This week, Wisconsin once again found itself in the middle of a union labor dispute. This time it was about referees, not teachers, and the people getting screwed
were our favorite millionaires, not our children.

After the “Inaccurate Reception” ruined my Monday night, it managed to bring the
country together on labor issues. Because we might not be able to decide if teachers
are “union thugs,” we sure as hell can tell the difference between catching a ball and
catching a guy holding a ball. So, after weeks of ineptitude, the consensus was clear: The referees’ union was right, and the referees deserved whatever they wanted just so long as we
got our football back.

I know these are different labor situations. One is about a multi-billion dollar
company watching its hardball negotiating tactic backfire with a wave of bad
national press when referees from the Lingerie Football League couldn’t handle professional athletes. The other
relates to a government facing a deficit trying to find a way to get employee wages and
benefits under control. Still, when both President Barack Obama and Gov. Scott Walker
come out on the same side of a labor issue, it’s at least got to pique your
curiosity.

A lot of the issues in both cases are similar, and it’s interesting that on one hand
we have the human Hercules NFL referee Ed Hochuli being petitioned by just about everyone to receive the
benefits his union sought, while on the other hand teachers face a very vocal group that thinks the teachers not only don’t have the right to collectively bargain, but they are
also essentially more interested in living off the government than educating their
students. Look at the biggest issues in both cases: The NFL
wanted to change the pension package the referees received into a 401(k), create a
new system under which they could pay for performance and change the overall pay
structure; the state wanted to change how much teachers were paying into their pension and health care benefits, have the flexibility to start paying for performance
and control the overall pay structure.

In one case, the employers got everything they wanted, in the other the workers
essentially got everything they wanted. Why?

I don’t think they are equal situations, but it’s interesting to me that we as
consumers of football never questioned the referees’ right to fight for what they
thought was adequate compensation; in fact, we were the driving force behind them
getting it. But as consumers of education, we absolutely questioned the teachers
right to unionize and bargain. In Wisconsin, we took it away from them altogether until the recent Dane County court ruling and were able to
save money as a state. Certainly a valuable goal, but also very similar to the goals of
the NFL ownership. The NFL ownership has been blasted for allowing the replacement referees
to operate, which only happened because at the end of the day the NFL wanted to save
money.

We recognize in this country we need to be able to educate better, just
as clearly as we saw the quality of officiating under the replacements
was unacceptable. We demanded the NFL pay these referees to give us the
quality we wanted. Yet for education we cut the budget by $900 million. A recent report by the Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities said “Teacher quality is the most important school-based determinant of student
success…. Recruiting, developing, and retaining high-quality teachers is … critical to
improving student achievement. But these tasks are more difficult when school
districts are cutting their budgets.” We chose the priority of saving money over the
priority of improving the system.

I think the NFL learned the hard way you get what you pay for with the replacement
referees. I wonder if there will be an “Inaccurate Reception” moment in education
before we realize the same lesson.

John Waters ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in journalism.