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© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
-By Warner Todd Huston
The board of directors at the bio-warfare company SIGA likely thought they had made the hire of the century last year when they took on former Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern. In fact, for a while, Stern, one of Obama’s most frequent White House visitors and close confidantes, seemed to bring the company good fortune.
In Stern’s first six months the company’s shares doubled in worth especially after it was awarded a humungous government contract worth up to $2.8 billion of our tax dollars.
But then came the collapse. And maybe all the lawsuits and government investigations had something to do with that?
SIGA’s stock has taken a tumble since the investigations into why the politically connected firm was able to get government rules rewritten just for them.
So, maybe this is another crony capitalism loser, eh?
(H/T LaborUnionReport.com)
-By Larry Sand
Useless teacher “professional development” classes cost California taxpayers billions in increased salaries and pensions
On June 14th, my blog, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Union Wind Blows,” addressed the “Teacher Quality Roadmap: Improving Policies and Practices in LAUSD,” a 58 page report commissioned by United Way and several civil rights’ groups, produced by the National Council on Teacher Quality and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The “Roadmap” was full of mostly common sense prescriptions; it suggested changes to the current union contract and to laws regulating staffing, evaluations, tenure, teacher compensation and work schedules. But there was one egregious element in the report that warrants special analysis and is the subject of my latest City Journal post:
“With California reeling fiscally and education eating up about half of its budget, the state’s taxpayers are being hoodwinked to the tune of billions of dollars by an outrageous contractual perk that pays teachers to take useless classes, ostensibly with the aim of improving their classroom work.”
To continue reading the article, go here. Continue reading »
-By Warner Todd Huston
Reuters has a very interesting article detailing the fall of the United Auto Workers (UAW) in the modern era. It is a long article, but if you are interested in the way the UAW intends to keep itself relevant to the auto industry on into the future, it is worth the read.
It is also a good article if you want a glimpse of the possible end to the UAW. Its deep financial troubles, its steady loss of members and plants to represent, and its powerlessness to spread its cancer to other auto makers in the south is an ominous warning that the UAW might be headed for the dust bin of history.
Let’s not start popping champagne corks yet, though. We should not count the UAW out, of course, as it is still very powerful. But things are not looking good for the once supremely powerful union.
One thing that this means most is that the UAW will have far, far less cash to spread around for Democrats. The union is starting to realize that it must turn its finances inward in order to survive. As the next decade moves forward the UAW will find that it simply cannot afford to line the pockets of Democrats with the millions of past campaigns.
This is an important link to break. The sooner it happens the better.
In any case, this is a good article…
Crunch time at America’s richest union
(Reuters) – Bob King, the president of the United Auto Workers, has a problem: the labor union that credits itself with creating the American middle class has glimpsed the end of the line.
Two years after the wrenching restructuring of the U.S. auto industry and the bankruptcies that remade General Motors and Chrysler, the UAW is facing its own financial reckoning. America’s richest union has been living beyond its means and running down its savings, an analysis of its financial records shows.
Unless King and other officials succeed with a turnaround plan still taking shape, the next financial crisis in Detroit may not be at one of the automakers but at the UAW itself.
That picture of the growing financial pressure on the 76-year-old union emerges from a Reuters analysis of a decade of UAW financial filings and interviews with dozens of current and former union officials and people close to the union…
Read the rest HERE.
-By Warner Todd Huston
Now this is the sort of corruption we are used to seeing in Illinois, eh? This week the Chicago Tribune and WGN TV has found up to 23 retired union operatives that are collecting millions in taxpayer dollars because they had pals in government tweak the state’s pensions laws to favor them.
These former government workers that were government union members got pliant politicians to alter the pensions laws to say that their pension remuneration would be calculated not on the lower pay they received when they retired from government, but from the much higher salary they received when they worked as union operatives. These folks worked as union bosses at the same time as working on the clock for government.
The “luck” of former union boss and Dept. of Streets and Sanitation worker Thomas Villanova is a typical example. Villanova last worked full-time for the city in 1989 and made $40,000-a-year. But he was also a union big wig making $198,000 annually upon his retirement in 2008 at age 56. His city pension, it appears, was calculated on the union salary of $198,000 instead of his real salary of $40,000 — itself obviously a no-show job in the first place.
