Free Republic

Private lawyers with the Massachusetts Bar Advocate Program say they will not take new court-appointed cases until they get a pay raise. The base hourly rate for court-appointed lawyers in Massachusetts is $65. In Rhode Island, it's $112, in New Hampshire, $125, and in Maine, it's $150 per hour. "It's woefully inadequate. No one's asking to be paid what private attorneys get paid. I have a private practice," said attorney and Bar Advocate Sean Delaney. "We're just looking for something that's fair and reasonable." The effects of the strike are already being felt in Massachusetts courtrooms. A Boston man accused...

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...

Republicans are falling into a familiar trap. From President Trump to Vice President JD Vance to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a growing number of party leaders have come to believe that coercive labor unions are a permanent part of American politics, so the Republicans might as well forge an uneasy truce if not an outright alliance with them. To build that bridge, Hawley released his first of several promised pro-union bills in early March. The thinking seems to be: If labor unions are here to stay, why not put political expediency ahead of deeply held Republican principles like worker freedom...

Six farm murders have taken place in the Two weeks since 90.000 leftist radicals sang “Kill the Boer” in Johannesburg. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa blamed white South Africans for the killing spree. An AfriForum neighborhood watch apprehended four farm attackers outside Pretoria. ... On Tuesday, August 8, the local neighborhood watch of South African civil defense organization AfriForum responded to a farm attack alert in Brits, North West Province, 40 miles west of the capital Pretoria. Local civil defense volunteers were alerted of a vehicle heading east toward Pretoria and established a presence on all roads heading to the...

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...

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...

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was meeting last week with representatives from a teachers union in his home state when things quickly devolved. Before long, Fetterman began repeating himself, shouting and questioning why “everybody is mad at me,” “why does everyone hate me, what did I ever do” and slamming his hands on a desk, according to one person who was briefed on what occurred. As the meeting deteriorated, a staff member moved to end it and ushered the visitors into the hallway, where she broke down crying. The staffer was comforted by the teachers...

Now that Hugo Chávez is out of the picture, former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela Otto Reich warns President Obama to tread carefully in dealing with the “evil, evil men” that are now running the South American nation. “These guys are so tricky and so evil, quite frankly,” Reich, tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview following the announcement of Chávez’ death on Tuesday. “The people in power in Venezuela today are evil.” … Reich added that Fidel Castro and his brother may be calling the shots in Venezuela. …

While more than 55,000 unionized workers for Los Angeles County are set to strike Monday evening, county officials said there is simply no money to meet the employees’ demands. The members of Service Employees International Union Local 721, including public works employees, library workers and mental health professionals, were expected to walk off the job for 48 hours, starting at 7 p.m. Monday, accusing the county of failing to negotiate a new labor contract fairly. “We faced nothing less than disrespect at the bargaining table,” a union leader said during a rally, claiming the county's proposal was a 0% increase...

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.

Chicago Teachers Union members have overwhelmingly voted to ratify their new contract agreement with Chicago Public Schools, making official a deal that notches improvements for educators and students but leaves political turmoil in its wake. After almost a year of negotiations, 97% of members who voted late last week approved the contract, according to the union. About 85% of the CTU’s 27,000 eligible voting members participated. Voting took place by paper ballot in schools and voting locations across the city on Thursday and Friday, and counting wrapped up over the weekend. The Board of Education will likely vote to approve...

Understanding why China has a chokehold on the US and many multinational companies has a lot to do with the government’s creation of special economic zones (SEZs)... For example, the city of Shenzhen was once a small fishing village of 30,000 before it was designated as one of the first SEZ in 1980. Now, Shenzhen,..a top ten global finance center in 2024...home to multinational tech companies like Huawei and Tencent (maker of Wechat)...The Shenzhen experiment illustrates what happens when you bring together dense clusters of suppliers, logistical infrastructure (including highways, railroads, and ports), skilled workers, economic investment and tax incentives....

Coming out of the Second World War, the US was the king of production,” says William B Bonvillian, a lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and an expert in US innovation policy.... by 1945, more steel was produced in the state of Pennsylvania alone than in Germany and Japan combined.... By the turn of the millennium, the US’s global domination in mass-scale industrial production, technology and efficiency was lost. Long-standing issues culminated between 2000 and 2010, when the US lost one-third of its manufacturing jobs.... Between 2000 and 2010, nearly six million jobs in US manufacturing were lost, with...

Radical socialists who back anti-Israel groups and alleged CEO killer Luigi Mangione are steadily making inroads into one of the city’s most powerful labor unions, sources warn The Post. Candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America are polling strongly in elections to lead the United Federation of Teachers — who represent nearly 200,000 educators and manage a welfare fund with $1 billion in assets — which take place next month, according to a source. The progressive political movement, which backed Vermont governor Bernie Sanders during his presidential campaign in 2016 and was behind New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio...

More than 100 educators at Wellesley College are striking, causing credit confusion for students while the college is calling on the union to sit down with a mediator. The union voted to authorize their strike to begin on March 27 after nearly a year of failed bargaining. Now, it says the administration has been “surface bargaining.” Non-tenure track faculty at the small liberal arts college initially voted to unionize as the Wellesley Organized Academic Workers, or WOAW with the United Auto Workers, in January of last year. Annie Brubaker, a senior lecturer at Wellesley and a member of the WOAW...

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;...

AFGE will challenge the Trump administration for illegally attempting to strip over one million federal workers of collective bargaining rights and rip up union contracts. In the biggest attack on the labor movement in history, President Trump on March 27 issued an executive order illegally stripping collective bargaining rights from federal workers under the guise of “national security.” The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) also issued guidance telling agencies to end union rights and union contracts and shut down grievance procedures. It also told agencies to continue Trump’s Reduction in Force (RIF) order but ignore RIF requirements in the union...

The SAG-AFTRA strike against major video game companies has nearly reached the 250-day mark and there’s no deal yet. And while nothing seems to have changed from the outside, real progress is being made behind the scenes. The video game companies’ bargaining committee (which represents Activision Productions, Blindlight, Disney Character Voices, Electronic Arts Productions, Formosa Interactive, Insomniac Games, Llama Productions, Take 2 Productions and WB Games) presented an updated counter proposal of the Interactive Media Agreement to the actors union on March 26, which “directly addresses several issues the union has identified as important components of a deal,” a source...

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...

PULSE POINTS:❓What Happened: President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order to end collective bargaining with federal unions in several agencies tied to national security. This action uses authority from the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978.👥 Who’s Involved: President Donald J. Trump, Department of Defense (DoD), Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), National Science Foundation (NSF), Coast Guard, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Justice (DOJ), Department of State, Department of Energy (DOE), and others.📍 Where & When: The White House, recent Executive Order signing.💬 Key Quote: “President Trump supports constructive partnerships with unions who work with him; he...