Free Republic

America’s second-largest teacher’s union has drafted a group of resolutions calling for the end of US military aid to Israel — and defending the anti-Israel protests that have rocked campuses across the country. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — which is affiliated with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) that represents most teachers in New York City public schools — will vote on the controversial proposals at its national convention starting in Houston next Monday.One of the resolutions, which calls for a cease-fire between the Jewish State and the terror group Hamas, demands a halt to US military assistance...

Donald Trump’s decision to pick JD Vance as his running mate is a clear sign that the former president is determined to re-harness the populist and working-class energy that propelled his first campaign in 2016. The immediate task is to present that agenda in a winsome way to the country. In crucial ways, Vance has already demonstrated that he’s up to it, and it helps that the other side is in disarray following Joe Biden’s precipitous decline. Should the Trump-Vance 2024 ticket win – and polls indicate they will – the deeper challenge will be preserving that energy in office...

The Republican Party’s recent pro-worker turn has too often amounted to little more than cultural posturing: going after “woke capital” but stopping well short of challenging corporate and Wall Street power as such. As Batya Ungar-Sargon has written in these pages, today’s GOP is a “working-class party without a working-class agenda.” But there are important exceptions to this trend, and few shine as brightly as Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) when it comes to standing up for wage-earners and forging alliances with organized labor. Over the past few months, these efforts have earned Hawley justified praise—and donation dollars—from the International Brotherhood of...

Douglass Academy High School had 35 students with nearly 900 seats unfilled. None were proficient on the SAT. The Chicago Teachers Union wants to add at least eight staffers there and at every other school in the district at a cost of $1.7 billion. Only 35 students enrolled in Douglass Academy High School for the 2023-2024 school year, but the building can hold over 900 students. Logic would say it should be closed, but the Chicago Teachers Union prohibits closing it and other underused schools. In fact, CTU sees the 23 staffers at Douglass as inadequate. CTU’s new contract demands...

Last Friday, the National Education Association (NEA) abruptly cancelled its annual convention, scheduled for July 4-7, after just one day of official proceedings in Philadelphia. The shutdown of the Representative Assembly (RA) was in response to a strike by the union representing NEA staffers, the National Education Association Staff Organization (NEASO). Timing a three-day strike for the convention, NEA staffers based at the union’s Washington D.C. headquarters greeted delegates arriving at the Philadelphia Convention Center with picket lines. The NEASO contract expired June 30 and the staffers’ union staged the walkout as an unfair labor practices action. The NEA informed...

Joe Biden on Wednesday dropped by a meeting of national union leaders at the AFL-CIO headquarters in DC. There was no enthusiasm for Biden at the union meeting (even though they were paid to be there). It had a ‘funeral-like’ atmosphere. “I think of you as my domestic NATO — not a joke,” Biden said. “I said I’m going to be the most pro-union president in American history,” Biden said. “Well guess what? I am.” As usual, Biden was incoherently rambling about a bunch of different topics. At one point Biden went off-script in an attempt to be relatable and...

Jane F. McAlevey, a fierce labor organizer and scholar who trained tens of thousands of workers across the globe in strategies for taking charge of and shaping their unions, died on Sunday at her cabin in Muir Beach, Calif. She was 59. Her stepbrother Mitchell Rotbert said the cause was multiple myeloma. Ms. McAlevey (pronounced MACK-a-leevee) dedicated her life to increasing working class power. She believed that worker-driven unions — led from the bottom up rather from the top down — were the most effective engines to combat economic inequality. In her writings, including for The Nation, as what the...

The modern democracy desired by Saturday’s participants is one our corporate and ivory tower overlords control, rather than the peons in red states.On Saturday, 100 big business leaders joined a Zoom call to plot a unified response to voting-integrity legislation pending in many states, similar to a law recently passed in Georgia. While billed as “non-partisan” efforts to defend voting rights and democracy, the players involved, their preferred policies, and the undemocratic pressure they seek to exert proves the virtual gathering was nothing of the sort.CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe first confirmed the existence of the call on Saturday, identifying American...

The National Education Association Staff Organizations (NEASO) announced Friday it is going on strike days ahead of a speech President Biden is supposed to make at the NEA’s annual convention. The NEASO said they were on a Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) strike against the NEA headquarters in Washington, D.C., filing two ULP complaints with the National Labor Relations Board. The group alleges the country’s largest teachers’ union has not bargained over unilateral changes, accusing the NEA of wage theft and failing to provide information regarding outsourcing $50 million to contractors. “The National Education Association has threatened to host its convention...

