Labor
This little blurb stuck out as I sifted through the newspaper, the other day. Why should this be so: Despite high unemployment in Connecticut, Census jobs are going begging. The Hartford office of the U.S. Census Bureau is struggling to fill between 1,000 and 1,500 temporary jobs that pay $15 to $22.75 an hour. More…
One must suspect that Ed Achorn is link-seeking when his column addresses both state-government dependents and the state of my youth, New Jersey: Ultimately, while the public-employee unions and other government-fed special interests keep fattening up, the middle class suffers from a loss of jobs and opportunity, and the poor suffer from a loss of…
Monique and Matt talked Central Falls and Chafee on last night’s Matt Allen Show. Stream by clicking here, or download it.
Every working Rhode Islander, and all of those looking for work, can see the disconnection of Central Falls union rhetoric: “We still hold that this termination of the entire faculty is a violation of the contract and contrary to state law and federal law as well,” [teachers union President Jane] Sessums said. “This is a…
As circumstances deteriorate, it’s instructive to observe the varying reactions and strategies for handling them. In Tiverton, the established order, so to speak, has redoubled its efforts to keep the negative focus on Tiverton Citizens for Change in the hopes that people won’t notice that the plans for improvement bear a striking resemblance to the…
[This fascinating e-mail was forwarded to me tonight. It has presumably been circulated to all members of NEARI.] As you are aware, Commissioner of Education Gist and Superintendent Gallo of the Central Falls School District are set to fire all 74 of the district’s high school teachers tomorrow. In one of the most blatant acts…
My February column for The Rhode Island Catholic takes up the subject of the Church’s support for labor unions: Catholic theology enters the political mix with the holding that God works through the individual conscience. What organized labor does, in the ideal, is to combine the power of individuals to construct a stronger, more substantive…
The thing that most irks me about unions in general and public-sector unions in particular is their way of obscuring natural alliances for the benefit not of their members, but of their organizers and political allies. Now, I can’t speak to the in-fights that union discipline may be keeping out of public view (although I…
Mike at Assigned Reading is dead on that the Newsmakers head-to-head between Central Falls union representative Jim Parisi and Superintendent Frances Gallo is very revealing about the two sides’ priorities. Perhaps the most crystallized example of unions’ determination to spin rather than inform — because everything’s “negotiable” — comes at approximately 9: in the video:…
The Newport Daily News isn’t very friendly about putting information online, so I don’t have a link to the story, but I read this weekend that the Tiverton School Committee is floating the idea of closing the town’s high school. In hopes of saving $450,000, as I recall, the town would either send its students…