Free Republic

Menino: Bodybuilding Firefighter Should Quit Albert Arroyo Did Not Show Up To Work Monday BOSTON (WBZ) ― The Boston firefighter who claimed to be permanently disabled - but then competed in a body building contest was a no-show at work on Monday and now he might lose his job altogether. Albert Arroyo was ordered to return to work by Fire Commissioner Roderick Frazer. He sent a letter to Arroyo late last week ordering his return to work on Monday. Arroyo did not show up for his shift and he did not contact anyone with a reason for his absence. "The...

United cabbies have elected driver accused of assault by brian x. mccrone / metro philadelphia JUL 21, 2008 PHILADELPHIA. The past two weeks have been momentous ones for the city’s roughly 3,000 taxi drivers, with an election July 9 that unified fragmented unions and a meeting last week that appointed 15 board members. But the election of longtime drivers’ advocate Ron Blount as president of the newly-formed Unified Taxi Workers Alliance — by 64 percent of an estimated 900 to 1,000 votes cast — has put the new group at immediate odds with the Philadelphia Parking Authority. Blount, who was...

Unions have been decrying outsourcing for years. The word "outsourcing" has been used as a boogieman to blame declining union jobs upon for the last decade. Unions, for their part, claim to desire to stand up against outsourcing -- especially that of outsourcing jobs overseas -- and wish to push the home grown alternatives to outsourcing jobs, namely keeping them in the country and under the control of the union. Yet what have we discovered here on the blog? Why that the nation's largest union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has outsourced the design of one of their own...

<p>The newly elected head of the nation's largest teachers union on Monday called on school districts nationwide to create community schools that would offer services to students and their families ranging from health care to recreation.</p> <p>Speaking to about 3,300 conventioneers at Navy Pier, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said minority students need the help to bridge the achievement gap between them and their white counterparts.</p>

The long-serving president of New York City's powerful teachers' union was tapped last week to lead the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers - a post from which she'll have ample opportunity to push her education agenda on the national level. "Imagine schools that are open all day and offer after-school and evening recreational activities and homework assistance," she said. "And suppose the schools included child care and dental, medical and counseling clinics." A one-stop nanny state, in other words - owned and operated by Randi Weingarten & Co. Weingarten's push for all-purpose schools is hardly surprising, of course. What...

NEW YORK (MarketWatch)-- American Airlines said it expects to lay off about 1,300 aircraft mechanics and 200 management and support staff positions as it begins retiring its A300 fleet later this year.

Randi Weingarten has delusions of grandeur. She thinks she should be given the power of a dictator instead of those of a teachers union president. Instead of just teaching kids, Weingarten imagines that she should become doctor, nanny, nutritionist, psychologist, and mother to every kid in America. She imagines that she should be given the care and feeding of all the nation's kids. Parents? Who need 'em when we've got Mother Weingarten to trot them off to re-education camps where they will be fed and cared for on a daily basis? Catch the arrogance, see this nanny-state despot lining...

Click on the link for a great video report on the attempt by Democrat Rep. James Oberstar and unions to shut down the 1926 passenger steamboat Delta Queen, which sails America's inland rivers.

Iran's Brutal Labor Crackdown New York Post Amir Taheri A year ago last Saturday, Ali Khamenei ordered the abduction of trade-union leader Mansour Osanloo. In so doing, Iran's top ruling mullah hoped to kill in infancy the independent trade-union movement that Osanloo had launched in '05 with the help of colleagues among bus drivers and conductors in Tehran. A year later, Osanloo is still in prison, sentenced to five years on a charge of "undermining the security of the Islamic Republic." Yet the free-union movement that he inspired has spread like wildfire. Transport workers in Tehran and its suburbs have...

Two former officials with the Houston Police Officers' Union -- one a police officer, the other a recently retired officer -- were indicted this morning on charges accusing them of stealing more than $100,000 from the union. A Harris County grand jury indicted ex-board secretary Ronny Martin on charges of misapplication of fiduciary property and theft by a public servant. Former board treasurer Jeff Larson is charged with misapplication of fiduciary property. All of the charges allege that $100,000 to $200,000 was taken. Both men were relieved of duty in mid-January in the midst of an investigation, police union officials...