Alaska’s Supreme Court justices on Friday reversed a Superior Court ruling that struck down key components of the state’s correspondence school program. Nearly 23,000 homeschool students may continue to use their allotments of state education money to pay for private school tuition until the Anchorage Superior Court reconsiders the case. The Supreme Court made its decision a day after oral arguments in an appeal of the ruling in State of Alaska, Department of Education and Early Development v. Alexander, in which plaintiffs argued that it is unconstitutional for public education money to be spent on private school tuition. The justices...

Schools in the progressive haven of San Francisco are facing a major budget crunch. Things are so dire that the district may have to actually close some schools. It’s amazing that these schools are having cash flow problems when you consider the taxes people pay to live there. Officials from the school district recently met with some financial experts who gave them some tough love. ... Late last week, two fiscal experts — appointed a few years ago to give guidance to the district — were authorized to suspend or reverse financial decisions made by the superintendent or school board....

In Minnesota, 50% of students cannot read at grade level. If we were to apply the traditional academic grading scale to that outcome, the public education system in the state would get a solid F.. That abysmal performance was the topic of much debate during this term of the Minnesota legislature, prompting the Democrat trifecta to pass “the READ Act,” an effort to replace the failed “whole language” method of literacy training with traditional phonics education. “Whole language” is an absolute joke, recognized even by many on the Left as a toxic methodology that fails students. In essence, “whole language”...

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — A heat wave is coming to Pittsburgh, and almost all of the city's 200 public water fountains have yet to be turned on. But now a Pittsburgh City Council member is crafting a plan to get the water flowing after the Pittsburgh Department of Public Works director said this week that he didn't have the means to get the fountains working anytime soon. "I have one plumber working for the city," Pittsburgh Department of Public Works Director Chris Hornstein said. "We have over 200 drinking fountains."

Leftists Stunned: Philly Coffee House Employees Unionized — A Week Later, All 3 Locations Shut Down CBS Philly on YT: SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWUnEJEdqes

The soaring cost of living under Joe Biden is taking a toll on blue collar Hollywood, driving the labor unions that represent production crews to push for higher wage increase guarantees from the major studios. IATSE and the Teamsters — which both endorsed Biden in 2020 — are currently in the thick of contract negotiations with Hollywood studios as the industry continues to reel from dramatic budget reductions that have resulted in far fewer movie and TV shoots. Add to that the skyrocketing costs of consumer goods and services and you have a recipe for widespread financial misery in what...

Low-income minority students from one chain of NYC charter schools rank #1 in my state in math. Why do they do so well? Because school leaders have high expectations. And unlike government run schools, Success Academy innovates!

The battle for labor unions’ support in the presidential race wages on as the leader of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters reportedly seeks a platform at the Democrat and Republican national conventions this summer. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported Monday that Teamster President Sean O’Brien has requested to speak at both nominating events. This is a promising sign for former President Donald Trump and a worrying sign for President Joe Biden, given that the union has regularly endorsed Democrats for president dating back decades, according to the outlet.

The local teachers’ union encourages students to resist “Zionist bullies.” Portland, Oregon, has earned its reputation as America’s most radical city. Its public school system was an early proponent of left-wing racialism and has long pushed students toward political activism. As with the death of George Floyd four years ago, the irruption of Hamas terrorism in Israel has provided Portland’s public school revolutionaries with another cause du jour: now they’ve ditched the raised fist of Black Lives Matter and traded it in for the black-and-white keffiyeh of Palestinian militants. I have obtained a collection of publicly accessible documents produced by...

President Biden announced Friday he planned to appoint two key union leaders to an advisory committee on international trade, including United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain. The White House announced Fain and Brian Bryant, who serves as the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) president, would be appointed to the advisory group. The President’s Export Council serves as the main national committee advising the White House on matters of international trade. The group discusses and works to resolve trade-related issues around business, agriculture and labor.

Randi Weingarten's American Federation of Teachers defends pro-Hamas campus occupations as 'peacefully demonstrating' The American Federation of Teachers led by Randi Weingarten claimed that anti-Israel protesters on college campuses were simply "peacefully demonstrating." The American Federation of Teachers led by Randi Weingarten claimed that anti-Israel protesters on college campuses were simply “peacefully demonstrating.” The Tuesday statement from the AFT came in response to a hearing last week from the House Education and the Workforce Committee where leaders of Northwestern University, Rutgers University, and the University of California, Los Angeles, were grilled regarding their response to campus anti-Israel encampments. ”AFT members...