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The Police Union and the Teacher's Union have certainly been reported to be responsible for making it hard to fire people.

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Yet, both police and teachers do get fired.

Some of this just comes down to both being local government jobs run by a multitude of independent systems some of which are going to be far below average. There are ~13,506 school districts in the US, so the bottom 5% consists of 675 different systems with a huge range of issues.

The other issue is it can be hard to get replacements.

Police do get fired, but the city is often forced to rehire them, because of the unions and the arrangements they've had put into law.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/investigations/...

A cop can be fired for sexually assaulting a teenager in his squad car, and end up getting rehired by the same department.

The police union is famously regarded as different than other unions, but I have heard of many teachers getting fired (see sibling comment)

And I've heard of teachers who are universally disliked by students, teachers, and administrators who are too difficult to fire. These are people who get switched to a new co-teacher every single year because the last one refuses to work with them again.

I'm not anti-union but it's a double edged sword.

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