I don’t think there’s merit to completely capitulating to unions. If you’re the leader of a large organization that has a highly unionized workforce, sometimes you have to draw a line & decide, no, we can’t increase wages anymore without having to cut spending on things like more faculty hidings or renovations.
I don’t think politics is a zero sum game where the two only choices are “will you say yes to anything a union asks for” or “unions shouldn’t exist at all”. There’s a middle ground, my ideology leans much closer to the former, but I definitely don’t think that anybody who ever said no to a union is a completely demon, because context matters.
Context: the janitors were asking for $8.55 an hour.
Context: this $2.15 raise amounts to $4,300 a year.
Context: for 200 janitors, the total annual cost to the school is around $900k.
Context: the University of Miami's renovation of their baseball field in 2007 cost $3.9 million.
Context: the University of Miami has an endowment of $3.2 billion.
