Posts tagged Covid
Op-ed: Los Angeles Schools Run Out of Other People’s Money
August 11, 2026 // Covid dollars from Washington turbocharged hiring at public schools and papered over their structural budget problems. But now that the federal money is drying up, the red ink is starting to gush. According to the Labor Department’s monthly jobs report on Friday, local government education shed 49,600 jobs in July—the leading contributor to the nation’s 23,000 employment decline. Ground zero is the Los Angeles Unified School District, the country’s second largest. Its overseers at the Los Angeles County Office of Education last month warned that the district meets the criteria for a “Lack of Going Concern” designation. In the business world, the terminology means a company is at risk of going bankrupt.
They cleaned N.J. schools during COVID and got extra pay. The court just took it away.
August 11, 2026 // The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the East Orange Board of Education did not have to pay the custodians more than double their regular salary for working while schools were closed to students.
Don’t Panic: A Skeptic’s Guide to the AI Jobs Doomsday
July 16, 2026 // Overall, US unemployment was 5.9 percent in mid-1979 and 5.3 percent by mid-1989.[25] During this same period the working-age population swelled by 21.5 million, or about 13 percent.[26] So, while some manufacturing jobs were lost, overall unemployment actually declined slightly over that period despite an increase in job seekers. New jobs in new fields were created by automation. Somebody had to operate the machines, build and maintain them, and transport them to foreign countries. This is the nature of automation: It focuses on eliminating the more tedious tasks, freeing up time, labor, and resources for other pursuits.
Calif. In-Home Workers Accuse Unions of Coerced Dues, Shakedowns
July 15, 2026 // May, 39, received training to become a home worker through Medicare’s In-Home Support Services, or IHSS, to care for her then-infant. In the summer of 2023, as a mandatory part of her training, she attended an IHSS orientation. May was expecting to learn about the program’s rules, payroll procedures, and her legal responsibilities for compliance. Instead, she says that 75% of the orientation was devoted to pressuring her to join the local chapter of the Service Employees International Union. At the end of the presentation, May said a representative from the Service Employees International Union local 2015 locked the doors of the orientation room and told attendees that “no one is leaving until everyone signs” a union membership card.
Opinion: The Socialists Are Coming for Your Grandparents
June 29, 2026 // Turns out, the answer lies in betraying the faith the elderly have in historically trusted institutions, such as government labor unions. Leaders like Becky Pringle can start with a light touch of anti-establishment rhetoric about protecting education, and then a few years later can bluntly call for fighting the Trump administration. The picture of her praising Mamdani on BlueSky is the next warning sign. In a few years, we shouldn’t be surprised to see the NEA glorify socialism by name.
As Newsom’s return-to-office mandate is just one week away, state workers and unions continue pushback
June 29, 2026 // Governor's order requiring most employees in the office four days a week takes effect July 1 amid concerns over costs, staffing and workplace readiness
LA hotels hit by largest job losses in a decade as ‘Olympic wage’ mandates bite, data shows
June 11, 2026 // "This is the largest year-over-year drop in the hotel industry in a decade (barring losses related to COVID)," the EPI noted in its report. "While countywide the minimum wage reached $17.81 an hour last year (higher than the state’s $16.50 hourly mandate), the City of Los Angeles also increased its hotel-specific minimum wage mandate up to $22.50 an hour."
California Public Sector Union Threatens Environmental Lawsuit Over Gavin Newsom’s Return-to-Office Policy
May 31, 2026 // Unionized state workers say agencies need to study the additional emissions that would be caused by requiring employees to come into the office four days a week.
Report: The diminishing power of teacher unions
May 29, 2026 // The result is A Crowded Table: Teacher Union Strength in 2026. Building on our original study, the authors set out to gauge teacher union strength in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia (D.C.). Collectively, the 59 measures—which include 29 new measures that were not in the original report—seek to quantify union strength in five key areas: Resources and Membership; Involvement in Politics; Labor and Bargaining Policies; Policy Wins and Losses; and Perceived Influence, which draws from an original survey examining how stakeholders in each of the 50 states and D.C. perceive teacher union strength today. The states with the strongest teacher unions are Vermont, California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Hawaii. The states with the weakest teacher unions are Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Mississippi. (See our interactive table on the report website for the overall rankings alongside the rankings for each of the five areas.)
NYC hotel maids now make more than rookie cops, firefighters, teachers — as union averts strike following new salary agreement
May 27, 2026 // Hotel maids in NYC already out-earn rookie cops, firefighters and even teachers with master’s degrees — and they just got a raise. The Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, the union representing 22,000 city hotel workers, ratified the new contract Thursday that will bring housekeepers to $77,113 on July 1 with $110,000 in salary alone in the sixth year. The agreement made last weekend with the hotel owners averted a strike that was already throwing a wrench into the city’s America 250 celebrations and the FIFA World Cup as visitors said they were afraid to make reservations if a strike was at hand.