Keyword: unions
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An October conference has become the first to pull out of Indianapolis due to controversy over the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) announced Monday they are pulling their 2015 Women's Conference from the city in response to the legislation Governor Mike Pence signed into law last week. The conference was scheduled from October 9-11 at the JW Marriott. "The 1.6 million members of AFSCME cannot in good conscience make such a sizable financial investment in Indiana knowing that women and men in that state are deliberately being targeted for discrimination," the...
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UNITED FEDERATION OF HUMANITY LOCAL 15120 OFFICIAL GRIEVANCE FORM Grievance filed against: Steel Valley Education Association Grievance alleged: The union representing Park Elementary School teachers filed a cruel, insensitive, unnecessary and ultimately impotent grievance against Steel Valley School District. Said grievance involving a special needs student violates the compassion, decency and concern for others clauses of its collective bargaining agreement with the UFH, hereafter referred to as “humanity.” The grievance was incalculably unintelligent and an enormous public relations gaffe that casts Park teachers as complete cads. Those aren't explicit violations of the CBA but should be noted for the record....
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Prior to a court case ruling otherwise, taxpayers in the city of Phoenix paid $950,000 a year in salaries and benefits to send six city police officers to work as full-time union managers, 35 officers to work as part time union representatives and one to work as a union lobbyist. Including Phoenix, the state of Arizona was giving approximately $3.7 million in taxpayer dollars to public employees doing union work on “release time.” Wednesday, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) released a new report, “A Remedy for Taxpayer Giveaway to Unions.” The report explains how public employees receive subsidies from the...
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There are several egregious exhibits that clamor for more scrutiny of union contract negotiations with governments: vacant jails awaiting unionized staffing; ill-timed, even illegal teacher strikes; funding for salaries of union officers and bogus bonuses, to name a few. Here’s another: illusionary job inequities that elicit extra pay for some state workers and extra taxes for everyone else. In Washington State, collective bargaining between the Governor’s office and public unions is exempt from the state’s Open Public Meetings Act (OPMA). When public unions enter the breach of accountability they conjure secret covenants, secretly arrived at, and this is true in...
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When he arrived on Capitol Hill in January, freshman Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., discovered something he had no clue was going on. Hundreds of federal employees spend their entire workday -- not doing the business of the government, but working for their unions. Hice told Fox News he was shocked by what he found. "Waste on an egregious level by federal employees who are taking taxpayer monies and using it for purposes other than the reason they were hired," Hice said. It's called "official time," and it was sanctioned into law by Congress in 1978. Lawmakers voted to allow federal...
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On Feb. 20, Kamal Abbas, Egyptian union leader and prominent figure in the Jan. 25 movement, sent a message to the “workers of Wisconsin”: “We stand with you as you stood with us.” Egyptian workers have long fought for fundamental rights denied by the U.S.-backed Hosni Mubarak regime. Kamal is right to invoke the solidarity that has long been the driving force of the labor movement worldwide, and to compare their struggles for labor rights and democracy. The two are closely intertwined. Labor movements have been in the forefront of protecting democracy and human rights and expanding their domains, a...
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Labor unions negotiate higher wages and better benefits for union members. That’s fine – that’s their purpose and it’s why some people choose to join unions and pay union dues. The unions have to perform a delicate balancing act. If they don’t push for better wages and benefits for their members, then workers will have less of an incentive to join unions. But, as unions attain better wages and benefits for their workers, non-union labor starts to look much more attractive to employers and so employers will tend to prefer to hire non-union labor. If union labor is more productive...
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Power from the People FINANCE & DEVELOPMENT, March 2015, Vol. 52, No. 1 Florence Jaumotte and Carolina Osorio Buitron The decline in unionization in recent decades has fed the rise in incomes at the topInequality has risen in many advanced economies since the 1980s, largely because of the concentration of incomes at the top of the distribution. Measures of inequality have increased substantially, but the most striking development is the large and continuous increase in the share of total income garnered by the 10 percent of the population that earns the most—which is only partially captured by the more traditional...
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Gerardo Hernandez, a spy for Communist Cuba and the man responsible for the murder of four humanitarian workers (three of whom were American citizens) over international waters, was freed from prison last year by the Obama administration, due in part to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). This was revealed at a February 6, 2015, celebration of Hernandez’s release, along with two of his fellow Cuban agents (collectively known as the “Cuban 5.. At the beginning of the event, an IPS official thanked all who who took part in the 17-year campaign and singled out a number of organizations that...
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You’d think Wisconsin Republicans would reward themselves with some rest after pulling off—via a great deal of misdirection from Scott Walker—the enactment of a southern-style “right to work” law banning union shop agreements reached via voluntary free-market contract negotiations. But no: as The Nation’s Moshe Marvit explains, Badger State GOPers are back with a bill to revoke the right to a day off after seven days of labor. The new bill, which is being sponsored by Republican Van Wanggaard in the State Senate alongside [Rep. Mark] Born in the Assembly, would add a provision to the “day of rest” law...
