FRAMINGTON, Mass. – Members of the nation’s largest teachers unions recently taught American students a lesson they likely won’t forget: being a bully will get you what you want.

The office supply chain Staples Inc. announced this week it is canceling a pilot program with the U.S. Postal Service to offer post office services in more than 80 stores after the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers encouraged teachers to boycott its stores, Reuters reports.

“Staples will continue to explore and test products and services that meet our customers’ needs,” Staples spokeswoman Carrie McElwee told the news service in an email.

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The NEA and AFT boycotts had nothing to do with educating students or any other education issue, but rather was a show of solidarity with the American Postal Workers Union, which strongly objected to the plan because it could have replaced some top-dollar postal positions with lower paid non-unionized Staples workers.

“The USPS and Staples agreed in October to allow Staples employees to sell postal packaging and accept mail that is later picked up from the stores by postal workers,” Reuters reports.

The yearlong pilot program would have put postal services in 82 Staples stores in California, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts to help the USPS save cash to pay into a health fund for the agency’s future retirees. The arrangement would also have helped to drive traffic to Staples, which announced plans in March to close up to close about 225 stores in the U.S. and Canada, according to the news service.

In other words, what was a win-win situation for USPS and Staples has been squashed by Big Labor. It also illustrates the distorted priorities of the nation’s teachers unions.

While students across the country are struggling to graduate from schools staffed with AFT and NEA teachers, the unions are focused on organized labor’s never-ending war against America’s capitalist system. The boycott was a strategic political move designed to help the country’s Big Labor coalition retain power and control at a time when its clout is quickly slipping away.

It’s the same strategy teachers unions use in school districts across the country to bully local school board members to approve spending tied to union contracts that local communities can’t afford.

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The fact that teachers unions value their commitment to other labor unions more than their commitment to teachers and students says a lot about what these organizations truly stand for.

The misguided focus also helps to explain why American students continue to fall further and further behind their peers in other developed countries.