— Labor —

April 17, 2013


Union Rules and "Unique System" Drive Up Overtime for State Government Community Living Aides

Justin Katz

Suzanne bates has another state-payroll-related investigative report on the Ocean State Current, this one covering a job titled "community living assistant."

These are high-school-educated employees with average regular pay below $36,000, who've been able to triple their pay with overtime and other salary enhancements, topping out near $130,000. Their job entails helping the residents of group homes, with at least two CLAs watching over four to six patients on a 24-hour basis. Obviously, there's apt to be downtime.

Especially notable, in this case, is the role of union rules in driving up the overtime costs. A decade ago, the department attempted to introduce "floaters," who could cover shifts at more than one of the facilities. The union objected that the strategy wasn't fair. On the other hand, senior CLAs can effectively "float" around the state... as long as they're doing it for overtime.

As we continue to sort through the outrageous spending for which so of Rhode Islanders' income is confiscated through taxes, Suzanne's doing a great job of filling in the picture of how the game works.

Read here.


April 4, 2013


Another State Route to Riches: Institutional Attendants Earning Six Figures

Justin Katz

The job listings for “institutional attendants (psychiatric)” positions in the state Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities, and Hospitals (BHDDH) offer a salary in the mid-$30,000s, and payroll information available through the RIOpenGov project of the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity suggests top regular pay in the low-$40,000s.

In 2010 and 2011, however, almost all of those employees added significantly to their pay by working extra hours, as well as other salary enhancements and bonuses that the state reports as “overtime.” A significant number of them doubled their base pay or more.

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...


February 8, 2013


Binding and Bound by Legislation

Justin Katz

Interesting things happen when news producers order wall-to-wall coverage of a storm set to arrive in a day or two and visibility of anything but snow moves toward zero. Over the last twelve hours, two such things came flashing out of the blizzard of pre-blizzard forecasting and caught in my eye via email.

The first was in the humdrum yet esoteric area of legislative rules for the Rhode Island House of Representatives. ...

The other bit of legislative shrapnel to pierce the snow coverage is the annual bid to give union employees of public schools (teachers and others) access to binding arbitration in matters of money.

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...


December 18, 2012


The Right to Not Have to Pay For a Job

Patrick Laverty

When I was in graduate school, I had my first experience with a "closed shop". I had borrowed enough money to pay for my tuition but didn't do the usual thing that students do, and borrow enough for things like rent and food. So I had to find a job, and one that was fairly flexible as I was in a program that often included weird hours and schedules. I applied to the local grocery store to bag groceries. I got the job and that's when the store manager told me about the fact that the employees are unionized, that there's a joining fee and there'd be weekly dues taken out. I immediately had the realization that this job was not for me. I'm working to support me, not someone else. I didn't need the benefits that a union negotiates, so I want nothing to do with the union. I declined the job and went to work at a non-union pizza shop. Rent money problem solved, food problem solved. Every penny I earned went to either me or the government, not a third-party.

I often remember my experience when I see people complaining about the "free rider" problem, as described in the Providence Journal where Bloomberg's Michael Kinsley tells us his view of Labor Law 101.

Without a rule like [Taft-Hartley], unions faced a “free-rider” problem: People could enjoy the benefits of union membership, including negotiation of wages, without sharing in the cost. Not only was this unfair to those who did pay their share, but it made organizing a union significantly harder. Why should I pay union dues if my fellow workers don’t?
Ok, I have the solution to this free rider problem and it's not new. Let me negotiate my own deal, as I do in my non-union job. If I could have done that at the grocery store, I would have stayed. Let me decide whether I want to be in the union, pay their dues and receive the benefits that they have negotiated. Or maybe I don't want to be in the union, pay their dues and I'll work out my working arrangements with the employer. That seems to be an easy solution. I'm not calling for outlawing unions, people can still have those and be able to collectively bargain, just allow for a choice. If you choose to not pay the dues, you're on your own. You don't get the benefits of the union. If the employer chooses to pay non-union employees much less or offer lesser benefits, I'm ok with that. That is the deal new hires can agree to. Or, they can simply join the union and get the benefits. I don't see the problem there.

Kinsley also asks:

For principled conservatives, there is another question: Why should there be laws that limit the freedom of individual employers to negotiate any deal they want with their employees? Or at least that ought to be a question for conservatives, though I’ve never seen any of them struggling with it.
Excellent question and one I completely agree with. There should be no laws that prevent me from negotiating any deal with my employer. Exactly! Leave me alone and let me negotiate it. I don't want someone else doing that for me, and most of all, I don't want to be forced to pay someone else to do that for me. So no, there should not be any laws that limit the freedom of individual employers to negotiate any deal they want with me.

The other problem that I see with the way unions work in Rhode Island is that the employer needs to collect the employees' union dues for the union. This is idiotic. Union loyalists will extol the virtues of their union and all the great things they've done. Outstanding. I'm happy for them. They see and approve of the benefits they get for membership in the union. If that's the case, then they should be able to set up and automatic payment from their bank or simply send a check every month.

I personally value the benefit I get from my local YMCA. I like being a member. I set up a bank transfer to automatically pay the YMCA each month so I can continue receiving the benefits of the YMCA. No one requires my employer to withhold my membership dues and send those along to the YMCA, so why is it any different for a union? Could it possible be that the union's members don't actually see the benefit and wouldn't pay it?

I believe we should live in a state where I am not required to pay someone as a condition of my employment. Period. Let me work out the compensation package with my employer. That's my business. If I can't have that then let's at least have the first step where the employer is not burdened with needing to collect a third-party's dues and send them along. If the third-party wants that money, they can collect it from their members themselves. Anything else just doesn't make sense.


December 12, 2012


Things We Read Today (41), Wednesday

Justin Katz

Two narratives on the economy; a health exchange story the media is missing; government as pretend leader; powerful teachers' unions (plus Ted Nesi's Rolodex)

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...



State Comparisons: Right to Work and Beyond

Justin Katz

A stunningly biased article by AP writer Jeff Karoub on the front page of today's Providence Journal likely captures the attitude of most in the Rhode Island media on the issue of right-to-work legislation, as enacted into law in Michigan, yesterday:

The GOP-dominated House ignored Democrats’ pleas to delay the final passage and instead approved two bills with the same ruthless efficiency that the Senate showed last week. One measure dealt with private-sector workers, the other with government employees. Republican Gov. Rick Snyder signed them both within hours, calling them “pro-worker and pro-Michigan.”

Yes, that plea-ignoring, ruthless GOP. Not mentioned in the article, in the paper, or in any mainstream RI media that I've seen was reportage of a unionist mob tearing down a large tent set up by Americans for Prosperity, while bystanders plead with them to stop because people were inside, and physically attacking a conservative commentator, after a Democrat legislator promised that "there will be blood."

The Projo's reporters are a unionized subset of the AFL-CIO, after all.

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...


November 29, 2012


Things We Read Today (37), Thursday

Justin Katz

Changing unions' privatization strategy; the government spending ratchet; the government spending racket; and the trap of dependency.

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...


November 28, 2012


Rhode Island's Government Payroll: Living Beyond Our Means

Justin Katz

When a family comes to a decision about purchasing any product or service, it doesn't merely accept the seller's sense of what's reasonable. In addition to the market rate, consumers must take into account the quality of the thing they're buying as well as their own ability to afford it.

With deteriorating infrastructure, doubts about the quality of government services, and the high-profile specter of unfunded municipal and state retirement liabilities looming over the state during this current period of economic stagnation, the compensation of public-sector employees has become a subject of heated debate about fairness and affordability.

A study that I’ve just produced for the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity shines a stark light on the comparison of the public sector in Rhode Island to the private sector that supports it financially. Using a refined methodology for collecting data, economists William Even, of Miami University, and David Macpherson, of Trinity University, find that state and local government employees here enjoy a 26.5% "premium" in total compensation over their private-sector neighbors — even after controlling for variables like education, experience, and broad job category. That compares with 18.8% for New England and 14.9% for the United States as a whole.

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...


November 18, 2012


Per Iowahawk: Hostess Shrugged

Monique Chartier

Citing an inability

to fulfill customer orders or sell product at their retail stores

and a lack of money to wait out a prolonged strike, Hostess announced Friday that it will return to bankruptcy court to request liquidation.

It's difficult not to see some resemblance to the denouement of the Brown and Sharpe strike right here in Rhode Island. (Contemporaneous labor perspective of that strike here.)

The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union denies that its work stoppage precipitated this action.

The truth is that Hostess workers and their Union have absolutely no responsibility for the failure of this company.

One interesting item in this CNN article: as part of its counter offer, the company had offered its workers a 25% equity stake in the company. This, however, did not seem to appeal to the union and/or its members.

Normally, my attitude towards private sector unions and how they conduct their business is one of complete indifference. But shouldn't they be ultimately motivated by and provide guidance on the basis of what is best for their members? This one appears to have missed this concept and has "succeeded" in marching its members straight off a cliff.

[Title of this post coined by Iowahawk in a tweet.]


November 3, 2012


A Familiar School Committee Time Line

Justin Katz

"I had the sense that everybody around the table knew that we were part of the same team.” That's how Tiverton School Committee member Carol Herrmann described negotiations with the teachers' union this summer. On August 14, the committee passed the contract extension.

It isn't surprising that the negotiations would be "cordial," as Herrmann put it. Negotiating for management were Herrmann (a union teacher), Deborah Pallasch (Herrmann's campaign partner in 2008), Superintendent William Rearick (formerly a union teacher), and Finance Director Douglas Fiore (who works for Rearick). Chairwoman Sally Black is a retired union teacher.

The committee's "negotiations," so to speak, with the people of Tiverton have been less cordial.

In January 2009, the committee approved a contract with retroactive raises despite residents' fears that the recession would continue. And voters at the May 2009 financial town meeting (FTM) refused to approve the committee's requested budget increase.

The school committee meeting a week later was heated. One guidance counselor told the committee: "I am the last person on this Earth that would want to hurt a child, but you need to make a statement… to get people to the town meeting."

As it happened, the Obama administration's stimulus filled the gap and then some.

In May 2010, Pallasch proposed an increase, as an FTM voter, that essentially made the stimulus a permanent part of the budget. Herrmann's husband, Nick Tsiongas, then made the familiar threats; if her budget didn't pass: "We will begin by closing one of the new elementary schools… eliminating all extracurricular activities… every sport and every after school activity… middle school band, high school chorus… and then five or six teaching positions at the high school."

We'd heard that before, and we've heard it ever since, including before this year's financial town referendum (FTR), which has replaced the FTM.

For the upcoming FTR, the "five-year plan" that the committee mentioned when it approved the teacher agreement calls for a school department appropriation of $29,106,009, an increase of $1.2 million (4.3%), well over the state tax cap.

And the cycle continues. The only way to stop it — and to make the people of Tiverton feel as if they are the ones "on the same team” — is for voters in Tiverton to elect Susan Anderson, Ruth Hollenbach, and me to the school committee. We will insist that the district maintain its programming within the budget that taxpayers feel they can afford, without threatening to "hurt" children in order to "make a statement."


October 2, 2012


Things We Read Today (22), Tuesday

Justin Katz

Economic development options, from all-government to government-dominated; the heartless-to-caring axis in politics; Southern New Englanders' "independence"; solidarity between Romney and his garbage man; the media coup d'etat.

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...


September 26, 2012


Things We Read Today (19), Tuesday

Justin Katz

Believing the political worst of priests; spinning bad SAT results; the skill of being trainable; the strange market valuation in Unionland.

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...


September 17, 2012


Things We Read Today (12), Monday

Justin Katz

Chafee shows his bond cards, Chicago exposes a metric discord, Rhode Island misses the skills-gap/business-cost lesson, QE3 misses the inflation nebula, and college majors miss the mark.

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...



Rhode Island Politics: a Game That the State Can't Win

Justin Katz

People periodically give me incredulous looks when I tell them I dislike politics.  The campaign horse race is a roundabout annoyance of spin, and more importantly, it simply isn’t appropriate to view politics as a team sport.  Depending on the level of government, thousands or millions of people’s lives are directly affected by the policies that result.

Note that I’m saying that the team-sport mindset is not merely inadequate or imperfect; I'm insisting that it is inappropriate.  There’s just no such thing as an objective referee or rules.  Imagine if, over the course of some major sporting event, the winning team were able to rewrite the rules in their favor.  We'd rebel against that even when nothing more is invested than our ticket price for entertainment; how much more ought we to recoil from it in relation to our very communities!

Yet, sports may be the closest metaphor available for us to organize the idea of politics, with its mix of partisans and special interests in competition, into a form that we can get our heads around.  Thus, WPRI's Ted Nesi comments, in his bullet-pointed Saturday column.

