The prison guard union in California is a huge, highly public union that progressives hate because it’s an anti-progressive force. They are a pariah union, and they are, as noted by one of the cites articles, a main reason why unions are dropping in popularity.

The conflation of problems with other unions with the problems with the prison guard union makes it very difficult to extract useful data about people’s opinions about unions. Anyone writing about unions or labor in California should be careful to distinguish the two.

Notably when a Republican Governor pointed this out he was fiercely shouted down. When the new Democratic governor acted on the exact same issues, he prevailed.

I don’t agree with this. I don’t think that the same things were pointed out, nor were they addressed in the same fashion, nor were the same solutions offered.

The Democratic party in California created the Union monster.

Language like this detracts from reasonable argument.

We have, in the US, a major problem of under-unionization. Where we do have unions, we have a problem of union specialization and characterization. Reducing that to ‘the union monster’ is silly. Comparing unions—who have achieved massive, massive gains for the American people, unions who created the weekend, the eight hour day, the concept of overtime, who got rid of company stores, etc. etc.—to the Tea Party, is beyond silly.