It's the screwoffs at the bottom 5% or so that are the problem. They know they have little to no accountability as long as the union is there to bail them out. So they're the most active and vocal union members. If schools would get rid of the bottom of the barrel a lot of problems would vanish.

Then the management has accepted a crappy contract. I ran businesses with many different unions, and not one if them prevented terminating an employee. AFTRA, for instance, required a severance package, which for a long time employee could be healthy (up to a year's salary, roughly), but if you wanted someone gone they were gone.

Even the Teamsters allowed for terminations, although they had (rightly, in my view) some procedures that we had to go through to make it happen.

Having seen the capriciousness of some managers, I have little question why unions tried to make it a bit difficult to terminate employees without cause; heck Henry Ford went around firing people if they so much as had a beer on their own time on their own property.

I have watched bad managers use termination as a weapon against people rather than legitimately trying to run a business. Of course I have also seen bad union members (along with bad managers), so I'm not saying it's all one sided. Only that these issues didn't fall out of the sky for no reason. When you end up with an onerous union contract, the first place to look is at your own past practices, but most managers won't and can't seem to do that.