It’s good to know the union bosses are focused like a laser on the issues that affect American workers:
“The handling of cargo at seaports from Southern California to Alaska ground to a halt Thursday as several thousand longshoremen skipped work to protest the war in Iraq.”
“‘The worst part of it seems to be for the truckers. They came down here this morning not knowing what to expect and now most of them are just sitting around waiting.’”
I’m sure many union workers are against the War in Iraq.And I’m sure many are supportive of it. But either way, it’s not a work issue.
The primary function of modern unions is to perpetuate their power and use it for political ends unrelated to the welfare of America’s workers and opposed by huge portions of their membership.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Timesreported 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.
Taking a page out of the TeachersUnionExposed.com playbook, Michigan teachers union watchdog Education Action Group has launched MEAexposed.com. The new website trains a harsh spotlight on the deeds and misdeeds of the Michigan Education Association, the 800-pound gorilla of education politics in that state. Some of the highlights:
Disclaimer: While no one is entitled to their own facts, they are
entitled to their own opinions. These opinions originate from their
authors and should not be attributed to the Center for Union Facts.
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 
And SEIU’s saga continues.
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.” 