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© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
This is how “nurses” act? The kind, gentle folks of the California Nurses Association are seen in this video intimidating, pushing and knocking around some videographers at the union’s recent pro-Democrat rally in California.
Mike Griffing is the bearded fellow acting the thug at the end of the video. But he isn’t just some run-of-the-mill union tough. He’s the CNA’s Director of Collective Bargaining! That’s right, he’s an official of high status one that makes almost $164K a year, as Moe Lane found out.
If this is how officials of unions act… well, what does that say about their legitimacy?
Disrupting a business and trying to extort them for undeserved riches is a tough job. It really makes a union thug tired, you know? So, what to do, what to do? Well, because protesting an employer is such tiring work, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters Union came up with the perfect solution: hire non-union scabs to man the picket lines in D.C.
The Wall Street Journal has the sordid tale:
the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters is seeking paid demonstrators to march and chant in its current picket line outside the McPherson Building, an office complex here where the council says work is being done with nonunion labor.
“For a lot of our members, it’s really difficult to have them come out, either because of parking or something else,” explains Vincente Garcia, a union representative who is supervising the picketing.
So, while these carpenters make $24 an hour and up — not including benefits — the union is paying their non-union stand-in protesters a whopping $8.25 an hour… oh, and no benefits.
In the real world this is called hypocrisy.
Naturally the union thugs are explaining it all away as perfectly sensible. You see, the non-union, stand-in protestors don’t have to be in the union to help the union protest “union issues.”
After all, would you want actual union members to leave the comfort of their homes, get in their nice automobiles, and drive ALL the way to the protest site so that they can advocate for themselves? You’re kidding right? THAT sounds too much like WORK!
What’s a matta you, anyway?
(H/T HolyCoast.com)
From The Heritage Foundation…
Despite decades of union gridlock, the Washington, D.C., school board, with the help of school Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s leadership, has successfully contracted with teachers unions to implement performance pay.
The contract with the Washington Teachers’ Union is a huge triumph for Rhee in her fight for education reform in our nation’s capital. Rhee has battled with teachers unions for nearly two years over the new contract. The agreement offers teachers more compensation in return for greater accountability in their students’ academic achievement.
The contract will provide significant bonuses to teachers who demonstrate positive results in the classroom. Bonuses of up to $20,000 to $30,000 will be awarded to teachers whose students show better-than-expected growth in test scores—one of the primary benchmarks in the performance pay teacher evaluation system. This new teacher evaluation system will also allow principals to base their employment decisions on performance instead of seniority. The contract also offers development opportunities called “teacher centers,” where teachers can go to learn new approaches to improve their teaching skills in the classroom.
Michelle Rhee recently had this to say about the performance pay aspect of the new contract:
The new union contract passed unanimously by the City Council means students will have more effective teachers in the classroom and teachers will be rewarded monetarily for increasing student achievement. … It also tackles three of the perennial problems that have plagued school district agreements over time—lock step pay, seniority and tenure.
A report entitled “New Millennium Schools: Delivering Six-Figure Teacher Salaries in Return for Outstanding Student Learning Gains” from the Goldwater Institute demonstrates how performance pay has the potential to dramatically improve the education system in our country. According to their study, performance pay makes teaching careers more attractive by treating educators as professionals—offering comfortable salaries without increasing the burden on taxpayers.
James Hall is a member of the Young Leaders Program at the Heritage Foundation. For more information on interning at Heritage, please visit: http://www.heritage.org/about/departments/ylp.cfm.
Last week the Washington Times had a story that should enrage every true American. The Democrat Congress is allowing Big Labor’s needs to come before the needs of our troops. The supplemental budget that Congress is considering is supposed to be about funding the troops and their efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Democrats are more interested in how many payoffs for Big Labor they can stuff into the thing then in funding the troops.
Like most supplementals, this bill began with a singular purpose: paying war expenses. It since has been larded with billions in wasteful projects and programs designed to attract the vote of the left-of-center members with no fondness for the military. Among the House-approved giveaways are a $10 billion bailout for big-spending local governments, loan guarantees worth $9 billion for purported renewable energy, $3 billion for black farmers and American Indians who sued the government and $1 billion for summertime “youth activities.”
Even worse is the language to nationalize our first responders, policemen, and firemen. (As we talked about HERE)
This outrageous action would force all police and firefighter’s work rules under federal control and prevent all local governments from being able to make their own local rules and regulations for their own police and fire departments. This bill would essentially cause all state and local governments to have to deal with Washington-based union regulations when setting budgets, hiring and firing, and writing work rules for first responders.
