LaborPains.org

A Reuters article entitled “States face hurdles in cutting worker benefits” could have subtitled “Unions made this reporter feel bad for governors”, because that ended up being how it read. Instead, the subheading was:

“State governors working to close yawning deficits are again eyeing a tempting target — the billions of dollars in benefits and wage hikes that public workers won in boom times.”

The article covers Governor vs. Union (and huge budget shortfall) drama in Massachusetts, Maryland, California, Hawaii, New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.  The most interesting take on furloughs was from none other than Hawaii’s Governor Linda Lingle:

“Courts in states from Maryland to California have partly blocked unpaid furloughs, although some unions still prefer them to lower pay, as Hawaii’s Republican Governor Linda Lingle found after the teachers’ union spurned graduated pay cuts.

“They said ‘Oh no, we have to treat everybody the same,’” Lingle told Reuters in late April. “I couldn’t get them to accept that a furlough costs a lot more to someone at the bottom of the pay scale.”"

Regardless of who gets hurt the most by cost saving furloughs, many governors are left with the furloughs as their only option. And it’s the only option that public unions seem willing to consider. Forget long term solutions. Those aren’t even to be mentioned.

Image courtesy of kreslik.com.

It never ceases to amaze how comfortable unions are with the idea of giving up a shot at extra funding. For years we were told that the answer was to pour more and more money into our school systems. As soon as someone comes along with a plan to do just that in exchange for teacher accountability, well, suddenly funding isn’t as important any more. The latest example comes from Maryland, where Washington County’s teacher union opposes proposed reforms that would give the county a shot at an extra $2.8 million in funding:

The Washington County Teachers Association has joined other teachers unions across the state to oppose the Maryland Department of Education’s application for $250 million in federal funding from the Race to the Top initiative.

Denise Fry, president of the Washington County Teachers Association, said the unions oppose the application because it violates Maryland law by proposing teachers’ pay increases be based primarily on teacher evaluations, rather than on negotiated contracts. …

If the state’s application is successful, Maryland stands to receive $250 million — half of which would be given to local school systems.

The rest would be used for other program costs, such as building the data warehouse designed to track student performance and expanding professional development for struggling schools, said Bill Reinhard, a spokesman for the Maryland State Department of Education.

Washington County Public Schools’ share would be about $2.8 million, or $700,000 a year for four years.

One of these days I’ll stop being surprised, I’m sure. It might be a while, though…

Photo courtesy of Ohad

Remember when Charlie Crist sold out the future of Florida’s school children by vetoing a school reform bill that would have introduced merit pay and tweaked tenure in order to curry favor with that state’s powerful teachers union in the hopes that they would aid him in his race for the Senate? Let’s see how that’s working out:

Over at the Washington Post, one of their education bloggers, Jay Matthews, highlights an intriguing proposal from the Hoover Institution’s Eric A. Hanushek. Hanushek suggests using stimulus funds to simply pay incompetent teachers to go away:

He summarizes his plan for turning school budget cuts and more federal bailout funds into an opportunity to improve the teaching ranks: “The first-best solution, based on several decades of consistent research findings, is to lay off ineffective teachers selectively while letting class sizes drift up a bit,” he writes. “When the bailout ends, schools would be in a stronger financial position because the permanent teacher workforce would be reduced by the slightly larger class sizes, and this workforce would be of higher quality.”

As Matthews points out, the biggest problem with the plan is determining who, exactly, comprises the worst of the worst. Given the refusal of unions to allow standardized testing to stand in for a general measure of teacher accountability, it’s hard to say. And asking the schools directly is no better:

I asked some Washington area school districts, nationally regarded for their high performance and sophisticated management, what percentage of their teachers were rated satisfactory in the last evaluation. I subtracted the number they gave me from 100 percent to calculate what portion of their teaching ranks could be considered ineffective. The results:

Fairfax County 0.9 percent, Montgomery County 5 percent, Loudoun County 1 percent, City of Falls Church 0.45 percent, Prince William County 1.7 percent. I could not find a school district in the area that admitted to having more than 5 percent unsatisfactory teachers. Most said the figure was closer to 1 percent. Experts tell me this is common throughout the land. I don’t believe the numbers.

The idea that only one in one hundred teachers isn’t up to snuff in a nation that ranks third in money spent per-pupil and lags behind in every indicator of student success is, to put it mildly, kind of insane.

Photo via D. Sharon Pruitt

From the Wall Street Journal:

The rise of the tea party makes Democrats even more dependent on organized labor. In this week’s Pennsylvania special election for the late Jack Murtha’s seat, the AFL-CIO alone sent out 80,000 mailers on behalf of Democrat Mark Critz, along with 100,000 robocalls.

In Arkansas, unions showed their clout by forcing Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln into a June runoff with labor-backed Lt. Gov. Bill Halter. Unions decided to make an example of her after she opposed the “card check” bill that limits the use of secret ballots in union elections. Unions, especially the Service Employees International Union, spent more than $3 million against her.

In contrast to the tea party, there has been far too little scrutiny of the SEIU, whose membership of government and health-care workers is the fastest-growing of any union in the country. Andy Stern, the just retired head of the SEIU, was found to be the most frequent guest at the Obama White House last year, stopping by 22 times between January and September, more than all congressional leaders and cabinet members.

