An interesting excerpt from an MBA text on organizational behavior. Does this description remind you of any work force(s) in Rhode Island (hint: think people whose paychecks are derived from tax revenue):

"However, evidence suggests that in collectivist cultures. especially in the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, employees expect rewards to reflect their individual needs as well as their performance. Moreover, consistent with a legacy of communism and centrally planned economies, employees exhibited an entitlement attitude - that is, they expected outcomes to be greater than their inputs."

Donald,

As you have publicly advertised to justify your comments and existence, YOU ARE A FORMER EAST GREENWICH SCHOOL COMMITTEE MEMBER and implied and published town hall names of elected, appointed or hired members that have provided you with inside town hall track to supposed real current contract information which you gleefully embellish into outer space with no reality.

Get real Donald! Publish info with Town of East Greenwich Letter head and school committee signatures not you’re made up figures and slanted facts! Hopefully you have graduated from fifth grade?

If you are so good at what you do, why are you not actively serving on the current East Greenwich School Committee now?

You remind me of a lawyer that created more teacher strikes in the state of RI that no school committee will hire him anymore. He is shunned in his own community by residents.

I guess you have been sent to the corner for time out by RINEA too many times.

You and most everyone else understands the information you are requesting will not be provided to you for posting on the world-wide-web while labor contract talks are on going.

You might as well demand the information from the State of RI Superior Judge, RI State Labor Relations Board, Mediator, a named current East Greenwich School Committee member or Chariho Regional School Committee member William Felkner.

I am not a union member, RINEA member or a teacher. Just government/military retiree and a taxpayer but as I read your blog and read responses, I am beginning to see reasons why I should not stay in Rhode Island and East Greenwich has a nationally ranked high performing school department and student population.

You should be working for the RI Economic Development Corporation trying to get corporations to build business in the state of RI.

Ken,

This is all quite simple. The NEA's own paid liars Ducky and Walsh come here and make representations about contracts and contract talks. The only thing Don is requesting of these people are actual facts to back up their claims of a 'pay cut'. A pretty simple and straightforward request don't you think? Yet they can't produce anything to back up their claim. Why? Because it's a lie and they've been caught in it and in a very public way. The NEA hasn't put Don into 'time out' at all, they've run away like the spineless hacks they are because Don's challenged them to 'put up' so they 'shut up' and run away. What men! lol
Don should ban Duckey and Walsh from any participation on this blog until they address and 'confess' on this matter.
Btw your disclaimer re: union loyalties on this is very humorous Ken. Disclaimers are always a big big red flag.

One cannot produce that which does not exist. There are no pay cuts.

I suspect that Don that knowing there is nothing behind the claim, Mr. Walsh has been forced to order his manservant (or is it idiot savant) to shut his yapper and spend more time actually doing work!

Ken, please show us where Donald is not using direct source numbers.

It should be noted that the entire basis of these "supposed" salary increases stems from an informational leak of "supposed" raise offers. According to the agreement between the school committee and the teachers' union specific details are not to be released. While I personally do not agree with this policy, I find it amusing that this entire argument is based on unofficial numbers.

Unfortunately, we live in a society where 30 second news segments and single column newspaper articles provide us with "the facts" with which we form our opinions - how sad for all parties involved...

As I indicated, Donald has not presented any copies of information with Town of East Greenwich or East Greenwich School Committee letterhead dated 2007 during current negotiations..

He provides a somewhat convincing argument but then he goes off on a tangent against RINEA and retreats to his old spreadsheets.

As a former manager, I understand when entities enter into a judicial mandated State of Rhode Island labor relations contract negotiations, there are rules each party must follow or the party not following those rules can be found in violation of the laws by the presiding judge and prosecuted.

Donald knows this as a former East Greenwich School Committee member and maybe this is why he is trying so hard to use this Blog to discredit RINEA and get RINEA to respond to his Blog thereby breaking the judge’s instructions to all parties involved.

That is why I indicated to Donald, under the RI open records law demand the RINEA info from the presiding judge or RI Labor Relations Board Mediator.

I had coffee with a couple of teachers this pass weekend and my eyes were opened. My next step is to hear the other side.

