Labor
The editorial board of the Providence Journal notes a familiar problem in the old country: Last month, Britain’s biggest business group, CBI, released a report contending that the total liability for public pensions in the country had reached at least a staggering 900 million pounds — about $1.4 trillion. Some 5 million unionized public employees…
Union members and supporters in Rhode Island should contemplate hard where their self-imposed imperatives are placing them in the battle of messages. On their side is a dogged assertion that official processes don’t weaken their hand even during financial emergencies: [Union lawyer John] Leidecker also said state law says districts should adhere to the old…
So states East Providence School Committee Chair Anthony Carcieri in a press release just out (and available in full in the extended entry): “This school system has cut everything to the bone except the teachers’ contract. Everything,” Carcieri said. “They stopped capital improvements years ago. Basic maintenance of the school buildings has all but stopped.…
Michelle Malkin’s looked through some of the expenditures of the UAW, which via auto-industry bailouts, is now under the care of the federal government: In February 2000, the union poured $14.7 million into Pro Air, a Detroit start-up airline that, well, didn’t get off the ground. Plagued by safety problems, the feds shuttered the company…
Harvey Waxman, of Wickford, makes a good point: When private-sector unions make concessions their sacrifices will go to companies whose executives often make millions in salaries and to shareholders whose dividends can benefit from those concessions. When a public-sector union makes concessions the beneficiaries are not high priced executives but the people, the homeowners, the…
Commenting to my post on returning retirees in RI’s public higher ed system, Steve appears to have inside information: Justin, I’d like to clarify something, if I may. No one has “eased back into their old positions.” The staff that retired and were brought back have returned on a part-time basis. No one is working…
Rhode Isand commissioner of higher education Jack Warner has an op-ed in today’s Providence Journal “Explaining college retirees’ return.” This is the only new, mitigating factor: The Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education, through its predecessor, the Board of Regents, was given the authority to establish its own retirement plan in 1967 (Rhode…
Chris Powell’s description of the public sector in Connecticut sounds very familiar: With its law requiring binding arbitration of public employee union contracts, state government has established an elaborate mechanism of disconnecting the compensation of public employees from democracy, the public’s ability to pay, and even any discussion in politics. Since that compensation totals about…
The rhetorical dance of the East Providence teachers’ union is so flowing, it’s easy to miss the essential argument: “The School Committee’s solution to their self-inflicted fiscal problem is to blame it on the teachers’ contract and to shift the entire burden of paying off that deficit to the teachers,” union representative Jeannette Woolley countered…
Following up, the ProJo has their report on the situation today: School officials said that few members of the union that represents custodial, maintenance and secretarial employees — the Warwick Independent School Employees (WISE) –– responded to calls to come to work late Sunday afternoon even though union workers had showed up for snow duty…