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© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
These garbage men really stink.
Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts — a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.
Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.
“They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important,” said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.
Halloran said he met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department — and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan — at his office after he was flooded with irate calls from constituents….
Read the rest at The New York Post.
-By Larry Sand
Scrooge-like National Education Association shows no sign of remorse.
Once upon a time, school choice became a reality in our nation’s capital. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which allowed some poor kids in D.C. to go to private schools with the help of a government stipend, was ushered in by a Republican controlled Congress in January 2004. Earlier this year, Jason Richwine at the Heritage Foundation wrote,
Congress put school vouchers to the test in 2004 when it authorized the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (DCOSP), a federally funded voucher program serving low-income students in the nation’s capital. It has awarded $7,500 scholarships to more than 3,700 students over the past six years.”
Congress mandated a formal evaluation of the program, and researchers hired by the Department of Education have now released their latest report.
Among the report’s key findings
- Parental satisfaction. School satisfaction was higher among parents of voucher students.
- School safety. Parents of voucher students were more likely to describe their children’s schools as safe and orderly.
- Graduation rates. Voucher-using students achieved a graduation rate of 91 percent, compared to 70 percent for non-voucher students.
- Test scores. On reading tests, voucher students scored slightly higher (by 0.13 standard deviations) compared to non-voucher students, but the difference is not statistically significant. DCOSP did not produce any gains in mathematics scores.
Not only do students benefit from the program, taxpayers save money. According to Kirk Johnson, also at Heritage,
What is often overlooked, however, is that choice programs are good fiscal policy, as well. Consider the example of Washington, D.C., again. The maximum opportunity scholarship-$7,500-is less than 60 percent of what Washington’s public schools spend on a student.
So, let’s see – a program that benefits students and saves the taxpayers money. Who on earth could possibly be against it? Not surprisingly, it’s School Choice Enemy #1 – the National Educational Association.
Shamelessly, in its current Education Insider, NEA brags that due to its members lobbying, it stopped multiple efforts to fund voucher programs — in the District of Columbia ….
While some NEA members probably did write and call their legislators, urging them to kill the program, the heavy artillery came from the union bosses themselves. In March of 2009, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel wrote a threatening letter to every Democratic member of Congress –
The National Education Association strongly opposes any extension of the District of Columbia private school voucher . . . program. We expect that Members of Congress who support public education, and whom we have supported, will stand firm against any proposal to extend the pilot program. Actions associated with these issues WILL be included in the NEA Legislative Report Card for the 111th Congress.
Vouchers are not real education reform. . . . Opposition to vouchers is a top priority for NEA.
Three months later, the Congress, then controlled by Democrats, dutifully voted to kill the program.
Interestingly, in the same Education Insider that bragged about killing DCOSP, NEA was very pleased that more government money had been invested in Pell Grants. A Pell Grant is nothing more than a federal scholarship awarded to college students, who may then use the grant to go to the college of their choice.
The difference between Pell and DCOSP, you ask? NEA is more threatened by vouchers on a K-12 level because that’s where the primary source of its funding is. (Public school teachers are forced to pay union dues in most states and D.C.) Any political action that favors school privatization, bringing with it more non-unionized teachers, sends the union into an activist frenzy. For an organization that claims to be for the children, this is especially cruel and hypocritical.
As Christmas approaches, one can only dream that NEA will have an Ebenezer Scrooge-like makeover. At the end of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge found religion, but the NEA never will. Not even the Ghost of Ed Reform Future could budge the cold, self-absorbed and mean-spirited teachers’ union.
Yet there is some hope. In January, a new Republican majority Congress convenes. The Republicans, typically not in the thrall of the powerful teachers’ union, are talking about reviving the popular DCOSP.
Wouldn’t it be a wonderful late Christmas gift for thousands of kids, currently stuck in lousy schools, to be given an opportunity to escape them and with it a chance for a brighter future?
January 23rd-29th is National School Choice Week, during which advocates will attempt to build support for school choice. If you would like to help the kids in D.C. and elsewhere, and at the same time let NEA know what you think of their priorities, I urge you to get involved.
