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At least 17,000 teachers and civil servants took to the streets of Greece Monday to protest government plans for massive public sector redeployments and layoffs as the debt-stricken country was hit with a new wave of strikes. In the capital, isolated clashes broke out early in front of the ministry of administrative reform, the department coordinating many of the changes, with tear gas fired by police. A mass strike of the entire public sector by its main general union is expected Wednesday.

when it comes to public employee benefits and the damage they wreak on local governments, scoundrels have another refuge: blaming racism for concerns about lavish, unaffordable benefits and broken governments. ”Public-sector workers are disproportionately black. In 2011, about 19 percent of black workers were employed by the government, compared with 14 percent of whites and 10 percent of Hispanics. The upshot is pretty clear: Reducing the value of public pensions and other benefits wouldn’t just hurt blacks disproportionately; it would do so at a time when other economic trends have already hurt them more than most. So the question isn’t...

Moody’s has put 15 California transit agencies on credit watch for a possible downgrade because of a decision by the Department of Labor to hold up federal transportation grants. The Department of Labor, under its newly confirmed secretary, Thomas Perez, says pension reforms enacted by the state last year are in conflict with federal rules because they provide less generous pension formulas for new hires. State agencies fear that if exemptions from the reforms are carved out for transit employees, other government workers will also demand exemptions, gutting California’s efforts to contain its growing pension obligations.

LANSING -- The Michigan Court of Appeals has ruled a law requiring state employees to contribute four-percent of their pay to the pension system is unconstitutional. An Ingham County Judge said the entire law known as Public Act 264 violated the constitution, but the Appeals Court disagreed sent the issue back to the lower court. They asked the judge to define what parts of the law were valid. The Appeals Court did agree with the lower court over payment to the pension system saying the state's Civil Service Commission makes those decisions and not the legislature. The law passed in...

Hit by years of budget cuts, some U.S. public school boards are looking to avoid providing health benefits to substitute teachers and supporting staff under President Barack Obama's reform law, education officials say. According to the law, employers will have to offer health coverage to all full-time employees, defined as those who work an average of 30 or more hours per week each month, or else pay a fine starting in 2015. In Indiana's Fort Wayne Community Schools district, one of the state's largest, administrators reduced hours for 610 of its 4,050 employees, including substitute teachers and support staff, who...

<p>The State Worker is taking a first-ever look at what unionized workers earned over the last two years by bargaining unit.</p>

Chicago Public Schools says its plan to close 50 schools and programs means that it will have to lay off nearly 850 workers. The number released Friday includes about 550 teachers along with teacher assistants, bus aides, clerks, custodians and security officers. CPS says some of those workers will be eligible to reapply for other jobs. They will be notified in mid-July.

One of the nation's top credit rating agencies said Friday that it would begin a wide-ranging review of municipal finances in California because of what it sees is a growing threat of increased city bankruptcies and bond defaults. The report also noted the potential for ratings downgrades to fiscally distressed cities, counties, school districts and special districts throughout the state. Moody's Investors Service issued a report saying that the growing fiscal distress in many cities in the nation's most populous state was putting bondholders at risk.

Scranton, Pennsylvania's, the state's sixth-most-populous city (population of 76,089 in 2010 census), is down to its last $5,000 and has no way to pay salaries. The mayor wants an immediate tax hike of 29% and 78% over three years. In every sense of the word, Scranton is bankrupt. NPR reports Scranton's Public Workers Now Paid Minimum Wage. The city of Scranton, Pa., sent out paychecks to its employees Friday, like it does every two weeks. But this time the checks were much smaller than usual. Mayor Chris Doherty has reduced everyone's pay — including his own — to the...

Ten current and former postal workers launched a more than 3-day hunger strike Monday to protest looming cuts and closures at the U.S. Postal Service. Drastic? Yes. But organizers say desperate times call for desperate measures. The hunger strikers want the Postal Service to shelve its July plans to start closing or consolidating 48 mail processing plants. By the end of 2014, when the plan to shrink the postal network is completed, 229 plants will be consolidated or closed and 28,000 jobs will be gone. They also want Congress to eliminate a mandate that has been a major financial drag...

Have you ever heard anyone analyze how many private sector workers it takes to support the cost of one public sector worker? That is what Republicans should be emphasizing when Obama calls for growth in the public sector! Stop letting him pretend that only the rich will be affected by the increased tax needs. When Obama says we need to grow the public sector, people yawn, complain and move on. Republicans need to emphasize how it affects them specifically.

