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Defending their members is the role of a union. Your post makes about as much sense as somebody accusing lawyers of making a huge strategic mistake in agreeing

• acdha 13y ago
  You missed the point: there's a difference between demanding that evidence be produced, critically examining it, etc. and saying that someone is completely blameless and being railroaded by management. Both are defending your member but the difference between ensuring that the system works fairly and unqualified partisan support is that the former case allows you to distance yourself from someone who actually has committed an offense. This is particularly important for public sector unions where there's often a highly sympathetic third party involved and the union needs to avoid losing public support. Consider the case of a teacher accused of abusing a student – if the union says “we want the legal process to be followed completely and fairly" that will be remembered very differently than “our member is being railroaded by hostile management” if the evidence shows that they did in fact commit the crime. Lawyers are a special case — they do have something of a bad reputation because of this but most adults understand that this is how the system is supposed to work and don't assume that, say, a criminal defense lawyer personally approves of murder. Unions haven't managed to establish that distinction, in part because a lot of well-monied interests have made a priority of portraying every individual incident as representative of all union members.