This, boys and girls sums up everything that's wrong with unions. Laid off by seniority rather than performance. http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/sacramento-teacher-laid-off-144651918.html
This is a great starting place for a discussion of meritocracy in America! For example, is it still working?
The Teachers unions are BY FAR the most destructive force in America...... Thankfully their day is quickly coming to an end..... With the rise of Charter Schools no one in their right mind is going to support these animals.....
Feel free to point me to a group of people who is better than the teachers union at fucking children over from a very early age.....
You can't have meritocracry when you have a system that supports mediocrity in the work place. Sadly, unions have come to that place. They spend more time saving the jobs of slugs who should be fired, or trying to guarantee life time employment regardless of economic conditions, than they do on trying to improve work place environments.
Then I guess it's a good thing union membership is so low these days. Which must explain why the America of today, the middle class of today, is so much better off than it was 30 years ago.
First let me fight my way through the sarcasm. There's a reason union membership is so low, and it's because they have lost the trust and faith of many of their members. People don't like it when they see some dope that should be fired still have a job. Makes it tough on everyone. People don't like hearing about taking care of your union brother, and then getting laid off while your "brothers" work 60 hours a week in your absence. The unions brought this upon themsleves with poor leadership and a complete lack of forward thinking. Get it all right now mindset has brought them down.
I won't argue your explanations for the decline of unionism now, though I do think they're wrong, but will say, so what? They've declined and the middle class is still worse off in spite of huge growth in productivity. Something else is up, and it aint unionism.