The Education Intelligence Agency’s Mike Antonucci reports on the how teachers unions are faring in a post-Wisconsin Gov. Walker recall world:
The National Education Association took a body blow when it failed to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, but even before the results were known, the union's national leadership recognized that the serious troubles it faced extended far beyond a single state. … This is the first time I have seen NEA admit to its loss of market share even in the fat years. If unable to rely on exclusivity provisions in collective bargaining agreements to boost and maintain membership, NEA faces the same slow deterioration in member numbers that has been the bane of private sector unions for decades.
On that note, Antonucci elaborates in an earlier column:
Public sector unions have finally entered the world that private sector unions have inhabited for many years. It’s not the end of democracy. It’s not Armageddon. Liberal leading light Harold Meyerson wrote in The American Prospect that “before unions, the common form of protest for workers seeking a better life was rioting. That may eventually prove to be the common form of protest after unions, too.” It takes willful ignorance to fail to notice that 93 percent of American private sector workers don’t belong to unions, and they’re not rioting. They are paying taxes, though, and perhaps they now have a tiny measure more say about where that money goes.