In every place I've lived, teachers bargain hard for their students. Yes, they bargain for their own pathetic wages and benefits, but they're also bargaining for classroom resources, smaller classrooms, better education for kids with additional needs, etc. And DAMN the short-sighted politicians who play with kids' futures and use those asks as bargaining chips. Childhood education is one of the highest ROI investments we can make as a society, but apparently we'd rather spend money on cops and emergency rooms.

Teachers unions are only great for bad teachers; for good teachers they are at best grossly inadequate (see klyrs's response), and often outright harmful (for much the same reasons they're harmful to teaching).

I disagree, unions give teachers power in a system that constantly takes their labor for granted

In other words unions are... great for teachers?

You're conspicuously silent here on the "lousy for teaching" clause.

I'm a better employee when I'm not scrambling to make ends meet. I'd imagine the same is true for teachers.

As European it is hard to grasp the US hate on unions.

I love our European unions, which support anyone across the company, including software developers.

Want to make a slave out of me? Talk to the hand.

As an American, I think it is just decades of seeing the problems caused by unions. In the worst case look at our police unions, it is now pretty well accepted that they are a large part of the problem with police brutality and killings here. It's now a growing mainstream belief that they should be disbanded, and after seeing time and time again how they protect murderers and abusers it's hard not to agree.

In other industries the stakes are not life and death in the same way, but it seems like the same principles hold. If a small percentage of employees in an industry are corrupt or negligent, and the unions defend them and prevent them from ever being fired or facing any negative consequences, they can do a lot of damage.

Also, in the US a lot of benefits that unions provide for their members go against the interests of broader society. Unions are some of the biggest opponents of nationalized healthcare, for example.

As far as the upsides, I think unions were more useful when governments were much smaller and weaker than they are today. In that world, the upsides outweighed the downsides because people had no other protections. With how incredibly wealthy the US is now, a functioning government should be able to provide the benefits for every citizen that unions provide for their members, while avoiding the downsides of the fierce "us vs them" dynamic that unions can create which has ended up dividing society in many instances.

(Obviously there's a big asterisk there on "functioning" government, but many unions don't seem to be functioning very well either as I mentioned earlier, so it's a tie on that front. If we can't get our large bodies to function better than they are these days, we're screwed no matter what).

Plenty of hate for unions here in Canada too. Some how, in North America, we've convinced a large percentage of people who should belong to unions that unions will destroy society.

Which is quite sad, given how relevant both countries were in giving birth to them during the early days of industrial revolution.