Free Republic

Last night, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in the Western District of Texas on behalf of eight agencies against affiliates of the American Federation of Government Employees.Yesterday, the President issued an Executive Order entitled Exclusions from Federal Labor-Management Relations Programs. This order reflected the President’s determination that several federal agencies and subdivisions perform investigative and national security work and that those agencies may not be required to collectively bargain consistent with our national security.The plaintiff agencies have collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) with the defendants, which are locals, councils, and Division 10 of the American Federation of Government Employees;...

President Trump on Thursday signed an executive order purporting to outlaw collective bargaining across two-thirds of the federal government, citing a little-used provision of federal labor law that invokes national security.A "fact sheet" says the order applies a rarely used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act that allows the president to exclude agencies and their offices from collective bargaining rules that “cannot be applied to that agency or subdivision in a manner consistent with national security requirements.”Trump first considered using this authority in early 2020, granting then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper the ability to exclude the Pentagon from federal...

WASHINGTON – Today, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced it is ending collective bargaining for the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) Transportation Security Officers, which has constrained TSA’s chief mission: to safeguard our transportation systems and keep Americans safe.Eliminating collective bargaining removes bureaucratic hurdles that will strengthen workforce agility enhance productivity and resiliency, while also jumpstarting innovation.Making America’s Transportation Networks Resilient Again Gaps in benefit programs, including non-verifiable Family and Medical Leave, are being exploited by a select few poor performers, placing greater burden on TSOs at the expense of American travelers and taxpayers.This includes instances, where a TSO requested...

Thousands of federal and government workers landed members a work from home deal ahead of the incoming Trump administration's efforts to force workers to return to office... The updated contract, which affects 42,000 government employees, will allow workers to stay hybrid until 2029. The deal was signed by President Biden's former SSA Commissioner, Martin O’Malley....

Professional sports leagues aren't immune to lockouts, as we've seen them in the NFL, the NHL, the NBA and MLB over the past couple of decades. Could the WNBA be next? It's possible. On Monday, the WNBA Players' Association announced that they were opting out of their Collective Bargaining Agreement with the league. The current CBA, which was agreed on in 2020, featured an opt-out clause following the 2024 season, and the league's players are utilizing that. They will be negotiating for higher salaries, better accommodations and much more. The WNBA is coming off a record season in 2024, with...

Pamela Ricard received a three-day suspension and reprimand for 'bullying by staff' after referring to a biologically female student who identified as male with the prefix “Ms.” despite the student never formally requesting to be addressed differently.FORT RILEY, Kansas (LifeSiteNews) – A math teacher in Kansas is taking Fort Riley Middle School to court for punishing her because she referred to a gender-dysphoric student by her actual sex despite the lack of an official school policy on “gender identity” designations at the time. The Daily Caller reported that Pamela Ricard alleges that in April 2021 she received a three-day suspension...

Proposition B has failed. The San Antonio Police Department will keep collective bargaining moving forward.The final vote tally is as follows:For: 73,306Against: 76,781Total Votes Cast: 150,087Governor Greg Abbott weighed in on the race, tweeting the following:SAPOA released the following statement to us: We want to thank the people of San Antonio. Tonight they voted to support their police officers, protect our right to collective bargaining, and ensured that we can continue to keep our neighborhoods safe. To the people of San Antonio we say- we’ve always had your back, tonight you had ours. Thank you.

The Kenosha, Wis.School District teachers' union was decertified September 12. Depending which people you believe, it was either decertified by a vote of the teachers or it was decertified because the union did not follow procedures and request a recertification vote as required by Wisconsin's labor reform law, popularly known as Act 10.

Sound financial management clearly wasn’t a concern to any party involved in the recent contract negotiations in Chicago Public Schools. They were warned that new labor expenses might result in a credit downgrade for the financially-strapped school district, and they chose to ignore it. Now it has comes to pass. The credit rating agency Moody’s has downgraded the school district for the second time in one quarter. Moody’s wrote: “The negative outlook reflects the school district's budgeted depletion of reserves to fund ongoing operations in fiscal 2013; the moderate additional unbudgeted salary costs of labor contract negotiations, which have not...

Chicago Teachers Vote to Continue Strike By STEPHANIE BANCHERO The Chicago public school teachers strike entered its second week after the teachers union declined Sunday to call off a week-long walkout that has catapulted the city into the national debate over teacher evaluations and job security. Only hours earlier, Chicago Teachers Union officials had trumpeted new concessions they said they had extracted from Mayor Rahm Emanuel during talks to settle the strike that started last Monday and has canceled classes for 350,000 students in the nation's third largest district. The vote to continue the strike came Sunday night by the...