The SEIU’s close ties to the discredited group Acorn have largely been ignored. The same is true for the violence perpetrated by some of its members.

Image courtesy of gerlos.

Um.

Sometimes things just don’t make sense. Racine County has grass in its road’s medians. The Teamsters can’t and won’t mow it, but that doesn’t stop them from asking the County not to let local inmates do it for free.

Teamsters leaders filed a grievance in 2009 after county officials began using volunteers from the Racine County Jail to cut the sprawling grass. For budget reasons, the state government had announced that it would only pay counties to mow the full length of the medians once during the year.

The policy is back for a second year, with state officials hoping to save $2.5 million by minimally mowing. That means the inmates will be back, too, unless the union gets its way. We would be more sympathetic to their beef if the Teamsters, filled with law-abiding members, were actually losing work to the prisoners. They’re not. County leaders have repeatedly said the government can’t afford to pay anyone to do the extra work. The only reason to choose the inmates – all nonviolent offenders – is their willingness to work for free. Well, other than little time off for good yardwork.

If they don’t do it, nobody will.

According to the editorial, the Teamsters say that the contract violations extend beyond the “grass” issue. Sorry Teamsters, there’s no middle of the road on this one.

Image courtesy of boodoo.

Remember a while back when a Rhode Island district unceremoniously fired an entire school of teachers when they refused to agree to do more work — for more pay — in a school that was failing in almost every way (high dropout rates, laughably bad test scores, etc.)? A reminder:

Her plan calls for teachers at a local high school to work 25 minutes longer per day, each lunch with students once in a while, and help with tutoring.  The teachers’ union has refused to accept these apparently onerous demands.

 

The teachers at the high school make $70,000-$78,000, as compared to a median income in the town of $22,000.

Well, the teachers were rehired … but only after they caved to each and every demand laid out by administrators.

Under the agreement, which is expected to receive final approval next Tuesday by the Board of Trustees, teachers will be required to work an additional 30 minutes a day, devote 90 minutes after school every week to planning, and submit to rigorous evaluation to retain their jobs after the 2010-11 school year.

 

The teachers will also eat lunch with students one day per week, attend five to 10 days of professional development every summer, and accept a staffing policy that eliminates strict seniority. The high school principal will be replaced.

Teachers at the 850-student school will be paid for the extra work, Gallo said.

The teachers didn’t really have a choice. Their traditional allies ignored their plight; even the President of the United States said the firing was a good thing:

“If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn’t show any sign of improvement, then there’s got to be a sense of accountability,’’ the president said. “And that’s what happened in Rhode Island.’’

Combined with a weak economy — almost a thousand teachers applied for the spots that would have opened up in Rhode Island should the firings have become permanent — these hardball tactics broke the union without too much difficulty. As a result, the children of Central Falls, R.I. will now have the benefit of teachers who put in something closer to a full day’s work. This is the first step toward improving their lives; demanding accountability from their well-paid educators is the next step.

Image courtesy of jkirkhart35

Here’s a life lesson. If you are going to ignore conventional protesting practices and take a page from the play book of some of the most egregious protesters in modern times, make sure you check who lives next door. There could be a journalist nearby–a journalist with a camera and a website. And check that your “target” is home, not his frightened son hiding in the bathroom.

The SEIU probably couldn’t have planned it worse when they decided to protest at the house Greg Baer, the deputy general counsel for corporate law at Bank of America.  Despite their own desire to minimize the coverage of the protest, by just bringing a sympathetic HuffPo reporter, Baer’s neighbor was none other than Nina Easton, the Washington Bureau Chief of Fortune Magazine. I’ll let her take it from here:

“Last Sunday, on a peaceful, sun-crisp afternoon, our toddler finally napping upstairs, my front yard exploded with 500 screaming, placard-waving strangers on a mission to intimidate my neighbor, Greg Baer. Baer is deputy general counsel for corporate law at Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), a senior executive based in Washington, D.C. And that — in the minds of the organizers at the politically influential Service Employees International Union and a Chicago outfit called National Political Action — makes his family fair game.”

“Waving signs denouncing bank “greed,” hordes of invaders poured out of 14 school buses, up Baer’s steps, and onto his front porch. As bullhorns rattled with stories of debtor calls and foreclosed homes, Baer’s teenage son Jack — alone in the house — locked himself in the bathroom. “When are they going to leave?” Jack pleaded when I called to check on him. Baer, on his way home from a Little League game, parked his car around the corner, called the police, and made a quick calculation to leave his younger son behind while he tried to rescue his increasingly distressed teen. He made his way through a din of barked demands and insults from the activists who proudly “outed” him, and slipped through his front door.”

“Excuse me,” Baer told his accusers, “I need to get into the house. I have a child who is alone in there and frightened.”

Those of us who watch SEIU protests know sort of what we should expect. This was outside of that. As Easton put it:

Targeting homes and families seems to put SEIU in the ranks of (now jailed) radical animal-rights activists and the Kansas anti-gay fundamentalists harassing the grieving parents of a dead 20-year-old soldier at his funeral (the Supreme Court has agreed to weigh in on the latter). But that’s not a conversation that SEIU officials want to have.

I should add that there were no arrests, because the three officers on hand feared inciting the rabble-rousers.

Image courtesy of Nina Easton. I hope she doesn’t mind.