Free Republic

Randi Weingarten, left-wing activist and president of the second-largest teachers’ union in the United States, is leaving the Democratic National Committee (DNC), citing disagreements with leadership and dismay at the direction of the committee. Weingarten, who heads the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and has been an influential member of the DNC for 23 years, wrote a letter to DNC Chair Ken Martin indicating that she is at odds with committee leadership, Politico first reported. “While I am proud to be a Democrat, I appear to be out of step with the leadership you are forging, and I do not...

ARRESTED: Alejandro Theodoro Orellana was arrested this morning by @FBILosAngeles on an allegation of Conspiracy to Commit Civil Disorders (18 USC 371) for distributing face shields to suspected rioters on Tuesday. We are moving quickly to identify and arrest those involved in organizing and/or supporting civil disorder in Los Angeles. ... Conspiracy to Commit Civil Disorders under 18 USC 371 is a felony, as it carries a maximum penalty of up to five years imprisonment. The potential sentence could be up to five years, but the actual time served depends on factors like the defendant's criminal history and judicial discretion....

Anyone who was following politics in 2007 and 2008 knows exactly what role the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) played in supporting candidate Barack Obama. As Obama and Hillary Clinton battled for control of the Democrat apparatus, Barack made a deal with SEIU President Andy Stern. If the purple orcs would activate -violently if needed- on Obama’s behalf, when he became President Obama would remove the healthcare liability from the union retirement by creating nationalized healthcare, Obamacare. Andy Stern agreed to the deal, marshalled his orcs and that was the army the Chicago machine used to defeat the Clinton machine....

New Hawley Legislation to Speed Up Labor Contracts Earns Teamsters Endorsement, Bipartisan Support Tuesday, March 04, 2025Today, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) led a bipartisan group of colleagues in introducing new, Teamsters-endorsed legislation to speed up first contracts for new unions. The legislation would ensure that when workers vote to unionize, a labor agreement ultimately becomes a reality. Senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) joined as original cosponsors.“The status quo hurts workers. Despite exercising their legal—and moral—right to bargain collectively, workers are often prevented from enjoying the benefits of the union they...

Britain’s biggest trade union has allowed a trans woman to run for a senior female role despite the landmark Supreme Court ruling on gender. Ellie Waple is running for the female disabled member’s seat on the Unison national executive committee.

A federal appeals court on Friday lifted a block on an executive order from President Donald Trump that seeks to strip union rights from federal workers at dozens of agencies and offices. Trump in March issued an executive order that said that parts of the United States Code that protect federal workers’ rights to organize and collectively bargain would no longer apply to agencies including most or all of the Departments of Treasury, Defense, Veterans Affairs, State and Justice. The executive order covers about two-thirds of the federal workforce, according to the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which filed a...

A federal appeals court has lifted a lower-court order that prevented the federal government from implementing President Donald Trump’s plan to end collective bargaining by workers at more than a dozen federal agencies. In a 2-1 ruling Friday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said U.S. District Court Judge Paul Friedman appeared to have erred last month when he froze Trump’s executive order on the subject. The appeals court’s majority said there was insufficient evidence that the National Treasury Employees Union faced “irreparable harm” that would justify the preliminary injunction, Friedman said in his ruling.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy ripped NJ Transit engineers for going on strike Friday — blasting their actions as a “slap in the face” to commuters and a “mess of their own making.” The Democrat lashed out after roughly 400 rail engineers walked off the job after marathon contract talks stalled ahead of a midnight deadline, setting off the first strike to hit the major transit system in more than 40 years. “It did not have to come to this,” Murphy told a news conference after the morning commuter rush got underway. “A small handful of locomotive engineers have walked...

DOGE: While teachers scrape by, union "executives" like Randi Weingarten gorge themselves on salaries nearly eight times higher, raking in close to $600,000 a year. They neither teach a single child nor train a single teacher. They are not educators, they are parasites, draining a system they pretend to serve. ... She also flies in a private jet.

Andrew Cuomo has picked up another key hard hat endorsement Tuesday in the race for New York City mayor, winning the backing of the Laborers’ International Union. The New York affiliate of the Laborers Union represents 40,000 members in New York State, which further cements the former governor’s support within the construction trades. The union backed Cuomo’s rival in the June Democratic primary, former city Comptroller Scott Stringer, in the 2021 mayor’s race. “New York City is the cultural, economic, and social engine of the world—and leading it requires vision, grit, and proven experience,” said Donato Bianco, Jr., LIUNA vice...

