Free Republic

“Let’s Go Brandon” has made its way north of the border, where Canadian officials have banned its use by government workers.In a notice written late last week, a [REDACTED] official (see photo below) warned that “the use of the wording ‘Let’s Go Brandon” and any variation thereof under any circumstances is banned.”“Violation of this policy,” the notice concludes, “will be grounds for immediate dismissal without recourse or labour union representation.”The letter was photographed — with privacy-protecting redactions — and posted on several social media accounts.Canadians might prefer to know who would be foolish enough to sign their own name to...

New York City had more than 114,000 municipal workers earning $100,000 or more in 2019. That is up sharply from 76,166 employees with pay exceeding $100,000 in 2016. Data comes a year before the pandemic hit and is the latest year available. These were not just high-level employees like agency commissioners or deputy mayors. NYC employees included thermostat repairmen making up to $198,630; regular laborers hauling away $213,169; electricians taking home $253,132; and plumbers pocketing up to $286,245. The cost of benefits would be additional and is not included in these figures. These large paychecks are only sustainable because Congress...

Washington-- When Congress passed its $2 trillion economic relief package in response to the coronavirus epidemic battering the country, lawmakers provided relief to Americans, small businesses struggling under the economic pain of the crisis and state and local governments on the frontlines of combatting the virus. But mayors in small and medium-sized communities from coast to coast are sounding the alarm after they were left out of the package, despite facing the same cash crunch as their larger neighbors. Only localities with populations of 500,000 were eligible for direct aid under the law, known as the CARES Act. Those cities...

WASHINGTON - Just as they face unprecedented new challenges and financial costs, leaders of K-12 public school districts around the country are warning of dire consequences from sharp budget cuts from state legislatures attempting to deal with the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. The alarm was sounded by school superintendents in 62 cities, who sent a letter to Congress through the nonprofit Council for the Great City Schools, asking Congress for billions of dollars in new federal education assistance and warning that some 275,000 teachers could be laid off in their districts alone because of budget cuts caused by...

Gov. Phil Murphy painted a dire outlook for New Jersey public-worker jobs on Saturday afternoon, pleading for more financial aid to lift a state economy that has been cratered by the coronavirus. “We will have layoffs that will be historic,” Murphy warned, as he called for Congress to send more direct aid to states, and as he urged state lawmakers to help him borrow billions of dollars. He added that the layoffs would be felt through New Jersey, at the state, county and local levels. “That’s what’s at stake. I don’t know how many, but it is big, big numbers,”...

American taxpayers have paid for nearly $2 billion in federal aid to fund 30,000 public employees in Baltimore at local and federal levels, an audit shows. Baltimore reportedly has 13,522 employees with a combined payroll that exceeds $821 million annually. The mayor’s office paid $7 million in 2018 for the salaries of 111 employees and $1 million for public relations fees, according to an investigation conducted by auditors at OpenTheBooks.com. “We found the city drowning in taxpayer dollars,” Open the Books CEO Adam Andrzejewski wrote in an editorial published Wednesday in Forbes. Baltimore’s schools pay another 10,770 employees with a...

The second-longest bull market in American history hasn’t stopped the deterioration of state and local pension funds, whose unfunded debt has almost quadrupled—by their own accounting—from about $360 billion in 2007 to $1.4 trillion today. Having relied on overly optimistic and inaccurate financial assumptions for decades, public pension administrators are now forced to acknowledge that the systems owe much more than previously thought. Even as local governments struggle to pay for this debt, it keeps growing. Concerned that mortality tables for private-sector workers don’t accurately reflect what’s going on among retired government employees, the Society of Actuaries conducted a three-year...

Kansas has come a long way in restoring Second Amendment rights.  In 1905, it lead the "progressive" pack when the State Supreme Court concocted the myth of a "collective" Second Amendment right that only applied to state militias.  100 years later, in 2005, it went from banning the concealed carry of arms to a shall issue permit system.  Ten years later, it removed the requiement for a permit, restoring a semblance of permitless or "Constitutional" carry. On one July, 2016, it restored the legal ability of public employees to exercise their Second Amendment rights while on the job. From...

California’s largest public pension fund made a return of less than 1% in its most recent fiscal year, the fund’s worst performance since 2009. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System said Monday that its rate of return for the year ended June 30 was just 0.61%. What’s more, Ted Eliopoulos, the pension fund’s chief investment officer, said the poor year has pushed CalPERS’ long-term returns below expected levels. “We have some challenges to confront,” Eliopoulos said during a conference call. “We’re moving into a much more challenging, low-return environment.” CalPERS assumes that, in the long-term, it will earn investment returns...

the public pension debt for the 50 states and the District of Columbia jumped 84 percent in recent years, from $2.625 trillion in 2008 to $4.833 trillion in 2014. ... The highest pension debt/household is in Alaska, with an estimated $113,137 figure; Illinois and California are in the second and third highest rankings at more than $77,000 per household.” The lowest state pension debt per household is in Tennessee at $17,761. Illinois has the lowest “market funded ratio” (value of pension assets divided by market liability), at 23.3 percent. The other 49 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. have a market...

