Free Republic

When Gov. Chris Christie’s pension-cutting rhetoric started rumbling through union halls, fire stations and teachers lounges across the state earlier this year, many predicted a coming wave of retirements. That wave is here. Retirement applications from teachers, police officers, firefighters and state workers jumped 67 percent through the first seven months of the year. Nearly 14,900 workers in the public employees pension systems put in their retirement papers through the end of July — already 16 percent more than all of last year. Public sector workers — and their contractual raises and guaranteed benefits — have become a target when...

Workers in the federal government now earn, on average, double what private-sector workers make, according to a USA Today study released Aug. 10. "Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation," the paper said. "Public employee unions say the compensation gap reflects the increasingly high level of skill and education required for most federal jobs and the government contracting out lower-paid jobs to the private sector in recent years." The report was based on numbers from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. The federal pay and benefits also...

They also are accused of hiring prostitutes for sexual encounters at their remote worksite on the former Navy base in San Francisco Bay and stocking a private bedroom in their office suite with liquor, condoms, Viagra and pornographic DVDs. They were known as the Hetch Hetchy Power Crew, an elite unit named for the reservoir in Yosemite National Park that supplies the city with hydroelectric power. Their difficult, sometimes dangerous job was to maintain the city's high-voltage electrical system, especially during emergencies. Five members of the power crew were arrested last year after a whistle-blower complained that crew leader Donnie...

Meet Neil Codell an Illinois educator with a $26 million state pension. Just to drive the point further -- if Obama gets his way on his newly proposed bailout for State Public Unions, that means you will be paying a portion of Gary and Neil's out of control pensions. --- Make sure you notice 'Codell, Neil C.' who is 4th from the top of the list. Career pension of $26,661,604. That's almost $27 million for a single administrator within just one local Illinois school system (Niles, to be exact). Should you have to bailout the state of Illinois?

Lately, there's been much talk about the generous compensation of government workers. This is understandable after a long recession in which many private-sector workers got laid off or took cuts in compensation levels. As USA Today reminds us, federal pay has surpassed private-sector wages. Since private-sector workers pay the taxes that fund government workers' wages, conflict exists. Marxists have long stated that class conflict exists between workers and the owners of capital. Marx and his followers were wrong about that. Class conflict exists between taxpayers and tax-consumers. As the nearly forgotten nineteenth-century politician John C. Calhoun stated: "The necessary result,...

“It’s hard to believe there’s a recession,” a friend recently observed, as he navigated the jam-packed parking lot at a suburban Albany shopping mall. While private-sector workers in the capital region have, in fact, suffered like everyone else during the downturn, many of those cars likely belonged to the favored not-so-few: state employees. New York’s statewide unemployment rate in January hit 9%, the highest level in 26 years. New York City’s rate was 10.6%. In addition, untold thousands of New Yorkers have seen their hours or wages slashed, their health benefits cut, and their retirement accounts plummet. But in New...

Treasury civil servants grappling with the recession and record deficit have been given a 71-page document to cope with stress which includes messages such as “learn to laugh at yourself” and a six-point lesson in how to “relax your thighs". The taxpayer-funded brochure is available to employees to help them cope with life in the Treasury. It states at one point that “stress may be avoided if I allow myself to make mistakes…recognising that sometimes I will make mistakes and that it is OK to make mistakes.” With Labour saddling the country with a deficit of £178 billion, opposition MPs...

The number of union workers employed by the government for the first time outnumbered union ranks in the private sector last year, the result of massive layoffs that plunged the rate of private sector union membership to a record low. Local, state and government workers made up 51.5 percent of all union members in 2009, up from 48.7 percent a year ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. Overall, union membership declined by 771,000 workers, to 15.3 million. But with the number of nonunion workers also shrinking, the rate of union membership fell only slightly to 12.3 percent of...

Data from the Rasmussen Consumer Index from the past seven days shows that a plurality of government workers think the economy is getting better while those who work in the private sector tend to have the opposite view. Those in the government sector are also more upbeat about the current state of the economy and their own personal finances.

Hundreds of federal health officials are earning more than cabinet secretaries because of a program intended to recruit and retain a handful of top-level scientists. The program is known as Title 42, after a provision in federal salary regulations. It was set up for "rare" cases to attract and keep "extraordinary individuals" in the health sciences who might otherwise defect to private-sector jobs, according to an October 2000 memo from a Department of Health and Human Services unit that sought permission to pay these individuals outside normal civil-service rules. An HHS memo from late 1999 promised to "ensure that these...

Don't let anyone tell you the American dream has faded. the truth is the U.S. is still minting lots of millionaires. Glenn Goss is one of them. Goss retired four years ago, at 42, from a $90,000 job as a police commander in Delray Beach, Fla. He immediately began drawing a $65,000 annual pension that is guaranteed for life, is indexed to keep up with inflation and comes with full health benefits. Goss promptly took a new job as police chief in nearby Highland Beach. One big lure: the benefits. Given that the average man his age will live to...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Before he was elected as the incoming U.S. president, Barack Obama spelled out his goals for change at seven government agencies in letters to federal workers, the Washington Post reported on Monday. The letters, all but one written on October 20, were Obama's effort at "wooing federal employee votes on the eve of the election" on November 4, the newspaper said. They reveal a candidate adeptly tailoring his message to a federal audience and tapping into many workers' dismay at funding and staffing cuts in the Bush years, the Post said. The letters describe Obama's intention to...

Federal executives are less satisfied with their pay than they were two years ago, and many don't understand how their raises and bonuses are linked to job performance ratings. Those were two of the key findings of a survey of the Senior Executive Service, the government's senior leaders who oversee the day-to-day operations of the government, released yesterday by the Office of Personnel Management. Congress and the Bush administration placed the SES in a pay-for-performance system four years ago to emphasize the importance of job performance and to provide higher salaries for executives. Under the system, executives are not guaranteed...

January 4, 2008 Gerald McEntee International President AFSCME 1625 L St. NW Washington, DC 20036 Dear President McEntee: We are writing to protest in the strongest terms the negative campaign that AFSCME is conducting against Barack Obama. We do not believe that such a wholesale assault on one of the great friends of our union was ever contemplated when the International Executive Board (IEB)made its decision to endorse Hillary Clinton. In fact, when the vote to make a primary endorsement was taken by the IEB, there appeared to be widespread agreement that we had a strong field of Democratic candidates...

... The war in Iraq is being studied in classrooms across the Bay Area, challenging students to research the past to understand the present. Teachers have responded in dramatically different ways, from accompanying students on war protests to carefully presenting opinions from both sides. And across the country, universities and nonprofit organizations such as Rethinking Schools and the Mercy Corps have responded by creating lesson plans on Iraq for teachers of all grade levels. ...