Labor
Today’s Providence Journal article on organized labor in the state is must-reading. This passage is particularly telling: But organized labor also has a strong voice in discussions about over health-care cuts for the poor, reduced benefits for foster children, environmental causes like such as recycling, and even gay marriage. Rhode Island unions have formed unique…
Yes, that’s an organization composed mainly of teachers offering up unimaginative slogans that promote left-wing clichés:
My piece in today’s Providence Journal dwells on the collision of my affection and admiration for Providence Firefighter/EMT Lt. Michael Morse and his book and my opposition to public-sector unions.
The Projo headline should have been “Murder case could threaten ex-officers’ pensions,” because it shouldn’t take the manifest ability of killing another human being to correct this clear fleecing of the public: Gianquitti has been collecting an accidental disability pension since 1993, retiring at 24 after six months as a patrolman for the Providence Police…
Julia Steiny is must-reading today: After collecting my thoughts and temper, I wrote back. It seemed to me that teaching a child to read was the principal mission of any school and was, therefore, funded. Rhode Island has one of the highest per-pupil expenditures in the nation. If not to teach reading, what is it…
West Warwick teacher Paul Bovenzi appears to have attended a few too many union prep and pump sessions: Teachers drive education, and know what’s best for children in their schools. Contrary to popular belief, administrators (or managers to use his misnomer) are no more educators than a hospital administrator is a doctor! Do you want…
In the obviously titled “State workers protest any pension cuts,” one protester said the following: Others, including social worker Michael Fallon, said they felt state workers had been unfairly made the “scapegoats” for both the ballooning unfunded liability in the state pension fund and the “poor management” that landed Rhode Island in its current fiscal…
On the Tuesday evening Matt Allen WPRO show, Matt interviewed State Representative and House Minority Whip Nick Gorham about Gorham’s bill H-7664, which would redefine the scope of issues subject to bargaining for RI public employees. During the interview, Gorham noted that there are very different approaches across the 50 states as to what issues…
Andrew makes a central observation in the comments to his latest post on the pension deficit: If politicians making bad fiscal decisions are the entire story of the pension funding crisis, that is a strong case against defined benefit plans, because there is no reason to believe that current and future pols are going to…
Perhaps no practice is a better distillation of the blight that is teacher unionization than bumping. I’m with Julia Steiny in thinking that it ought to end, but the suggestions of the Business Education Partnership that she describes in her column, yesterday, are worth considering as half-way measures: To professionalize education personnel practices, Blais and…