Continue reading on the Ocean State Currenet...


September 13, 2012


Things We Read Today (10), Thursday

Justin Katz

Madness overseas and at home, lunacy in the Fed, the disconcerting growth of government, and the performance art of public-sector negotiations.


September 10, 2012


Teacher Walkouts in Chicago, Conspicuous Details

Justin Katz

The Chicago Tribune is reporting that 25,000 public-school teachers are picketing, rather than teaching, today.  The details are a bit distant from Rhode Island for a finely tuned analysis, but it's fair to say that the union is not fighting a political class on the verge of right-to-work legislation.  A significant political emphasis on "labor peace" can just mean that the goalposts move.

In this case, Chicago school district administrators are saying that they offered 16% raises over four years. The union is complaining about health benefits, teacher evaluations, and job security.

Taking a long-term view, though, the key sentence in the entire story, by reporters Noreen Ahmed-Ullah, Joel Hood, and Kristen Mack, may very well prove to be the one that I've emphasized in the following paragraph:

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...


September 6, 2012


Slow Adjustment to the Teacher Union Machine Continues in Chariho

Justin Katz

This video by Evan Coyne Maloney succinctly presents a critical part of the small-government, free-market perspective on one of Rhode Island's most intractable difficulties:

The machine by which teachers' unions turn public dollars into union-organization profits and political patronage is clear and unambiguous.  One could argue that the process is for the better, for one reason or another, but Coyne Maloney accurately follows the money.

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...


September 2, 2012


Unemployment: Thinking Out Loud

Patrick Laverty

Here in Rhode Island, we're one of the few states to still be increasing the unemployment numbers. We're currently at 10.8%, and second highest in the nation. Making matters even worse, the number of jobs available is also in decline.

We have many people looking for work and fewer jobs available for them to take. Meanwhile, these people are getting help from the state in the form of unemployment insurance. The unemployed are people receiving a few hundred dollars a week for up to 47 weeks now. It's certainly not a good situation.

Meanwhile in the midwest, North Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate in the country, somewhere between 2.9% and 3.0% due to an oil boom. The same article mentions:

North Dakota, the state with the nation's lowest unemployment rate, capped a decade of economic prosperity with dramatic population growth in its biggest cities. Fargo added nearly 15,000 residents to hit a record population of 105,549, the Census Bureau reported Wednesday. Its fast-growing neighbor of West Fargo added an additional 11,000 residents to reach a population of 25,830.
Hmm, business booming, low unemployment rate and the population grows? Wow, interesting how that works. Let's see if we can work something out here that is mutually beneficial to Rhode Island, to the unemployed and to the states who need workers.

Picking numbers, let's say that on average, the unemployed in RI are collecting $300 a week for the maximum 47 weeks. That's more than $14,000 the taxpayers are covering for each person.

Keep in mind here, I'm not blaming the unemployed or stating anything negative about them. The plan I'm about to mention is 100% voluntary and no one is forced to take part. It's more trying to set up a win-win for everybody.

Let's incentivize the unemployed to go where the jobs are. If you're unemployed and have more than $5,000 remaining to your possible unemployment benefits, we will pay you $5,000 to move out. We will basically pay the moving expenses for the unemployed to go elsewhere, along with the counseling for which states have the highest need, such as North Dakota. When a person would like to take advantage of this program, we track them with their social security number, as joining this program eliminates them from any further unemployment benefits in the state of Rhode Island. They are bought out.

Again, this is completely voluntary. It's just another program that people can take advantage of if they choose to, and they can only take advantage of it if they are eligible for RI unemployment benefits.

We see that the job numbers in RI are decreasing and we're not seeing any great signs of the unemployed being able find jobs quickly. When there is a mismatch between supply and demand, you work to balance the two. Aiming for increased demand (jobs) has not worked, and this would work on the other end, reducing the unemployed (supply).

Incentivizing people to go where the jobs are will reduce the number of people looking for work and reduce the strain on the state's unemployment insurance budget.


August 28, 2012


North Kingstown Employees Strike to Maintain Public-Sector Premium

Justin Katz

One question lost in the heat of this school year's example of the annual opening-day labor dispute is: Why should school children pay more for janitorial services than anybody else would?  The practical answer is that parents are very sensitive to the treatment of their children, and that's just one of the points of leverage that public-sector unions have.

According to the North East Independent, writing in July, janitors in North Kingstown used to make $19.47 per hour. Since the school committee voted to switch from the in-house union to the private GCA Services Group, while keeping the same workers, that hourly rate has fallen to $15.17. That's a substantial drop of 22%, and it comes with greatly inferior benefits.  But in Rhode Island's continuing jobs recession and apparent economic decline,  it isn't clear that public-sector jobs, especially in schools, ought to be notably inviolable.

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...



"Education Support Professionals" Block School Opening In North Kingstown

Marc Comtois

In June, the North Kingstown School Committee voted to privatize the union jobs of 26 custodians. Twenty of the twenty-six were re-hired by the private company--GCA--that was brought in to take over.

The committee voted to award a bid to GCA to privatize the district’s custodial department and will plan to award the contract at its meeting Tuesday night. Though the staff got the axe, GCA has made a verbal agreement to hire all of North Kingstown’s current custodians as long as they pass a BCI check. The custodians will be rehired at the company’s “enhanced wage.”

The committee also moved to reject the ESP (Education Support Professionals) contract and made substantial changes to its support staffing. Though the committee agreed 4-2 (Benson and Dick Welch opposing) to grant the paraprofessionals a one-percent pay increase (up from the superintendent’s recommendation to freeze salaries), it also eliminated life insurance for ESP, cut three sick days and one personal day and established new buyback rates for employees who opted out of health care. (Those new rates are now $2,500 for family and $1,200 for individuals.)

Employees who work fewer than 30 hours per work will no longer be eligible to receive health care through the school department. (Formerly, the cutoff was 20 hours.) The committee also authorized the hiring of 12 part-time employees to replace six full-time positions – a move that will save the district approximately $198,000.

NK School Committe Chair Kimberly Page explained it wasn't an easy decision to privatize. Now, via Bob Plain, we learn that the NK School Committee is--according to the NK school unions--engaging in "economic violence" (gotta love the hyperbole), which is why the NK school unions united in solidarity to close the schools for the sake of, er, 6 jobs. Or maybe there's more to it than that.
Education special interest groups, such as the teachers unions, are experiencing a decline in membership. As Stephen Sawchuck reports in Education Week, “by the end of its 2013–14 budget, NEA [the National Education Association] expects it will have lost 308,000 members and experienced a decline in revenue projected at some $65 million in all since 2010. (The figures are expressed in full-time equivalents, which means that the actual number of people affected is probably higher.)”
Look, it's pretty simple. This is only a little about jobs and mostly about power for unions. They certainly didn't shut down school for "the children." Or is shutting down a school district what we're call "education support" now? (Wait, don't answer that!).

For those who think handing these support services over to contractors will result in diminished quality, well, guess what? If the people of North Kingstown aren't happy with the janitorial services, they can go to School Committee meetings and complain. That's one benefit of hiring a private company to do these services: if NK taxpayers demand better results and they don't happen, they can fire GCS and find someone new. I know, it's amazing but true. It happens all the time in the private sector. Really.


July 26, 2012


Talking Teen Unemployment and the Minimum Wage on the Dan Yorke Show

Justin Katz

630AM/99.7FM WPRO has posted my appearance on the Dan Yorke show, Tuesday, in two segments. The first is the initial half hour introducing the research from the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity and touching on some conclusions. For the second hour, Economic Development Corp. board member and VIBCO President Karl Wadensten joined us in the studio for a broader discussion.


July 25, 2012


Temporary Means Temporary

Patrick Laverty

While watching the 11 pm news tonight on Channel 10, I saw a story about the 67 former employees of the Department of Labor and Training (DLT) protesting their layoff.

I get it, layoffs are bad, I wish everyone who wants a job could be employed. I also get what they're saying about the irony of them being laid off because they were the ones who helped the unemployed receive benefits and search for a new job. Rhode Island has such a high unemployment rate that this probably isn't the department that we should be cutting. So why aren't we keeping these people on staff?

Department spokeswoman Laura Hart said most of the positions were always expected to be temporary because they were funded by now-exhausted federal stimulus dollars.
Isn't this exactly what some were asking when the federal stimulus money became available? What happens when that money dries up? No one ever gave a straight answer there. Well now we all know what some suspected. When the money is gone, the jobs are gone. Why is this hard to understand? Also, when you take a job on a temporary basis, you go into it knowing there's a likelihood that you will be laid off at the end of that temporary period. I see jobs listed all the time for a "10 month contract" or something similar. When that ten months is up, there's a good chance that you're going to be unemployed again.

It might be interesting to see what has happened to every position in the state that was hired with temporary stimulus money. Are they still employed? Is the federal government still picking up the tab or did it switch over to being state-funded?

Along the same lines, this was a tough call for some governors. A few, including Bobby Jindal in Louisiana refused the stimulus money for unemployment benefits because he also saw this sort of situation coming and knew it would simply add to his state's burden.

“The federal money in this bill will run out in less than three years for this benefit and our businesses would then be stuck paying the bill,” Jindal said. “We must be careful and thoughtful as we examine all the strings attached to the funding in this package. We cannot grow government in an unsustainable way.”
And some in Rhode Island wonder why we're ranked last in so many economic rankings? If an organization decides to rank states based on unsustainability, I'd expect Rhode Island to finally show up right near the top.


June 3, 2012


Now Who's "Created This Problem?"

Patrick Laverty

Did you catch the article this week by Tim White on pension averages and this other great nugget called "Option IV"?

Of course we all remember a few months back when the Cranston firefighters' union President Paul Valletta accused Treasurer Gina Raimondo of "creating this problem."

Valetta charged that there is no pension problem as stated by the General Treasurer but instead this is just playing politics. “She created this problem, she created this pension problem on April 13th of this year and now she’s riding in on her white horse with this pension legislation before you to solve this problem and why did she do that? We will find that out in three years,” said Valletta.
However, this article by Tim White has to make you wonder who at least is playing a large part in creating this problem.

First we have Providence Firefighters Union President Paul Doughty making some inaccurate claims (yes, I'm looking at you Politifact). White references Doughty's claims of the average firefighters' pension being about $25,000 per year.

But here is what Doughty isn’t saying: the average retired firefighter’s pension is $48,142 a year – nearly double the average amount Doughty highlights in radio, print and television interviews. That's according to 2011 pension data the city provided to WPRI 12 in response to a public records request.
And back to that "Option IV" thing. We hear about how so many of the pension systems are drastically underfunded and many of us have questioned the politicians as to why these systems have been so underfunded. Some have also questioned why the unions didn't hold the pols' feet to the fire in keeping the systems properly funded. Well, we might have found one reason for that.
Here's how "Option IV" works, based on an actual example from city records: When Firefighter “X” retired in 2012, he opted to take $153,000 out of his pension account in a one-time cash payout, which is the amount of money he contributed to the pension fund from his paycheck over the years. That reduced his annual pension from $34,000 to $24,000.

Records show 1,475 of 3,148 retirees – nearly half of all Providence pensioners – used "Option IV." The ratio is even higher for public safety retirees, with 55 percent taking the lump sum cash payment upon retirement.

If "Option IV" wasn't available and those retirees had been forced to leave the money in their pension accounts, the average city pension would be much larger than the amounts Doughty cites in interviews.

Imagine that. You pay into the pension system for your career and then upon retirement, you get to take it all out in one lump sum that you can then do anything you want with it. So at that point, many would think that the retiree is off the books. Nope. That person still receives a pension, however at that point, it is 100% of the taxpayer funded. Part of what helps these investment funds is having the capital to earn interest. If that capital isn't there, less interest is earned and the fund further lags.

What's worse is as White mentions, until the rules changed, retirees on disability could withdraw their own money and not see any reduction in their pension. Imagine what that did for the fund's balance. Oh that's right, we don't have to imagine it, we're seeing it up close and personal now.

It's things like this that show the problems are multi-faceted and the blame doesn't just go in one direction. And as for Option IV, that name is more than a little ironic as this perk has helped to put the state on life support through an IV.


April 24, 2012


Secretary of State Advertises For A Union

Patrick Laverty

The Providence Journal has a story today by Randal Edgar about a "bug" on the Secretary of State's envelopes. For those unaware, a bug is a little icon that is placed on an item or a screen, sort of like advertising. You're probably familiar with the television network bugs during their programming. On NBC, they'll have the little peacock logo or recently, I've seen the peacock with the Olympic rings under it. That's what is referred to as a bug.