DETROIT (Reuters) - The United Auto Workers union has called a strike against a Johnson Controls Inc factory in Columbia, Tennessee, that will supply seats and consoles for the upcoming Chevrolet Traverse crossover vehicle from General Motors Corp. UAW Local 1853 President Mike O'Rourke, who also represents workers at GM's Spring Hill, Tennessee, assembly plant, said Johnson Controls' management had refused to recognize the union even though 170 of 172 workers at the plant had signed cards seeking UAW representation.

Federal authorities have launched an investigation into New Jersey's largest state worker union, and of Gov. John Corzine's ex-girlfriend, Carla Katz, who until recently was its head, ABC News has learned. As first reported by the Star-Ledger, investigators served document and record subpoenas yesterday on the Communications Workers of America in Washington, D.C. The investigators are looking into allegations that Katz misappropriated union funds, sources confirmed for ABC News. These allegations were first raised in the union's own probe into Katz' management of Local 1034, sources confirmed to ABC News. They were made public last week when the organization's governing...

The full-page ad inside Wednesday's edition of USA Today is as scary as it is unprecedented. The union representing more than five-thousand US Airways pilots accuses the airlines of threatening "termination of their careers" if pilots fail to "reduce fuel levels" "to save money." "Fuel is very critical to any mission. When you start varying the amount of fuel and getting it below a captain's comfort zone, that's why we have an issue here," said Capt. James Ray of the US Airline Pilots Association.

Competitiveness: As a venerable U.S. automaker cuts production by 150,000 trucks, a European producer is making plans to open a factory that will build 150,000 units a year. Guess which one is unionized.Not only will General Motors reduce truck production, it will shed jobs, cut executive salaries, freeze base salaries, eliminate health care benefits for retirees over 65 and sell assets. The short-term intent of GM's plan is to raise cash and to reassure a Wall Street that is afraid the company that has lost more than $50 billion in the past three years will file for bankruptcy. The long-term...

It must be nice to be spending 85 million dollars on political campaigns yet refuse to fully fund your own member's pension plan. That, among other things, is exactly the sort of hypocrisy that it was revealed that the SEIU has been caught indulging in this week. Diana Furchtgott-Roth did yeoman's work in detailing the state of the SEIU's underfunded pension obligations in the New York Sun yesterday. The Sun's Furchtgott-Roth details the SEIU's latest campaign against New York financier Henry Kravis of the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts whom they accuse of all sorts of nefarious activities... none...

Senator Obama apparently felt free enough from obligations to the American Federation of Teachers, which is meeting in his home city of Chicago, that he skipped their convention and appeared by video. The AFT had endorsed Mr. Obama's opponent, Senator Clinton, in the Democratic primary. Too bad Mr. Obama doesn't feel free enough to deviate from the union's policy agenda. That he is captive to it was made clear by his prepared remarks. "What I do oppose is using public money for private school vouchers. We need to focus on fixing and improving our public schools; not throwing our hands...

Randi Weingarten, the New Yorker who is rising to become president of the American Federation of Teachers, says she wants to replace President Bush’s focus on standardized testing with a vision of public schools as community centers that help poor students succeed by offering not only solid classroom lessons but also medical and other services. Ms. Weingarten, 50, is running unopposed for the presidency of the national teachers union, whose delegates at an annual convention in Chicago are expected to elect her Monday. In a speech prepared for delivery after the vote, Ms. Weingarten criticizes No Child Left Behind, President...

Oil workers at Petrobras, Brazil's national energy giant, halted extraction at most of the country's main fields in the Campos basin at the outset of a planned five-day strike, a union official said on Monday. Campos accounts for more than 80 percent of Brazil's crude output of 1.8 million barrels per day, or around 2 percent of world supply. Worries about the strike helped push up world oil prices CLc1 last week to a new record on Friday above $147. "Of the 42 platforms, 33 are now stopped," said Jose Genivaldo Silva, director of the United Oil Workers' Federation, an...

Photos from the Obama ralley in Dayton, OH (7/18/08) (waiting for doors to open)

The AFL-CIO is attacking McCain with a TV spot saying he voted "against increasing health care benefits for veterans." Actually, he voted for increases in those benefits. The labor federation points to McCain's votes against Democratic proposals to increase funding. Those were defeated along party lines, and then quickly followed by alternative measures to increase benefits by smaller amounts, all of which passed unanimously or with near-unanimous majorities. McCain supported all of them. The AFL-CIO also points to a McCain vote against a war spending supplemental appropriations measure from 2007 that included additional funding for veterans' health care, along with...

