LaborPains.org

Front-page news in today’s Washington Post: D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee has signed an agreement with Washington Teachers Union President George Parker giving Rhee authority to reassign all “excessed” teachers at 23 D.C. schools that are set to close. This may sound rather arcane, but in the world of D.C. public education this is a big deal.

What makes the story blogworthy, however, is a statement by WTU trustee Candi Peterson, a critic of Parker’s, who expressed concern on behalf of older “excessed” teachers that “when they go for an interview, they won’t get picked up [because principals] will get two younger teachers for their salaries.”

The problem here is not that older teachers aren’t guaranteed jobs. The problem is the union demand that teachers be paid by seniority. Pay teachers according to how well they teach (a system which will generally benefit experienced teachers, incidentally) and you won’t have the perverse incentives Peterson alludes to.

Click over to TeachersUnionExposed.com to see more about problems with the typical union contract.

Yesterday, the beleaguered Union Labor Life Insurance Company, better known as ULLICO, posted a $2.4 million net loss, much of which resulted from a $20 million settlement with the Department of Labor after a five-year investigation into the union-administered insurance company’s corruption.

TMCnet has a brief run down of ULLICO’s long list of misdeeds:

Ullico’s troubles with federal authorities first began in March 2002, when the Labor Department filed suit against subsidiaries Trust Fund Advisors and Union Labor Life Insurance Co., alleging the units violated ERISA when they used $10 million in pension-plan assets to buy 120 acres in the desert outside North Las Vegas in 1995. Two years later, the development was scrapped with no lots sold.

That December, the Maryland Insurance Administration sued Ullico to enforce a subpoena demanding information on stock transactions by Ullico’s board. Ullico filed a motion to quash the subpoena.

In May 2003, current House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio—then serving as chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee—subpoenaed then-Ullico Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Robert Georgine to appear before Congress to explain nearly $6 million in profits he and three other board members allegedly made from insider stock transactions between 1998 and 2000. Ullico stock is fixed in price on an annual basis and not listed on any public exchange. Concurrent with the subpoena, Georgine resigned and he ultimately refused to testify, citing his Fifth Amendment privileges.

In somewhat related news, the deadline for filing public comments regarding the Dept. of Labor’s recent announcement on union trust reporting is coming up on May 5. The new rule would require larger labor unions to disclose information about their trust funds, similar to LM form reporting.

And SEIU’s saga continues.

The New York Times’ Steven Greenhouse reports  that the California Nurses Association (CNA) has lost its petition for a restraining order against SEIU  and its president Andy Stern.

The case between the CNA and SEIU is less than a month old, but its already generated more than 200 pages of court filings. I wonder how much this grand-standing lawsuit is costing their respective members? Court filings don’t write themselves; lawyers write them for hundreds of dollars an hour.

If you’re interested, I have put all the recent filings into a PDF (10megs). And if you want to keep tabs on the lawsuit, the most recent documents are buried deep within the Superior Court’s website.

Everyone secretly likes watching a good sports fight. And while a baseball bench-clearer is fine and good, nothing beats a hockey smack-down. That’s what I feel like when watching the SEIU these past few weeks. It’s like the rest of the world is chanting: “Fight, fight, fight!”

In honor of that, imagine that Andy Stern is number 87 and Sal Rosselli is number 32 in this video.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) is embarrassed (and he should be). In a recent conference call with bloggers, he explained that House leaders are holding up passage of the Colombia Free Trade Agreement to “kowtow” to the labor movement’s demand for “card check.” Here’s a snippet that Carter Wood over at ShopFloor transcribed:

Let me just say bottom line, I’ve never seen anything that’s just so brazenly a genuflect, if you will, by House leadership to unions. Card check, to me, it’s hard for me to believe that people really believe in this country that card check is a good thing, where basically union leaders go out and one on one should pick people off to bring a union into existence in companies. I’ve experienced first hand some of those types of tactics. Years ago, as a young man, I was a card-carrying union member. And again, it’s hard for me to see…it’s hard for me understand the tremendous tilt that this leadership has toward the unions. But this Colombia free trade agreement is absolutely inflicting pain on the very people that are being represented.

