Labor
An East Providence school committee member in attendance at the Ed Achorn talk gave me a copy of a flier that’s going to homes across the town: Inside are a few union talking points presented in a “true or false” format, my favorite of which is the following (emphasis in original): It’s the teachers’ fault…
Yesterday, I pointed to a report showing that Rhode Island teachers lead the nation in pay compared with neighbors in similar fields within the state. With a methodology that selects specific occupations that require a comparable amount of education to teaching, the study’s authors found that RI teachers exceed their peers by 12%. Not surprisingly,…
What we’re seeing across Rhode Island, from Tiverton to East Providence, to West Warwick, and now to Johnston is the essential nature of the teachers’ unions: Resistance from the teachers’ union has forced the Johnston school system to abandon its leading role in a $12.5-million project to dramatically upgrade science and math education across Rhode…
As I recall, it was during America’s discovery of FoxNews, just after 9/11, that I saw Robert Reich on Hannity and Colmes, and Hannity made a comment to the effect that Reich’s ability to talent for promoting detrimental economic policies was frightening. That memory came to mind while reading Reich’s recent essay promoting the “Employee…
Taking a soft tack in defining “fairness” when it comes to teacher compensation, Julia Steiny references a series of reports put out by Education Week: The researchers averaged the earnings of all 16 occupations and used that number to draw a “parity line” across the center of the chart. Against that line they graphed each…
It’s curious — at a time when lefties and unions are more than happy to accept far reaching justifications for weaving their wish lists into an ostensible stimulus package at the federal level — to hear them arguing for a close delineation of “budget repair” in the state: Union leaders are accusing the Carcieri administration…
On Friday evening, Portsmouth Fire Chief Jeff Lynch sent an email to a baker’s dozen (or so) of state legislators explaining why not a single one of the governor’s budgetary suggestions related to public-sector labor ought to be accepted. The entire letter is printed in the extended entry, below. It would be folly to state…
It’s difficult not to rub one’s eyes and look again: Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year. That was the sixth-largest…
Michael Morse is a good guy. A very good guy. He’s reasonable, compassionate, and intelligent, but also emblematic of the cult of unionism. That such a man would not spare one word of sympathy for those appalled by the teachers’ union tactics at the infamous East Providence school committee meeting or one word to disassociate…
The way in which individuals construct an understanding of their societies is what makes it fatal to paint them all with the bold colors of their affiliations: People will be particularly amenable to certain explanations for events around them — whether they’ve been pushed toward prescribed priorities via social clichés, have an economic interest in…
