US Unions

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February 15, 2017: South Caroline Boeing employees reject opportunity to form union. 

November 12, 2016: from The Wall Street Journal, the fall of the unions paved the way for Donald Trump.  Working-class whites once had a political home at the union hall; now they've found solidarity in a new populist movement. So much irony in the article. GOP supporting unions, now?

May 2, 2016: Detroit public school teacher sick-out.

A mass of teacher sickouts has shut down 94 schools in Detroit Public Schools today, as teachers protest the news Saturday that the district won't be able to pay them past June 30.
The district enrolls about 46,000 students in 97 schools.

The Detroit Federation of Teachers on Sunday called for the mass sick-out of the district's 2,600 teachers.

And then we wonder why students do poorly on standardized testing.

May 2, 2016: from the WSJ -- unions lose sway over Verizon as landline business shrinks.

Not long after the 2000 merger that formed Verizon Communications Inc., Denny Strigl rushed to Boston to talk wireless employees out of joining a union.

“We fought it tooth and nail,” said Mr. Strigl, who ran Verizon’s wireless operations until retiring in 2009. “There’s a mentality that builds up in a unionized workforce that pits the union against its management. And that’s not the kind of culture that you want in a new startup.”

The episode was one of many over the years in which Verizon sought to keep unions out of its fast-growing wireless business.

The result: the company has avoided work stoppages at operations that employ about 75,000 and generated about two-thirds of its $132 billion in revenue last year.

Of the nearly 40,000 Verizon employees who went on strike April 13, only about 160 worked for the company’s wireless unit.

And, as the company’s landline business has shrunk, so too has unions’ influence on it.