Today, per the Andean free trade preference agreement, Colombia can ship goods into our country tariff-free, for the most part. Very few things have tariffs on them. This agreement would allow us, our employees, our companies, our workers here in America to ship goods to Colombia tariff-free.

This is solely, solely bowing to union pressure. To me it’s an embarrassment to our country. This president has been our friend; Colombia as a country has been our friend in a part of the world where we need friends, where we need people who care about democracy, who care about freedom, who care about commerce, who want to be stable contributors, if you will, to the world. He has done that, and here we are, holding him hostage, holding their country hostage, holding our workers in this country hostage to the fact that the AFL-CIO and other unions are trying to lever this to some other end. I really mean it. I have never seen anything so blatant, so blatant of nothing, if you will, of kowtowing to union officials in our country.

You can listen to the entire conference call (thanks to NAM).

Ok, I admit it. We’ve been sitting back and enjoying the Service Employees International Union and California Nurses Association battle royale. Anything I have to add has probably already been said by one side or the other.

That said, I did spend a few minutes today piecing together the restraining order against Andy Stern and the SEIU, which alleges SEIU operatives went to the homes of CNA officers to intimidate and harass them.

It is also worth your time to watch the video put together by the CNA describing SEIU’s violent attack at the Labor Notes conference.

The state of California is facing a budget crisis, and as part of its fiscal belt-tightening, the state is making cuts in its education spending. As a result of the spending cuts, many school districts are laying off teachers. In a sensible world, you would first lay off those teachers who were contributing the least to their schools, relative to what they were being paid.

But public education is not a sensible world — especially in California.

Thanks to state law bitterly defended by the state’s teachers unions, school districts facing cuts are required to lay off teachers in order of their hire dates. The result is that some very good teachers get pink slips, like San Diego teacher Precious Jackson, who “has two years of teaching under her belt and two school teacher-of-the-year awards to show for it,” the Associated Press reports.

For an in-depth look at these absurd seniority-based layoffs, check out this April 10 article from Voice of San Diego, which profiles Guillermo Gomez, a 2006 San Diego County Teacher of the Year who recently got his own layoff notice. Lame union defenses of seniority are also included.

Mark Krikorian over at NRO’s Corner has an interesting post on an arresting report:

And you thought our teachers’ union was bad? We’ve just published a piece by William & Mary Prof. George Grayson identifying Mexico’s stupefyingly corrupt teachers’ union one of the reasons that country is so screwed up and can’t hold on to its own people. The leader of the union, one Elba Esther Gordillo Morales, makes Jimmy Hoffa look positively civic-minded. Among other evidence of her venality:

“Her acquisition of at least four apartments and six houses in the exclusive Lomas de Chapultepec and Polanco neighborhoods of Mexico City, valued at $6.8 million (68 million pesos); property in the deluxe Coronado Cays development in San Diego, Calif., where her yacht is moored; properties in France, England, and Argentina; private jets; and “a personal fortune … [of more] than $300 million in cash,” according to a longtime key operative.”

The teachers union in Mexico might be more corrupt, powerful, and destructive than our own teachers unions. But not by all that much — our teachers unions also deal in corruption, protect bad teachers, and block education reforms –- and it shows.

Mexico comes out worse than the US on international tests, but we’re down there at the bottom with them. Our kids do worse in math than Azerbaijan, worse in reading than Poland, and worse in science than kids in the Czech Republic. It’s sad but no surprise that the average graduation rate in America’s 50 largest cities is only 52 percent according to the non-partisan America’s Promise Alliance.

And unlike Mexico, we spend mountains of money on education. The New York Times reported that out of 40 countries, the U.S. had “the poorest outcomes per dollar spent on education” in 2003.

If we don’t do something about the teachers unions’ deathgrip on public education, the future of U.S. education is in Mexico. Except more expensive.