The A.F.L.-C.I.O. announced on Wednesday that it has set up a new union council for military veterans that will run broadcast ads in six states praising Senator John McCain’s military record, while criticizing his Senate record, especially on economic issues. In a telephone news conference, John J. Sweeney, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s president, said that 2 million union members are veterans, and he urged them to back Senator Barack Obama for president over Mr. McCain. “On military issues, everyone respects Senator McCain’s record,” Mr. Sweeney said. “I want people to know that his agenda is wrong on pocketbook issues.” The labor federation,...

There are still 167 days until Christmas, but the Amalgamated Order of Real-Bearded Santas will try mustering up some early holiday spirit this coming weekend in Kansas City at their convention. If only they weren't at each other's bearded throats. The Amalgamated Santas, one of the nation's largest Santa groups, are dealing with a schism in their ranks. The rift has left burly bearded men accusing one another of bylaw violations, profiteering and behaving in un-Santa-like ways. Some Santas have filed complaints of wrongdoing against others in Kentucky and Pennsylvania. The once-fraternal Santa impersonators began to split last year when...

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Saturday thanked the National Education Association for its endorsement but also made it clear that he continues to support merit pay for teachers. His position is a controversial one with the 3.2 million member group and it has earned him criticism when he addressed the NEA in 2007. “Now I know this wasn’t necessarily the most popular part of my speech last year but I said it then and I’m saying it again now because it’s what I believe and I will always be an honest partner to you in the White House,” said...

Over at The Nation's political blog, John Nichols reports on efforts by AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka to get steelworkers and other union members to throw their support behind a black presidential candidate: Trumka knew that the steelworkers had backed John Edwards for this year's Democratic presidential nomination -- and that the union had only endorsed Obama when Edwards finally came around. He understood that a part of his job was to get a union that is especially strong in the battleground states of Ohio and Pennsylvania excited about a candidate who must win those states. Trumka knew, as well, that...

Six out of ten... Click here for the table.

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee is proposing a contract that would give mid-level teachers who are paid $62,000 yearly the opportunity to earn more than $100,000 -- but they would have to give up seniority and tenure rights.....Under the proposal, the school system would establish two pay tiers, red and green....Teachers in the red tier would receive traditional raises and would maintain tenure. Those who voluntarily go into the green tier would receive thousands of dollars in bonuses and raises, funded with foundation grants, for relinquishing tenure. Teachers in the green tier would be reviewed yearly and would be...

The United Steelworkers union is holding its annual convention this week. Union conventions in presidential election years invariably deal with presidential politics, and this one is no different. Except, perhaps, for the quality of the oratory – and the depth and meaning of the message. Barack Obama may well be the most eloquent presidential candidate the Democrats have run since William Jennings Bryan. But what is fascinating is the extent to which Obama's candidacy is inspiring his supporters to hit their rhetorical strides. AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka, a veteran mineworkers union leader who has always been known as one of...

In 1983, when the seafood processing plants on the New Bedford waterfront broke the back of the Seafarer's Union, the starting salary for a line worker was around $7.50 an hour. Twenty-five years later, the starting salary for processing and packing workers at the New Bedford fish houses was about the same, $7.50 an hour.

Bay Area News Group East Bay undertook company-wide job cuts Friday, affecting every department, including the newsroom, advertising, circulation and production. Separately, Bay Area News Group-East Bay said it will notify a local labor union that it intends to reduce the newsroom rank-and-file workforce by nearly 13 percent. BANG-East Bay operates numerous papers in the East Bay and San Mateo County. BANG-East Bay would not specify the total number of job reductions across the company. The company also said it plans to lay off 29 out of 226 employees in a newsroom operation whose journalists voted this month to be...

The Supreme Court recognized "that a lack of clarity in the lower courts on business issues causes a lack of predictability for American business," Mr. Sarwal said. "It makes it harder for a national or international business to operate." In one of the rare labor relations cases decided for corporations, the Supreme Court said in Chamber of Commerce v. Brown that California's liberal labor laws could not override federal laws on what contractors tell workers about their rights to seek union representation.

