The Public Employee Relations Board, referred to by the acronym PERB is the state organization that sets the ground rules for union creation, union-management relations and collective bargaining. New York State is the most unionized state in the nation, especially public employees. There are thousands of public employee unions with hundreds of thousands of members. Seven hundred school districts across the state, 700 teacher unions; local, country, state, park and marine police, and on and on, all belong to unions, negotiate contracts, under guidelines set by PERB (See PERB website