[...] New York’s other unions, some of them among the largest and most powerful in the country, were mostly indifferent to public employees and particularly unsympathetic to teacher unionism: teachers were college-educated and their collective profile did not fit into a labor movement of more than a million industrial, construction, and transportation workers, many of whom were not even high school graduates. In general, the unions shared the prejudice that professionals—including teachers, doctors, nurses and many other categories of public employees—were not organizable.