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Absolutely not. The government does not need to support the labor union movement financially in any way, shape or form.
Teachers demand too much these days. They should be based on the performance of the students.
Several points with this question.
1) Should people be permitted to form unions for contracts? Yes, I think so.
2) Should they be required to join? No, I don't think so
3) Should public funds be paid to those union workers? If the union does the job we pay them for, presumably better than the alternative (which would be the point of the union certifying its members as quality workers, eg teachers licensing programs), sure.
4) Should public unions demand more salary or benefits for their members, I'd say this is one feature of unions. But I'd also argue that demanding more salary or benefits over and above a market rate would be foolish. In a down economy, demanding more salary and benefits is likely over and above the market rate. Wages should be more flexible downward.
5) Ultimately the best solution is to let the public itself allocate funding for schools as they see fit through tax credits for education. If they don't want to support generous public pensions or tenured academics for some reason, then they won't send their money to institutions that provide such things to their faculty. My guess is that it would be difficult to attract some quality of teachers without these in the median term, but that given enough time a merit based higher pay scale would overtake paternalistic provision of benefits like lifetime employment or retirement accounts.
The bigger question for now is how best to determine merit of teachers. Jared's "performance of the students" may fail to take into account that some students are better than others already for example, and many teachers can already cherry pick these kids for attention and development over more demanding students. Merit pay needs to take factors such as these into account and look for improvement or development based metrics if metrics are to be used at all.
I agree with Lord Tiberius.
Nix any and all government financial interaction with unions.