______
Larry Sand began his teaching career in New York in 1971. Since 1984, he has taught elementary school as well as English, math, history and ESL in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where he also served as a Title 1 Coordinator. Recently retired, he is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues – information teachers will often not get from their school districts or unions.
CTEN was formed in 2006 because a wide range of information from the more global concerns of education policy, education leadership, and education reform, to information having a more personal application, such as professional liability insurance, options of relationships to teachers’ unions, and the effect of unionism on teacher pay, comes to teachers from entities that have a specific agenda. Sand’s comments and op-eds have appeared in City Journal, Associated Press, Newsweek, Townhall Magazine, Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union Tribune, Los Angeles Daily News, San Jose Mercury News, Orange County Register and other publications. He has appeared on numerous broadcast news programs in Southern California and nationally.
Sand has participated in panel discussions and events focusing on education reform efforts and the impact of teachers’ unions on public education. In March, Sand participated in a debate hosted by the non-profit Intelligence Squared, an organization that regularly hosts Oxford-style debates, which was nationally broadcast on Bloomberg TV and NPR, as well as covered by Newsweek. Sand and his teammates – Terry Moe of the Hoover Institution and former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, opposed the proposition – Don’t Blame Teachers Unions For Our Failing Schools. The pro-union team included Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. In August, he was on a panel at the Where’s the Outrage? Conference in San Francisco, where he spoke about how charter school operators can best deal with teachers’ unions.
Sand has also worked with other organizations to present accurate information about the relationship between teachers and their unions, most recently assisting in the production of a video for the Center for Union Facts in which a group of teachers speak truthfully about the teachers’ unions.
CTEN maintains an active and strong new media presence, reaching out to teachers and those interested in education reform across the USA, and around the world, with its popular Facebook page, whose members include teachers, writers, think tankers, and political activists. Since 2006, CTEN has experienced dramatic growth.
Years after most Americans retire, in fact years after the federal retirement age of 68, more than 100 U.S. Postal Workers in their 90s are still getting 75 percent of their salaries (tax free, yet) of federal workers compensation payments instead of having been graduated to the cheaper retirement payments at 60 percent of their salaries.
This is classic government waste.
Jim McElhatton of the Washington Times gives us this tale of government foolishness and waste as Senator Susan Collins (R, Maine) scolds the Post Office for its failed administration of the issue.
Collins notes that over 80 percent of the Post Office budget goes to pay the work force. Not being a titan of business I cannot say for sure, but that seems a high percentage to me. In any case, Collins relates some alarming wasteful spending where it concerns workers comp and retirement benefits for the Postal Service.
“At the Postal Service, more than 1,000 employees currently receiving workers compensation benefits are 80 years or older,” she said. “Incredibly, 132 of these individuals are 90 years of age and older and there are three who are 98.”
The Washington Times has more information that you should check out, but the reason that these people are still getting such high payments into the 80s and 90s is because… they chose to get paid more.
You heard that right. Due to federal rules as forced upon them by unions a federal worker is allowed to choose whether he keeps getting paid the higher amount under workers comp or go into the retirement benefits at lower compensation. No wonder these guys stay at the higher rate of pay. Who would consciously choose to cut his own salary?
It’s hard to blame the worker, at this point. No what the real problem is happens to be the stupidity of the system.
It’s all pretty obscene. There is no reason whatsoever that any federal worker should still be getting workers comp once they’ve aged beyond the retirement age. It shouldn’t matter at all why they were on workers comp in the first place, once they reach retirement age they should be immediately placed into the retirement phase of their benefits. Period.
This is just another example of the waste of our government.
Another on a growing list of editorials calling for the end to public employee unions, this one from IBD.com.
Union Rollback
Pension Tsunami: A guest on Fox Business Network said last week that public employee unions are bankrupting state governments. Isn’t it time that legislators outlaw collective bargaining for public-sector workers?
Working for the government as a member of a union is an easy path to prosperity. On average, the yearly compensation for a public sector worker is, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data, $67,812. In the private sector, that average is $59,909.
Put another way, when measured as total compensation per hour, state and local government wages are 45% higher ($39.66) than private-sector wages ($27.42)….
Read the Rest at Investors Business Daily.
