COATESVILLE, Pa. – Some teachers in the Coatesville Area School District don’t want their union to get its hands on the district’s teacher seniority list, and Coatesville officials have withheld the information on their behalf.

But the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board this week ruled that the district’s refusal to produce a copy of the document for the Coatesville Area Teachers’ Association violates state law, and forced the district to comply, Daily Local News reports.

That means some highly qualified teachers could be bumped from their jobs by lesser colleagues, just because they lack seniority.

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

The disagreement stems from the union’s request for the seniority list when district officials issued furloughs in 2012. The union wanted the list “to make sure (teachers) are furloughed properly,” CATA President Audra Ritter told the news site.

District officials allowed union leaders to briefly view the document, but refused to produce a hard copy at the request of several teachers. The union filed a complaint with the PLRB for “unfair practices” in October 2012, alleging the denial violates laws on “policing the administration of the existing contract,” Daily Local News reports.

Coatesville school solicitor James Ellison explained to the news site why the district refused to release the seniority list.

“Coatesville Area School District has furloughed members of its teaching staff each of the last three years,” Ellison told Daily Local News in an email. “The union alleged that it needed a copy of the seniority list to ensure that teachers with the least seniority were furloughed by allowing more senior members to ‘bump’ into their teaching positions and displace them without regard to merit but based solely on seniority.”

Several teachers, however, didn’t want the information to become public.

“Those teachers expressed concerns that if a physical list was provided, the union leadership would circulate the list to its senior members who could, in turn, indentify the certification areas of less senior members and obtain those same certifications,” Ellison wrote.

MORE NEWS: How to prepare for face-to-face classes

“The more senior members with newly minted certifications could ‘bump’ less senior members who could have held the same certifications for more years than the senior members,” according to Ellison’s email.

Those certainly seem like valid concerns. If the union has its way, higher qualified and better prepared teachers could lose their jobs, just because they haven’t been in the district as long as other teachers.  It’s conceivable that a teacher with 15 years of total experience and 10 years of teaching in a specialized classification could be replaced by a teacher with 16 years of total experience, but no experience in the specialty area.

That’s would definitely be unfair to the less senior teachers, students and taxpayers who fund the district. But fairness in the world of organized labor has nothing to do with what’s best for students, or the education they receive.

The union’s idea of fairness is that teachers who have paid the most dues get to keep their jobs over those who have paid less, regardless of their actual teaching abilities.

In other words, the bad guys win again.