There is a foul taste in my mouth from third party use of public Blogs to bate entities into violating judge’s orders and labor relations negotiation rules.

At least one thing is positively good, all posting on the world-wide-web Blogs are archived and can be recovered for later court use.

Thank you, Ken, for proving (yet again, sadly) that public sector union negotiations in Rhode Island resemble nothing so much as a bad Sopranos re-run..."Donnie, your blog posts are archived, capice?"

Donald, your [words deleted by Hawthorne].

NOTE TO ALL READERS FROM HAWTHORNE:

Please note that having an open Comments section on Anchor Rising is a privilege that exists under an informal Honor Code whereby all of us agree to retain a basic level of civility. Hard-hitting comments are fine and welcome; obscene comments are not.

We do not permit the use of inappropriate words in the Comments section and will continue to delete them when they occur.

We will do this whether they are directed at us personally - as this one was - or they are directed at others.

For example, I recently deleted one such comment directed at Bob Walsh of the NEA. It is certainly well known that Bob and I disagree vehemently on many issues but it is the intent of Anchor Rising to ensure our disagreements remain focused on the substantive policy and political issues without having to resort to obscene language.

Thank you.

Don Hawthorne

ken, so is your wife a teacher?????

and ..do you enjoy paying higher taxes? and do your kids go to the public schools?

Ken:

I am struck by how your latest comments are all twisted up in a layman's attempt at legalese regarding the NEA possibly being baited into making public comments to justify its "pay cut" claim.

Your comments both miss the point about what is important in this debate and completely misconstrue the role Anchor Rising is playing in this public debate.

As I have written previously, we are a new media outlet doing investigative reporting and opinion writing, in this case on the NEA's quite public claim of "pay cuts." Our investigative efforts were triggered by the NEA's public actions and our opinion writing grew out of the results of our investigative reporting. What we are doing is simply living an American tradition under the 1st Amendment of the Bill of Rights!

In that context, your insistence on us producing official documents on letterhead is really just an attempt to play games. After all, I am sure you are not simultaneously writing the Washington Post or Wall Street Journal to tell them that you will only accept their investigative reporting efforts if they first publicly disclose 3rd party documents on official letterhead to "prove" their points.

Nonetheless, what is striking in your response is how you choose to ignore a core point: The NEA started this PUBLIC debate on its own by making the "pay cut" claim in the first place - and they did it during the labor negotiation period, no less.

Did you see anything on their letterhead to justify such a public claim or are you giving only the NEA a free pass on public comments without proper formal documentation?

You speak about seeking information from both sides. That begs two questions:

First, are you going to file the kinds of legal actions you mention to get the NEA's supporting materials or are you just going to take the informal words offered by several teachers? And, if you only take their informal words, how did you convince yourself that the information they shared with you was not the very "slanted facts" and "made-up numbers" that worry you so much here at Anchor Rising?

Second, may I suggest you start your information search of the "other side" by confirming the 16 publicly available historical data points and the 2 projected health insurance cost increase numbers central to my publicly available analysis? The good news is that you don't have to file all sorts of legal nonsense you mention in your comment because the information I used in the model is all publicly available to concerned citizens. An earnest call/meeting or two - like I did - is all that is required. When you publicly confirm you have sought and received that data, we will know you are truly serious in your comments and not just playing a baiting game.

Plus, once you have that data (and I assure you it will be identical to mine), you can then go back to my model available here on-line for everyone to review. You can walk through each table of the model to see how the data you confirmed as valid forms the basis for the analysis in it. I can promise you that effort will directly refute your earlier words that the model is based on made-up numbers and slanted facts!

To address RobertS's earlier comment, you can even vary the step increase numbers and copays for the 3 years - try 2%, 1.75%, and 1.75% with a 20% copay in all 3 years, which was publicly disclosed in the media as the School Committee's original offer - and show yourself how even that does not yield a "pay cut."

What you report back will tell us a lot about your intentions. It will tell us whether we truly have a dialogue here or just a subterfuge game aimed at derailing the public debate.

I hope you show all of the Anchor Rising readers that you are genuine and willing to do the work to confirm the facts. If you do that, I can state with certainty that you will be pleasantly surprised by the validity of the Anchor Rising analysis and reporting.