Posts tagged pensions
Opinion: Imagine there’s no public employee unions
February 21, 2023 // But try as President Joe Biden has, it just hasn’t been enough. Automation (including not only factory machinery but also the gig economy), trade, high-profile union corruption cases, failing pension funds, and a string of adverse court rulings are among the many factors rendering private sector unions irrelevant to workers in most modern fields. This has led the unions to desperate measures, such as organizing esoteric, low-income professions, including graduate student teachers and video game testers. Yet the story is quite different for unions in the public sector. The unionization rate of public employees remains robust, at more than 33% of all government workers nationwide. Local government workers are the most likely to be unionized, at a rate of nearly 39%, and public sector union members are concentrated in states that mandate collective bargaining. The states with higher rates of unionization seem to correlate with the nation's least functional state governments: California (54.5%), Illinois (48.7%), New York (66.7%), and New Jersey (59.3%) among them. As their private sector cousins starve, public employee unions are fat and happy — a strange development, given that there was no public sector collective bargaining at all 70 years ago, when unions were at their apex.
Outgoing New York Teachers Union Boss Leaves Behind an Organization Deep in the Red
February 20, 2023 // NYSUT and its allies pushed hard last year for a mandate that requires New York City’s public schools to phase in class-size limits over the course of five years. At least 20 percent of the city’s schools will need to reduce class sizes, requiring more classes and more classroom teachers. The union has also been fighting to stymie the growth of charters: Earlier this month, Governor Hochul in her most recent budget proposal moved toward increasing the number of charter schools in New York City. “If I was paying dues under the assumption that the union was using those dues to represent me with my employers, it would be a little concerning to me that so much of that is being used for other things,” the senior organizing director of Americans for Fair Treatment, Brigette Herbst, says. “Perhaps they should focus more on those representational activities.”
Transit Union: Contract Offer ‘Insulting’
January 19, 2023 // Under Keolis’s latest offer, commuter bus drivers, dispatchers, and some technicians would earn $40 an hour at the top of the pay scale. That makes them competitive with other wages in the region such as the $43 for WMATA drivers or $40 at the DC Circulator. But local bus drivers and others would top out at $27.36, continuing the disparity that existed under the previously separate contracts.
United Steelworkers hold rally for new labor contract
October 10, 2022 // U.S Steel and its unions are currently fighting over a new labor contract. Typically contracts culminate to four years in length and include things like wage increases amongst other things. The rally held today included steelworkers from many of the mines expressing their grievances.
Striking union workers confront truck drivers at Sysco warehouse in Plympton
October 6, 2022 // Sysco food service workers, who have been on strike since Saturday, confronted non-union truck drivers trying to enter the distribution center in Plympton early Monday morning. Police monitored the demonstrators who blocked trucks for a few minutes as they entered and exited the distribution center, voicing their complaints about non-union drivers taking the food trucks out.
New Jersey hospital workers begin strike
May 25, 2022 //
Act 10 Savings Tops $15 Billion Since 2011
March 27, 2022 // Before the unions convince you that contributing 12.6% towards health insurance is an unfair and undue burden, think about this. A state employee in Wisconsin pays $2,952 a year for the regular family plan with dental. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average annual worker premium contribution is $6,015 a year. State employees pay roughly half of what the average taxpayer pays for health insurance and the state employee is receiving platinum coverage for that reasonable amount.
STRIKE UPDATE: Teamsters’ Canadian Pacific Rail Strike That Threatened Supply Chain Is Over
March 23, 2022 // The parties have agreed to binding arbitration to settle outstanding issues.
Canada’s CP Rail Shuts Down Railroad, Workers Strike
March 21, 2022 // Canadian Pacific Railway (CP) halted operations and locked out workers over a labor dispute early on Sunday, with each side blaming the other for a halt that will likely disrupt shipment of key commodities at a time of soaring prices.
Canada, U.S. shippers brace for possible CP Rail strike, latest supply-chain disruption
March 19, 2022 // Numerous U.S. farm industry groups wrote a joint letter to President Joe Biden this month asking him and the Canadian government to avert a strike.