Labor
Maybe we can plug the state deficit with Ethics Commission fines: The Ethics Commission voted yesterday to prosecute state senator and union official Frank Ciccone on two charges, but dropped five other charges that his votes in the General Assembly amounted to ethics violations because they benefited unions he works for. The decision means that…
Here’s how even private-sector unions “negotiate”: A carpenters union that has been shut out of a $34-million renovation project at the Hyatt Regency Newport Hotel and Spa picketed yesterday at the Goat Island causeway, accusing the hotel of improperly removing mold. Representatives of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters, Local 1305, passed out leaflets…
Marc offered the substantive commentary yesterday, so all I’ve got in response to bad news about Rhode Island’s high schools is a quip (emphasis added): But proficiency rates among students statewide are stagnant. Despite an aggressive statewide high school reform effort, test scores of high school juniors have remained flat for the past several years,…
Julia Steiny has a good column explaining one area in which the union model is a poor fit for teachers (the best parts aren’t quoted): Traditional “defined benefit” pensions motivate some teachers to become deadwood. Teachers who have lost their appetite for the work must continue to put in their time, however half-heartedly, to qualify…
Not to make light of others’ hardships (even if those hardships are relative), but this line from Local 1033’s “business manager,” Donald Iannazzi, on the layoffs of his walking-guard clients truly deserves highlighting: “Here we have 18 people from working-class families who are members of the Warwick community,” he said. “They care about our kids,…
The paper didn’t put it online, but my response to a recent letter to the editor by the NEA’s Pat Crowley is in the current edition of the Sakonnet Times. I just hope that I’ve done a little something to help clarity and truth foil the union’s plans.
Boy does this sound familiar: “There is a process called negotiation by which issues get resolved,” James P. Dwyer III, a teacher, wrote in a Nov. 29 e-mail to School Committee member Stephen A. DeCastro. It was titled, Democratic Society. DeCastro read it at the committee’s meeting last Tuesday. He read his two-page response aloud…
Seemingly to change the topic after the NEA’s many missteps in Tiverton (including the widely distributed image of his own middle finger to the townspeople), NEA Assistant Executive Director Patrick Crowley adds insult to injury by attempting to sell Sakonnet Times readers a portrait of deception. His letter in yesterday’s edition ends with a statement…
Surprised? Providence Fire Union president Paul Doughty has not come to work for much of the last three years, staffing what Chief George Farrell said appeared to be a no-show position in the department’s training division instead of working a fire truck. At the same time, Doughty was making extra cash working overtime shifts to…
Seemingly because of Bobby Oliveira’s attempts to talk some sense into the NEA’s Pat Crowley (I know!), the Tiverton teachers’ union moved its planned picket from the hospital at which School Committee Chairwoman Denise DeMedeiros works to the superintendent’s office. Maybe next time, we on the other side shouldn’t forecast our outrage so explicitly. So…