We don't need to kill unions, we just need to restore them to their proper role in society.
Today, unions have amassed significant economic and political power into the the hands of a few union bosses who see the unions purpose as political activism. For example, Big Labor spent more money on the political process during the 2008 election cycle than did presidential candidate Sen. John McCain!
Union bosses don't ask the rank and file members how they want their money (taken through compulsory dues) spent either, the decisions are made by a handful of union bosses only. This deprives the worker of choosing to spend his/her money differently, or not spend it on politics at all. There are more important things in life than politics.
Big Labor has a monopolistic stranglehold on our economy and wields excess influence on our political process. Unions have become defacto-socialist governments within our system, lead by a handful of dictators at the top.
Teachers Unions Oppose Education Reform
Regardless of one’s view of any particular method of improving America’s struggling public schools (whether it's school choice, charter schools, or rewarding better teachers with better pay), the tactics and rhetoric that teachers unions employ to block any meaningful reform is remarkable. Their motivation is simple: maintain the status quo -- and the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars in dues. Meanwhile, union leaders’ suggestions for reform are best summarized as “more money to hire more teachers,” who are then likely to become dues-paying union members.
How Teachers’ Unions Handcuff Schools
When Tracey Bailey received the National Teacher of the Year Award from President Clinton in a festive Rose Garden ceremony in 1993, American Federation of Teachers chief Albert Shanker called to say how pleased he was that a union member had won this prestigious honor. But Bailey, a high school science teacher from Florida, is an AFT member no more. Today he believes that the big teachers' unions are a key reason for the failure of American public education, part of the problem rather than the solution. The unions, he thinks, are just "special interests protecting the status quo," pillars of "a system that too often rewards mediocrity and incompetence." Such a system, he says, "can't succeed."
Bailey is right. In the final analysis, no school reform can accomplish much if it does not focus on the quality of the basic unit of education—that human interaction between an adult and a group of children that we call teaching. The big teachers' unions, through the straitjacket of work rules that their contracts impose, inexorably subvert that fundamental encounter. These contracts structure the individual teacher's job in ways that offer him or her no incentives for excellence in the classroom—indeed, that perversely reward failure.
So as Tracey Bailey and many other dedicated teachers have learned, schools can't improve until reformers confront the deadly consequences of the power that teachers' unions wield over a monopolistic industry, not only through contracts but also through the unions' influence on the elected officials who regulate the education industry. Until then, any reform—whether more money for the schools or smaller classes or high national standards or charter schools—will get short-circuited from the very outset.
Time to Play Hardball with the Chicago Teachers Union
[T]he Chicago Public Schools faces the worst budget deficit in anyone's memory. Yet the Chicago Teachers Union is willing to sacrifice 2,700 of its members -- thereby forcing its remaining teachers to lead classes of 35 -- in order to preserve a 4 percent pay hike that comes on top of the standard step increase that teachers will receive anyway.
Chicago Public School teachers are already among the best compensated in the country. Right now, starting Chicago elementary teachers earn $45,450 for teaching a 5 hour and 45 minute instructional day, 174 days per year -- the minimum allowed under Illinois law. First-year New York elementary teachers, by comparison, earn $45,530 for teaching a 6 hour and 30 minute instructional day, 180 days per year.
Well-Funded Schools, Teachers Don't Need Bailout
It wasn't long after American Federation of Teachers' president Randi Weingarten wrote in the Wall Street Journal that public schools needed a bailout that the administration dispatched Christina Romer, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, to make the case for billions of new stimulus dollars to avoid public school layoffs.
Given that even clear-eyed economists tend to go weak in the knees when discussing "our commitment to our kids," it wasn't surprising that Romer's piece in the Washington Post, like Weingarten's before it, contained no actual facts about public school spending, teacher pay or student performance, but instead largely rested on clichés like, "Let's ... do what we need to do now...and prepare our students for the challenges of the future."
Is Hollywood Turning on Teachers Unions?
It's time to break the union monopolies and restore unions to their roots.
Why do you say we don't need to kill unions?
Collective bargaining is an unconstitutional violation of the individual worker's right to make his own bargain with the boss. It was forced on us by FDR's threat to pack the Supreme Court, and it has no place in American law.
The right of private property, and to make your own deals with trading partners, is fundamentally and absolutely an individual right. Imposing any "democratic" voting process upon it is Communism.
Unions are no different than any other bands of gangsters. Their main function today is not to help their members, it is to extort dues and funnel them to Democratic politicians.
In the few cases where businesses still treat workers badly, the rightful, American way to respond to the problem is to boycott them. Not to use government or any other form of force.
I don't disagree with you as they are now, see:
http://the-classic-liberal.com/in-defense-of-labor-unions/
http://the-classic-liberal.com/justice-for-the-american-worker/
Back when the US was going through their industrial revolution unions were important but now all they do it drive up prices for crappier products / services. Just look at American car companies (Ford is starting to step up their game now though) or the state of California; going bankrupt because of the public labor unions.