Labor
The proper scope of union activities has been a topic of conversation, around here, lately, and I’ve been drawing my line mainly where the union become a broader advocate for its members in the public, specifically political, sphere. Here’s a particularly curious instance: I’m Jade Thompson and my husband, Andy Thompson, is running for the…
It’s pretty clear, from a recent Brown University poll that about one-fifth of the electorate in Rhode Island are in the die-hard public sector camp: On the other hand, a large percentage — 73.3 percent — opposed raising the state sales tax, while 18.9 percent supported the idea. And 74.7 percent opposed raising the state…
Janet Daley’s reminiscences of union-run England as it was some decades ago sound eerily familiar, although even Rhode Island, among the states, still has far to fall before matching her experience: In the 1980s, as now, the justification for nihilistic persecution of the innocent citizen was The Cuts: the diabolical reductions in spending which the…
I don’t think WRNI reporter/commentator Scott MacKay would take offense at the suggestion — or bother to deny — that he’s got a union-friendly worldview, but I wonder whether it’s occurred to him that this imbalance in political influence might be structural and unfair in its core: Union activists and their allies in the liberal…
Always desirous of sharing the wise observations of my fellow Rhode Islanders, I recommend Raymond Palmieri’s recent letter to the editor: Union leadership now plays the role of the industrialists. The Aug. 25 Wall Street Journal reported that the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees Industrial Union (SEIU) “have a combined $88 million or more to…
A common theme that one sees in the talk of the history of movements and political factions — and on which I comment frequently — arose in a recent Bob Kerr column: “They knew nothing about the history of labor,” [Studs] Terkel recalled. “The young have no sense of yesterday. She was sort of a…
Both sides of the coin that the Providence Journal editorial board describes in this passage from an unsigned essay concerning public labor in Central Falls are overly broad assertions, but the sentence that I’ve italicized seems especially presumptuous: … as virtually anyone who has dealt with public employees at the state and local levels can…
Providence real estate agent Mark Van Noppen notes the numerical consequence of one aspect of the city’s labor practices: Not a bad gig: Become a Providence firefighter at age 20, work the 23 years required to collect a pension and retire at 43. But Providence taxpayers — its property owners — have to pay a…
Sometimes people have to say what they have to say, I suppose, but this comment out of Cumberland really points to the different world in which some Rhode Islanders live: School Supt. Donna A. Morelle stated that the committee and the administration “are greatly appreciative of the sacrifice made by the teachers.” So what “sacrifice”…
… before the endorsement (of that same candidate). The gubernatorial campaigns of John Robitaille (R), Ken Block (M) and Frank Caprio (D) have all confirmed the absence of an NEA RI candidate questionnaire in the inbox and the non-ringing of the phone for the invitation to be interviewed that never got made. In fact, following…