Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
But blaming the teachers unions for the state of the schools is a fool's errand. They're just profit-maximizing, like any firm would. They have every right to call for the return of a school board, however misguided that is.
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I think I know what you're saying, and it isn't what you've written above. Of course, no one can blame a teacher's union for doing what serves its interests best. Unions are capitalist endeavors. They're as amoral as corporations, and it's absurd to criticize them in any moral sense for damaging an industry in which they operate. Their charge is not to improve something, but to maximize their members' take. If they go too far and kill the company they work for (say, as airline unions did), they lose their pensions and jobs. Simple risk/reward balancing act.
But they can be blamed, among other forces, for causing the sorry state of many schools. Where they've taken too much, like an investor/owner deciding it's better to liquidate the pieces of a company than operate it, the death of the entity is at least partly based on the union's decision to allocate more of the entity's revenues to themselves than to the continued operation of the entity. Nothing wrong with that. But technically, it does warrant "blame."