The Secretary of State's office takes it one step further. Their envelopes have a pretty large bug under the return address in the upper left corner. It's the logo of the United Steelworkers union. Take a look for yourself here.

Was the office aware this was going to happen? Are they ok with it?

Secretary of State A. Ralph Mollis says the union symbol — or bug, as it is commonly known — is on his office’s envelopes because they were printed by a union shop and union shops “routinely put their bug on the material they print.”

Gee, if I knew the state was in the business of taking ads on their stationery in exchange for cheaper rates, I'd probably give them all the envelopers they need with the Anchor Rising URL on it. I'd probably even do this for free.

According to the article, the state saved $400 over the next lowest bidder and the order of 70,000 envelopes for $2,485. Also interesting in the article, though might not mean anything at all:

The company hired to handle the job was Regine Printing Co. Inc., of Providence — a company that has also done work for the Mollis campaign, according to campaign finance reports filed with the state. The Mollis campaign paid Regine $480 in 2011 and $2,868 in 2010, while also hiring other printers, according to the reports. In addition, two Regine employees donated to the Mollis campaign during 2010 and 2011, contributing a total of $525.
Umm, nope, nothing sounds too fishy there.

Well, I guess over here at AR, we should just keep our eyes open for any upcoming state purchase requests. Let's see what we have in that advertising budget for the next time when you get a mailing from the state, maybe it'll have the Anchor Rising "bug" prominently displayed.


March 19, 2012


Full Time Pay To Attend College

Patrick Laverty

In the video below, WJAR's Jim Taricani dug up a provision in Rhode Island Local 580's contract that says they may attend college full time to obtain a master's degree in social work while being paid their full time salary. I am familiar with businesses that offer a tuition reimbursement plan, but I'm not familiar with any that let their staff take a leave from their job and attend school full time while still collecting their full salary.

On top of receiving their full pay while attending college, the state (again, that's you and me, the taxpayers) pay half of the cost of the schooling. One thing that was not mentioned in the video was whether these employees are going to school full time and still keeping a full time case load as well. However, reading an associated document on the turnto10.com web site shows the employees using the benefit are "out on Ed leave"

What has this cost so far? Since 2007, the salary cost has been $1.1 million paid to the employees while on education leave and the cost of the schooling has been slightly more than $100,000 for 18 employees. On the latter part, that sounds like either one incredible bargain or a few of them never completed it or some of those 18 just began. Because remember that $100,000 is just half the cost. That puts the average at just a little more than $10,000 per employee. How in the world can you get any master's degree for about $10,000? So there's clearly more to that story too.


February 2, 2012


Legislation to Beat Cities and Towns Senseless with Their Own Amputated Legs

Justin Katz

Fresh on the heels of Governor Chafee's declaration of the Year of the Cities and Towns, Reps. Scott Guthrie (D, Coventry), Roberto DaSilva (D, East Prov., Pawtucket), and John Savage (R, East Prov.) have introduced legislation (H7317) that may win the sure-to-be-tough contest for union-loving lunacy:

28-7-7.1. Representation of towns and cities - maximum legal fees. — Notwithstanding any provision of law to the contrary contained in any general or public law, rule or regulation, legal fees pertaining to a labor contract entered into by a city or town, shall not exceed two tenths of one percent (0.2%) of the value of the contract.

Says Guthrie in the associated press release:

"My legislation is not intended to interfere with contract negotiations, or muddle the legal process associated with them... My legislation is intended to be a form of property tax relief, by setting a specific monetary cap on legal fees so they do not grow and grow like top seed."

One needn't be but so cynical to think that his legislation just might be intended to add a restraint on the employer in negotiations. They have to fight with the knowledge that a buzzer will eventually go off requiring them to lower their gloves and take whatever beating is coming their way.

Then again, given the lack of a "what then" in the legislation, a municipality surely would gain some immunity to accusations of unfair negotiation tactics if it unilaterally imposes contract terms the day that the law says its paid advocate has to go home.


January 4, 2012


The Dogs That Didn't Bite in Pension Reform

Justin Katz

Two aspects of this Monday editorial in the Providence Journal, lauding Central Falls Superintendent Fran Gallo for progress in her school district are interesting.

For one, multiple Projo columnists have compared Democrat General Treasurer Gina Raimondo favorable with Republican reformers in other states, like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Ohio Governor John Kasick, on the grounds that union intransigence illustrates that the Republicans' method of reform wasn't sufficiently collaborative. Yet, here we have Gallo receiving the full union-thug treatment (short of physical violence, which even the thugs must have seen to be a losing proposition against a diminutive older woman), and the editors hailing the "cooperative efforts."

More pointedly, the editors detail some union-friendly legislators' efforts to bully Gallo in order "to disrupt public-spirited efforts to improve Central Falls High School." The essay also mention's last year's conspicuously high absenteeism among teachers. It ought also to have mentioned the aggressive campaign of threatening nastiness that Gallo experienced when things were at their roughest.

What's interesting about that is how it compares with the relatively light touch of the unions and their members during the supposedly radical pension reform. Sure, they held a fun evening rally one warm evening. Sure, some paid union leaders made some silly statements and issued threats of electoral defeat. But where was the real heat?

Reform was necessary for both Central Falls schools and for the state pension system. In both cases that was and is impossible to deny. In both cases, union deals had to be pushed back. Yet, there's a marked difference in the tone of the response, with the smaller of the two skirmishes sparking a higher degree of venom. What could account for that?


December 18, 2011


“You want to play hardball, and that’s what happens.”

Patrick Laverty

That was the answer given by SEIU Local 580 President Phillip Keefe about his union's response to the fact that Crossroads RI decided to back Engage RI in the recent pension reform discussions. In today's Providence Journal, Crossroads' president said they're getting some of their donation cards back with a different response from the past.

“Some of them were quite vulgar,” Nolan said. “Some of them were threatening. Some of them were, pardon me, ‘Why the [expletive] don’t you ask Engage Rhode Island for a donation!’"
Keefe doesn't deny that his organization could be behind the feedback.
The union sent letters last month to its 1,000 members, he said, and followed up with discussions at membership meetings about directing their charitable contributions away from organizations such as Crossroads and Family Services of Rhode Island, which are affiliated with EngageRI. Any nonprofits that support an organization that is “slamming” union members, he said, should expect similar treatment.
And then, he went on further:
“These people are targeting you and your families. You can act now by simply not using the services of these groups or contacting them directly to voice your concern … [and] when you run into them at the office or in the community feel free to express your displeasure with their position.”
So SEIU 580 is telling their people that when they see members of Crossroads RI (and other Engage RI supporters) at the grocery store, at the coffee shop, or walking down the street, express their displeasure with the Crossroads' position. The letter told the union members that they should voice their displeasure to anyone they believe is taking money out of their pockets? Really? And the response is "You want to play hardball, this is what happens", really? So if I'm not happy with what their union does, I should heckle their members every time I see them? Is that what all taxpayers should do? If I don't like the union's contract, should I shout down my local teachers, the guy driving the plow, the people working at Town Hall? When I see them at the grocery store, should I tell them what I think? Is that really what Phillip Keefe is advocating for? Wouldn't that be interesting if many taxpayers started harassing his union members in public like this and the response was "You want to play hardball, this is what happens." Sounds pretty good to me.

While no one is or ever should be required to donate to any organization, Crossroads RI said they are down about $100,000 in their usual donations since the pension discussions. Crossroads is one of the organizations that takes care of homeless people, women and children included. This is who the union is turning on. Apparently, "I will not support any organization that works to cut my pension." is more important to these people than children sleeping on the street and having food to each. But it's good to see that SEIU 580 is out to protect the little guy.


October 29, 2011


Jobs, Who Creates Them?

Patrick Laverty

In GoLocalProv.com today, Dan McGowan tells of how Rhode Island has shed more government jobs, as a percentage, than any other state in the country since 2007. He uses some nice numbers and percentages to show the facts.

In total, Rhode Island lost about 4,400 government jobs over four years, ranking 33rd among states in jobs lost. The state now has about 59,900 government employees.

The 6.84 percent reduction over four years is the highest in the country

Ok, so there's nothing wrong with using percentages and raw data like that. But let's look at it another way. We have 59,900 people employed by the taxpayers. According to the 2009 census, RI had about 1.05M people living here. Doing a little math there shows that one in every 17.5 people living in the state is employed by the state or a municipality. That's not one in every 17.5 working people, that's one in every 17.5 people. That includes babies, students, retirees. If I knew how to figure out how many people are actually of working age, I'd better know just how many people working in the state, work on the taxpayer dime.

McGowan also goes on to very casually mention that states like New Hampshire and North Dakota actually gained government employees. Why is that not surprising when those states are actually growing their economy? North Dakota is experiencing a bit of a boom as currently the fastest growing state in the country. New Hampshire is a pro-business state. So to compare Rhode Island to those states would be comparing apples to dump trucks.

The article also gets opinions from Kate Brock, the executive director from Ocean State Action who says that cutting state employees is killing the economy. I don't understand how costing the taxpayers less by not having to pay for bloated payroll will harm the economy. It means not as much money will need to come out of taxpayers' pockets, so we will have more money to spend on the economy, to spend on businesses that are still trying to make it in Rhode Island. This is exactly how you grow an economy, not hurt it.

Carcieri was on the right path when he cut the government workforce. In my own random experience, he didn't go far enough. We've all seen the reports of government employee waste, with examples like the guy literally sleeping on the job.

We do have many problems in this state, especially with regard to the government, but cutting too many government jobs definitely is not one of them.


October 6, 2011


NEA-RI Promotes John Leidecker

Monique Chartier

EastBayRI reports - exclusively, it appears - in an article that also describes the latest development (mediation) in the stalled Bristol/Warren teacher contract negotiations. Mr. Leidecker is the lead negotiator for the NEA-RI in those talks.

... Mr. Leidecker, negotiator for the Rhode Island chapter of the National Education Association (NEARI), was recently found guilty of cyberstalking by a Superior Court judge. Though some, including his target, former Bristol/Warren Representative Doug Gablinske, have called for him to step aside as negotiator now that the court has spoken, that won’t happen.

Instead, he’s been promoted. Once Mr. Leidecker finishes these negotiations, he will step aside as a “UniServe,” the union’s name for one who negotiates contracts across the state, and will step in as Deputy Executive Director of NEARI. Once he leaves, the plan is to make Linda LaClair, a long-time librarian at the Kickemuit Middle School who now works for NEARI, the district’s new UniServe.



October 3, 2011


Block on the Labor-Social Welfare Crackup

Justin Katz

Moderate Party founder Ken Block has been circulating an interesting letter:

I have been waiting for someone to call out Bob Walsh on his comments in the September, 22, 2011 Providence Journal article "Business Coalition Backs R.I. Pension Reform."

Since no one else has yet taken Mr. Walsh to task, I will now do so.

The article describes how Crossroads RI and Family Services of RI - two prominent providers of social services to the needy - have joined a coalition whose mission is to advocate for thorough pension reform in the upcoming special legislative session in October.

The NEA chief has this to say about about Crossroads' joining the coalition: "They should think long and hard about who is the bigger supporter of social services - the unions or the Chamber of Commerce. Labor is their ally, not the business community."

Mr. Walsh's error in logic is that Crossroads is choosing between 'Labor' and 'Business'. I am fairly certain that Crossroads is looking at the issue as to how the organization can best assure that their funding stream from the State is maintained into the future.

Rhode Island's pension crisis threatens everything that the State government touches. If Rhode Island's pension problems are not fixed, an ever growing chunk of tax revenues will go solely to keeping the pension system afloat - to the detriment of funding schools, building roads and yes, funding worthy organizations such as Crossroads RI and Family Services of RI.

It is time for Labor's union bosses to meaningfully engage in helping to resolve Rhode Island's pension problem - a problem that these bosses have helped to create. Red herrings like selling off Twin River or trying to frame the pension issue as 'Labor' versus 'Business' are attempts to distract an easily distractible public from a simple truth: If we do not fix the pension problem, every aspect of Rhode Island's economy and society will be massively and permanently harmed.

Pension reform is not an us versus them issue. Successful pension reform means a stable and guaranteed pool of retirement monies for pensioners and a kick start to rebuilding Rhode Island's ailing economy. Failed or incomplete pension reform will keep Rhode Island on our downward spiral into the economic abyss.

Perhaps recent cuts to social-service spending at the state level helped advocates for the less fortunate to see the writing that others of us have long seen on the wall. If businesses cannot operate and productive residents continue to leave, there will be no tax revenue to divvy up against the various groups that survive on government revenue. It may be easier for the government-dependent to pretend that they can survive without a thriving economy, but they can't, and ultimately, they'll have to fight over what the government is able to confiscate from the shrinking pool.

