And even worse, schools can't be shut down. It's okay for companies to have unions. In the worse case, the company closes doors, so ultimately the union needs to work with the company one way or another. In government entities, unions are tumors as they don't need to worry about their employers going down.

On the flip side, I've been a student in a school with a teacher's union (NYS public middle school) and a school without (South Carolina public high school) and there was an absolute world of difference between the two. My NYS teachers were almost universally better, whereas in South Carolina good teachers seemed to be the exception. My good SC teachers made 20k/year less than my worst NYS teachers, iirc

There are a lot of confounding factors here. New York state has higher median income, lower violent crime, etc than South Carolina. It is more than possible that the unionization of NYS education is a result of its better education system rather than its cause.

If by NYS, you mean Westchester (as is not unlikely given HN), I don't think this is a fair comparison.