The eyes of the nation are on San Jose as a landmark June 5 measure to trim soaring pension costs puts residents of the 10th largest U.S. city at the center of a $1 million-plus battle for their votes. Should San Jose's Measure B pass, as Mayor Chuck Reed and the business and taxpayer groups behind it expect, it would be a key test of a city's authority to reduce future pension costs that exceed expectations and revenues, despite earlier promises to employees. Government employee unions maintain that the measure is illegal, unfair and unnecessary. "It will have nationwide implications...

As Stockton stands on the brink of insolvency, cities, counties and school districts throughout California are grappling with the same problem of paying the health insurance of its retired workforce. San Francisco, which once allowed its public employees to qualify for full retiree medical benefits after working just five years, is projected to pay $153 million in retiree health care costs this year. Cities like Thousand Oaks and school districts like the Los Angeles Unified School District are also facing long-term unfunded liabilities. The looming crisis is similar to the one involving public employee pensions. The difference is that retiree...

The stock market's summer slide took a toll on public pension funds, with the assets of the 100 largest ones down 8.5% in the third quarter of 2011, the Census Bureau reported Wednesday. The quarterly decline was the first since early 2010, and the steepest since the fourth quarter of 2008, when the asset total plummeted 13.5% at the height of the global financial crisis. The latest drop brought the value of investments and cash held by the biggest pension funds -- including the California Public Employees' Retirement System, the California State Teachers' Retirement System and the Los Angeles City...

Milwaukee — Last year, Milwaukee's struggling public school system fired the woman named Wisconsin's outstanding first-year teacher because of union rules that protect senior teachers and require newer ones to be laid off first. As it cuts 560 more teaching jobs this year, the district faces a bill more than double its entire $1-billion budget to pay for retired teachers' health benefits. For decades, critics have railed against the union. "Teachers unions do what they're supposed to do, which is protect teachers," said Howard Fuller, a former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent who has fought the union over the district's voucher...

The Costa Mesa Employees Association has filed a complaint with an Orange County Superior Court judge in an attempt to stop the possible layoffs of more than 100 city employees, according to a statement released by the union Monday afternoon. The association contends that the city's action to lay off their employees and outsource their jobs is against state law and violates an agreement between the city and the employee association. In a prepared statement, Nick Berardino, the association's general manager, said the city does not have legal authority to do a mass outsourcing. "The council majority has had a...

Having failed to win enough Republican votes to put the taxes on the ballot in June, the governor is expected to ask lawmakers to impose at least some of the levies first and seek Californians' blessing after the fact. Even Democratic leaders and the governor's union backers, doubting the odds of a tax measure passing at the ballot box, are pushing Brown to break his pledge and forgo voter input. "Go get a deal done," said David Kieffer, executive director of the state council of the influential SEIU. Californians "would vote the taxes down," he said, and "they don't actually...

Teachers who rallied Friday to protest looming state budget cuts had a message that was sometimes plaintive. "Teachers are paying for basic supplies. ...They're taking away money every year," said Lisa Gemma, who teaches 27 multilingual students at Belle Air School in San Bruno - where, she added, "we're out of pencils and eraser tops." "They cut the school year five days. They laid off the librarian. We're fighting for our lives," said Deborah Waggoner, a third-grade teacher at Cinnabar School in Petaluma. The demonstrators also included students like 7-year-old Tai Min, a first-grader at Olinda Elementary School in Richmond....

Today wraps up a week of Capitol protests by the California Teachers Association and other groups that oppose cuts to the state's budget. Mark Paul, a former Bee editorial writer suggests that it refocus its efforts: Don't tell me that failure to extend the temporary taxes will result in big cuts in schools, including a shorter school year. Show me. Announce that, beginning Monday, every teacher in every school in the district of every Republican legislator who has failed to vote for the Governor's budget plan will be out sick. So will every other school employee. There will be no...

The sign fourth-grade teacher Julie Timmerman held declared in large bold letters "I am a public service worker." It was a tribute to the civil rights slogan "I am a man," and it was an iconic image at the California Democratic Party convention in Sacramento over the weekend. While Democrats dominate California's political landscape and hold all its major offices, both political leaders and the labor unions that put them in power are sounding the alarm about anti-union initiatives that are creeping into the state and efforts to "demonize" union workers as the source of the California's knee-buckling economic problems....