The shared interest of public-sector labor and the needy isn't much deeper than a mutual interest in having the government redistribute money, and the pension crisis threatens to absorb more of it than social services groups can afford. What's particularly interesting, though, is that the alliances that have formed like fingers around Rhode Island's throat have created another division: between the members of various groups and their government-class leaders.

The deeper alliance, that is, is between the labor leaders, like Mr.Walsh, and the professional advocates who usually speak for the poor. They represent the core of the left-wing movement, and although a few groups might splinter off, the members who actually suffer by the difficulties of bad governance will have to replace their own leaders before a new paradigm becomes possible.

Mr. Walsh should take note of that fact. Eventually, the teachers who ultimately give him his power will figure out that his interests aren't the same as theirs, much less of the state in which they live and work.


September 9, 2011


The Employee's Leverage

Justin Katz

Statements such as the following are so foreign to my way of seeing things that there must be some fundamental question at the bottom of the difference:

To understand how we got here, first consider the Ben Franklin-Horatio Alger-Henry Ford ur-myth: To balk at working hard -- really, really hard -- brands you as profoundly un-American. All well and good. But today, the driver is no longer American industriousness. It's something more predatory. As Rutgers political scientist Carl Van Horn told the Associated Press recently: "The employee has no leverage. If your boss says, 'I want you to come in the next two Saturdays,' what are you going to say -- no?"

Employees should have plenty of leverage. The company has already invested in their training. They've got institutional knowledge and contacts that take time to develop and that could help competitors even more than just as a matter of training, not the least because employees could take clients and other valuable employees with them. Smart employers also need to protect organizational moral and sense of community purpose.

Never mind that bosses are actually human beings with emotions and moral senses, too.

Leverage comes in making one's self of value. This applies in greatest to degree to star employees, but even those who are merely competent are more valuable than they probably realize — the workforce is full of laziness, dishonesty, cantankerousness, and other qualities that could harm a business's operations. If people want jobs that allow them never to have the courage to stand up to managers on an individual basis, then that comfort is going to come at a price.

Admittedly, multiple factors have made such courage more difficult. For one, prices have adjusted to the assumption of two-income households. For another, we've waded into a swamp of new necessities — from cell phones to expensive higher education — without which we think our lives would be incomplete. (It's one thing to see such things as tools to increase personal value; it's another to think them necessities for which funding must be found.) For a third, government regulations have decreased the ability of employees to take their institutional and occupational knowledge and start off on their own to compete.

That's where this difference in perspective becomes so critical: In the solutions that we believe will alleviate the situation. If employees are helpless cogs, then one will call for more government regulation of employers, more forceful confiscation, and more empowerment of third-party labor organizations. If employees are the company's and the nation's most valuable asset — merely boxed in by cultural and regulatory factors — then one will call for changes in those areas.

The authors of the above-linked essay, Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery don't dive into the former pool, but the only solution that they describe (actually, the beginning of a solution) is to complain to friends and coworkers. Such communication could be a first step in either direction, but it too often precedes the next step of voting for officials who promise to tilt the playing field rather than the next step of standing up too the boss.


September 8, 2011


The Projo's Preferred Narrative

Justin Katz

I notice that the wire story that the Providence Journal chose for its coverage of President Obama's Labor Day speech didn't make mention of the call to arms of Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. The omission would be one thing if the article were narrowly focused on President Obama's words (that is, if they took the spin that only what the president said is newsworthy), but even that isn't applicable:

Before Obama's speech U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis picked up the UAW's frequently used "fired up, ready to go," slogan today as she urged union members to provide vocal support to U.S. President Barack Obama, who soon will unveil a new jobs plan.

"It won't be an easy thing to do," Solis said. "We know some will fight us and...some will say we can't afford to invest in our workforce."

Solis also criticized those who are trying to reduce the salaries, benefits and collective bargaining rights of union members.

I suppose a major figure in labor warming up Obama's audience with declarations that unions should target the opposition in such a way as to "take the son-of-bitches out" doesn't quite fit the narrative of Tea Party as terrorists versus the well-meaning president (who can only be faulted for giving in to the extreme Republicans in his urge to hear all sides).


September 1, 2011


Using the Legislature to Increase Union Leverage

Justin Katz

Senator Frank Ciccone, who was a leading voice for legislation to generate some monopoly business for a particular media purchase agent and who makes $161,168 working for the Laborers' State Council, wants to provide micromanagement-level oversight of quasi-public entities:

In a letter that went out to the top administrators of these agencies on Aug. 25, Ciccone posed a series of questions, such as this: Does the agency give bonuses to any of its employees? Does it pay overtime?

Does it provide any form of compensation to its board members, including "travel, lodging, meals, training and, or education and if so, please provide a list of all compensation and/or reimbursement that board members received in FY 2011?"

Does the agency make "charitable and non-charitable contributions" and, if so, did its "employees or board members receive any benefits from [these] contributions, such as tickets, meals or golfing?"

Each letter also asks the administrator of each agency to "please list all gifts, benefits or other compensation that vendors or consultants gave to employees or board members in FY 2011."

That looks to me like an information-gathering effort for his union employer and its other allies in labor. Just another indication of why it doesn't have to be illegal to be corruption in Rhode Island.

It occurs to me, incidentally, that public-sector unions are essentially quasi-public entities, inasmuch as they collect their revenue directly from government revenue and conduct their activities with in and for the purpose of government operations. Surely, they should be receiving bullying letters and demands from legislative boards, especially considering the recent antics of executives in the National Education Association Rhode Island.


August 23, 2011


Compressing the Same Workforce

Justin Katz

What am I missing in this story?

Providence teachers on Tuesday voted overwhelmingly to approve a three-year contract that guarantees that every fired teacher will be returned to the district in exchange for substantial concessions.

But:

The unprecedented decision to fire every teacher and close five schools left teachers and parents angry and demoralized. Although the mayor later recalled three-fourths of the faculty, the remaining teachers had to apply for openings via a job fair this spring that some felt was unfair.

So the city closed five schools but is still going to employ the same number of teachers? The article mentions fewer sick days, longer school days, an end to seniority, and the union's dropping a lawsuit that had sought to prevent the end of seniority-based hiring. No doubt there are significant savings in the deal, and ending seniority is a structural change worth some negotiation. The end of seniority was coming, though, and it's probable that the long-term expenses of a too-large workforce will soon swamp the savings of a dropped lawsuit.

At the least, this is a good example of the inefficiencies of government and the lethargy with which it changes.


August 16, 2011


Life Expectancy Follow Up

Justin Katz

You'll recall, from a couple of weeks ago, the commentary of Robert Barber, a retired Cranston police captain eight years into a retirement that he began at 50. Well, PolitiFact has looked into his very specific claim that "law-enforcement officers die 10 years earlier than the general population" and found it wanting:

Whether a person was age 50, 55, 60 or 65, the life expectancies of the police officers were slightly higher than for other workers. For example, men age 60 who had taken regular retirement were projected to live to age 82.7, versus age 81.9 for workers who were not in the public safety field. (Firefighter rates were close to those for police officers.)

Even when CalPERS added in all the men who had retired as a result of work-related injuries, the life expectancies of the police officers were essentially identical to other public employees. The life expectancy for someone age 60, regardless of why they stopped working, was 81.8 years, just a tenth of a year lower than for regular workers.

According to other research cited, public safety officers appear only to have shorter life expectancies than other public-sector employees. (Apparently, nobody lives longer than female public-school teachers.)

Why Barber's statement is only "false," not "pants on fire," I'm not sure.


August 12, 2011


Saving Everybody from Themselves

Justin Katz

On July 14, Andrew put up an excellent post responding to a comment from Michael Morse and explaining what we mean when we talk about the inherent corruption of the public sector, particularly with respect to unionization:

When someone regularly deals on a firsthand basis with people in need of real help -- and in the case of public safety workers, people who are in real danger -- it is natural to prioritize the needs of those making or answering calls for help ahead of the monitions raised by people not immediate in distress, who are asking for relief from the strains they feel are being created by publicly-imposed obligations. But just like self-interest is not inherently bad, but leads to problems when pressed too far, so too can the impulse to help those whom we have most direct contacts with create problems and confusion, when effects of our actions on people outside of our personal interactions are too severely discounted. No human being is immune to this, which means no human system is immune to this.

The next day, Michael made a relevant appearance in a Bob Kerr column titled, "It keeps happening because no one tries to stop it":

... among the shooting victims and stabbing victims, those injured in traffic accidents and those hurt in fires, are the drunks. There will always be the drunks because, says Morse, they are a problem that is tolerated rather than dealt with. There have been a few initiatives, some trying to shift the focus from the physical to the psychological. But they haven't gotten anywhere. The drunks keep falling and the city has to keep picking them up.

"They're survivors," says Morse. "I don't get angry. They're using the tools at their disposal. They get to eat and get cleaned up at the hospital. If they're a little too ripe, they get new clothes."

There will always be drunks, but I'm not sure one can blame society for not "dealing with" their problems. Indeed, it's not unlikely that public efforts to assist alcoholics reinforce the thinking and bad impulses that draws them to the bottle in the first place. (Rephrasing it from language of personal decisions and responsibility to language of psychological disease doesn't gain us any ground, here.)

Being familiar with Bob Kerr, I'm comfortable inferring that his means of dealing with alcoholics problems would take some form of government action to alleviate "root causes." If they've got some diagnosable medical issue (such as depression), he'd have the government provide them with treatment and medicine. If they're lacking for material comforts, he'd have the government supply them. If they're chronically unemployed, he'd have the government employ them, train them, and give them subsidies while waiting for them to conclude that working a whole lot harder for a little bit of income beyond the subsidies makes sense.

In other words, he'd respond using methods that have seemed to me only to prolong adolescence and cultivate dependence when applied to teenagers.

Kerr begins and ends the column lauding a woman who took time out of her life to stop and call 911 to help a particular drunk passed out on the street. Even in a libertarian construct, there is an extent to which we are obligated to deal with drunks, even if only to keep them from disrupting the lives of everybody else. If the expense isn't too great relative to the society's wealth, picking them and helping them home is preferable to turning them into criminals.

But the error to which we incline when we take that woman's compassion as a model for public policy is one of hindering long-term objectives in the service of the short-term gratification that comes with feeling compassionate. We will never eliminate the problems of human society and remain human. To alleviate those problems, though, and to improve the lot of our fellows as individuals, we ought to focus less on assuring them that we will do everything we can for them and more on creating a society in which the rewards of better decisions can overcome the lure of self destruction.

That means making it less difficult for people to find ways of supporting themselves. It means getting government out of the way of both productive activities and destructive stumbles. And it means returning to a confidence in higher purpose and more profound truths than a Marxist can admit.


August 11, 2011


The Verizon Strike - Reality Calling

Monique Chartier

Disclaimer preamble: The matter of labor unions does not move me either to cheers or to condemnation: neither the philosophy itself of workers banding together - now that we are many decades past sweat shops - nor as the cause of the state's current fiscal travails. (The overwhelming responsibility for the latter accrues to our elected officials - but more on that some other time.)

45,000 Verizon workers went on strike Sunday.

I sincerely hope that they arrive at a new contract soon. It's no more fun for employees to walk the picket line than it is for managers, et al, to work double shifts trying to service customers.

I just have one question (and a follow up).

These employees have been paying zero towards their health insurance?

Verizon wants unionized workers, who currently pay no monthly premiums for health care, to begin contributing at least $100 a month, or $1,200 a year.

And they propose to continue doing so?


August 1, 2011


Re: Disabled (Ha!)

Justin Katz

Monique's already expressed a justified skepticism about this:

Former firefighter John Sauro remains permanently and totally disabled from doing his job in the Fire Department, an orthopedic surgeon has concluded after a special examination.

But the surgeon recommended additional tests to confirm his finding.

The report by Dr. Anthony DeLuise Jr. was submitted Wednesday to the city Retirement Board, which voted to have the additional tests done.

Sauro, you'll recall, retired in his late thirties with his tax-free disability pension of $45,600 and fully paid health benefits and at age 48 spends a great deal of time bodybuilding. As Monique highlights, Dr. DeLuise's conclusion was based on a physical exam, viewing of WPRI's sting video of Sauro's workout, and the decade-old medical records that won Sauro his boon in the first place.

