The head of Utah’s largest teachers’ union is warning that a bill proposed in the Utah Legislature could hurt public workers — teachers, law enforcement, firefighters, public transit drivers and more — and the people they serve.
“The bill is silencing our voice in terms of trying to improve working conditions, and those working conditions are our students’ learning conditions,” Renée Pinkney, president of the Utah Education Association, said Tuesday, the opening day of the 2025 legislative session.
The bill, HB267, is aimed at banning collective bargaining across all of Utah’s public sectors. The bill would not prevent public employees from joining or forming unions, but it would prohibit government employers from “recognizing a labor organization as a bargaining agent.”
The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Jordan Teuscher, R-South Jordan, said rather than “silencing” public workers, as Pinkney put it, his proposed legislation “will enable more participation in the negotiation process and provide better benefits for our public employees.”
It would do that, Teuscher explained, by “opening up the free market” and allowing other people and organizations to have a seat at the negotiating table.
‘What this bill does’
Jeff Worthington, president of the Utah AFL-CIO, shared Pinkney’s concerns, and predicted HB267 would produce a negative “trickle-down” effect were it to pass.
“Wages will become stagnated or even decrease,” Worthington said. “Benefits could be taken away from employees. Retirement benefits could be stripped away.”
Without union representation, public employees are “at the mercy of the state,” Worthington added. “They just become at-will employees,” he said. “That’s no better than working at 7-Eleven.”
In schools, Pinkney said, the bill could exacerbate an existing teacher shortage.
“If we don’t have competitive compensation packages that honor our role as educators, then we’re going to have more people leaving the profession, and we’re not going to have new educators joining us,” she said.
Teacher turnover, Pinkney said, isn’t just a staffing issue, but a student success issue. She added that the bill would eliminate teachers’ ability to drive improvements within the system, directly affecting student outcomes.
“If our students are not getting what they need when they need it, and there isn’t that advocacy in place, then that can have far-reaching consequences in our communities,” Pinkney said.
Teuscher said he isn’t surprised the UEA opposes the bill, arguing that the union holds a “monopoly” over Utah school districts. “I think what’s important is ensuring that all voices are heard, and that’s what this bill does,” he said.
“It doesn’t prevent these public institutions from recognizing the employee associations,” he said. “But, in a lot of cases, they’ll enter a contract with the employment associations as being the sole arbiter of employee negotiations, and so when they sit down to negotiate contracts for their employees, they’re the only person on the other side of the table.”
“What HB267 does,” Teuscher continued, “is say, ‘You can continue as associations and unions to speak, advocate, present all the issues, but we’re not going to recognize you as the sole arbiter of these collective bargaining agreements.’”
Under Utah’s current “right to work” law, an employer cannot require someone to join a union or labor association to get or keep a job, in the private or public sectors — and cannot require someone to quit a union or labor association to get or keep a job.
‘Collateral damage’
Brad Asay, president of the American Federation of Teachers Utah, called any promises by lawmakers that HB267 gives public employees a stronger voice a “ruse.”
“There’s no employer out there in the public sector that’s going to bargain or have negotiations with individual employees,” Asay said. “It just doesn’t happen.”
Asay argued that the bill falls in step with a broader, national assault on the public sector, especially in Republican-led states.
“Public employee unions wield a lot of political clout,” he said. “We’re kind of that last power that stands in the way of those that have that political ideology of the right. … They don’t like that power in solidarity.”
Public employees are not protected under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which guarantees private-sector employees the right to unionize, Asay said.
“We’re easy to pick off,” he said. “It’s much harder to destroy trade unions that are under the [National Labor Relations Board]. … And the best way to get rid of public employee unions, or any associations, is to eliminate their collective bargaining.”
Asay added that he believes the bill is aimed at one union in particular: the UEA.
“Leadership and many in the Legislature are targeting [the] UEA for some of the lawsuits” it has filed, Asay said. “The problem is [everyone else] is collateral damage.”
In the first lawsuit, filed in May, the UEA argued the state’s $82 million “Utah Fits All” program is unconstitutional because it uses income tax dollars to fund vouchers meant to cover private school and homeschooling expenses. Third District Judge Laura Scott heard arguments in December but has not yet issued a ruling.
The second clash between the UEA and the state came in the form of a complaint tied to the reasoning in the May lawsuit. In the second case, the UEA asked a judge to throw out Amendment A, a ballot proposal that sought to erase the constitutional guarantee that income tax revenue would fund public schools.
The judge ultimately ruled the ballot question void. That resolution followed the Utah Supreme Court’s ruling on Sept. 25 that upheld a lower court’s decision to void Amendment D, which would have given the Legislature the power to repeal citizen-passed ballot initiatives.
In both cases, plaintiffs argued that the Utah Legislature violated Article XXIII of the Utah Constitution, which mandates that ballot language must be published in newspapers statewide at least two months before appearing on ballots.
