Labor
Citing an inability to fulfill customer orders or sell product at their retail stores and a lack of money to wait out a prolonged strike, Hostess announced Friday that it will return to bankruptcy court to request liquidation. It’s difficult not to see some resemblance to the denouement of the Brown and Sharpe strike right…
“I had the sense that everybody around the table knew that we were part of the same team.” That’s how Tiverton School Committee member Carol Herrmann described negotiations with the teachers’ union this summer. On August 14, the committee passed the contract extension. It isn’t surprising that the negotiations would be “cordial,” as Herrmann put…
Economic development options, from all-government to government-dominated; the heartless-to-caring axis in politics; Southern New Englanders’ “independence”; solidarity between Romney and his garbage man; the media coup d’etat. Continue reading on the Ocean State Current…
Believing the political worst of priests; spinning bad SAT results; the skill of being trainable; the strange market valuation in Unionland. Continue reading on the Ocean State Current…
Chafee shows his bond cards, Chicago exposes a metric discord, Rhode Island misses the skills-gap/business-cost lesson, QE3 misses the inflation nebula, and college majors miss the mark. Continue reading on the Ocean State Current…
People periodically give me incredulous looks when I tell them I dislike politics. The campaign horse race is a roundabout annoyance of spin, and more importantly, it simply isn’t appropriate to view politics as a team sport. Depending on the level of government, thousands or millions of people’s lives are directly affected by the policies…
Madness overseas and at home, lunacy in the Fed, the disconcerting growth of government, and the performance art of public-sector negotiations.
The Chicago Tribune is reporting that 25,000 public-school teachers are picketing, rather than teaching, today. The details are a bit distant from Rhode Island for a finely tuned analysis, but it’s fair to say that the union is not fighting a political class on the verge of right-to-work legislation. A significant political emphasis on “labor peace”…
This video by Evan Coyne Maloney succinctly presents a critical part of the small-government, free-market perspective on one of Rhode Island’s most intractable difficulties: The machine by which teachers’ unions turn public dollars into union-organization profits and political patronage is clear and unambiguous. One could argue that the process is for the better, for one…
Here in Rhode Island, we’re one of the few states to still be increasing the unemployment numbers. We’re currently at 10.8%, and second highest in the nation. Making matters even worse, the number of jobs available is also in decline. We have many people looking for work and fewer jobs available for them to take.…
