Posts Tagged ‘union’

A County Board committee recently directed a Labor Relations Director to negotiate with a decertified union despite the dissenting advice of county attorneys urging the board to refrain from negotiations. The Red Fox debuted this report on April 7, but the mainstream media — for unknown reasons — has entirely ignored the developing story.

–SNIP– Third, how do taxpayers benefit from the County Board negotiating a contract that – under Act 10 — it is no longer obligated, nor legally permitted, to negotiate?

Read more by Aaron Rodriguez at JSonline.com

Two years after state legislation rolled back collective bargaining for public employees and reshaped the state’s education landscape, several Milwaukee-area superintendents on Tuesday praised the overall effects, saying that relations with teachers are solid and that they have more flexibility to help improve student achievement.

Read more by Erin Richards of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Enrollment in online schools has increased twelvefold in Ohio since the first internet-based school was created in the state in 2000, The Gazette Medina reports.

More than 30,000 students are currently enrolled, most of them concentrated in seven statewide cyber schools. Only Arizona had more students in online schools, according to the news report.

Online schools, and other forms of digital learning, are an inevitable and promising form of education for the 21st Century, unless special interest forces are able to keep technology from becoming more integrated into everyday education.

Read more by Kyle Olson at Townhall.com

This is the house that Obama built

These are the firms
That paid for the house that Obama built

This is the media that didn’t inform
That everyone’s broke except for those firms
That paid for the house that Obama built

These are the crony big business concerns
That gave to the unions what they didn’t earn
That the media saw but didn’t inform
That everyone’s broke except for those firms
That paid for the house that Obama built

This is the stimulus ready to burn
That the crony big businesses didn’t return
That gave to the unions what they didn’t earn
That the media saw but didn’t inform
That everyone’s broke except for those firms
That paid for the house that Obama built . . .

Read more at thepeoplescube.com

The dark fiscal clouds are starting to lighten in Wisconsin’s largest school District.

But Milwaukee Public Schools’ fiscal picture could be a lot brighter, had its teachers’ union chosen to open up its labor contract with MPS and agree to some salary concessions.

Tweaking the deal could have saved scores of positions, opening up the opportunity for more teachers in the classroom, more programs to bolster the academic achievement of a school system that has seen its share of failure, and perhaps offering relief to Milwaukee taxpayers.

Life is all about choices, and the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association opted to reject concessions and keep what it had earned through its 2010 negotiations with the district.

Beginning in July 2013, however, if the law that redefined public-sector collective bargaining in Wisconsin holds, Milwaukee’s teachers will be operating under a new system, and the district and its taxpayers are expected to see pronounced savings.

They said, no, no, no

Read more by M.D. Kittle at Wisconsin Reporter

Abstract: Policymakers at every level of government are confronting the cost of fringe benefits for public-sector workers. The difficulty of placing an economic value on public employees’ pensions, however, means that policymakers rarely know whether benefits are excessive, especially as interest groups take advantage of the confusion by advancing misleading arguments. This paper discusses how to properly calculate the cost of public defined-benefit pension benefits, compares the cost of these benefits to private-sector retirement plans, and refutes two of the most common arguments that public pension benefits are somehow modest.

The generosity of public-sector pension benefits has come under increased scrutiny in recent years, as states and local governments search for ways to close their budget deficits. The intense battles over public-sector collective bargaining in Wisconsin and Ohio, for example, have been seen as conflicts over whether to reduce public-pension benefits for future retirees. Whether pension cutbacks are justified, however, depends crucially on whether existing benefits are excessively generous compared to those in the private sector. More broadly, policymakers cannot know if total compensation in the public sector—including salaries, benefits, and job security—is at an appropriate market level without a proper understanding of pension costs.

Read more by Jason Richwine, Ph.D. from Heritage.org

When cities declare emergencies, the reason is generally a natural disaster of one kind of another — tornado, flood, fire — or at the very least a man-made event that puts people in imminent physical danger, like a riot. But officials in the town of North Las Vegas are looking to use a law designed for those sorts of emergencies to address its fiscal crisis.

According to the Associated Press and the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the city council in North Las Vegas — a municipality of some 200,000 residents located to the north and east of the gambling mecca, and the fourth largest city in Nevada – will vote this week on a proposal by City Manager Tim Hacker that would declare the town a financial disaster area. If it passes, the move would allow the city to void union contracts. But more importantly, it could set a precedent for other cities to do the same.

Read more by Josh Sanburn at Time.com

Thank you Scott Walker for saving Wisconsin from bankruptcy!