Unfortunately, that TownHall.com aricle isn't news, or shouldn’t be. America’s public schools haven’t merely been falling behind. They’re in a freefall compared to other nations, including “developing” nations such as Romania, Belarus, et al. which, almost literally, don’t have a pot to pee in but yet succeed in educating kids far better than we do. Thing is, it’s not news simply because it’s been going on for a generation, at least, and if anyone noticed, they haven’t said much about it, and those who try to say much about it are derided as simpleton reactionaries. The causes of the misedumacation...

Looking for Union Label by: Emily Miller, June 27, 2008 Last Thursday, the AFL-CIO officially endorsed Barack Obama, throwing its weight behind the presidential hopeful by continuing its $53.4 million campaign called Working Families Vote 2008 against the presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. Yet partisan politics will not significantly affect plummeting union membership, wrote Professors Jeffrey and Barry Hirsch, co-authors of the Florida State University Law Review article “The Rise and Fall of Private Sector Unionism: What Next for the NLRA?” Union membership is likely to continue its steady decline, and chances for a revival of previous membership rates, even...

One of the most ambitious pay-for-performance initiatives in Washington area schools is drawing strong teacher interest and local union support even though many national labor leaders have long asserted that it is unfair to link teachers' paychecks directly to their students' test scores.... ...The program's criteria exclude some teachers from certain bonus pools. Half of the bonus money is tied to scores on state tests given in third through eighth grades and in high school: Up to $2,500 is won when the school meets test score targets, and up to $2,500 is given for improving a given class's scores. The...

DETROIT -- General Motors Corp. told dealers Monday it plans to raise prices on 2009 models by an average of 3.5% despite a tough market that is forcing the automaker to cut production and discount its 2008 models. Company officials said in conference calls to dealers that the increases will allow GM to recover only part of the rising cost of steel and other commodities and the cost of safety and other features on the new models. The increases will amount to about $1,000 per vehicle. GM already had increased the prices of its 2008 model year vehicles twice because...

Union leaders representing InBev workers in Brazil, Canada and Europe have a simple message for Anheuser-Busch employees if InBev takes control of the St. Louis-based brewery: Watch out. "They should worry, because the production is going to be concentrated and the work force reduced," says Siderlei Oliveira, president of Brazil's 1.2 million-member food workers union, citing a reduction in Brazil's brewery workers to 13,000 from 23,000 since the 1990s. "This is the strategy that they have." In Canada, labor-management relations are "starting to thaw after a significant period of turmoil" marked by years of strikes, lockouts, changes in work rules,...

In Chicago politics a key question has always been, who "sent" you? The classic phrase is "We don't want nobody that nobody sent" - from an anecdote of Abner Mikva's, the former White House Counsel (Pres. Clinton) and now retired federal judge. (And someone I campaigned for while in high school when he ran, unsuccessfully, for Congress in the early 70s.) As a young student, Mikva wanted to help out the his local Democratic Party machine on the south side of Chicago. In 1948, he walked into the local committeeman's office to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas and...

The director of volunteers for the Democratic National Convention in Denver has resigned, saying she wasn’t “empowered” to do her job. Sondra Williams ...declined to elaborate on her reasons, saying she doesn’t want to criticize the host committee. The committee is coping with fundraising problems. It reported this week it is $11.6 short its $40.6 million goal.

The Denver Post ran a column by Al Lewis that questioned the need to enact a Right to Work law in Colorado and the reaction has been visceral. Dozens of citizens have taken it upon themselves to teach Mr. Lewis a thing or two about the unfairness of forced unionism. A sample of the reaction: * . . . I am 72 years old and had been in the work force for 50 years prior to my employment with the City of Boulder and this is the FIRST time that I have ever been in a union. $10.00 a month...

http://www.nrtwc.org/blog/ Why is Michigan’s car industry struggling but Alabama’s is thriving? How is the “Yellowhammer State” successfully courting companies like Honda, Toyota Motor Corp. and Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz?

Students earn way by sweat of brow in new program . Bruce Randolph's bold decision last fall to end social promotion, to inform parents that students who fail core academic classes will not be passed on to the next grade. "We're changing the culture," said Principal Kristin Waters. "You can't not pass anymore; you have to do the work." It's an unprecedented stance by a neighborhood school in Denver. DPS, unlike other metro districts, allows parents to decide whether their children are held back a grade until they reach high school. Few choose to hold them back. Not until grade...

SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal appeals court ordered reinstatement Monday for 33 janitors in Los Angeles who were fired because their Social Security numbers did not match the government's database, a ruling that could strengthen unions' case against a Bush administration proposal to pressure employers to get rid of suspected illegal immigrants. The decision by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco did not address the legality of the administration's so-called no-match rule, which a federal judge blocked in October. That rule would threaten employers with civil fines and criminal prosecution unless they fired workers who failed...

With the U.S. auto market worsening for Ford Motor Co. almost daily, managers told union officials Friday that the company will have to further reduce its factory work force in the coming months. The slumping U.S. economy has cut U.S. auto sales by 8 percent during the first five months of the year, but it's been a double hit on Ford, General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC as consumers shun their high-profit pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles for more fuel-efficient models as they cope with $4 per gallon gasoline. United Auto Workers union officials were told in a meeting...

Still reeling from a long strike by screenwriters this past winter, Hollywood is bracing for the possibility that the entertainment industry will grind to a halt again -- this time because of a dispute with actors. The studios' contract with the Screen Actors Guild expires June 30, and talks are getting contentious. Already, film and television producers are holding back on new projects, fearing the talks will fail, even as they rush to complete existing projects before the end of the month. The two sides have made little progress on key issues including compensation for actors when their work is...

How would you like elections without secret ballots? To most people, the notion of getting rid of secret ballots is absurd. This is modern-day America. Such an idea could not be seriously considered, right? People support secret balloting for very obvious reasons. Politics frequently generates hot tempers. People can put up yard signs or wear political buttons if they want. But not everyone feels comfortable making his or her political positions public. Many would rather vote without fearing that their choice will offend or anger someone else. Secret balloting has solved another potential problem: vote buying, which they essentially ended...

Bill Clinton on Tuesday canceled a commencement speech at the University of California, Los Angeles, because of a lingering labor dispute. The former president was scheduled to address 4,000 graduating seniors on Friday, but his office said he would not appear because of the long-running rift between the university and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

What do the farm bill, the cap-and-trade global warming bill, the clean water bill, the housing bailout bill, and the school construction bill all have in common? Not much, except that in each one and countless others the Democratic majority in Congress has inserted "prevailing-wage" requirements that amount to a super-minimum wage. We're speaking of Davis-Bacon, the 1931 law that originally applied to road building and other federal construction projects and set a floor on wages in part to price black and Mexican workers out of the work. Today, its main impact is to require de facto union wages. Many...

Business reporter Michael Barbaro has long patrolled the Wal-Mart beat for the Times and has taken his journalistic night stick out on the retail giant on several occasions. Thursday's Business section story, "Wal-Mart’s Detractors Come In From the Cold," heralding the successes of two anti-Wal-Mart groups, Wal-Mart Watch and WakeUpWalMart.com, is both a coronation and at last, an investigation. Barbaro has been pumping up Wal-Mart Watch in particular for years, but only today, when it appears that the pressure group has gotten much of what it wanted, does he go into the full extent of the Service Employee's International Union...

“Whaddaya gotta do to get fired in this town?” It’s a great question, asked by a co-worker of mine (emphasis on “worker”) shaking his head over the latest Department of Public Works story in the Herald. This time it was five city workers hanging out at the Northern Avenue Bridge, watching satellite TV and throwing steaks on the hibachi. After opening the swing bridge once a day, they’ve got nothing to do, all day to do it and the taxpayer’s dime to do it on. My buddy, like every taxpayer reading that Herald story, knows that despite the obvious waste...

ALBANY — An actuary paid by public employee unions and yet relied upon by the State Legislature to determine the cost of proposals affecting New York City’s pension system underestimated their ultimate cost by at least $500 million, city documents and other records show. In the hundreds of bills for which he has provided estimates to lawmakers since 2000, the actuary, Jonathan Schwartz, said legislation adjusting the pensions of public employees would have no cost, or limited cost, to the city. But just 11 of the more than 50 bills vetted by Mr. Schwartz that have become law since 2000...

EAST PEORIA, Ill. (AP) -- The United Auto Workers union filed an unfair labor practice charge against Caterpillar Inc. over a smoking ban that goes into effect at all of its U.S. properties on Sunday. The union claims the ban goes against guarantees in the UAW contract, and that such a policy shift is subject to collective bargaining. The union says smoking has been a contractual privilege for 60 years. Caterpillar, however, said it was time to end smoking at work. "It would be unfortunate and disappointing if some employees decide to strike over the company's decision to prohibit smoking...