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Well, I'm not trying to get rid of the unions, but I am saying that they appear to be an antiquated concept in today's economy.

What's going on in this country? Unions stand against those trends. We've got to somehow insulate the robust American economy from this global economy that seems to want to devour our standard of living.

There has been a huge attack against private sector unions. Actually, that's been going on since the Second World War.

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.

I think the business community is smart enough to realise that just having a trade union is not enough. They are smart enough to know they need to be part of a union that has political and financial power.

People have to be reminded that unions played a very historic role in our economy.

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.

This is the crux of the problem: because the Republicans and the right wing have been successful in almost eliminating unions, everyone else has suffered as a result.

The real bottom line is, the national unions want their hands on the money.

Public unions are big money.