This initial finding is just part of the process, of course — which process appears designed to delay and give politicians and bureaucrats plenty of opportunity to grant Sauro and his union a soft exit from the public spotlight. Meanwhile, in the wave of controversy and careful phrases, like "permanently and totally disabled from doing his job," the larger question is lost:

  • Even if Sauro has difficulty with a very limited range of motion
  • and even if the risk of further injury makes it inadvisable for him to perform active firefighter duties
  • should a public-safety-job-related injury mean that the employee never has to work another day in his life even though his impairment is so minimal as to be unobservable?

July 29, 2011


Feedback and the Public Sector Exemption

Justin Katz

A recurring theme arose when the Providence School Board voted to eliminate administrator unionization:

[Stephen Kane, executive secretary of the Association of Providence Public School and Staff Administrators] now worries that the fate of each administrator will be left to "the whim of the School Board. Of course, it's going to get personal. It's going to get political."

You can call it "whim" or "judgment," but granting responsibility throughout any organizational hierarchy is the most effective way to ensure efficiency and productivity. Whether the goal is corporate profit or public education, whether consumers react to policies through purchase decisions or taxpayers through votes, administrators must be accountable to policy makers, and policy makers must be accountable to stakeholders.

Unions certainly change the calculation a bit for their members, but not unlike resistors in an electrical circuit, they inherently distort the feedback loop by distributing some of that responsibility onto labor processes. That can have its benefits, but over the long term, it hinders the organization's ability to adjust to the interests of those it ostensibly serves.

And when the organization is a government entity, it can survive by fiat as problems fester.


July 28, 2011


Productivity Isn't in the Union Interest

Justin Katz

The budget battle has come and gone, but one section of an op-ed that Independent state Senator Ed O'Neil published in May is worth considering:

George Nee, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, has said publicly that we should give our state workers a chance to improve productivity. They know best how to get the job done. I agree with Mr. Nee on this point.

Operational excellence is a natural outcome of people working as a team. Everyone needs an oar in the water to get our costs down. A new day has dawned, and Rhode Islanders are beginning to realize that we need to work together to get our state operations lean. That means better thinking, better systems, better tools, and better leadership.

Employees may "know best" how their workplace functions, but it isn't in their interest to be more efficient. In the business world, employees at least know that increases in their pay require expansion of their employers' revenue or dollars freed up through productivity. They also know that their jobs are at risk if the financial reality goes the other way.

In the government world, increases in pay are tied to political leverage. It doesn't have to be that way; super-productive workers could lead to low-cost government that satisfies more recipients of government services while not causing excessive pain to taxpayers, thus accruing credit to elected officials, but decades of maneuvering by bureaucratic administrators and labor unions have left us in an untenable position.

Citizens are paying so much, often for services that they don't want, that a correction is necessary. Therefore, employees would be far down the line in profiting from the efficiencies that increased productivity would create — after decreasing debt and eliminating deficits and after decreasing the cost of government to residents. Organized union entities have even more reason to undermine efficiency: An employee might stand to profit if his or her high efficiency eliminates the need for the public to hire additional workers, but the union to which he or she belongs would stand to lose dues and political clout.



Public Sector and Politics

Justin Katz

Last night, Monique reviewed some Anchor Rising posts with guest host Tony Cornetta on the Matt Allen Show. Stream by clicking here, or download it.


July 27, 2011


Private and Public Sector Differences in Calculation

Justin Katz

The intention of the City of Providence to hire 72 new firefighters would make an interesting case study for anybody learning about public administration:

When an hourly employee in the private sector quits, it is not unusual for the employer to put off hiring a replacement. Instead, the employer has another person pick up the slack on overtime pay. ...

But that is not what the City of Providence is going to do in the Fire Department. ...

According to [Administration Director Michael] D'Amico, the initial crop of new hires would cost the city $2,195,000 a year but overtime would be reduced by an estimated $1,872,000 in fiscal year 2013 and then by an estimated $3,744,000 annually. ...

The second crop would not save on overtime costs because those hired would replace firefighters who are expected to retire. But the new group would be paid lower wages than the senior people they replace, so the city will save an estimated $270,000 in fiscal year 2016, according to D'Amico.

Two critical differences between the private and public sectors, changing the calculation for each, are that private-sector companies don't necessarily hire at the bottom rung, because experience is critical. New hires in the fire department therefore stand to make much less than current employees, especially current employees on overtime.

The second difference is that private sector companies don't tend to be bound in their quest for efficiencies by "minimum manning" requirements that force them to have a certain number of employees on the job. That's a separate debate, but it does give companies more latitude to adjust to their changing workforces.

One big omission from the article, and perhaps the hiring decision itself, is the calculation of pensions and other retirement benefits (such as healthcare). In keeping with the discussion that we've been having about the use of pensions to hide the real cost of public labor. It may be cheaper right now to bring on new firefighters, but as we're learning, the accumulation of retirees can create a substantial annual burden.


July 26, 2011


NEARI's John Leidecker Rallies the Troops Against the South Kingstown School Committee ... and South Kingstown Children

Monique Chartier

The following e-mail was sent out recently, presumably to all members of the NEARI.

Background: South Kingstown's teacher contract expires at the end of August. Daniel Kinder, referenced in the e-mail, is the attorney advising the South Kingstown School Committee. Here is what the School Committee said recently about negotiations between the town and the NEA-SK. You will also glean from the e-mail that the NEA-SK filed a complaint against the SK SC with the State Labor Board, accusing the Committee of bargaining in bad faith and "surface bargaining".

Bigger picture, the NEARI (which incorporates the word "education" in its name) is fighting, in South Kingstown and around the state, the shift away from seniority authorized by Education Commissioner Deborah Gist. Why? How exactly does the hiring and retention of teachers basis seniority rather than merit ensure that students receive a good education?

Dan Kinder is at it again and we need your help.

Here is the background:

The South Kingstown School Committee has refused to bargain with the teachers over seniority, transfer, assignment, layoff and recall. This, after the teachers agreed to significant concessions. We have filed an unfair labor practice charge for bad faith bargaining and surface
bargaining.

This past Wednesday, Dan Kinder filed a complaint for Declaratory Judgment before Judge Savage. The complaint, in short, asks the judge to declare that Title 16 (Education law) supersedes Title 28 (Collective Bargaining). If we lose that, we will no longer be able to bargain seniority, transfer, assignment, layoff and recall.

These same questions are pending before other bodies at the moment. The Providence Teachers Union has asked the Board of Regents to respond to the Commissioner's statements on seniority. And, again, we have the bargaining issue before the Labor Board.

Kinder failed to include the Labor Board as a party in the complaint, despite specifically requesting a ruling that would end the Board's authority. Judge Savage said she would not set a briefing schedule unless all the parties were before her. We are supposed to be back in her court this coming Thursday.

The link is to CitizenSpeak and we are trying to pressure the SK School Committee to withdraw the suit. Your help is greatly appreciated. I'm copying this to our Sisters and Brothers at the RIFTHP, since it is of obvious significance to them.

Here's the link:

http://www.citizenspeak.org/campaign/skteachersspeak/stop

Thanks,

John Leidecker
Assistant Executive Director
NEARI




Who Is Talking About Fairness

Justin Katz

I'm beginning to wonder whether all of the stories are like this or whether there's some other reason so many of the people who step forward to be faces of the pension crisis seem unlikely to evoke sympathy. Here's one from the hearing at which Central Falls Receiver Robert Flanders asked public-sector pensioners to agree to a cut in their benefits:

Michael Long, a retired police sergeant who said he suffered a neck injury when he was run over during a shooting, got a big round of applause and later a standing ovation when he asked Flanders, "Where is the fairness?"

Long, now a practicing lawyer, said that the retirees are being asked to surrender up to $20,000 of their pensions that are in the $35,000 to $40,000 range. Bankruptcy, he suggested, might be a better option.

"We will take our chances," he said.

Well might Long take the risk of bankruptcy, considering that he's got another income as a lawyer. According to this posting Long was on the force for just eleven years, and as reported in the New York Times, he's 54 and lives in Attleboro, Massachusetts.

A reasonable guess would be that Long has already collected his pension for about twenty years, perhaps twice the number of years that he worked as a police officer. Justifiably, he used the resources offered to build a new career as a lawyer (and moved or remained outside of the punitive state from which his pension is drawn). So where's the fairness for the Rhode Islander who cannot find work and has no tax-free disability pension to support a change of occupation? Where's the fairness for those who expect never to be able to retire at all thanks to the government albatross dangling from the economy's neck?


July 24, 2011


Crediting the Good, While Debiting the Bad

Justin Katz

It's come up in the comment sections, but I've been meaning to comment on Michael Morse's essay describing the ghosts that haunt the urban firefighter-EMT's dreams after twenty years on the job since I first read it in early June. Michael puts those who focus on the affordability of public-sector pay and pensions in a delicate position — deliberately, I imagine. Who could look such a man in the eye and balance tax rates against the trauma of his experience?

Such balances have to be made, however, and both sides of public policy questions have to be weighed. Were resources unlimited, and were human nature less complex, we might be able to assess the value of every job based on the case that its practitioners could make for themselves. As it is, we have to be a bit more circumspect about various measurements of value.

For one thing, firefighters and EMTs are not solely rewarded through their pay and benefits. Michael provides a bullet list of dramatic scenes — murders, suicides, child abuse, and accidents — but (for this particular essay, at least) he places his hand over the other side of the ledger. How many days did he drive home justifiably feeling heroic? How many lives has he had the opportunity to save? People to help? His twenty years haven't been a long slog of death and unavoidable failure, and while one can place a dollar value on neither the strain of helplessness nor the euphoria of defeating death and destruction, at some abstract and variable point, they would surely balance without any monetary compensation at all to make up the difference.

The careful reader might note a mild contradiction in Michael's text: When speaking of the passage of time between his early days on the job and the present, he writes that "20 years passed in the blink of an eye." Yet, a few sentences later, "20 years in firefighter time is a long, long time." That's hardly an "a-ha!" catch on my part. "The blink of an eye" is a mere turn of phrase, and the reference to "firefighter time" evokes the fullness of the days, weeks, and months. An important point hides within the contrast, though.

Michael's twenty years have been rich in experience, and despite the tone of his essay, not all of them have been haunting and negative. Some midlevel corporate functionary who's trudged through the same length of time among gray cubicle walls bathed in florescent lights pushing numbers along some process watching his body soften and sag every time the computer screen goes blank won't have the smell of charred infants in his nostrils, but neither will he know the pulse of a revived heart beneath his palms. Time is slow, indeed, for those with no cause to blink.

Even with life affirmation and a sense of purpose somehow factored into the equation, it may very well be that twenty years is too long for some men and women to spend battling flames and injury in particular environments. If that's the case, it still isn't obvious that the solution is twenty to thirty years of retirement, particularly when the cost thereof threatens the very solvency of the local civic structure. Perhaps the solution lies in the opposite direction — removing the incentive to linger on the job for so long, making firefighting an experience shared by more people, earlier in their lives. Or perhaps the necessary changes needn't be so dramatic.

Whatever the case, I can only encourage Michael to enlist the memories of his victories in the fight against his demons. An unsustainable pension system can in no way substitute for the strength that he has within.


July 20, 2011


Lack of Sympathy for the Pensioner

Justin Katz

Time will tell whether I'm an isolated cold heart or part of a growing swell, but I'm having trouble mustering the sympathy that the preferred storyline implies I should feel for public-sector pensioners. The "human angle" that the Providence Journal tried to emphasize in an article yesterday provides an excellent example:

In fact, [Donald] Cardin, 46, who retired [from the Central Falls fire department] in 2008 after 22 years as a firefighter, needs to work to pay the bills. He formed his own company, D'Amico Painting Contractors, in North Providence. He climbs ladders, scrapes shingles and spreads on new coats of latex because he can't live on an annual pension of $36,000, which breaks down to $28,800 after taxes.

I have no problem stipulating that anybody who "retires" at 43 should have to continue working in some fashion. At that age, the money that the pensioner receives shouldn't be more accurately described as "residual income" from a previous job, or somesuch. And Cardin may consider that guaranteed $36,000 "peanuts," but one must wonder how many of the painters with whom he competes have such a nice cushion, including (it must be noted) his completely free Blue Cross & Blue Shield.

That's the perspective that ought to dominate during meetings of General Treasurer Gina Raimondo's pension advisory board. Instead, we get reports of this:

Some panel members questioned whether state and local plans are meeting professional recommendations that retirees should receive anywhere from 65 to 80 percent of their salaries when pensions, Social Security (if applicable) and personal savings are added up.

Alicia H. Munnell, former assistant to the Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and head of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, said she is worried that people are not in the habit of putting money into savings, and that public pension plans need to take this into account.

By the time one retires, one should have saved enough and paid off enough of their mortgages and so on to scale back on expenditures once they're no longer employed. In the private sector, with its absence of official retirement ages, readiness is part of what determines whether a worker can stop working. There's no reason public sector employees should be any different just because they can band together in powerful unions that help elect the people who make decisions about their income.

