Speaking to reporters yesterday on the first day of the strike by Seneca Valley School District teachers, the union representative compared the teachers' strike to the recent strike against General Motors and suggested that this strike could produce a settlement, just as it did with GM and the unionized auto workers.

But strikes by teachers are not the same as strikes by workers in the private sector. The teachers union at Seneca Valley is providing a lesson to people across the county by illustrating the differences between public sector and private sector strikes.

The recent strike against General Motors is an example of how strikes work in the private sector. The teachers strike in the Seneca Valley School District reveals a very different scenario — and how strikes in the public sector work, or don't work.

When the United Auto Workers union began its strike against General Motors, it knew that GM and other American car manufacturers were in serious financial trouble and had been losing market share to imports for decades. Demanding too much from GM could have burdened the automaker with higher costs, which could have plunged the company into bankruptcy. The UAW also understood that its impact on GM also could raise the price of cars, so that GM's customers could continue to favor imports from Japan and Korea.

The strike against GM, if it continued long enough, could have hurt the company financially. And, as with all strikes in the private sector, it could have hurt workers, who are not paid during a work stoppage but must rely on strike funds from the union.

In contrast to the GM work stoppage, the strike against the Seneca Valley School District does not hurt the employer(school district), nor does it hurt the teachers, who will receive their full year's pay because the strike's duration is limited and 180 days of instruction are mandated by state law.

A labor-management dispute in private industry is, to a large degree, regulated by market forces. The ability of GM to satisfy labor demands while also retaining its customers and making a profit must be factored into negotiations because car buyers don't have to buy a GMvehicle. They can choose a Honda, Toyota or Subaru, for example.

A teachers strike is different. Market forces do not play a role. If teachers' demands are excessive, the school district has little choice but to raise taxes on property owners. Property owners cannot choose to buy another product by moving to another school district. Today's public school is a monopoly, and its labor-management relationship is immune from market forces.

In the private sector, if employees at one company want higher wages or a better benefits package offered at another company, they can apply for a job with that other employer. So, some taxpayers might suggest that Seneca Valley teachers wanting the higher wages reportedly paid at the North Allegheny School District should just apply at NA. But that's not how things generally happen.

The Seneca Valley labor dispute has attracted interest across the region because of the attention-grabbing wage demand by the teachers union, initially more than a 7 percent wage increase and now 6.3 pecent for each year of a five-year contract. The Seneca Valley strike, as well as another teachers' strike and several threatened strikes across the state, are generating renewed interest in the General Assembly for two versions of a bill that would outlaw teachers strikes, something already in place in 37 other states.

It is time for Pennsylvanians to take a hard look at teacher strikes, how they work and their impact. Unionized teachers benefit from an imbalance in the labor-management relationship that is directly related to the lack of market forces that generally moderate labor demands in the private sector.

What a better system might look like is not clear, but it makes sense to look at other states' experiences where teacher strikes are banned. Elements of school choice and merit pay could change the dynamics, but those are resisted by the teachers union.

Regardless of the outcome of the Seneca Valley strike, teachers and their union representatives are providing an education to district residents and property owners across the region. And the lessons learned might not be what Seneca teachers had hoped for when this process began.

In Seneca Valley and elsewhere, it is becoming increasingly clear that there needs to be a better, more-balanced way to run public schools — one that gives equal consideration to workers (teachers) and employers (taxpayers), while keeping the best interests of students in mind.