These new rules would wildly inflate state and local budgets and eliminate all local control. Voters would be unable to affect their own police and firefighters, local politicians would be looking to Washington to guide them, and union leaders would see their power and personal wealth skyrocket.
And all of this is being stuffed into the bill to fund our troops. Obviously Democrats care more about unions than they do our troops. Even terrorism seems to be less important to Democrats than the needs of union thugs. It is an outrage.
On Thursday the Senate passed the Democrat’s financial reform bill. But even as Obama claims that this bill will “solve” the financial crisis, a look at the thing seems to prove that things financial took a back seat to giveaways to Obama’s union pals and sops to many of the Democrat’s other special interest friends.
The main union payback is the provision to allow unions and environut groups the ability to take control of the boardrooms of corporations in which they own stock through the so-called “proxy access” provision. This provision has been widely panned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups.
The Washington Times reports that there are other sops to Democrat special interests in this “financial reform” bill, too.
Business groups are also rankled that the legislation would impose costly new burdens on airlines, utilities and other non-financial businesses that were victims rather than villains in the crisis, simply because they use financial derivatives to hedge their businesses against risks such as fluctuations in oil prices, interest rates and currencies.
But as the Times notes, these “hedging” practices played no role in the financial collapse. Obviously, the Obama administration just wanted another way to control our business community in its inimitably socialist manner.
And what’s a good crisis if we can’t use it for some social engineering?
The bill would create more than 20 “offices of minority and women inclusion” at the Treasury, Federal Reserve and other government agencies, to ensure they employ more women and minorities and grant more federal contracts to more women- and minority-owned businesses.
The agencies also would apply “fair employment tests” to the banks and other financial institutions they regulate, though their hiring and contracting practices had little or nothing to do with the 2008 financial crisis.
Yeah, the economy tanked because there weren’t enough racial set-asides! Seems to me that one of the reasons the housing market collapsed was specifically because of the Democrat’s racial set-asides in cheap money mortgages through Fanny and Freddie. But let’s not let reality intrude on Obama’s grand plan to remake America in his Daddy’s and uncle Frank’s image.
This so-called reform bill stinks to high heaven as business as usual Democrat special interest gladhanding. So much for Obama’s “new” Washington.
As the Obama economy tumbles farther and farther down into depression, as states begin to face the reality of a budget crunch that can only be solved by layoffs of public employees, and as teachers find they are open to those layoffs, we commonly hear teachers claim that they are perennially underpaid and don’t deserve layoffs. Yet the Chicago Tribune has found that nearly half the teachers in many of Chicago’s ritziest suburbs are making over $100,000 a year in salary.
The Tribune reviewed the salary information of 132,000 Illinois teachers and in Highland Park, Deerfield, Park Ridge, Hinsdale, and other Chicago area suburbs it found that in some cases half the teachers — and in other cases over 40% — make $100K yearly (not including benefits) even as the educational system in Illinois crying poor and cutting staff.
The Trib found that only four percent of Illinois teachers make the big bucks, but those higher salaries are concentrated in the Chicago suburbs in question. “In all, 32 Chicago-area districts paid at least 20 percent of their teachers six figures — five times the state average.”
Naturally these teachers say they deserve the pay scale and their unions certainly won’t try to put sensible limits on anything. But this raises the question of just how much a teacher is worth? Remember the old argument questioning why a factory worker that puts a nut on a bolt would make $30 an hour for such unskilled labor? Do teachers deserve $100K even if they are the best of the best? How much is too much especially in a day and age when money is tight and so many are losing their jobs?
The Trib also found the highest paid Illinois teacher:
A now-retired physical education teacher and longtime football coach at Addison Trail High School in DuPage County earned more than $184,000 in 2008-09 — the highest teacher salary in the Tribune’s analysis. He had 35 years of teaching experience and a master’s degree, all factors that boosted his salary.
A phys ed teacher and coach? Does a simple jock warrant almost $200,000 a year?? He isn’t a rocket scientist… heck he may not even know what science IS being a mere phys ed teacher!
We all want what’s fair for teachers and, yes, their job is supremely important. However, should a high school or grade school teacher make as much as a surgeon or highly educated and skilled doctor, lawyer or judge?
Further, should a mere phys ed teacher be making almost $200,000 a year while a new teacher gets laid off? Should one guy be making what could pay two teacher’s salaries?
We really need to take some pains to address this situation.
Eric Odom (Media Director)
Warner Todd Huston