If there never was a story that explains how unions are really little else but a criminal extortion racket, the story by James Ahearn in the New Jersey Began Record helps explain it for us. Ahearn’s piece headlined “For Backstage Labor, Rich Rewards,” informs us that some stagehands in New York theater make upwards to $422,000 a year in salary — and that doesn’t include benefits.
These positions are not as highly skilled as brain surgeons, to be sure, yet these guys make hundreds of thousands a year to move chairs, rearrange scenery, raise curtains, and what have you. Why the absurdly outsized pay scale? Threats of strikes shutting down Broadway and its multi-million dollar industry is why.
Ahearn reveals that one mere stagehand makes $422,599 a year, plus $107,445 in benefits and deferred compensation, another makes $290,000, and two carpenters and two electricians made about $400,000 a year with benefits to work the theaters of New York.
These guys are skilled laborers, of course. Not every guy off the street can just start being an electrician or a stagehand without training. But should these manual labor positions be making hundreds of thousands a year for their efforts? What accounts for this absurdity?
How to account for all this munificence? The power of a union, Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. “Power,” as in the capacity and willingness to close most Broadway theaters for 19 days two years ago when agreement on a new contract could not be reached.
In fact Ahearn quotes another journalist that tried to investigate these outlandish salaries and found that folks in the theater industry were reluctant to even talk to him about it because they feared the power of the union to disrupt their businesses.
As Ahearn notes, these high salaries inevitably drive up the costs of tickets to theatergoers and unduly inflates the cost of doing business.
But that is what unions do. Unions have nothing at all to do with insuring a “fair salary” for members. How can $400,000 a year be a “fair” salary for a guy that raises curtains and moves chairs or plugs in extension cords? The stagehands union is in it to extort exorbitant pay scales that hurt everyone, customer and businessman alike. In this way they aren’t any different than any other union. It’s little else but a legalized extortion racket.
In 1997 a Brooklyn teacher was accused of attempting to molest a sixth-grade girl at PS 138. As it happened, he admitted the behavior, but no criminal charges were filed when all was said and done. Still one would think the fact that he inappropriately fondled a teen should be enough to get him fired from his teaching position. But then again, in New York you can’t even fire a child molester if he happens to be a teachers union member.
Thanks to the fact that it is nearly impossible to fire a teacher, this lowlife has been drawing his almost $100,000-a-year salary to do nothing. You heard that right, to do nothing.
You see, even as the union agrees that this pedophile isn’t fit for a classroom, the union still won’t agree to his being fired. So, teacher Roland Pierre sits in a “rubber room” five days a week and does nothing and he’s paid $97,101yearly to do so. And that doesn’t include benefits.
For particulars on the accusations and how the case came out, see the New York Post piece written by Susan Edelman. Suffice to say that it’s the taxpayers getting taken to the cleaners.
Edelman also casually notes that the school system has five other such teachers that have been on the clock but doing nothing for years and at full salary.
For those unaware of what a “rubber room” is, it is an office to which union members report when they are on suspension and/or are under investigation for misconduct. They go to these offices and read newspapers or magazines and sit around drinking coffee and watching TV. They do this while their cases are winding their way through the system before a determination can be made if they are to be fired or returned to the job.
Rubber rooms are not just seen in the New York school system but in many school systems across the country (usually in the larger cities) as well as other union infested industries like the auto industry under the heavy hand of the United Auto Workers (UAW).
The problem with these rubber room policies is that teachers are being paid sometimes for months and other times for years — as in the case of Mr. Pierre – while their cases snail through the system of constant claims, counter claims and arbitration forced on school systems by unions. Sadly, taxpayers across the country are footing the bill for thousands of these union members to sit around in a relaxing climate without having to work day in and day out.
Often it is so hard to fire these people that some of the most outrageous cases of misconduct never sees justice done and teachers fired. Another New York teacher, for instance, actually impregnated a 16-year-old student and a few years later molested two 12-year-olds yet the state still found it impossible to fire him.
Stories just like these in New York also happen in Los Angeles and many other cities.
Sadly, even when it comes to protecting child molesters, our teachers unions only care about the dues money they can pry out of our taxes and making sure that no union member is ever held to account for their behavior.
Eric Odom (Media Director)
Warner Todd Huston