Moreover, if "people" are not saving enough in general, then it makes little sense to take more money out of their paychecks in order to fund defined benefit pensions for folks retiring well before they've truly exhausted their working years. That's why, when I read such statements as this, I remain unmoved:

"One can debate whether it's good or bad, fair or unfair policy, but legally it makes no difference," contended Tarantino. "We've read and heard a lot about 'broken promises,' and there's a visceral reaction to that. In the world according to John Tarantino, people should keep their promises."

Granted, lawyer John Tarantino was laying some sympathetic gauze over his argument that the state should be able to change the terms of existing pensions, but this stuff about "promises" ought to be considered more specifically. When most of the pension "promises" that are strangling our towns, states, and nation were made, I was just beginning to work and not of voting age. I didn't even live in Rhode Island. Why should I insure public employees against the possibility that they didn't save enough to retire comfortably in their forties and fifties?


July 19, 2011


Training for Jobs That Don't Exist

Justin Katz

Under normal circumstances, this program might be an unalloyed positive, and I do believe that every student should have some familiarity with construction and trades:

On Olmsted Way, a short street across from the Wanskuck Mill on Charles Street, 10 graduates of the YouthBuild Providence program are at work this summer, renovating 24 apartments in two buildings at the Olmsted Gardens affordable-housing complex. ...

In the YouthBuild Providence program, www.youthbuildprov.org, part of the national YouthBuild network, low-income youths ages 16 to 24 work to earn their GEDs or high school diplomas while also learning job skills by building affordable housing. Marques said the 10-month educational program includes alternating weeks of classroom work and on-the-job training.

The money for the program appears to come, ultimately, through the federal government, in part (one infers) by paying for the projects, which thereby operate with the inexpensive labor. But are public dollars spent on training for a flailing industry really a good idea?

The organization's Web site calls construction "a booming industry in our state that is poised for substantial growth." Another article in Sunday's Providence Journal, however, describes the industry's employment position as follows:

In building construction, slight job gains in commercial and industrial construction are being swamped by losses in residential, where foreclosures, tight credit and depressed prices have taken a toll. In June, residential and commercial building companies employed 1.2 million workers, down 15,900, or 1.3% from a year earlier, according to the Labor Department.

Back in October, Rhode Island led the nation in its percentage of construction jobs lost, and I haven't seen any evidence that much has changed. That means that job training programs focusing on building are adding low-end labor to an industry that already has a great deal of downward pressure on employment and salaries. And a 10-month program does so relatively quickly.

That sounds like a blueprint for stagnation for older workers and disappointment for new entrants to the trade. Were it a (gasp) for-profit program — with enrollees paying for their training — it would have to adjust to economic trends. With government funding, the folks making the financial decisions aren't those who stand to gain or lose by graduates' success or failure, and the bureaucracy in place to funnel the funds generates its own motivation.


July 14, 2011


The Meaning of Corruption

Carroll Andrew Morse

Commenter Michael responded to Justin's statement from earlier in the week concerning "the faulty attitude under which the public sector has become corrupted" by saying…

The public sector is not corrupted. These generalized comments, written as fact are what prompts me to draw the proverbial line in the sand and defend the public sector without participating in any worthwhile debate due to the preconceived "fact" that my employment status and ethics are questionable, and my work and compensation tainted.
I'm going to cover a fair amount of ground in a short space, so there may be a gap or two...

To understand the rift that has opened between public sector organizations and the public, the meaning of corruption has to be understood in its broadest sense. The term corruption as used in news reports usually denotes acts of thievery and dishonestly committed by a public officials or employees. Corruption, however, also suggests something that happens before the corrupt act, i.e. how it is that surrendering to temptation might change a person.

The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr succinctly and poignantly discussed what he called "the corruption of self-interest" in his essay on the realism of St. Augustine...

It is this powerful self-love or, in modern terms, "egocentricity", this tendency of the self to make itself its own end or even to make itself the false center of whatever community it inhabits, which sows confusion into every human community....
(What, you mean Reinhold Niebuhr and St. Augustine aren't the first sources you think of, when discussing public labor tensions in Rhode Island?)

Humans are susceptible to the temptations that arise not only from the self-interest expressly highlighted by Niebuhr, but also from an interest in helping those who immediately surround them. Most obviously, personal interests widen to take into account an individual's family and immediate friends. In the case of many public employees, the widening beyond strict self-interest frequently takes another form. When someone regularly deals on a firsthand basis with people in need of real help -- and in the case of public safety workers, people who are in real danger -- it is natural to prioritize the needs of those making or answering calls for help ahead of the monitions raised by people not immediate in distress, who are asking for relief from the strains they feel are being created by publicly-imposed obligations. But just like self-interest is not inherently bad, but leads to problems when pressed too far, so too can the impulse to help those whom we have most direct contacts with create problems and confusion, when effects of our actions on people outside of our personal interactions are too severely discounted. No human being is immune to this, which means no human system is immune to this. (Well, maybe DMV clerks are immune. Whether you are right in front of them or completely out of their sight and mind seems to make no difference to how they treat you).

The social and political environment that individuals live in will either enhance or dissuade the potential for the corruption of self-interest that exists in all of us. We have learned from history that the potential is greatly enhanced when one person or group is given power over others to say that we're taking from you what we deserve, that we will tell you how much you owe us, and that there's nothing you can do to alter how much we are going to take. This is a dynamic that has created lots of turmoil throughout history. To maintain a functioning society that does not succumb to that turmoil, political institutions need to be designed to dissuade more than enhance this tendency of one group of people to try to take from another in pursuit of their personal interests. The emphasis is on the political here because political institutions are the most easily changed. Social systems can be changed too, but more slowly and with more unpredictable results. The laws of economics cannot be changed, no matter what liberals and progressives may think.

Unfortunately, right now in the United States, we live under a number of governmental processes that do more to enhance than to dissuade the inescapable potential for corruption that is part of the human condition. For a small example, consider the mischief with disability pensions from Rhode Island's recent past. Were the people who took advantage of this flaw in the system granting them early "retirements" fundamentally different from people now? Are we going to confidently claim that we are significantly more honest than our predecessors from just a decade or two before? I think a more reasonable answer is that a badly designed system allowed the worst impulses that exist in everyone to be enhanced and acted upon.

For a more important example, consider the period of time where the union representatives on the City of Providence retirement board were allowed to vote themselves benefits, regardless of what the representatives accountable to the entire community might decide. The union reps voted themselves huge benefit packages, without regard to how paying for those benefits would impact the community. They didn't outright want to hurt others, but since the union reps felt the positive effects of their decisions directly, while the negative impacts were on people they weren't directly connected to, they didn't care. This is a crystal-clear manifestation of Niebuhr's concept of the corruption of self-interest sowing the seeds of confusion into the community.

To prevent the corruption of self-interest from running rampant through our government, we need to restore some basic checks and balances into our political systems that insure that government being responsible to all of the people. We cannot let one group of citizens make extreme long-term claims on a piece of the livelihoods and property of others, without expecting some very negative consequences. We cannot leave a future generation encumbered by circumstances they are not responsible for. It is our responsibility, as citizens in a democratic society, to design a system that passes along to the next generation as much of the stuff we know about making government work despite the limitations of human nature, while not saddling the next generation with our mistakes. Right now, we have a political system that too often exhibits an unfortunate tendency to do the opposite.


July 12, 2011


Pensions Are an Example, Not the Whole Problem

Justin Katz

I'm skeptical that anything substantial will come of the current push for pension reform among elected officials, but even if some positive change results, I'm concerned that elected officials and the public alike will wipe their hands together with a collective "problem solved." This article explaining that growing pension costs promise to eat up whole increases in school budgets for the next fiscal year, for example, doesn't offer any hint that labor costs have been doing just that for years, decades.

But let's start with the faulty attitude under which the public sector has become corrupted:

"In some regards the state Retirement Board made its adjustments in a void without thinking about the wealth of the communities in the state or conflicts with the tax levy cap," Peder A. Schaefer, assistant director of the [Rhode Island League of Cities and Towns], said.

The only consideration that the Retirement Board ought to make when setting payment requirements is what reasonable predictions should be applied. The fact that the promises of elected officials will be difficult to requite does not lead to the conclusion that the state ought to pretend otherwise, which is what Schaefer is ultimately suggesting.

The executive director of the Rhode Island Association of School Committees, Tim Duffy, gets a little closer to my main subject, though:

"Hopefully the pension review commission will address this major problem," Duffy, from the school committee association, said. "Otherwise we have a situation that doesn't even allow for critical decision-making by school committees. "They won't even have the ability to weigh what [programs] are most important to student learning because basically they'll have budgets that are just funding a retirement system."

This dynamic is nothing new. Schools have been ending programs (like music) and forcing parents to pay separately for sports precisely because school budgets, which almost never actually decrease, whatever enrollment may do, are basically just funding the salaries and benefits of the adults employed within them. Pensions are unique because they were future payments that administrators didn't have to slip into the system on an regular basis, as they have had to do with salaries and more immediate benefits, like healthcare.

Even with those, though, the game is stacked in the unions' favor, with steps, longevity, and the arsenal of budgetary tricks that make voters believe that they have no choice but to pay up. We don't need structural changes just for pensions. We need them for our entire school system.


July 5, 2011


Providence used as example of how "Compensation Monster [is] Devouring Cities"

Marc Comtois

Steve Malanga looks at the national problem of cities in over their heads (particularly because of pension promises) and uses Providence (and New Haven, CT) as examples:

Cities are also running out of fiscal alternatives to deal with their deficits. Like states...many cities have used one-shot revenue deals, hidden borrowing, and other gimmicks to bolster their finances. The weak economy has lasted so long, though, that these techniques have been exhausted. To balance its 2010 budget, for example, Providence, Rhode Island, borrowed some $48 million (using its fire stations and headquarters as collateral); it also drained most of its reserve fund, which shrank from $17 million to $2 million in just one year. Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings subsequently downgraded the city’s bond ratings by two notches, essentially ending its ability to use fiscal gimmicks. But Providence still faces a budget squeeze because its retiree costs amount to 50 percent of tax collections.
Nationally, the rate of growth of such local expenditures outpaced state and federal:
Local governments also helped bring on their current budget nightmares by carelessly expanding hiring and wages in recent boom years. In the decade leading up to the 2008 financial crash, the number of workers for cities, towns, and schools increased 16 percent, even though the country’s overall population grew just 12.5 percent. Wages also increased, and, of course, the hiring frenzy made those pension obligations even worse. The result: over the same decade, the total in wages and benefits that public schools paid to teachers and noninstructional staff (to take one category of public-sector worker) jumped an amazing 72 percent, despite moderate increases in student enrollment.
As Ted Nesi highlighted, albeit over a longer period, local government payrolls increased while state payrolls went down. Some argue that the cuts in state jobs have led to the increases at the local level. But, looking at Nesi's chart, it's obvious the local growth doesn't equate to the state reduction.



NEA Disapproves of and Supports Obama

Marc Comtois

Anyone who keeps abreast of education issues knows that teachers are not particularly enamored with President Obama's education reform: Race to the Top (RI Ed. Commissioner Deborah Gist certainly takes heat for her local championing of this national policy), school turnaround models (think Central Falls) or expanding charter schools are just a few policies that rank-and-file teachers regularly castigate in comments sections at various blogs (education or political) or newspapers, for instance.

That's why it was no surprise when, in a recent address to the national convention of the NEA, Vice-President Biden was greeted with loud applause when he stated that, according to the AP, "there's widespread unhappiness among teachers for the Obama administration's education policies."

That's the same AP story explaining that the NEA has already endorsed President Obama for re-election. (No word yet if the RI tactic--tacitly endorsed by the silence from NEARI leadership--of having six-figure union leaders harass and bully* political opponents will be part of the national effort of the NEA).

I suppose the argument is that the NEA has no where else to go, right? It's too bad the rank and file have put themselves in the position of removing half of the electorate from political consideration. You'd think an organization composed of people who deal with all types of kids and their parents would be a little less inclined to have such an attitude. Maybe be a little more open minded. After all, conservatives are generally the ones who support more local control for education (instead of the imposition of, we're oft told by teachers, unrealistic, idealistic education mandates from above). Federal guidelines are inherently less flexible than those controlled locally. Local entities can more easily put pressure on local politicians and bureaucrats to effect change (for good or ill), whether that pressure is applied regarding teacher pay and benefits or the more important education quality and student-centric issues.

