Union fail — Rhode Island teachers refuse to work an extra 25 minutes, so instead lost their $80k a year jobs

Here is an example of the end result of what President Obama and his buddy Andy Stern of SEIU are trying to push on America:

A school superintendent in Rhode Island is trying to fix an abysmally bad school system.

Her plan calls for teachers at a local high school to work 25 minutes longer per day, each lunch with students once in a while, and help with tutoring.  The teachers’ union has refused to accept these apparently onerous demands.

The teachers at the high school make $70,000-$78,000, as compared to a median income in the town of $22,000.  This exemplifies a nationwide trend in which public sector workers make far more than their private-sector counterparts (with better benefits).

This happened in a poor town, where reportedly 50% of students were currently failing their courses, and they had a graduation rate of only about 50%.  In order to try and turn the school around, the teachers’ union was asked to give a small number of concessions on time and extra help for the students.  They refused.

As always, Ed Morrissey of Hot Air offers a good perspective:

This is a good argument for getting unions out of the public-employee business altogether.  Not only does the marriage of unions and the public sector create too much of an impulse to expand bureaucracies, it twists the priorities away from public service and towards entitlement thinking.   To their credit, most educators, law enforcement, and emergency response personnel successfully resist that impulse, but this jaw-dropping standoff in Rhode Island shows that it does exist.

The average public sector job is in the $75-80k range, while the average private sector job is in the mid $40k range.  Support for unions and union memberships are near all-time lows.  When given a choice, employees around the country are saying no to unions. Professor Mark J. Perry on his Carpe Diem blog reports that in the ’50s nearly one in three employees were members of unions.  Now, the number is around 12%, or about one in eight workers.

However, there is one exception.   While the number of private sector union workers has been on a steep decline, in 2008 the number of public sector union workers actually exceeded private sector workers for the first time and continues to grow.

While most Americans are rejecting unions, the liberal arm of the Democratic party is fighting to revive one of their largest sources of campaign funds.  This is the reason that Reid, Pelosi and Obama are working hard to get card check passed.  If they succeed in passing card check, then union thugs will be able to intimidate workers into voting for unionization when they otherwise would not and America will suffer the consequences.