The difference is that you don't have the entire town calling the CEO of IBM to get an employee fired for explaining what a condom is. While the same social norms were behind both corporate rules and also rules for school teachers, the rules for school teachers were many times stricter because of much greater pressure from the community. And if you look at the union rules for firing teachers, it's pretty clear that they were crafted in part to make it more difficult for a teacher to get fired due to a few parents putting pressure on the principal. Because if these rules didn't exist, then most principals would take the easy out and fire that teacher every time regardless of whether or not they actually did anything wrong. Because unlike at IBM, the principal doesn't lose any money for firing a good teacher; all that happens is they get rid of a headache, so the incentives are aligned to reward principals for harming students. That's why the protections currently offered by the unions are needed.
In the same era he is discussing (most likely < 1967 [1]), no one would tolerate interracial dating from a newspaper columnist, homosexuality from a money manager or non-whiteness from the CEO of the #3 Bank in the US. In the present era, Paul Krugman, Peter Thiel and Vikram Pandit all have jobs. Can we attribute that to teachers unions as well?
As for firing the occasional good teacher, it's true that schools currently have no incentive to do a good job teaching students. This is a much bigger problem than firing unpopular teachers. Guess which organizations are the biggest proponents of keeping things that way?
[1] Pre 1967, interracial marriage was illegal in some states (Virginia, at least). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia
They applied to all professions, but not at the same time. Check out this possibly-false-but-accurate set of rules for teachers from 1915: http://www.pchswi.org/archives/schools/teacher_conduct_1915....
Sure these rules applied to every other profession as well. The difference is that they probably stopped applying to other professions 200 years earlier than they stopped applying to teaching.
"Guess which organizations are the biggest proponents of keeping things that way?"
No argument there, I'm not defending the unions, just pointing out that historically schools have been extremely abusive toward their employees. Sure the value are different today, but the psychology, social pressures, and incentives are all the same. So if the protections given to teachers were completely repealed teachers might get screwed over for different things, but there would be much injustice nonetheless. But yeah, obviously I don't agree with making it impossible teachers who are bad at teaching, I just think that if there were no protections at all then firings for social or political reasons would become so commonplace that it would drive talented people away from the field. (Granted, talented people are already kept out of teaching today by the unions and a million other policies, but still.)
http://www.autotropolis.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ford
As I pointed out, the rules concerning interracial dating applied until 1967 in Virginia to people of every profession. The rules concerning men wearing garters at IBM applied in the 60's. And according to my late grandmother, you could be fired from a job on the police force for marrying a Jew (I'm not sure of the exact date, but it was definitely post 1915).
So no, the rules didn't stop applying to other professions 200 years earlier than to teaching. Things were just really different in 1915 and even 1970 than today.
"When I started at IBM there was a dress code, that was an informal oral code of white shirts. You couldn't wear anything but a white shirt, generally with a starched collar. I remember attending my first class, and a gentleman said to me as we were entering the building, are you an IBMer, and I said yes. He had a three piece suit on, vests were of the vogue, and he said could you just lift your pants leg please. I said what, and before I knew it he had lifted my pants leg and he said you're not wearing any garters. I said what?! He said your socks, they're not pulled tight to the top, you need garters. And sure enough I had to go get garters."
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html
It wasn't just the US, the UK was also very puritanical.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Conviction_for_inde...
Claiming that these things were restricted to teachers, or have changed because of teachers unions is nothing but the post-hoc fallacy.