Labor
Marc offered the substantive commentary yesterday, so all I’ve got in response to bad news about Rhode Island’s high schools is a quip (emphasis added): But proficiency rates among students statewide are stagnant. Despite an aggressive statewide high school reform effort, test scores of high school juniors have remained flat for the past several years,…
Julia Steiny has a good column explaining one area in which the union model is a poor fit for teachers (the best parts aren’t quoted): Traditional “defined benefit” pensions motivate some teachers to become deadwood. Teachers who have lost their appetite for the work must continue to put in their time, however half-heartedly, to qualify…
Not to make light of others’ hardships (even if those hardships are relative), but this line from Local 1033’s “business manager,” Donald Iannazzi, on the layoffs of his walking-guard clients truly deserves highlighting: “Here we have 18 people from working-class families who are members of the Warwick community,” he said. “They care about our kids,…
The paper didn’t put it online, but my response to a recent letter to the editor by the NEA’s Pat Crowley is in the current edition of the Sakonnet Times. I just hope that I’ve done a little something to help clarity and truth foil the union’s plans.
Boy does this sound familiar: “There is a process called negotiation by which issues get resolved,” James P. Dwyer III, a teacher, wrote in a Nov. 29 e-mail to School Committee member Stephen A. DeCastro. It was titled, Democratic Society. DeCastro read it at the committee’s meeting last Tuesday. He read his two-page response aloud…
Seemingly to change the topic after the NEA’s many missteps in Tiverton (including the widely distributed image of his own middle finger to the townspeople), NEA Assistant Executive Director Patrick Crowley adds insult to injury by attempting to sell Sakonnet Times readers a portrait of deception. His letter in yesterday’s edition ends with a statement…
Surprised? Providence Fire Union president Paul Doughty has not come to work for much of the last three years, staffing what Chief George Farrell said appeared to be a no-show position in the department’s training division instead of working a fire truck. At the same time, Doughty was making extra cash working overtime shifts to…
Seemingly because of Bobby Oliveira’s attempts to talk some sense into the NEA’s Pat Crowley (I know!), the Tiverton teachers’ union moved its planned picket from the hospital at which School Committee Chairwoman Denise DeMedeiros works to the superintendent’s office. Maybe next time, we on the other side shouldn’t forecast our outrage so explicitly. So…
Newport Superior Court Judge Vincent Ragosta has rebuffed the Tiverton School Committee’s attempt to “block the teachers’ union from picketing on Monday [this afternoon] at the workplace of the committee chairwoman, St. Anne’s Hospital in Fall River.” Anybody considering elected office in Tiverton with the intention of upholding citizens’ interests against the unions — or…
This is a plea to the teachers of Tiverton: Please step back for a moment and consider the depths to which your union is bringing you: Tiverton teachers plan to picket the workplace of School Committee Chairwoman Denise deMedeiros on Monday afternoon and have notified the president of St. Anne’s Hospital in Fall River, Mass.,…