaders can use such occasions to recruit nonmembers to join. Strikes also gain teachers unions sympathetic national press coverage. In 2019, a smaller wave of strikes occurred in Democrat-dominated, strong-union cities, including Los Angeles, Oakland, Denver, and Chicago, as well as in a number of smaller school districts in Oregon, California, and New Jersey. Prior to 2018–2019, only two notable teacher strikes had occurred in big cities in the past 20 years: a 7-day walkout in Chicago in 2012 and a 16-day walkout in Detroit in 2006. Besides pay, a major point of contention in these strikes was the demand that school districts hire more teachers to reduce class sizes and employ more support staff. Regardless of whether such measures make wise policy, they clearly serve to increase the pool of potential union members. Consider that, in Los Angeles, the district and the union settled on a deal that added 300 nurses, 82 librarians, 77 counselors, and some new teachers to reduce class sizes. In Chicago, the district and the union settled a five-day strike with a contract that included caps on class sizes, which necessitated adding more teachers, and promises to hire 250 nurses and 209 social workers. All of these new employees are potential union members. There is evidence that teachers-union activity post-Janus did increase solidarity. A survey by Educators for Excellence found that 54 percent of teachers in 2020 felt that union membership provided them with “feelings of pride and solidarity,” up from 46 percent in 2018. In addition, a little more than half of teachers who do not belong to the union say they are likely to join their union next year. The strikes have also increased public support for the teaching profession. Although a vigorous debate persists among analysts, it is now the popular wisdom that teachers are underpaid. West Virginia and Arizona both ended teacher walkouts by passing across-the-board pay increases. Early in the current presidential campaign, some Democratic candidates proposed using federal funds to top up teacher salaries. Public opinion has notably shifted in favor of increasing teacher salaries. The 2019 Education Next survey found that, among respondents who were not told the average salary of teachers in their home state, 72 percent said teacher pay should increase, while just 3 percent favored cutting it. Even among respondents who were told how much teachers currently make, 56 percent favored hiking these salaries—a 20 percent increase since 2017—and only 5 percent wanted to decrease them. Beyond pay, one study found that the recent strike wave increased support for teachers unions. The survey found that parents of school-age children with firsthand experience with the recent strikes supported greater legal rights for teachers unions and favored a stronger labor movement. This is a notable finding, given that teacher work stoppages make life difficult for parents, who must scramble to find childcare and things for kids to do. In short, the teachers unions have gained public sympathy, while education reformers have lost some. Consider the cover of Time magazine at the dawn of the education-reform movement in 1980: “Help! Teacher Can’t Teach.” Forty years later, in the aftermath of the Great Recession and red-state teacher strikes, Time once again put the image of a schoolteacher on its cover, but the headline told a different story: “I have a master’s degree, 16 years of experience, work two extra jobs, and donate blood plasma to pay the bills. I’m a teacher in America!”