But it's pretty obvious that pedagogy and policy really are second-tier concerns. Actions indicate that the real concern of the rank and file--as the binding arbitration legislation shows and no matter the "for the children" gloss that is put out--is pay and benefits (not surprising nor meant to be damning--we all have our fiscal self-interests). I guess the NEA leadership is banking that the Democratic Party still provides the best chance for being "taken care of" as far as monetary compensation while "job quality" issues (ie; federal mandates and student-centric reform) take a back seat. The lack of dissent amongst the rank and file regarding the Obama endorsement indicates the NEA leaders' political calculations are correct.

*Incidentally, remember the big anti-bullying push in schools this year? Glad NEARI is setting an example.


June 30, 2011


UPDATE: For Binding Arb, as the Magic 8-Ball Might Say, It's Very Doubtful

Carroll Andrew Morse

Lisa Blais of the Rhode Island Tea Party just posted the following to her Facebook page...

League of Cities and Towns received assurance that binding arb. will not be a problem tonight. RI School Committee Association Exec Dir. given same assurance but will not leave the State House until the session is officially closed. We may indeed be out of the woods for this year.
ADDENDUM:

Jennifer D. Jordan has a story up at 7-to-7, including an official quote from House Speaker Gordon Fox...

House Speaker Gordon D. Fox announced at 7:45 Thursday evening that a bill that would expand binding arbitration for teachers will not move foward, ending one of the most contentious battles of the last days of the legislative session.



All You Need to Know About Binding Arbitration

Justin Katz

GoLocalProv puts the added price tag of binding arbitration for teachers at $2 billion (albeit with few specific details). For my part, I'd say that National Education Association of Rhode Island Executive Director Bob Walsh tells us all we need to know about binding arbitration:

Expanding the binding arbitration law to teachers and other school employees would mean "no strikes, no work-to-rule, no disruption of the education environment," Walsh said. "It will bring labor peace and let teachers teach and just focus on the kids."

Take a moment to roll that statement around in your mind and consider its various angles. People who are willing to "disrupt the education environment" and the communities that they supposedly serve to secure high pay raises and low copays are willing to give up their weapons for binding arbitration. That's how much they expect binding arbitration to work in their favor.



Arbitration and History

Justin Katz

Marc and Matt Allen continued the conversation about binding arbitration on last night's Matt Allen Show and went on to talk a bit about Michelle Bachmann. Stream by clicking here, or download it.


June 29, 2011


UPDATE: Binding Arbitration Passes the Full Senate

Carroll Andrew Morse

The binding arbitration bill has already passed the full Senate, 20-17.

UPDATE:

According to the information of the General Assembly website, Senator Frank Lombardo voted for binding arbitration in committee, in a 5-3 vote for passage, but against the measure on the floor. With the ex-officio votes available (Senators Paiva-Weed, Ruggerio and Algiere can vote in all committees), Senator Lombardo's vote didn't necessarily impact the outcome, but if he is unable to provide a good explanation for why he flip-flopped in the span of several hours, he should from now on be dubbed "The Johnston Joker".



FLASH: Senate Committee Adjourns Arbitration Hearing...then Quickly Reconvenes and Approves

Marc Comtois

Monique called into Matt Allen to report that the Senate Labor Committee had approved binding arbitration after having ended the hearing, clearing the room and then quickly reconvening to vote.

Voting YES (to pass the bill)
Ciccone
Doyle
Goodwin
Lombardo
McCaffrey

Voting NO
Hodgson
Picard
Fogarty

There is still hope in the House, which is hearing testimony as we speak (though supposedly no vote will happen tonight).



Matt Allen on Binding Arb

Carroll Andrew Morse

Matt Allen of WPRO (630AM) is on top of the binding arbitration issue, via his Twitter feed...

Gop State Reps Watson and Ehrhardt send an open letter to the Speaker to adjourn tomorrow and forget binding arb.
15 minutes ago

Larry Berman says the Speaker wants to review the new binding arb bill and review testimony.
1 hour ago

House Speaker's spokesman Larry Berman tells me there will be no vote on Binding Arb. tonight in Labor Committee. Only testimony.
1 hour ago



Re: Binding Arbitration Bill Made Public

Carroll Andrew Morse

This is the current language in Rhode Island law on the right of public school teachers to strike...

"Certified School Teachers' Arbitration", 28-9.3-1(b) It is declared to be the public policy of this state to accord to certified public school teachers the right to organize, to be represented, to negotiate professionally, and to bargain on a collective basis with school committees covering hours, salary, working conditions, and other terms of professional employment; provided, that nothing contained in this chapter shall be construed to accord to certified public school teachers the right to strike.
This is the proposed language in the binding arbitration bill being heard in House and Senate committee hearings today...
28-9.3-9.2 Conduct of teachers during arbitration -- Proceedings -- (a) No certified public school teacher shall participate in a strike.
There is very little difference.

The deal being offered to RI taxpayers is that, in return for being stripped of their rights to have democratically accountable representatives determine how money is to be spent on public schools, they will receive absolutely nothing. This is, of course, what RI teachers' unions refer to as taking a "bargaining" position in good faith.



Binding Arbitration Bill Made Public

Marc Comtois

The arbitration bill has been made public (PDF) along with a press release explaining the rationale. A "Last Best Offer - Final Package" model has been added:

The legislation changes the arbitration process to one in which the complete “Last Best Offer” from both teachers’ unions and management is considered in its entirety, as opposed to the current approach in which various elements of proposals are considered individually. It extends matters eligible for arbitration to wages, and changes the manner in which arbitrators are selected. Under the current system, one arbitrator is chosen by each side in negotiations, and the third arbitrator is selected from the American Arbitration Association. The new legislation proposes that the third arbitrator would be selected instead by the Presiding Justice of the Superior Court from a list of retired judges and justices.
The legislation also outlines what the arbitration panel is supposed to consider before making a decision:
28-9.3-9.2.1 Factors to be considered by the arbitration board. – The arbitrators shall conduct the hearing and render their decision upon the basis of a prompt, peaceful and just settlement of wage or hour disputes or working conditions and terms and conditions of professional employment between the teachers and the school committee by which they are employed. The factors to be considered by the arbitration board shall include, but are not limited to, the following:
(1) The interest and welfare of the students, teachers, and taxpayers;
(2) The city or town’s ability to pay;
(3) Comparison of compensation, benefits and conditions of employment of the school
district in question with compensation, benefits and conditions of employment maintained for other Rhode Island public school teachers;
(4) Comparison of compensation, benefits and conditions of employment of the school
district in question with compensation, benefits and conditions of employment maintained for the same or similar skills under the same or similar working conditions in the local operating area involved; and
(5) Comparison of education qualification and professional development requirements in regard to other professions.
According to various reports, mayors, the Rhode Island Association of School Committees, Education Commissioner Deborah Gist, the Rhode Island League of Cities and Towns, RISC, the Moderate Party, the RI Tea Party and others are against the legislation. For example:
The bill’s opponents say they are concerned that the expansion of binding arbitration would instead place job protections for teachers ahead of sound educational policy.

“The temptation for an arbitrator to look at financial issues — to the detriment of the contract overall — is overwhelming,” said Tim Duffy, executive director of the Rhode Island Association of School Committees.

“If the union says they are willing to freeze pay and give an additional 5 percent to health care, but insist on no changes to existing language that protects, for example, 30 paid days of teacher sick leave each year, will an arbitrator say, ‘Well it’s a good financial deal?’ ” Duffy said.

“Our concern is, the unions understand the difficult environment for wages right now, so what they will use binding arbitration for is to dig in on the contract language they want to protect....We know teacher unions are worried about teacher seniority and teacher evaluations,” Duffy said. “Binding arbitration is a way of handcuffing the entire education-reform movement.”

The only apparent supporters of this legislation are teacher unions. Why?

Are pensioned and retired judges the best people to assess whether the contract proposals offered by municipalities are a result of fiscal reality? Will communities be more generous than otherwise in hopes of possibly "winning" the "last best offer" showdown? What will inevitably happen is that both union and community proposals will mean more dollars for the unions. Like I said before: binding arbitration = tax hike.

Finally, the whole concept of binding arbitration provides an "out" for our elected officials, making it easier for them to avoid really negotiating when that is a major part of the job that we elect them to do. "It wasn't us, the arbitrator made the decision."



Standards for State Employment? Who'd Have Thought?

Justin Katz

An op-ed from Common Cause Rhode Island Executive Director John Marion raises one of those issues that is apt to make the average Rhode Islander wonder why things don't work that way already:

The key to solving this [hiring] problem [in the General Assembly] is to put in place sound human-resources practices — in this case an employee-classification plan. This plan would contain a salary structure to be used to guide who is paid how much, and for what work. With this plan in place the public could hold the General Assembly responsible for any raises that deviated from the salary structure for any given job. ...

Determining what is necessary to do a job requires you to look at the job content, the job context, the intensity of the mental processes required and the effect of the work on results. The content of a job includes which knowledge and skills are necessary to complete the work, including any specialized knowledge. The job context includes the conditions the person works in, such as the seasonal nature of different tasks. Looking at those factors you can create a job description to then be used in recruitment or performance evaluation for that position. Those who do the hiring, in this case the leadership of the General Assembly, would have to justify hires, raises or promotions on the basis of objective qualifications for the position.

In areas dealing with union labor, the contracts do some of that work, but that only highlights additional ways in which such a system would benefit the public — by moving matters of employment further from the negotiating table.

In any event, the reform is so obvious and straightforward that it would surely require a concerted fight over at least a decade to even bring it into the realm of possibility. For the time being, we should just try to make names like that of Senate Majority Leader Dominique Ruggerio's special assistant, union-boss son Stephen Iannazzi infamous.


June 28, 2011


Everybody Wants Action

Justin Katz

Everybody's telling us to call our legislators. An email from the Rhode Island Statewide Coalition (RISC):

THE WORST SCENARIO IS NOW UPON US, AS RISC HAS WARNED. IF THERE WERE EVER A TIME TO PICK UP YOUR PHONE OR EMAIL YOUR LEGISLATOR, IT IS NOW!

THE LABOR UNIONS HAVE STRUCK A DEAL WITH HOUSE AND SENATE LABOR COMMITTEES TO PASS BINDING ARBITRATION.

HERE'S THE BOTTOM LINE:

Binding Arbitration means even more crushing property taxes...RHODE ISLANDERS ARE ALREADY HURTING WITH HIGH TAXES, BUT THIS UNION POWER GRAB WILL FORCE THEM FROM THEIR HOMES AND CAUSE FISCAL CHAOS IN OUR LOCAL CITIES AND TOWNS.

CALL TODAY AND SHOW UP AT THE STATE HOUSE TOMORROW! IF THIS PASSES, RI TAXPAYERS ARE TOAST. IT COULDN'T BE MORE SERIOUS.

Later, from Ken Block and the Moderate Party:

Binding arbitration is back - and the stakes are huge.

There could not be a worse time for our legislature to consider tieing the hands of local elected leaders by removing from their toolbox the ability to negotiate local labor contracts.

Binding arbitration places the responsibility for negotiating local labor contracts with an unelected third party. We can ill afford to allow an outsider to determine local tax rates, which is in effect what will happen if the expansion of binding arbitration is allowed to proceed.

In a sane polity — and I offer this as a suggestion to those who remain sane around here — any legislator who plays any role in advancing binding arbitration would be considered forever unelectable no matter what he or she might subsequently say or do. But this isn't a sane polity; it's Rhode Island, and if (as rumors suggest) Democrats and labor leaders exchanged a mere wince at the end of state-employee longevity payments for binding arbitration, then they've merely found another variation of the one-time fix.

With binding arbitration, your elected officials cease to be the ones with the final say on expenditures of your money confiscated via taxation. If this is the deal that's been struck, then all Rhode Islanders for whom leaving is a realistic possibility should probably do so.

That conclusion comes, not the least, because only with the death of binding arbitration can there be considered to exist a glimmer of hope that the the state's civic culture could right itself. If binding arbitration comes to be, the wave of groups — from RISC to the Moderate Party to the Ocean State Policy Research Institute (OSPRI) to the RIGOP to Anchor Rising — are no longer "reform groups," but must be considered the voices of a subversive minority, fighting a rear-guard action mainly so that historians can report that some lone voices warned the state.



Binding Arbitration = Tax Hike

Marc Comtois

The House and Senate Labor Committees will be conducting simultaneous hearings and votes on binding arbitration laws tomorrow. A fait accompli? Probably.

Tim Duffy, executive director of the Rhode Island Association of School Committees, whose organization opposes the legislation on grounds that it would make local taxpayers liable for the decisions of an unelected panel, said the move by both labor committees to act on the same legislation on the same day "does not bode well for our ability to stop its happening."

