Labor
Ted Nesi has allowed far-left radical Tom Sgouros guest-posting privileges to his blog, which the latter used to offer an excellent example of his typical rhetorical style. Sgouros likes to explain complicated issues as if he’s writing for children, so as (it appears) to leave the adult reader with a “well, gee” feeling and to…
This paragraph from a weekend PolitFact points to the really disturbing part of news about $100,000-plus pension payments: The Wisconsin report didn’t compare starting retirement salaries. It simply catalogued the elements each state used to calculate the amount. To do the calculation, you take a worker’s final average salary (usually the average of the last…
Another interesting aspect of the article on Education Commissioner Deborah Gist’s new regulations that Marc mentioned yesterday is the way in which one of the objections is answered in a separate article on the same page: “If they gut collective bargaining, they are heading down a road to destroy public education,” said Larry Purtill, executive…
So the public-sector labor unions in Wisconsin, on top of threatening businesses that decline to take a side in their fight for a continued monopoly on government jobs, have found a judge to interfere in the legislative process in an unprecedented way and are now pushing to change the makeup of the state’s Supreme Court…
Oh, the shades of gray! A number of organizations are advocating a boycott of the products that come from companies owned by the Koch family. This is problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it could potentially hurt the wrong people. The Koch brothers own Georgia Pacific. It is…
Local 2882 President Cathy Paquette: The answer to the pension problem … is, if you hire more state workers …You would get more people paying into the pension system, and you won’t have any unfunded liability. Yeah, I get it. More workers now to pay for current retirees. Then we just keep hiring more, every…
Predictably, teacher-legislator James Sheehan (D., North Kingstown) is vocally opposed to Providence Schools’ attempt to save the necessary money while causing the least amount of harm to students. At bottom, Providence’s approach is an attempt to keep the teachers who offer the most value per dollar, which will also allow it to keep more teachers,…
In response to Monique’s post on the restructuring of the Fire Department by the Woonsocket City Council, commenter Tom Kenney asked…Are you willing to negotiate with the unions for those concessions or is your answer the same as many conservatives are proposing…do away with collective bargaining altogether?Here’s how I would answer the first part of…
A bill will come before the Rhode Island Senate Health and Human Services Committee today, S0483, that would if passed alter the mandate of the “Uniform Public School Employees’ Health Care Benefits Program Committee” (aka the “Teachers’ Health Insurance Board“). This board was created by the legislature two sessions ago over a veto by Governor…
The legislation has so little chance of coming anywhere close to enactment that proposing it is mainly theatrics, but it’s definitely a show worth performing, if only to remind people that the process exists to make it happen: [The bill by Rep. Joe Trillo (R, Warwick)] would rewrite the rulebook on negotiations with public-employee unions,…
