Having worked for a number of years in the NYC DOE, I feel many politicians who go after public employee unions miss a critical point. I am philosophically a conservative, and don’t believe that unions in their current incarnation are good for the country or economy, but I would never consider a government job that is not unionized. Simply put, government bureaucracy is terrible from all angles. Almost no one takes personal responsibility for anything, and most people have very narrow areas of jurisdiction. Private companies generally have HR departments whose job it is to keep good workers happy. Governments generally don’t even know who the good workers are. (These are generalizations, but tend to hold true.) So the unions end up filling the role of an HR departments. When I had problems with my health insurance because a secretary somewhere filed something wrong, and for over 7 months it still wasn’t sorted out, my supervisor advised me off the record to speak to the union. I did and they had it solved in 2 days! Most teachers have had some experience where the unions helped them when they just hit a dead end trying to deal with the DOE. For many years teachers couldn’t even get phone numbers for staffers at the HR headquarters at Court St. — everything went through your school secretary, who often didn’t know information herself, and certainly couldn’t do anything about it.
As long as public employers do not have their own structure to help support employees, anything that looks like an attack on the union is going to be fought against very strongly.