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The Education Department on Monday said over 615,000 student-loan borrowers have had debts forgiven through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program since October 2021 due to policy changes made by the Biden administration. The government has forgiven a total of $42 billion in loans for public servants since October 2021, the department said. "This is a result of the temporary [Public Service Loan Forgiveness] changes made by the Biden-Harris Administration that made it easier for borrowers to reach forgiveness," the department also said. Under the Trump administration, 7,000 borrowers were approved for the forgiveness program

LOS ANGELES — Thousands of custodians, security guards, gardeners and other service workers at University of California campuses started a three-day strike Monday to address pay inequalities and demand higher wages. Strikers gathered at sunrise on the 10 campuses throughout the state, wearing green T-shirts and carrying signs that call for “equality, fairness, respect.” The strike was called last week by American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299, which represents 25,000 service workers, after the union and the university could not agree on a new contract and mediation efforts failed. Nurses and other medical workers will join...

Teachers all over the country are going on strike. They say they want higher salaries and education funding and the tax increases necessary to pay for them. But there’s a bigger motivation underlying the strikes — mobilizing Democrats. What do all of these strikes and protests have in common? They are taking place in states where Democrats are either trying to make gains or consolidate their power in this fall’s elections. Democrats are trying to keep Sen. Joe Manchin in power in West Virginia. In Kentucky, Democrats are trying to retake the legislature and would love to oust Matt Bevin...

It has been called the “Teachers’ Spring” in the United States, with educators from five states staging an unprecedented wave of protests demanding increases in pay and school budgets. Encouraged by progressive resistance to President Donald Trump and the #MeToo movement, the protests by the nation’s teachers, more than three-quarters of whom are women, mark the first statewide walkouts since the 1990s. Some educators have likened their movement to the “Arab Spring”, a series of anti-government uprisings that hit Arab countries in North Africa and the Middle East beginning in 2010. The movement has already prompted lawmakers to allocate pay...

PHOENIX -- Thousands of teachers in Arizona and Colorado descended upon their respective Capitols for a second day in a growing educator uprising. Educators in both states want more classroom resources and have received offers either for increased school funding or pay, but they say the money isn't guaranteed and the efforts don't go far enough. The walkouts are the latest in demonstrations that spread from West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky. Teachers said they won't return to work until they feel their message has been heard. Alexis Aguirre, a second-grade teacher in Phoenix, said living paycheck to paycheck has forced...

During the next five weeks, the CalPERS board, custodian of $326 billion in assets needed to fulfill retirement promises for 1.8 million California public employees and beneficiaries, will make decisions affecting government budgets for decades to come. The problem is, despite their fiduciary duty under the state Constitution to “protect the competency of the assets” under their absolute control, CalPERS is roughly $153 billion short of fully funding the retirement promises earned to date. How did CalPERS dig this huge hole? During the last decade, they manipulated actuarial assumptions and methods to keep employer and employee contribution rates low in...

The City of San Francisco employed 39,634 people in 2016 (including part-time and construction workers), and the total spent on their salaries and benefits in 2016 was $4,262,344,675, according to the Office of the Controller. That's about the same amount as the budget for the state of Delaware, which has a population of 945,000 (100,000 more than San Francisco's). Salaries have increased 18.5 percent since 2012, and benefits have gone up 18.6 percent. The average salary (excluding benefits) per city employee is $83,227.14.

California cities and counties will see their required contributions to the largest U.S. pension fund almost double in five years, according to an analysis by the California Policy Center. Including the costs paid by cities and counties that run their own systems, the fiscal 2018 tab will be at least $13 billion to meet retirement obligations for public workers, according to the analysis, which is based on actuarial reports and audited financial statements. Barring any changes to pensions, "several California cities and counties will find themselves forced to slash other spending," the group wrote in its report. "The less fortunate...

California's public employee unions used their muscle this week to fight back a legislative bid to open their books, killing in committee a bill that would force them to post online how dues are spent -- and a second bill requiring a union vote every two years. "These members want to belong to a union. They want to be represented by a union. They just want to know where their money's at," said bill sponsor Assemblywoman Shannon Grove, a Republican. The two bills went down Wednesday on a party-line vote, after dozens of union members came out against the legislation....

... f State, County and Municipal Employees in response to the civil unrest in late April and early May after the death of Freddie Gray from injuries suffered in police custody. The organizers targeted the neighborhoods of West Baltimore, where Gray was arrested. AFSCME Maryland has done voter registration efforts before, but the unrest "put it into hyperdrive," said Patrick Moran, president of the union group. On Saturday, the ASFSCME members had more luck elsewhere, registering 22 new voters. One of them was 18-year-old Brandi Womack, who was set to graduate from Carver Vocational-Technical High on Sunday. Womack, whose mother,...

