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My contract with my teachers is fair, and is two pages. The union contract is 200 pages. You cannot manage your business when you cannot make any decision without going back to 200 pages worth of stuff.

Unions can play a valuable role in large organisations where it is difficult to talk to a thousand people. They can negotiate annual pay awards with management, represent grievance cases, and explain and advise on complicated changes in employment or pension law.

It's like there was the Union, and then there's the Union Management. In some of the strikes that I covered when I saw the strike starting to break, wasn't necessarily when Management was giving in, more so than when the strikers were at odds with the Union Management.

My problem with unions is they breed mediocrity.

Unions inherently create an 'us versus them' dynamic that makes winning against a company's management the top goal, not serving customers, innovating, or in the case of education, teaching kids.

Now it's a fully realized production but for the fact that we're holding our scripts in our hand and some of us used them, and some of us didn't and you have to by union rules hold the script. You don't have to use them but you gotta hold them.

The unions claim the deck is stacked against them when it comes to labor laws, but the truth is many private and public sector workers are forced to pay union dues as a condition of their employment, yet they have little say in how the unions spend their money.

I sometimes think that unions don't understand that we live in a free society, and people have the right to not select union representation if they don't want it.

If you don't have collective agreements between unions and employers, governments have to legislate more.

Even in Britain, the trade unions tell me that employment contracts have less protection than in the past.