Actually, several claims have been made.

One was that the Haymarket Riot was a labor success. It pretty clearly wasn’t. (The AFL was a huge pull-back from the Knights of Labor.)

Another was that the 8 hour day came about only because of organized labor. The statutes may be due to organized labor, but lots of folks got an 8 hour day before then.

A third claim was that unions made things better for an industry. We’re still waiting for an example. Does anyone want to argue that the auto and steel industries were helped by unions?

“The Haymarket Riot was a signal event in the early history of American labor. It was largely responsible for DELAYING acceptance of the eight-hour day, as workers deserted the K.O.L. and moved toward the more moderate American Federation of Labor. For many years the police at Haymarket Square were regarded as martyrs and the workers as violent anarchists; that view moderated to a large extent in later times.”

emphasis added

The following is excerpted from InfoPlease:

Labor Day
In many countries, May Day is also Labor Day. This originates with the United States labor movement in the late 19th Century. On May 1, 1886, unions across the country went on strike, demanding that the standard workday be shortened to eight hours. The organizers of these strikes included socialists, anarchists, and others in organized labor movements. Rioting in Chicago’s Haymarket Square on May 4th including a bomb thrown by an anarchist led to the deaths of a dozen people (including several police officers) and the injury of over 100 more.

The protests were not immediately successful, but they proved effective down the line, as eight-hour work days eventually did become the norm. Labor leaders, socialists, and anarchists around the world took the American strikes and their fallout as a rallying point, choosing May Day as a day for demonstrations, parades, and speeches. It was a major state holiday in the Soviet Union and other communist countries.

Labor Day is still celebrated on May 1 in countries around the world, and it is still often a day for protests and rallies. In recent years, these have often been targeted against globalization.

Huh? http://www.kentlaw.edu/ilhs/haymarket.htm says “When police ordered the protest meeting to disperse (peaceful though it was), a bomb was thrown toward the police by an unknown person. The police responded by firing at the crowd. This became known as the “Haymarket Riot,” now more properly named the Haymarket Tragedy. The 8-Hour Day Movement was destroyed in the nation-wide hysteria which followed.”

The existence of “labor day” holidays doesn’t prove anything about what unions did. Claiming credit is standard PR for every kind of organization. (Roosters claim credit for the dawn.)

BTW – What countries celebrate the Haymarket incident? (And, who got to May 1 first, the trade unions or the communists? They’re not always the same, even though the latter often try to co-opt the former.)

(1) It isn’t the public who has set up the current system, it is teachers, via political advocacy. The public has gone along for the ride.

(2) As Smith points out, some kids can’t be educated by even the best teachers. Smith seems to think that we should nonethless pay to try. I disagree.

“harder or better” misses the point. As a car buyer, I don’t care about “harder or better” wrt the workers. I care about car quality and price.

It’s also false.

Here’s what the UAW defends (http://www.regularfolksunited.com/index.php?tab=article_view&article_id=561)

“For instance, I had an employee who punched in his time card and then disappeared. The rules were such that I had to spend hours documenting that this man was not in his three foot by three foot work area. I needed witnesses, timed reports, calls over the intercom and a plant wide search all documented in detail. After this absurdity I decided to go my own route; I called the corner bar and paged him and he came to the phone. I gave him a 30 day unpaid disciplinary lay off because he was a “repeat offender”. When he returned he thanked me for the PAID vacation. I scoffed, until he explained: (1) He had tried to get the lay off because it was fishing season; (2) The UAW negotiated with GM Labor Relations Department to give him the time WITH PAY.”

I supervised a loading dock and 21 UAW workers who worked approximately five hours per day for eight hours pay. They could easily load one third more rail cars and still maintain their union negotiated break times, but when I tried to make them increase production ever so slightly they sabotaged my ability to make even the current production levels by hiding stock, calling in sick, feigning equipment problems, and even once, as a show of force, used a fork lift truck and pallets and racks to create a car part prison where they trapped me while I was conducting inventory. The reaction of upper management to my request to boost production was that I should “not be naïve”.

One afternoon I was helping oversee the plant while upper management was off site. The workers brought an RV into the loading yard with a female “entertainer” who danced for them and then “entertained” them in the RV. With no other management around, I went to Labor Relations for assistance. As a twenty five year old woman, I was not about to try to break up a crowd of fifty rowdy men. The Labor Relations Rep pulled out the work rules and asked me which of the rules the men were breaking. I read through the rules and none applied directly of course. Who wrote work rules to cover prostitutes at lunch? The only “legal” cause I had was an unauthorized vehicle and person and that blame did not fall on the union workers who were being “entertained” but on the security guards at the gate. Not one person suffered any consequence.

Another employee in the plant urinated on the feet of his supervisor as a protest to discipline. He was, of course, fired…that is until the union negotiated and got his job back.”

It’s easy to find stories like this about union workers.

In the US at least, they became federal law during the 30s because FDR was trying to reduce production. They were upheld in cases involving “big bread” trying to shut down small bakers.

I’ve no objection to whatever working conditions a given biz chooses. However, I see no reason why one biz’ decisions should be binding on another.

As long as the public school monopoly exists, teacher unions are a necessary evil.

Empowering the parents who care about the quality of their children’s education is the only way to keep both teachers and administrators accountable.