Free Republic

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...

In a video posted to social media Thursday, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain praised President Donald Trump after Trump announced tariffs on imported automobiles and auto parts. Citing “national security concerns,” Trump imposed the 25% tariff Wednesday, which covers imported cars, SUVs, crossovers, minivans and light trucks, in addition to parts that include engines and transmissions. Fain said Trump’s policy would address “unfair” laws regarding trade. “We are ecstatic to see an administration finally address the unfair trade laws in this country,” Fain said. “These laws have destroyed the American working class. They’ve destroyed communities in this country, in...

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) said Thursday that President Trump signed an executive order limiting numerous agency employees from unionizing and instructing the government to stop engaging in any collective bargaining. The OPM memo references an order from Trump that has yet to be publicly posted, but a fact sheet from the White House claims that the Civil Service Reform Act that allows government workers to unionize “enables hostile Federal unions to obstruct agency management.”

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...

Massachusetts unions and school districts are challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education in a lawsuit filed on Monday. The lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts by Democracy Forward, claims the administration is acting unlawfully and will have a drastic impact on students. Plaintiffs include Easthampton and Somerville public school districts, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees Council 93 and the Service Employees International Union. “Protecting access to public education is an important component...

WASHINGTON — A large corporate marketing firm co-founded and led by Stephanie Cutter, a senior adviser to Kamala Harris’s failed presidential campaign, recently laid off 10% of its staff amid a steep revenue disruption following the Democrat’s loss, The Post has learned. The nine-person layoff unleashed an outpouring of criticism about allegedly hypocritical treatment of employees by Precision Strategies, which is staffed by prominent Democrats and counts many of America’s top corporations and unions as clients. “She was telling people that she lost a lot of business after the election. And she has also been telling people companies are being...

One of the seven small federal agencies that President Donald Trump ordered downsized or eliminated on Friday was rife with corruption, with its employees hiring friends and relatives, commissioning paintings of themselves, and using government credit cards to indulge in constant luxuries. The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) occupied a nine-story office tower on D.C.’s K Street for only 60 employees, many of whom actually worked from home, prior to the pandemic. Its managers had luxury suites with full bathrooms; one manager would often be “in the shower” when she was needed, while another used her bathroom as a...

Washington lawmakers are revisiting a bill that would extend unemployment insurance to workers on strike. The bill was reintroduced this year by Sen. Marcus Riccelli, D-Spokane, reviving debate among labor advocates and business associations. “Without a social safety net during a strike, workers are faced with tremendous pressures to end the strike quickly or never go on strike in the first place,” Riccelli said in public testimony. “I think this levels the playing field.” ...

American Federation of Teachers honcho Randi Weingarten’s sudden outrage over Team Trump’s plan to abolish the federal Department of Education is simply about losing her own power and influence — not any risk to the kids. America’s “competitors — and adversaries — are no doubt cheering President Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education,” Weingarten asserts in an MSNBC column, pretending the DOE “helps give all children in the United States access to the great public school education they deserve.” Nonsense: Few kids in America have “access” to “great public school education”; we lag our peers badly...

Teachers' union boss Randi Weingarten said during a recent podcast appearance that she is fearful President Donald Trump's plans to terminate the Department of Education will mean more funding for school choice vouchers, which she decried as a "tax credit" for wealthy families already sending their kids to private school. Weingarten's comments came during a podcast interview with Molly Jong-Fast, who spoke with her about the implications of Trump's spending reforms, particularly his plan to terminate the Department of Education. Weingarten stated that cutting the department's roughly $100 billion in funding will primarily benefit tax cuts for the wealthy or...