The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has approved a policy initiated by President Barack Obama’s Executive Order 13502, encouraging federal agencies to discriminate against nonunion workers and employers by adopting so-called “project labor agreements” (PLAs) on all federal construction…
(Source: April 2010 Forced-Unionism Abuses Exposed) By declaring bankruptcy, an insolvent municipality may avoid paying its bondholders anything near what it owes them. It may even succeed in cutting public employees’ health benefits. But it will not succeed in doing one thing that the bankrupt city of Vallejo, California absolutely must do to get back on its feet: Rescind labor policies that encourage healthy municipal employees to retire when they are 50 or 55 with lavish pensions. That is what public-sector union bosses are now out to prove in the Golden State. Two years ago this spring, Vallejo, a seemingly prosperous San Francisco suburb of roughly 120,000 residents, voted to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. In 2008, Vallejo’s budget, like those of many other California municipalities, had been driven deep in the red by government union bosses. Union officials wielding monopoly-bargaining power handed to them by state law had driven up taxpayer costs for compensation of public-safety employees and retirees so high that they consumed 74% of Vallejo’s $80-million general budget. Public-safety employee wages, though surely generous, were not the reason municipal spending was out of control. The real culprits were overtime costs, driven by complicated and counterproductive Big Labor work rules, and pension costs, driven primarily by union boss-instigated retirements of employees still in the prime of their lives.
How low can the union bosses go? That is a the question voters in West Virginia are asking themselves after seeing the teacher union produce an TV ad exploiting the death of 29 miners to make their…
The Investors Business Daily looks at the union bosses decision to spend worker’s dues money to purge incumbent Democrats who do not meet their ideological purity tests.
The Investors Business Daily looks at the union bosses decision to spend worker’s dues money to purge incumbent Democrats who do not meet their ideological purity tests.
In the midst of a recession, while Americans are tightening their belts, big labor unions monopoly bargaining privileges are taking taxpayers for a ride. The Examiner examines the data: For decades, public sector unions have peddled the fantasy…
The New York State teacher union spent an incredible $5 million in lobbying and campaign contributions in New York last year and their political spending helped secured a lucrative retirement deal that is an enormous hit…
General Motors is owned in part by the United Auto Workers. In an effort to help spin the bankruptcy and bailout, the Obama Administration recently made an outrageous claim declaring that the company had "repaid" its $6.7 billion loan from the government. Malarky. Fox News reports that the repayment was made by dipping further into the bailout money pot: "The hype is not the reality," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote in a column on FoxNews.com over the weekend. "It is far from clear how GM and the Obama administration could honestly say, much less trumpet in prime time television ads, that GM repaid its TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) loans in any meaningful way." Grassley wrote a letter last week to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner expressing his concerns and asking for more information about why the company was allowed to use bailout money to repay bailout money. The $6.7 billion is also just a fraction of the $52 billion General Motors received in government aid. Grassley said lawmakers are being told government losses on GM are expected to exceed $30 billion.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is taking on the government unions head on. George Will describes the financial situation in New Jersey as “the nation’s worst.” Christie has issued executive orders that have saved $2.2…