Free Republic

Democrats now assert their bailout of multiemployer union pension plans in March's American Rescue Plan Act was deeply flawed and are demanding the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) rescue multiemployer union pension plans from the act's botched rescue. Democrats' admission this bailout will cost much more than advertised should raise concerns about the real costs of the third massive bill they are rushing to enact this year with new social spending schemes. The American Rescue Plan Act provided an $86 billion "taxpayer bailout" to some multiemployer union pension plans, according to the Congressional Budget Office, but not enough to make...

A big win for medical privacy and the principles of freedom. Ford, General Motors and Stellantis have agreed the United Auto Workers union members will not be forced to take the mandatory vaccine as a condition of employment. [UAW Announcement] Additionally, the vaccine status of the workers will remain private with a policy of private and voluntary disclosure. UAW – At a meeting Monday evening, the COVID-19 Joint Task Force, comprised of the UAW, Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, has aligned on a policy of voluntary and confidential disclosure of vaccination status for UAW members. Each company will provide additional...

resident Biden is tapping former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu to coordinate the implementation of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, the White House announced Sunday. “In this role, Landrieu will oversee the most significant and comprehensive investments in American infrastructure in generations - work that independent experts verify will create millions of high-paying, union jobs while boosting our economic competitiveness in the world, strengthening our supply chains, and acting against inflation for the long term,” the White House said in a news release. In Sunday’s announcement, the White House touted Landrieu’s work shepherding New Orleans through its recovery following...

Across corporate America, relations between companies and their labor unions range from chilly to ice-cold. Not at Kaiser Permanente – the California-based healthcare giant. Kaiser has long been seen as having the nation’s best labor-management partnership. Now the partnership finds itself in crisis as 34,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers prepare to strike on Monday, in what would be the largest walkout in this fall’s strike wave. It certainly caused a strong reaction in Semanu Mawugbe, a Kaiser nurse in Los Angeles. “It’s a slap in the face,” he said, noting that the 1%-a-year offer was well below this year’s 5%-plus...

After keeping Virginia schools closed for over a year and repeatedly moving the goal posts on reopening, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten successfully delivered the state to Republican Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin last week. Despite appearing at a final campaign rally for Democrat Terry McAuliffe, parents showed up to vote against her endorsement and anti-parent education policies. Now, Weingarten is finally admitting it's time for a pandemic off ramp. "It was clear that vaccines for teachers helped us reopen schools. Maybe it’s vaccines for kids helping us get to an off ramp for masks and getting to a new...

Here’s a tip for Democrats going forward: Don’t poke mama and papa bears — especially when it comes to involvement in their kids’ education. If you provoke them, they’ll bite back. All in the name of protecting their cubs. After being gaslighted by bureaucrats this past year and deemed domestic terrorists by the Department of Justice, these folks have had enough. On Election Day, they—along with their allies — sent a powerful message to the nation: unaccountable politicians are being put on notice. Move over, teachers unions: parents are the new special interest group in town. Funding Students Instead of...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress are looking to give U.S. automakers with union employees the inside track on the burgeoning electric vehicle market, triggering vocal opposition from foreign trade partners and Republicans who worry that manufacturers in their home states will be placed at a competitive disadvantage. The $1.85 trillion spending package that Democrats are laboring to pass through Congress includes an array of programs designed to curb global warming and slash U.S. emissions. It includes incentives to hasten the transition to electric vehicles, which represent a small but rapidly growing share of the market....

Parents who never imagined running for office battled to win seats on local school boards last week; they won some, but lost many. Their fiercest opponents were the teachers unions. The media portrayed these school board races as culture wars, but more than anything they were struggles by parents to wrest control of the boards from self-serving unions. For decades, the unions have maintained a tight grip on who gets elected. No wonder school district decisions -- about budgets, masking, COVID closures, curriculum and teacher contracts -- protect teachers first. Never mind what's best for kids. That needs to change....

...Labor action has surged in many industries over the past two years, including in bookselling, a business where unions had been rare. Since 2020, employees have unionized or are attempting to do so everywhere from Printed Matter in New York City to Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle and Bookshop Santa Cruz in California. In Minnesota, workers at four Half Price Books stores have announced plans to affiliate with locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers union. "I think COVID-19 was a rude awakening for bookstore workers, and really anyone who works with the public,” says Owen Hill, a...

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten, whose organization advocated for mask mandates in pubic schools, apologized after she was caught with her mask down at the 2021 SOMOS conference in Puerto Rico. Weigarten faced criticism after Adriana Aviles, a New York City parent and former City Council candidate, posted a photo of the teacher’s union boss sitting maskless on a panel with other guests, including New York City Schools Chancellor Meisha Porter. “Gotta love when school leaders @rweingarten @DOEChancellor mingle with others in a packed room with no masks,” Aviles wrote, “yet I wonder if everyone needed proof...