Villanova stands to make millions off the taxpayers.
Speaking of making millions, as mentioned above, the media folks also found some 20 more government union members that could make a combined $56 million in unearned pensions off the taxpayer’s back.
One of these crooks even retired at 50-years-old, then was hired back by the city for one day so that he could bump up his pension returns!
Worse, I was listening to a local Chicago radio program and one of the reporters involved in this story was saying that there may be several hundred more union/government workers that are similarly getting cushy, undeserved riches from the state pension system.
All this at a time when the pensions system is about to crash because it is so deeply in the red.
Now, don’t imagine that these sort of sweetheart deals between politicians and government unions are only happening in Chicago. These deals are endemic throughout government at every level. From your smallest city to the county, state, and federal government, these union thugs are ripping us all off on a daily basis.
Without question, this is the sort of unethical, even criminal, double dealing that you get when government employees are allowed to unionize. These people are cozy with government officials and other elected folks, donate money to their campaigns so that rules can be changed in their favor, then live off the taxpayers for decades. And for the cash in their pockets, politicians bend to union wishes every time. All the while the taxpayers get raped repeatedly.
Government workers should never, ever be allowed to unionize. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew that!
The Goldwater Institute has a great, extensive piece on how government union operatives are bleeding that taxpayers of Arizona blind, today.
The problem is that city taxpayers of Phoenix are paying city wages to union operatives to work as union bosses. The actual city jobs these thugs and ripoff artists are supposed to have are no-show jobs. Instead of working for the taxpayers, these guys are working for the unions on city time and being paid a salary by both the union and the taxpayers.
But you should not relax. This is a very, very common practice in every city, in every county, in every state and the federal government. Anywhere there are government unions, taxpayers are being forced to pay government salaries to people who are not working for the public weal.
Don’t think this is just happening in Phoenix…
Phoenix taxpayers spend millions of dollars to pay full salary and benefits for city employees to work exclusively for labor unions, a Goldwater Institute investigation found.
Collective bargaining agreements with seven labor organizations require the city to pay union officers and provide members with thousands of additional hours to conduct union business instead of doing their government jobs.
The total cost to Phoenix taxpayers is about $3.7 million per year, based on payroll records supplied by the city. In all, more than 73,000 hours of annual release time for city workers to conduct union business at taxpayers’ expense are permitted in the agreements.
The top officials in all of the unions have regular jobs with the city. But buried in the labor agreements are a series of provisions for those employees to be released from their regular duties to perform union work.
For top officers, the typical amount of annual release time is 2,080 hours, a full year of work based on 52 weeks at 40 hours each. They continue to draw full pay and benefits, just as if they were showing up for their regular jobs. But they are released from their regular duties to conduct undefined union business.
Union officials say the time is a good investment that leads to a more productive workforce. Critics say it amounts to an illegal gift of taxpayer money…
Read the rest of the Goldwater piece at http://goldwaterinstitute.org/article/6327.
-By Larry Sand
Teacher union boss cherry picks from a biased poll and ends up with the pits.
Cherry picking is a phrase that has become quite popular these days. The term simply refers to advancing a certain point of view by using only data which supports that POV and omitting any contradictory or mitigating information.
A recent illustration of this phenomenon is on display in an article written by NEA President Dennis Van Roekel. The ironically titled Back-to-School Reality Check is, in fact, quite short on reality. The article, primarily a pep talk for teachers, uses a recent Phi Beta Kappa/Gallup poll as its motivating source. Early on, Van Roekel tells us,
“73 percent (of the poll’s respondents) said teachers should have flexibility in the classroom.”
I’m all for that. But what the union boss leaves out is that for teachers to have more flexibility they would need to tear up the telephone book-size union contract that dictates every little move a teacher makes.
Question 10 of the PDK poll says,
“Most teachers in the nation now belong to unions or associations that bargain over salaries, working conditions, and the like. Has unionization, in your opinion, helped, hurt, or made no difference in the quality of public school education in the United States?”
Cherries jubilee here! Mr. Van Roekel didn’t acknowledge this question. Why? Because 47 percent of those polled said unionization has hurt education, while only 24 percent said it helped. Continue reading »
Eric Odom (Media Director)
Warner Todd Huston