Free Republic

The state of Illinois reached a new contract agreement with members of the AFSCME union that will cost taxpayers an additional $620 million over four years. Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Tuesday announced the agreement with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The state's previous contract with the union expired at the end of June. The $620 million in additional costs amounts to a raise of nearly 18% during that time. About $200 million of that would be during the current fiscal year. “Illinois is a pro-worker state, and when it comes to workers’ rights, my administration is...

“You teach it to a group of seniors at West Jordan High and they don’t tell their parents.” Administrators, educators, and union officials in Utah were caught on video boasting about how they managed to keep teaching critical race theory or LGBTQ concepts to students, despite Utah’s bans on CRT in the classroom ... The Utah legislature passed two resolutions in May 2021 to ban CRT from schools, and the Utah Board of Education then approved similar restrictions in June 2021, ... her team gets around the rules by only telling parents what wokeness they taught kids after the fact,...

WASHINGTON — Track workers blamed for what Metro had called faked inspection reports are getting their jobs back, after an arbitrator found the reports were done as Metro had instructed. A court filing this week suggested Metro and five track workers who had filed a federal lawsuit over their firings reached a settlement in the case, and Metro and Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689 confirmed Wednesday that an agreement covers most of the at least 16 front-line workers and five supervisors who were publicly disciplined about two years ago. Three of the workers who challenged their firings are not covered...

WASHINGTON – The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) is ostensibly a public worker union. In truth, it is nothing more than an appendage of the Democratic Party. One hundred percent of its political contributions go to Democrats, and it works tirelessly to increase government spending and stop Republicans who want to reform state government.

As part of its broader package of rules for the 115th Congress, the House of Representatives revived the Holman Rule, a provision that allows House members to propose amendments to spending bills that closely manage federal agencies. These "retrenchment" amendments can affect details down to individual federal salaries and the number of staff in an office. ... The restoration of the Holman Rule means merely that when it comes to firing a federal employee, the president's signature on an act of Congress can do it. It doesn't seem extraordinary that the heads of the federal government should be able to...

Fairfield: CHP sergeant suspected of downloading child pornography on and off duty FAIRFIELD -- A California Highway Patrol sergeant allegedly downloaded child pornography on a laptop while he was working off duty and on duty near Wi-Fi locations in Suisun, Fairfield and Vacaville, a Vacaville police sergeant said. The child pornography allegedly downloaded by CHP Sgt. Eric Lund showed pre-pubescent children having sex acts with adults, police Lt. Matt Lydon said. Lund, 49, of Chico, was arrested at 9 p.m. Thursday on 21 felony charges of sending or selling obscene matter depicting a minor and on misdemeanor charges of possessing...

At least one BART union agreed Saturday to put the transit agency's contract proposal to a vote, but commuters looking for a quick end to the 2-day-old strike should hold off on the celebrations. Speaking from the entrance of the shuttered Pittsburg BART Station, Antonette Bryant, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555, said she expects that vote to result in a "resounding no." ... A spokeswoman from Service Employees International Union Local 1021, BART's largest union, declined to say whether that union also would allow a vote on the contract. ... With no negotiations scheduled, both sides said Saturday...

Forty percent of Colorado’s class of 2011 enrolled in a Colorado college or university needed remedial education courses in at least one subject in order to catch up to college-level work... in the core subjects of reading, writing or math. the new figures may jolt school board members, school and college leaders, policy wonks and parents. That’s because the state has changed the way it calculates remediation rates with the aim of making them more accurate. But by doing so, remediation rates for students from many districts look much worse. ... Using the old methodology a year ago, only 31...

[Madison, Wisc...] In what were likely the shortest negotiations in their history, the Dane County Board and its employees' unions reached a contract agreement Thursday night less than 48 hours after the negotiations were announced to the public. Ordinarily, contract negotiations, even in Dane County, involve months of wrangling over wages, benefits, and layoffs. Negotiations in 2010 began in the fall, and an agreement was reached in January 2011 only after union leaders saw state reforms on the horizon. Those reforms, called Act 10, limited government unions' bargaining authority to wage increases within the rate of inflation. Last Friday, a...

Better to live next-door to Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty than right around the corner. The Staten Island street outside Doherty's home was plowed clean on Tuesday - but the dead-end streets on either side of his block remained a snow-choked winter blunderland. There was similarly smooth sailing across the upper East Side, home to Mayor Bloomberg and Cathie Black, the mayor's choice for schools chancellor. No surprise there, snow-weary New Yorkers say. Cabbie Edward Fernandez, the front of his taxi torn off by a Greenwich Village snowbank, wasn't exactly shocked by the disparity in the wake of the 20-inch blizzard.

OLYMPIA — Sarah Harris goes through the motions of her day trying hard not to think about what life was like a year ago — or what it would be like now if not for "the incident." She feels guilty leaving the house, even if only for a couple of hours to visit her mom or sister, to run errands, or go grocery shopping. She still cries every night. Her husband, the first boy she kissed and the only man she's ever loved, suffered a catastrophic brain injury when his head slammed into a concrete wall after a brief footchase...

The nation's largest public hospital system plans to slash its work force—including doctors and nurses—by about 10% over two years as government aid drops and ... No hospital system in the country is exempt from the crushing economics facing the health-care industry," said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg... Officials in New York City have told hospital employees' unions that next year's goal of reducing staff by 2,600 ... Also weighing on the hospital system's budget: employee pension costs, which have jumped from $50 million in 2004 to a projected $333 million in the upcoming fiscal year... Across the country, public...

San Diego city employees earning at least $100,000 are the fastest-growing income group on the payroll... About 13 percent of city employees exceeded the six-figure mark in pay last year, when salary, overtime and add-on pay for reasons such as bilingual skills were included. That's up from 4 percent in 2003, and 7 percent since Mayor Jerry Sanders was elected in 2005. While this highest-paid group is growing, the proportion of middle-income earners is shrinking and the lowest-paid segment is basically flat. For many in San Diego, the conventional wisdom of government work being synonymous with low pay and high...

A pension fund covering 413,000 Colorado public employees and retirees has lost $10 billion in market value through mid-October. The drop in the assets of the Public Employee's Retirement Association raises the prospect of higher contribution rates or lower benefits if the market doesn't improve quickly. Colorado PERA had been hoping ...

If you ever doubted that the pension benefits of San Diego municipal workers were excessive, consider these simple numbers: A typical firefighter making $75,000 a year can retire at age 55 with a pension of $99,767 – or 133 percent of his highest-year salary. That's right, a worker earning $75,000 can retire with a pension just shy of a hundred grand, along with annual cost-of-living increases, for the rest of his life. The same lavish deal is provided to nonpublic-safety employees, with the only difference being that the worker would have to stay on the job until the advanced age...