Four major labor unions reached an agreement with the city over its vaccine mandate for municipal workers on Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said. The city successfully negotiated agreements with District Council 37, Teamsters Local 237, Uniformed Sanitationmen's Association Local 831 and SEIU Local 300, de Blasio said in a press release Thursday afternoon. “As part of this agreement, these unions have agreed to withdraw litigation filed last month which challenged the City’s right to implement the mandate,” the release said. The agreement will affect approximately 75,000 municipal employees connected to the unions, the release noted. “Vaccinations are critical to...

After weeks of stonewalling, the city’s Department of Education finally had to make public the 2021 school year enrollment figures but was still shifty. With an Oct. 31 deadline to report the numbers to the state Education Department, the DOE announced a total of 938,000 students enrolled, compared with 955,000 last year. But that includes pre-K toddlers — a category that’s growing, and so hides any larger K-12 decline. Nor did the DOE provide a grade-by-grade breakdown to give the public a better understanding of what’s going on. It did admit that charter-school enrollment rose 3.2 percent, from 139,000 to...

HBO star said 'what's going on in the schools' was going to be 'the issue' in future elections... Bill Maher sounded the alarm Friday night about next week's Virginia gubernatorial election, which could go to Republicans for the first time since 2009. Maher began the show's panel discussion by pointing out that Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe "should walk away with it" since resident Biden won Virginia by 10 points and McAuliffe previously served as the commonwealth's governor, 2014-2018. Instead, Maher noted, the race is "neck and neck," with GOP challenger Glenn Youngkin over an issue that Maher reminded viewers he...

The great global supply chain crisis of 2021 — which has ensnared groceries, holiday shopping and everything in between — has bottlenecked West Coast ports, and drawn the involvement of the White House to address it. As the disruption reaches a boiling point and adds to rising price pressures, longshoremen, union representatives and truck drivers have pointed fingers over which party is best positioned to alleviate some of the strains.... ...While the pandemic has exacerbated strains in the economy amid an unprecedented demand surge, a 2019 study published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics probed the dearth of truckers....

I believe it was Gaylord Nelson, then governor of Wisconsin, who first recognized the right of public employees to collectively bargain, and it was another governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, who decades later under state law virtually eliminated it with wonderful results for teachers, local governments, and pupils. Our reforms in Wisconsin -- known as Act 10 -- changed that by all but eliminating collective bargaining for government employees. This puts the taxpayers and the officials they elect back in charge of their state and local governments, instead of unelected union bureaucrats. Our reforms in Wisconsin -- known as Act...

The prop gun that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on a New Mexico movie set had been used by crew members offsite for fun, a new report claims. The gun, which was fired by Alec Baldwin on the set of the movie “Rust,” may have even been loaded with live rounds when it was used for what was essentially target practice, TMZ reported. Multiple sources connected to the production of the film told TMZ that the gun was fired at off-the-clock gatherings – which could explain how a live round found its way into the gun’s chamber. Another source who was...

Democrat regulations are holding the entire economy hostage.. After a long cross-country flight, I made it out of LAX and into an Uber. I wasn’t in the mood to talk, but the driver was. And hearing that I was a journalist, he wanted to tell me a story. I’ve heard a lot of stories over the years, but this may have been the most important one I let go. He hadn’t always been driving an Uber at 11:30 at night. Not all that long ago he used to have his own business with 7 trucks before he was bankrupted by...

The crew of Alec Baldwin's movie set were already concerned about gun safety before he accidentally shot and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, and they had walked off the set hours before she was killed, after they complained about long hours, shoddy conditions and two other incidents involving the 'misfire' of weapons. The workers had been complaining about the fact they had to stay overnight in Albuquerque - an hour's drive from the set - and not Sante Fe because production wouldn't pay for their hotels, according to sources cited by The Los Angeles Times and multiple social media posts by...

The operators of Los Angeles-area ports say President Joe Biden’s round-the-clock cargo mandate is not realistic, according to a report . The president recently called for the shipping hubs to go into overdrive to ease the supply-chain crunch that has more than a hundred loaded freighters anchored off the coast. But 24/7 operations would cost the ports huge money in overtime, and the owners aren't eager to eat the expense. “I don’t see how the terminals are going to be reimbursed. It’s big money,” Ed DeNike, president of SSA Containers, whose parent company Carrix operates three terminals in Long Beach,...

As California’s shipping ports congestion persists, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order on Oct. 20 to alleviate the crisis. The executive order aims to find state-owned land and various other areas to temporarily store goods once they are removed from the port. It also removes weight limits on trucking freight routes to transport more goods. “California’s ports are critical to our local, state and national economies and the state is taking action to support goods movement in the face of global disruptions,” Newsom said in a statement on Wednesday. “My administration will continue to work with federal, state, labor...