Black freedom & opportunity in America has always required the very federal intervention the right wants to destroy The continuing decline of public sector jobs at local, state, and federal levels is having an abysmal economic impact on African Americans, for whom steady, stable government employment opportunities have provided a sure path into the middle class. The New York Times reported yesterday that “roughly one in five black adults works for the government, teaching school, delivering mail, driving buses, processing criminal justice and managing large staffs.” Because Black people hold a disproportionate number of government jobs, cutbacks that affect everyone...

Every time the liberal media discovers that the racial composition of any particular company or industry does not reflect the population of the United States, immediately millions of gallons of ink (or digital ink) are shed as the media frantically searches for signs of inherent racism. Just look at this recent article worrying that not enough black directors were making Super Bowl ads. But in a curious article in the New York Times, the Times mentions an enormous racial disparity only second-handedly, and doesn't seem concerned about the nature of it, because the recipients of it are not white, but...

".....Roughly one in five black adults works for the government, teaching school, delivering mail, driving buses, processing criminal justice and managing large staffs. They are about 30 percent more likely to have a public sector job than non-Hispanic whites, and twice as likely as Hispanics.The Labor Department counts half a million fewer public sector jobs than before the start of the recession in 2007...understates just how much the government’s work force has shrunk.... because it fails to account for the normal growth in the country’s population: Factor that in, she said, and there are 1.8 million fewer jobs in the...

I’ve always been a great fan of Pope St. Leo XIII’s whose moves to protect the working man during the Industrial Revolution resulted in the rise of labor unions. It saddens me to see how unionism has fallen under totalitarian rule with the leaders thriving on power rather than the welfare of the workers – or the survival of the companies that employ them. More than one union has committed economic suicide by demanding pay and benefits beyond what an industry can support. They forgot it wasn’t only solidarity, it was also subsidiarity – well-stated in Pope Benedict XVI’s “Caritas...

Madison — The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld Gov. Scott Walker's signature labor legislation Thursday,delivering an election-year affirmation to the governor in one of the three major rulings issued by the justices on union bargaining, election law and same-sex couples. In addition to ruling Walker's labor law constitutional, the state's highest court also upheld the state's voter ID law and a 2009 law providing limited benefits to gay and lesbian couples, leaving liberals with one consolation to soften the sting of the two larger conservative victories. "Our courts have continued to give deference to our Legislature and in all three of...

A largely overlooked Supreme Court case has the potential to fundamentally alter the right of public employees to unionize — and a ruling could be handed down as early as this week. That case, Harris v. Quinn, comes from the great state of Illinois, which recognizes a union for its home health care workers. One of those workers, Pamela Harris, is the lead plaintiff. At issue are two critical questions. First, can the state actually recognize a union of such workers? And second, do these workers have a First Amendment right to refuse to pay their “fair share” of the...

Taxpayers in Will County have offered its public employees a hefty pay raise and are willing to pick up 90 percent of the cost for their health insurance, but that’s not good enough for members of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Local 1028. The labor stats show 35 percent of government workers are in a union, compared to just 6 percent of private-sector workers. The same report shows that unionized public sector employees are paid 27 percent more than private-sector workers. “County employees pay one percent of their salaries for single coverage and two percent for...

Hundreds of people, many of them union members, turned out at the State House on Thursday to oppose a bill that would save the state and municipalities a significant amount of money by cutting retiree health benefits for public employees. Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick has proposed the bill as a way to address the approximately $46 billion unfunded liability for retiree health benefits faced by state and municipal governments. “Modifications to retiree health care coverage are essential to keep the system sustainable for future state and municipal career employees and to maintain core government services for future generations,” said Secretary...

The Greek government began its first mass-firing of public-sector workers in more than 100 years this week, part of an effort to lay off 180,000 by 2015 under Europe-imposed austerity. Pushed by its European creditors amid its crippling economic crisis, Greece began this week to do something it hasn't done in more than 100 years: fire public-sector workers en masse. Following weeks of tough negotiations with its lenders – the "troika" of the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and the European Central Bank – the Greek government started laying off public-sector workers in an effort to implement the austerity...

Of course, Greeks must tighten their belts. But is the decimation of the middle class - through a change in labour laws and unbearable tax burdens - the way out of Greece’s financial impasse? At the same time, next to nothing has been done about the ineffectual and massively unproductive public sector which brought the country to its knees in the first place. The entrenched fear of unions and political cost has for decades prevented successive governments from taking drastic action to reform and modernise an antiquated civil service which, in many ways, instead of serving citizens and their interests...