Labor
The press releases are coming out concerning an administration-union deal in Central Falls. First in the emailbox was the union’s take: The Central Falls Teachers Union and the Central Falls School District reached a tentative agreement Saturday to implement a transformation plan for Central Falls High School for the 2010-11 school year in a way…
I’m not a fan of saying, “How high?,” when the federal government says, “jump,” and waves around a bunch of money. It’s also detrimental to begin seeing federal dollars as some sort of cost-free windfall. That said, the Race to the Top matter has brought forward the true face of labor unions and highlighted their…
Blogger Mickey Kaus is running for U.S. senator in the Democratic primary in California and thinks its time for the Democratic Party to re-think their relationship with unions (h/t). It’s time for Democrats, even liberal Democrats, to start looking at unions and unionism with deep skepticism. I don’t mean we should embrace the right-wing view…
The nominees: Markeesha Odom: Works at St. Louis DMV. At 24 years old, already twice name Missouri’s surliest and least cooperative state employee. Dennis Cosgrove: School custodian in Queens, NY. Set a record with 3200 hours on the job. All on overtime! Like many NYC custodians, Dennis is a year round resident of Florida. Anthony…
Chris Powell notes a strategy worth considering: Nominations for Connecticut’s mayor of the year should include Wallingford’s William W. Dickinson Jr. for proposing, in the town budget he recently submitted to the Town Council, to reduce the school board’s budget by exactly the amount the board planned to pay raises to teachers. The mayor thus…
Julia Steiny makes a reasonable point about the ability of the General Assembly — with limits and mandates for local teacher contracts — to ensure “peace at the local level,” but her assessment doesn’t go quite far enough: And this is the point: labor peace must be bought. And nothing is excluded from negotiations. Everything…
The comments to Marc’s post on the number of General Assembly members who benefit from public pensions are understandable, but most miss the point. Cutting the General Assembly’s pay and authority isn’t going to address the essential problem — namely, that an official position that doesn’t pay much will attract those who have other motivations,…
My main argument against looking toward centralized levers — whether in Providence or Washington — to reform education has essentially been that national teachers’ unions are better situated to manipulate higher tiers of government than are concerned residents acting through democratic processes. Within the scope of town politics, an active group can have some hope…
Rhode Island GOP Chairman Gio Cicione makes a good point about pensions and General Treasurer Frank Caprio: In fact, Mr. Caprio knew better a long time ago. As early as April 2002, when he was Senate finance chairman, Mr. Caprio indicated that an 8.25 percent return had “proved to be an overly optimistic assumed rate…
Sometimes, in the noise and rancor of politics and budgeting, one’s attention becomes monopolized by particular details. Consider the following: [The state’s public-employee unions’] chief target: a proposal to limit annual pension increases to the first $35,000 in retirement pay initially. The $35,000 would go up each year, in keeping with the Consumer Price Index,…
