Personally, I believe that what is happening, and happened during the last fifty to sixty years has nothing to do...

Personally, I believe that what is happening, and happened during the last fifty to sixty years has nothing to do with neoliberalism. If that were the case, we would not be seeing similar issues around the globe. We are in a global stage, as mentioned several times before, where every political and economic system has gotten mixed up, and it has become all about power control. Over the last fifty years, there have been almost an equal share of opposition parties holding power in many countries around the globe, and still the wealth gap has widened in majority of the countries.

While technologies are supposed to alleviate issues, instead it has given those with resources to further widen the gap.

Would Union help on this front?
Many of the union leaders have been getting unheard compensation during all these years, while the gap has been widening.

One of the issues and major concerns happens to be promotion of mediocrity in the name of collective bargaining. This does not mean collective bargaining is wrong, but it needs to be prudent.

For example, let us take the WV teachers strike example, the resolution was to give teachers 5% rate increase. With such an increase, a teacher who might be making $100000 solely based on the years of experience rather than performance would get a 5K increase, whereas a budding upcoming and creative individual making $50K would see only a $2.5K.

Moreover, if we were to consider students performance vs student to pupil ratio, WV could be placed in the bottom of the states pool.

As mentioned before, US educational spending is amongst the top three in OECD countries, but students performance at most in the middle of the stack.

Instead, promoting healthy competition that brings out creative, innovative individuals and institutions in the field of education and research should happen.