Sep 10, 2012 -- 7:54PM, rangerken wrote:

..."Romney has been critical of public employee unions, including teachers. Romney says union interests run counter to students' education.

Of course he would believe that. Standard Regressive boilerplate. They see unions as a source of Liberal power and they have to do whatever they can to shut them down.

Obama has not come out in support of anyone...total waffling yet again...

Not saying anything, yet, is not "waffling." Don't worry though, no one can waffle better than Romney.

What gets me is that teachers are educating our kids, our future! What kind of future do we expect if they are "educated" by untrained, uncaring, minimum wage flunkies? We need to INVEST in our future, not sell it off to the lowest bidder.

And that "right to work" bit... in every state that has that they also have the lowest wages and higher unemployment. It's a "right to work for less" model that depresses wages for everyone - except for the employers that will make more money and pay less taxes.

Sep 10, 2012 -- 9:29PM, Girlchristian wrote:

Sep 10, 2012 -- 8:25PM, Abner1 wrote:

The teachers put a rather different spin on it (obviously):

boldprogressives.org/chicagos-teachers-j...

Most republicans would say, of course, that they should just suck it up and keep working and more hours teaching more students for less pay and be grateful they have a job at all.  Since unions allow workers to fight unfair labor conditions they are a bad thing.

Are unions perfect?  No, of course not - a union that is too powerful is a bad thing.  As in any ecosystem, if any one thing gets too powerful it tends to get out of control.  The same is true of businesses and of government, of course.  If businesses get too powerful they get out of control.  If government gets too powerful it gets out of control.  The secret, IMO, is to have a bunch of opposing interests that help put limits on other interests.

The republicans want to minimize and finally abolish unions because they help put limits on the power of businesses and of governments that wish to abuse workers.  To support this they pretend that all unions are corrupt and overpowered.  I know from personal experience that this isn't true ... and that businesses with too much power over their employees can make the lives of the employees into private hells, especially if the employee *has* to have that job to survive at all.  In that sort of situation a union is your best hope.  If the unions are too powerful, it's bad ... but the same is true if they are too weak.

Whether one supports unions or not, public union members should not have the right to strike for this very reason.

As a nation we have made little progress in handling education in inner-city public schools. There are so many factors involved.

Rangerken wrote:

> The private schools, and charter schools in Chicago do fine, and educate kids well.

> The pubic schools do a lousy job and, as in just about all union controlled public

> school systems, it's nearly impossible to get rid of incompetent teachers.

That's the propaganda anyway.

> I'm all for unions in the private sector. I am opposed to them in the public sector.

You think that government employees don't deserve any protection against being abused by their employers?

> My personal experience with public school teachers unions is a big reason why I hold

> them in such disdain and contempt. They are not about the students. They are

> about job protections, seniority first, and maintaining incompetents on the job...

> first and foremost.

And my personal experience with my public school teachers union is a large part of why I disagree with you so strongly.  My union took down a corrupt college president who was abusing his position ... but worked closely with his predecessor and is working closely with his successor to help arrange situations that are equitable for all the employees, not just the administration running roughshod over everyone else.

You're trying to generalize your personal experience to all public school unions ... and there seems to be a fair degree of political bias there, as shown by the link you provided.

Can you provide evidence to support your claims that all public school teacher unions (or even most of them) are as horrible as you claim they are?