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...

A federal judge in Maryland on Monday indefinitely blocked the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing the sensitive personal data of about 2 million union members, student loan recipients and veterans. U.S. District Judge Deborah L. Boardman ordered that the Department of Education, Department of the Treasury and Office of Personnel Management cease in divulging personally identifiable information to DOGE representatives. Those three agencies, she wrote, had already “likely violated” the Privacy Act and Administrative Procedure Act by granting DOGE affiliates sweeping access to systems containing plaintiffs’ banking information, social security numbers and other sensitive data. “No matter how important...

... Less than one year ago, tens of thousands of TSA employees who are members of AFGE signed a seven-year union contract. Today, the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security announced that “it is ending collective bargaining for the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) Transportation Security Officers.” In other words, just tearing up the contract. DHS didn’t even really try to put a fig leaf of legality on this action. The agency said bad things about the union— “The union has hindered merit-based performance recognition and advancement—that's not the American way,” for example—but did not say anything that sounds like a...

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s (D) administration has faced lawsuits alleging it rigged the bidding process for the state’s controversial overhaul of a $9 billion homecare program. A December lawsuit alleged that the powerful healthcare union 1199 Service Employees International Union (SEIU) helped Public Partnerships LLC secure a multi-million dollar contract to take care of payment services for the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program (CDPAP). Several lawsuits have sought to unravel Hochul’s overhaul of CDPAP, two of which alleged a rigged bidding process by the governor’s administration.

A labor union representing farm workers that for more than a decade begged the Border Patrol to enforce immigration laws is now part of a lawsuit against the Border Patrol for doing just that. The lawsuit, filed by the United Farm Workers (UFW) and five Kern County residents, seeks to stop the Border Patrol from future enforcement actions that stop, arrest, and remove “community members” from the country. The lawsuit was filed in response to a week-long immigration enforcement operation conducted by Border Patrol agents assigned to the El Centro Sector of the United States Border Patrol in January. The...

The blockbuster three-team trade early Sunday morning had major financial ramifications for Luka Doncic. He was in line to receive a super-max contract from the Mavericks next offseason but is no longer eligible after being traded to the Lakers. The super max would have allowed Doncic to sign a five-year, $345 million contract with the Mavericks this summer. Instead, the most the Lakers can offer him next offseason is a five-year, $229 million deal, according to ESPN, a whopping $116 million less than what he could’ve gotten from Dallas.

"Only 41 percent of civil service supervisors are confident that they can remove an employee who engaged in insubordination or serious misconduct," Trump's executive order reads. A union for federal employees has sued President Donald Trump over an executive order regarding hiring and firing such government workers. The new class of employee, Schedule F, was created in Trump's executive order on Monday to allow federal employees working on policy to be like political appointees, so they can be swiftly hired and fired. This would allow such employees to be hired outside the traditional merit-based system for bureaucrats. “Congress has enacted...

A New Jersey law that removes a requirement for teachers to pass a reading, writing and mathematics test for certification will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2025. The law, Act 1669, was passed by Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy as part of the state’s 2025 budget in June in an effort to address a shortage of teachers in the state... Individuals seeking an instructional certificate will no longer need to pass a “basic skills” test ... Just months earlier, Murphy signed a similar bill into law that created an alternative pathway for teachers to sidestep the testing requirement....

(Reuters) - Amazon.com workers at seven U.S. facilities walked off the job early on Thursday during the holiday shopping rush, aiming to pressure the retailer into contract talks with their union. Warehouse workers in cities including New York, Atlanta and San Francisco are taking part in the "largest" strike against Amazon, said the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents about 10,000 workers at 10 of the firm's facilities. "If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon's insatiable greed," Teamsters' General President Sean O'Brien said late on Wednesday. [Snip] Amazon said it does not expect any impact...

Washington — President-elect Donald Trump said Monday that his new administration will challenge a deal reached between the Social Security Administration and its union that would allow employees to continue teleworking into 2029. During remarks at his South Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, Trump blamed the Biden administration for what he said was a "terrible" and "ridiculous" agreement that would allow tens of thousands of federal workers to continue working from home several days a week. The president-elect said "it was like a gift to a union, and we're going to obviously be in court to stop it." He said federal workers...