A Wisconsin judge has struck down the state law championed by Gov. Scott Walker that effectively ended collective bargaining rights for most public workers. Dane County Circuit Judge Juan Colas ruled Friday that the law violates both the state and U.S. Constitution and is null... *** It was not clear if the ruling means the law is immediately suspended.

(***Not applicable in Clark County***) It's possible to get fired, but after you're fired an arbitrator will reinstate you — with back pay — even while finding you manipulated the system for personal gain. Behold the wonders of binding arbitration and collective bargaining. Another Clark County firefighter fired last year over alleged sick leave abuse will get her job back. An arbitrator ruled Friday that former Battalion Chief Renee Dillingham, who was fired after emails appeared to show her creating a special roster for sick leave, is to be reinstated with full back pay. Arbitrator Frank Silver wrote, "Her...

Lynn Warne is the president of the Nevada State Education Association, and she appeared on Anjeanette Damon's “To the Point” show over the weekend, where she made the following comment about AB 225 and some other minor education reform bills passed by the 2011 Legislature. (7:30 mark) Warne: Provisions in those bills [including AB 225], much of which we supported, really struck at the heart of what we feel are educators' rights, workers' rights, human rights really, and there was no compromise to be had. (Emphasis added)Striking at the heart of "human rights" is a serious charge, so let's consider...

Madison - How much public workers should pay for benefits is emerging as a new flash point in the Democratic race to see who will take on Scott Walker in the recall election for governor. The two leading contenders part ways significantly, with Kathleen Falk wanting to open the issue back up in union negotiations and Tom Barrett wanting to keep employee contributions at current levels. And although both say they would attempt to re-establish the ability of public-sector unions to engage in negotiations - which was lost under Walker - they differ in how they would go about trying...

A federal court on Friday struck down key parts of Gov. Scott Walker's controversial collective bargaining legislation, ruling that the state cannot prevent public employee unions from collecting dues and cannot require they recertify annually. The collective bargaining bill, also known as Act 10, established a system in which most of the public unions were required to have a majority of their members vote every year to recertify. The law also took away some unions' rights to collect mandatory dues. The court ruled that the state did not have the right to pick and choose which public unions could charge...

Gov. Scott Walker told an audience Thursday in Washington, D.C., that he expected to face a recall election "sometime in early June" and said his Democratic opponent would be "someone handpicked by the unions." Walker said the biggest reason he had been targeted for recall was that union dues can no longer be automatically deducted from the paychecks of public-sector employees. "I think at the end that's what all the focus around here in Washington, in terms of the national unions focused on getting me recalled," Walker said. "What it really comes down to, I took away the gravy train,...

In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Herman Cain said he supports the "right" for public employees to bargain collectively. In other words, he is in favor of unions on the taxpayer dime. Cain also said federal workers have unions, meaning the right to collectively bargain, but they do not. On the issue of collective bargaining, Cain said he supported the right of public employees to bargain collectively. "But not collective hijacking. What I mean by that, if they have gotten so much for so many years and it's going to bankrupt the state, I don't think that's good....

Democrats and unions are hailing Tuesday's vote to repeal an Ohio law curbing collective-bargaining protections as the sign of an invigorated movement that could boost Democrats next fall. That is, if they've got enough fight left in them. The campaign to overturn the Republican-approved union law cost unions and their supporters millions of dollars. It followed another costly campaign in Wisconsin to recall state Republicans behind that state's anti-union law. And it precedes a new fight in Wisconsin to recall GOP Gov. Scott Walker. With millions of dollars going from union coffers to preserve union benefits and protections, and punish...

With few statewide elections and nothing nationally in 2011, several initiatives in Ohio provide bellwethers with broad implications for 2012. Issue 2, if passed, will uphold Senate Bill 5, a Republican attempt to alleviate looming budget problems by decelerating the expansion of employee compensation packages via collective bargaining reform. Thanks to a gargantuan grassroots effort, Issue 3, the Healthcare Freedom Amendment, will test Obamacare’s mettle. It would prevent pretentious governments from forcing citizens to finance their care in fashions fancied by bureaucrats. The attention afforded these contests across the ideological spectrum from Rush Limbaugh to the Huffington Post underscores their...

Today, Mitt Romney refused to take a position on the big battle in Ohio over the ballot initiative to repeal Governor John Kasich’s law rolling back the collective bargaining rights of public employees. The fight is a hugely important one to conservatives, with right wing money flowing into the state, and conservative bloggers erupted in fury at Romney, asking how it is that he can be running for president when he isn’t willing to take a firm stand against the scourge of public employees. [snip] Governors who are willing to risk serious unpopularity in order to roll back the bargaining...