A raise negotiated by Fresno County supervisors for its largest union was rejected after voting came to a close Thursday afternoon. The vote was an “overwhelming no,” said Riley Talford, a senior shop steward for SEIU’s supervisory employees. He did not disclose the final results. He said the vote showed that the county has to do “a better job and show respect to the employees who are serving this county.”

Most Americans think federal employees are working for the public. But a new report issued by the Office of Personnel Management on Monday shows that in fiscal 2012, 1.2 million federal workers spent 3.4 million hours reporting to their government unions. Paradoxically, time spent not working for the taxpayer is called “official time.” OPM reports that official time costs taxpayers $157 million in salary and benefits, up from $129 million in 2009 and $102 million in 2006. Taxpayers are subsidizing unions such as the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Treasury Employees Union and the National Federation of Federal...

The U.S. bankruptcy judge overseeing Stockton, California's municipal bankruptcy trial on Wednesday ruled that the state's public employee retirement system, known as Calpers, could be forced to absorb losses along with other creditors. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Klein said the city's contract with the California Public Employees' Retirement System could be rejected. While the judge ruled the city may impose losses on Calpers, he has not yet ruled that it must do so as part of its financial restructuring.

Labor Day used to be more than a summer-closing holiday; it was a celebration of labor unions and the American labor movement. That’s easy to forget these days because labor unions don’t have much to celebrate. At the height of their influence in the 1950s, labor unions could claim to represent about 1 of every 3 American workers. Today, it’s 1 in 9 — and falling. Some have seen the shrinking size and waning influence of labor unions as a sign that the US economy is growing more flexible and dynamic, but there’s mounting evidence that it is also contributing...

The future of public sector unions is in the hands of the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule Monday on a key case that could send shockwaves throughout organized labor. The Supreme Court has the power to make that happen. Depending how the nine justices rule in the Harris v. Quinn case, it is possible that automatic dues deduction could become a thing of the past for public sector unions. The head plaintiff in the case is Pam Harris, an Illinois-based home care worker who says automatic dues deduction violates her First Amendment rights. For the purposes of collective...

A union-backed bill in the California legislature to expand tenure protections for public school teachers to other employees stalled on Wednesday amid concern about a court ruling last week that said the practice is unconstitutional and hurts students. The measure, which could come up again next week, comes as officials in the most populous U.S. state continue to wrestle with whether to appeal the ruling by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge, which overturned five laws meant to protect teachers' jobs. The ruling said the protections make it too hard to fire ineffective teachers and inadvertently lead to placing the...

Reaction from policy makers, lawmakers, and education activists to a Los Angeles judge's ruling Tuesday that five California laws governing teacher tenure, layoffs and dismissals are unconstitutional because they infringe on the right of all students to a quality public education: "It's surprising that the court, which used its bully pulpit when it came to criticizing teacher protections, did not spend one second discussing funding inequities, school segregation, high poverty or any other out-of-school or in-school factors that are proven to affect student achievement and our children." — American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. "Let's be clear: This lawsuit...

The Treasury Department has revealed to the House Ways and Means Committee that Internal Revenue Service employees spent over 500,000 hours on union activities last year. They estimated the cost to taxpayers at $23.5 million in salary and benefits. “Many Americans would be shocked to learn that IRS employees are unionized,” House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Charles Boustany, R-La., told Secrets. “The IRS has wasted tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and over a half a million employee hours for union activities. It is absurd the IRS has the audacity to habitually come to this committee asking for...

Democratic Congressman Mike Honda, now engaged in a contentious fight for re-election in a Silicon Valley House race, has made the unusual move of locating his 2014 campaign office inside the headquarters of a major South Bay labor organization — the Service Employees International Union Local 521. The details about Honda’s campaign office emerged after the Chronicle reported last week that Honda can’t vote for himself in the 2014 election because his home is located outside the 17th Congressional District he represents.

DETROIT (AP) — Pressure was building Wednesday for Michigan lawmakers to commit $350 million to Detroit pensions, a day after the city reached tentative agreements with pension funds and a retiree group to reduce payouts. Retired police officers and firefighters would see smaller cost-of-living payments but no cut in pension benefits. Retirees and city employees who qualify for a pension will get a ballot in a few weeks.