Seven Deadly Sins of School Employees, NEA employees must be paid for time in prison

Seven Deadly Sins of School Employees

Your Association attorneys can help you if you avoid these gaffes.

We, the state attorneys who represent members of the National Education Association (NEA), love a good courtroom fight. In fact, we have an impressive win record in board hearings, trials, and appeals. So when clients have been sexually harassed, wrongfully terminated or denied wages, we take careful notes and fight the good fight on their behalf.

Sometimes, however, clients bring us stories that aren’t going to end well—where there is no argument to be made and our client isn’t on the side of truth and justice. In those cases, the most we can do is point out the error of their ways and hand them a Kleenex.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Though I have written about the fact often, it bears repeating that the National Education Association and its affiliates are employers.

Between them they hire thousands of workers to perform a variety of tasks. 

Virtually all of these workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements in which the teachers’ union is management – bosses, to put it plainly. Union employees use the contract to set salaries, benefits, working conditions and protections against arbitrary actions by union executives.

About 500 people work at NEA national headquarters in Washington, DC. A handful of unions represent them, the largest being the National Education Association Staff Organization (NEASO). NEA and NEASO negotiated a 136-page collective bargaining agreement in June 2012, and it runs through the end of May 2015. I have posted the full document on EIA’s Declassified page, but to save you the energy of mining it yourself, here are a few provisions I thought were worthy of highlighting:

* It is explicitly noted that “An employee shall be permitted time off as necessary to use the restroom.”

* NEA must assume financial liability for an employee who is prosecuted or sued “because of any act taken by him/her in the course of his/her employment.” Under these circumstances, unless the employee is guilty of “gross negligence or gross irresponsibility,” he or she “shall be paid at his/her regular hourly rate for all time spent in jail.”