...or are they more concerned with political power?

One of the resons Thatcher was able to take on the miner Unions, and win, is that she realized the Unions didn't represent the miners; the Union leadership was more about advancing far-left politics to keep and solidify their own power, politics that many on their members despised.

(Funny how socialism leads to an inordinate amount of control over the many by a small elite', and makes you wonder if that's what it's really about, but that's another ball of wax.)

They also found the Union leadership more arrogant, elitist, and insufferable than management; intellectually inbred, using Union rules to advance cronies and fellow ideologues, and more disconnected from Labor than Management was.

Teachers, for instance, hate buerocracy. Part of what makes their job so hard is that they spend so much time on paperwork than kids and some of the arbitrary standards legislation requires, such as reducing failing students and bullying, results in teachers not allowed to fail bad student and have to ignore bullys.

However, the big-government solutions that the Unions and many Democrats (plus, honestly, a certain sitting Republican president) back, has caused an *explosion* of buerocracy and made the lives of their teachers worse.

So what's it about; helping your teachers or solidifying your political power and control over them?