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By Eric Boehm | Watchdog.org After working one day as a substitute teacher in Illinois, David Piccioli could be entitled to an annual pension of more than $30,000. And he’s suing the state to make sure he gets paid. Piccioli is a retired union political activist who’s already pulling down a pair of state pensions from Illinois’ beleaguered public retirement system. But he’s taking the Teachers Retirement System to court to squeeze more money out of the state. The Chicago Tribune reported Thursday that Piccioli is already collecting $31,000 annually from the Teacher Retirement System, but he could get an...
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Even its own website makes unclear who runs a Grand Rapids entity calling itself “Our Kitchen Table,” but the statewide news conglomerate MLive elevated the obscure nonprofit into part of a “statewide coalition” in a story about a campaign to mandate that job providers give employees paid leave for sickness and other reasons. Our Kitchen Table has no financial or organizational paperwork on record, according to Guidestar.org, a website that tracks forms filed with the IRS by 1.8 million nonprofit groups. The address the organization filed with the IRS is a single-family residence. Its website doesn’t list the names of...
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The California teachers' pension fund still hasn't shaken off its investment in gun maker Bushmaster, more than two years after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. And now the teachers are mad. California teachers are planning a protest at the fund's annual meeting on April 2.
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Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has signed a measure freeing workers in his state from having to pay union dues if they want to keep their jobs, naturally enough upsetting labor honchos wanting to grab every worker nickel they can. Not the least of them: Randi Weingarten, chief of the American Federation of Teachers. “Scott Walker fails the test of common decency and common sense,” said Weingarten, who represents teacher unions that commonly abet youths in failing standardized tests. Her comments came after Walker signed a bill making his state the 25th to enact a right-to-work law that does exactly...
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LaKiesha Allen is a 35-year old Lansing school secretary who pays the Michigan Education Association $38 a month in union dues from her $23,000 annual salary. Local union officials have threatened to get her fired if she stops paying those dues. So Allen was stunned to learn that MEA President Steve Cook, a man she has never met, swung a deal with her employer to parlay his six-figure union salary into a richer pension payout. Cook's payout will come from the same pension fund that Allen is counting on for her own retirement – a fund that is currently underfunded...
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A machinists union is seeking an election at a Boeing plant in South Carolina. The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers is asking a federal agency to set an election so more than 2,400 Boeing production workers in South Carolina can vote on whether to form a union. Fred Wszolek, spokesman for the Workforce Fairness Institute, says the move is surprising. "It's interesting that it's a much smaller number than the actual number of Boeing employees in Charleston. It's only about a third," he observes. "They must have defined some sort of micro-union that they think they can win...
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Real German incomes, or gross wages adjusted for inflation, had not developed evenly in recent years across different wage sectors, a study by the Bertelsmann Foundation and the Munich-based IFO economic research institute showed Wednesday. […] The authors of the study said one of the reasons for the increasing wage disparity had been a creeping decline of collective bargaining deals with binding wages. […] “We need to redouble our efforts to scale back wage disparities again without losing too many jobs,” Bertelsmann Foundation chief Aart De Geus said in a statement, pointing out that the recent introduction of a minimum...
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For most people who follow government, nothing is more meaningful or more dramatic than the struggle to pass a law. In this romanticized view, the passage of a law means that change was required, and that those who break the new law will be punished. In 2011, the Michigan Legislature passed a series of education reforms, designed to retain and reward Michigan’s best teachers. According to these new laws, districts would have to pay high-achieving teachers a premium, and could not make teacher hiring and firing decisions on the basis of seniority alone. For those who celebrate new laws, this...
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|| By FITSNEWS || Wisconsin governor Scott Walker scored a big win in early-voting South Carolina this week … No, it wasn’t a major endorsement … or a smart staffing move … or another solid early polling performance in the Palmetto State. Walker – whose national profile was built by battling Big Labor – won thanks to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers’ petition to unionize Boeing’s North Charleston, S.C. plant. All of a sudden South Carolina – which boasts one of the nation’s lowest unionization rates – finds itself in the thick of a major organized labor...
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"......."What I really hope for at the end of all this is that people understand that education is not an expense, it's an investment," MPS Superintendent Darienne Driver said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C., Monday after she and other education leaders met with President Barack Obama to discuss urban education issues. [Governor Walker's] budget has a far-reaching impact on all school districts. Beyond urban and suburban areas, rural school leaders say the extra aid the governor proposed for their districts is trumped by the loss in per-pupil aid. In general, the governor's budget proposes keeping school revenue flat....
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