Yesterday, I noted that the group “Wisconsin for Falk” began running ads against Governor Scott Walker in the forthcoming Wisconsin recall election. While “Wisconsin for Falk” sounds very much like a campaign committee for Kathleen Falk, Walker’s primary union-backed challenger, it is actually a third party group unaffiliated with Falk’s actual campaign. (Despite their ability to magically obtain video of Falk posing for them, runway-style.)

Read more by Christian Schneider on March 22, 2012 at publicsectorinc.com

True Confessions in Wisconsin

When debate over public unions flared up in Wisconsin last year, educators claimed Gov. Scott Walker’s austere reforms would require thousands of teachers to be laid off.

They were wrong.

With small changes in pension and healthcare contributions while allowing school districts to buy health insurance plans on the open market, Walker’s reforms have resulted in what could be considered a statewide teacher-retention program. School districts such as Wauwatosa, hometown of Governor Walker and the Weekly Standard’s Fox News star Stephen Hayes, faced a $6.5 million deficit and planned to lay off dozens of teachers. But Walker’s reforms allowed all those teachers to remain employed.

Read more by Matt Naugle at Spectator.org

Gov. Scott Walker delivered a passionate defense of Wisconsin’s reforms at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday night. The embattled Republican governor used his keynote speech at CPAC to outline what’s at stake in Wisconsin and other states if his budget reforms are rolled back.

“Our most powerful tool is the truth,” Walker told an excited crowd of conservatives, who gave him two standing ovations. He defended his actions as courageous with labor unions mounting a recall campaign to remove him from office. Unions have already financed recall efforts against state senators, losing four of the six campaigns they ran against incumbent Republicans.

Read more by Rob Bluey at blog.heritage.org

It seems like a bizarre notion, but does Barack Obama want to lose the election in November?

I think he does!

One is struck by the way Obama has visibly aged in the job. He may well have grown weary being POTUS.

By any rational standard, one would say he wants a second term, but Obama has always operated in a fantasy world where mere words are supposed to translate into reality. And he has repeatedly talked about being a one-term president.

He is, after all, his own invention; the author of two memoirs of a life that had little achievement to point to other than getting elected first to the Illinois legislature and then to the Senate where he lingered a bare two years before running for president.

I raise the question because Obama seems to be deliberately irritating the very people who are supposed to be his “base”; the hard-core liberals, the Hollywood crowd, youth, and unions, among others. His partisanship has put Congress into total gridlock.

Read more by Alan Caruba at Canada Free Press

The claim that “this presidential election is the most important election ever” is an enduring political cliché, and it’s almost always wrong. Consider this year. It’s likely the 2012 race for the White House won’t even be the most important contest of this year, much less of all time.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is currently the target of a recall effort spearheaded by national public employee unions. If his opponents get enough signatures by Jan. 17, Wisconsin will hold a gubernatorial election this summer. The outcome is crucial to the future of the country.

Read more by Nick Schulz at USAToday.com

Gee, I guess the unions are raaacist.

[Via] John Romano at “Yes, But, However!” at the link. He asks the perplexing question of why do Democrats so fear voter ID? Apparently even unions don’t see the requirement of a photo ID as too burdensome.

“A picture is worth a thousand words. According to OpenSecrets.org unions belonging to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) have donated over $26 million to Democratic candidates and causes since 1990. During that same period, the union gave a paltry $272,311 to the Republican Party.

As you’ll note in the photo below the union requires its own members to produce a photo ID in order to vote. The photo shows a union worker voting earlier today on whether to sanction a new four-year contract with Boeing, clearly the union understands the need for a picture ID in order to help guarantee a clean election:

Read more at directorblue.blogspot.com

The Hartland-Lakeside School District, about 30 miles west of Milwaukee in tiny Hartland, Wis., had a problem in its collective bargaining contract with the local teachers union.

The contract required the school district to purchase health insurance from a company called WEA Trust. The creation of Wisconsin’s largest teachers union — “WEA” stands for Wisconsin Education Association — WEA Trust made money when union officials used collective bargaining agreements to steer profitable business its way.

The problem for Hartland-Lakeside was that WEA Trust was charging significantly higher rates than the school district could find on the open market. School officials knew that because they got a better deal from United HealthCare for coverage of nonunion employees. On more than one occasion, Superintendent Glenn Schilling asked WEA Trust why the rates were so high. “I could never get a definitive answer on that,” says Schilling.

Read more by Byron York at Washington Examiner

The Stoughton Area School District was facing a $1.8 million budget hole.

But, Act 10, Wisconsin’s controversial budget repair bill, filled more than half of that gap, Stoughton Superintendent Tim Onsanger said.

“We were able to balance this year’s budget partly by asking our staff to contribute” to the state pension fund, he told Wisconsin Reporter on Monday.

By M.D. Kittle at the Wisconsin Reporter