"It indicates a deal has been cut between the House and the Senate leadership to pass a binding arbitration bill," Duffy said. "It seems that the teacher unions have convinced legislative leadership that since the fiscal 2012 budget ended longevity bonuses for state employees they should be awarded binding arbitration as a concession. The state gets $4 million in savings and local government gets to pay for it with a new unfunded mandate."

Quid pro quo (OK, enough Latin)...no one should be surprised. We've been warning about it for a while. Why is it so bad, you may ask? Because it basically takes away the ability of school committees or city and town councils to actually negotiate with unions. Instead, the unions can play a waiting game, go to an arbitrator (or arbitration panel) who will, in the best case scenario, cut the baby in half between two proposals. Arbitrators are wont to look at so-called "comparables"--contracts and compensation data from other communities--that inherently benefit unions (someone, somewhere is always paying more) all while ignoring the actual ability of communities (ie; taxpayers) to pay. The end result: taxes go up.


June 27, 2011


Teacher Union Logic... Maybe It's Me

Justin Katz

There are a number of weird statements in this article about the Providence Teacher Union's attempts to protect seniority-based hiring. First is this statement, which I'm not sure is entirely meant to say what it does but indicates a mentality that surely exists in the public school system:

The new BEP is designed to ensure that the most effective teachers are placed in classrooms of students who have the most need.

If the "most effective" teachers are serving the children "most in need," what about the other students? Somehow our system seems to favor hard cases, which is fine, to an extent, but it doesn't seem like the best strategy for building a globe-leading advanced nation.

Then there's the peculiar union worldview:

[Union lawyer Marc] Gursky says it makes no sense to talk about seniority before the state has rolled out a new system for teacher evaluations, which will begin to take place statewide this fall.

"To say that seniority can't be a factor before you have an evaluation in place is like putting the cart before the horse," he said.

Evaluations and minimizing seniority-based decisions would seem to go hand in hand. Indeed, one way to find a merit-based system that works is to let administrators begin experimenting.

But the weirdest statement may be this one, in reporter Linda Borg's paraphrase:

The PTU argument is similar to one made by the Portsmouth School Committee two weeks ago. In a lawsuit filed against the Portsmouth Teachers Union, the School Committee claims that it has final say over how teachers are assigned. The committee, in April, approved a new hiring process that diminishes the role of seniority in staffing decisions.

The Providence Teacher's Union is arguing that the state can't insist on an end to seniority, and the Portsmouth School Committee is arguing that it has a right to end seniority in contravention of contractual habits. How are those the same?



The Value of a Dream Job

Justin Katz

An agreement appears to be near completion that would prevent the layoffs of 75 Providence police officers, but Friday's human interest story in the Providence Journal — highlighting young officers' sense of their "dream jobs" — touches on broader considerations pertaining to public-sector workers:

By March, [Sean Lafferty and Matthew McGloin] were named Officers of the Month for their numerous arrests, which contributed to a 50-percent drop in drug-related calls in the West End.

"We love coming to work. We know in our hearts that what we're doing is good. We're proud to be here," Lafferty said. "We don't want to leave."

Added McGloin: "This is our dream."

How bizarre is a system that places such men in the first wave of layoffs? And how much more productive would the police force be if they set a bar with which other officers felt at least some tangible incentive to compete? As with much else in the public sector, the rules appear designed to force the administrators and the public to make the worst decisions if ever they seek to rein in expenses.

Another point worth salvaging from the article is that jobs can have value beyond their pay:

[Donald] Castigliego had given up a well-paying job in the mortgage industry for this, spending months in the academy at minimum wage before hitting the streets as a rookie officer. "Other than my son, it's probably the proudest thing in my life," he said.

The layoffs have left him heartbroken, Castigliego says.

"I think people should realize — and I speak for my class — there's 25 guys who didn't take that job for a paycheck. They all gave up a lot to take this job," Castigliego said. "And every single one of those guys loves this job, and is here for the right reasons. We're not just a number."

Just because a job is fulfilling doesn't mean it shouldn't pay well, but the fact that people want a job is clearly an aspect of compensation. What's happened over the past half-century is that public-sector unions have taken advantage of the fact that they can appeal to voters, not to mention apply political weight to elect friendly bosses, so as to skew all such calculations. A fulfilling job that pays very well, with great benefits and uncommon job security, is not just a dream, it's a fantasy.

As reluctant as we may justifiably be to push back the expectations of motivated and well-meaning young men and women, there is no alternative, because the perpetuation of such a system cannot but come at the expense of others' dreams.


June 24, 2011


In and Out of the Public Sector

Justin Katz

The conversation was mainly of Esserman and arbitration when Monique called in to the Matt Allen Show, on Wednesday. Stream by clicking here, or download it.


June 21, 2011


Yes, Let's Address the Problem

Justin Katz

I have to express agreement with this comment that Project Future 2000 and Beyond founder Osiris Harrell made during discussion of the proposed Cranston mayoral academy:

"Public schools can be fixed if you people focused on what's wrong with the public schools, instead of spending all this time in trying to reinvent the wheel," Harrell said.

The difference is that many of us believe that the underlying problem with public education is the unioniized, bureaucratic morass into which it's been dragged, and by layering in some degree of competition, to highlight the problems of the public school system by contrast, charter schools can at least begin to change the discussion from the well worn rhetoric of unions and other entrenched players.


June 15, 2011


A Glimpse Behind the Union Curtain

Justin Katz

We've all made such mistakes as the Internet allows... replying too quickly for rationality to assert itself, sending mail to the wrong person, accidentally forwarding a conversation thread to parties with whom we shouldn't share them. When RI AFL-CIO President George Nee accidentally replied to an email by Providence Journal columnist Ed Achorn that he appears to have intended to forwarded to somebody else, however, he gave us a glimpse of labor's backroom exchanges.

Achorn had expanded his inquiry into the matter of Senate Majority Leader Dominique Ruggerio's hiring of Stephen Iannazzi, a union colleague's college-dropout son, at $90,000 per year to include Nee, and subsequently received the following reply:

the man has little to do with his time, i will not reply or speak to him, you can send this to marl if it helps but it doesn't appear that they can back him off, great reporter he just figured out i am the chair of the baord

"Backing off" may refer to a threatening email that Achorn mentions earlier in the column, or perhaps it refers to some other strategy. After all, Achorn's long been a target of the local labor hierarchy, which sends minions to disrupt his public speeches and such.

Whatever the case, it's surprising that the entrenched union powers would allow the cracks to begin showing over such a minor matter as a near-nepotistic job swapping, especially at a time when the spotlight is already on the unsustainability of their sweet pension deals. Even a mild inquiry into union-backed scholarships that Iannazzi had received from the Rhode Island Institute for Labor Studies begins to reveal the deeper game: The Institute's executive director, Robert Delaney ($113,822 total compensation, plus benefits), comes into the public eye by refusing to answer Achorn's basic questions and brings with him Carolina Bernal, who also works for the Institute and whom Governor Chafee appointed to his newly labor-friendly Board of Regents for Elementary Secondary Education.

That dot connects to Board of Regents member Colleen Callahan, who would be Mrs. Delaney if she'd taken her husband's name and who works for the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and health Professionals, taking home $183,971, plus benefits.

An interesting task for somebody with the time (which would be me were I able to make a full-time job of Anchor Rising) would be to create a chart of the various union positions and their associated salaries, as well as the personal links of the people who hold them. Such a resource might shed some light on the environment in which young Iannazzi procured his job and why powerful union leaders might want to back people away from the house of cards, lest they breathe a bit too heavily on it.


June 10, 2011


Seniority Means Efficiency in Whistleblowing?

Justin Katz

Can't say I buy the rationale that Eloise Wyatt offers for preserving seniority policies among public school teachers:

By eliminating seniority you get rid of the protection that lets teachers speak, up and stand up when an administration is hurting children. In my time as a special-education teacher in Providence, it was common for administration to save money to shortchange or totally deny students the services they were required to have by law.

Only when students had teachers protected by seniority was there someone to advocate for those students. It is not only special-needs students who can get ground up in by administration. Often students need an advocate. Sadly, any teacher who speaks out now might find themselves without jobs.

That might be an argument for tenure (although one must then wonder why every employee of every conceivable business doesn't need such protections), but seniority? What if it's a young teacher who sees the need to advocate for students? Indeed, it seems far more likely that fresh eyes in an educational system are more apt to spot the inappropriate activities that have worked themselves into the school's culture.

Of course, even by considering the topic to this extent, I'm allowing for the sake of discussion the assertion that teachers are more likely than administrators to be students' advocates. It seems to me that, in a properly run school, the principals, superintendent, school committee, and other non-teaching personnel would have at least as much motivation to ensure that students are well served and their parents satisfied with the job that the schools are doing.


June 9, 2011


More Commentary on Stephen Iannazzi

Justin Katz

My situation may be unique (although I doubt it), but one of the consequences of Rhode Island's political and economic structure is that it is so darn difficult just to get by and raise a family that little time remains to keep a consistently watchful eye on local political corruption. Such has been the case in my efforts to garner commentary on the union-rep nepotism that brought 25-year-old Stephen Iannazzi into a $90,000 State House job.

But the responses have come trickling in, nonetheless.

To recap, young Iannazzi's boss, Senate Majority Leader Dominique Ruggerio has defended the hiring in no uncertain terms. East Bay state Senator Louis DiPalma defended it, as well. Responding to an inquiry from me, several local elected officials took varying positions. Since then, Tiverton Town Council Member Rob Coulter sent the following:

Thank you for calling this to my attention. I agree that the qualification profile and the close relationships connected with such a highly paid public position are grounds for serious concern and further inquiry.

While obviously this involves a state – not Tiverton – position, we all share a common interest in transparent, efficient government. With Rhode Island suffering from the third worst unemployment rate in the nation, I’d say taxpayers, and other state employees for that matter, deserve a thorough confirmation of whether this $88,000 position was, and still is, appropriately filled. Perhaps a more thorough explanation will satisfy these questions which have been fairly raised, and I hope that our Senate delegation will take the appropriate steps to ensure public confidence in the integrity of the public hiring system and that taxpayer dollars are being spent fairly and wisely.

Coulter's fellow Tiverton Town Council member Joan Chabot looked into general salary levels:

I have reviewed the Providence Journal article that you indicated in this email and conducted some research into JCLS. I couldn't easily find hiring/compensation procedures for the JCLS, but found only that it should be similar to the procedures used by the executive branch.

I also researched salary information for a legislative assistant/legislative aide position to get an idea of the "going" rate. That research produced an average salary of $46,000 for a legislative assistant/aide at the state level.

Based on this research, I think it is very suspicious that a person with no experience and no college degree could qualify for a legislative aide position with a starting salary of $88,112. Common sense dictates that this issue deserves further explanation and scrutiny.

Many questions come to mind... What was the hiring process? Were there other applicants for this position? Were interviews conducted? What are the salaries of other legislative assistants/aides? Is this person’s salary in range of the other assistants/aides? If it is, why is the salary range so high?

This should certainly send up a red flag in government spending at a time when the state can least afford an $88K legislative aide. I’m certain we can find several college graduates that would take the job for half the salary. Our state legislators should be questioning this issue and pushing for answers from the JCLS now that they are aware of the situation. And if irregularities are found, then the situation must be addressed.

From the RI House, Representative Dan Gordon (R, Portsmouth, Tiverton, Little Compton) responded as follows:

I believe that at a bare minimum, the questions that have been posed by the media and the public regarding the hiring of Mr. Iannazzi must be answered. The lack of responses thus far are certainly lending to the cloud of suspicion.

As a State Representative and custodian of taxpayer dollars, it is troubling to me that there are obvious family and labor ties involved in hiring this young man. I’m certain the people would like to see his resume, what exactly are the job duties of a Senate Aide that justify an $88,112 salary with state benefits, how the position was advertised, and the resumes of the other applicants. I know for a fact that highly qualified degree holders have offered to do the job for half the salary. Let’s see some transparency from the Senate chamber.

And Rep. John Edwards (D, Tiverton, Portsmouth) mailed the following on House stationery:

Thank you for contacting me in reference to Senator DiPalma's remarks concerning a recent hire by the Senate Majority Leader. While I do not know this particular individual or of his qualifications, I was surprised to read that someone so young was so well compensated.

My experience has been that the level of income this young man receives is normally reserved for someone more experienced in their field. Again, I will re-iterate that I have no knowledge of his qualifications.

The hiring and personnel process in the General Assembly should be addressed to bring more transparency to it, to allow more people to apply for these positions. I have spoken to Speaker Fox, concerning the recent pay raises he has given to a number of House employees. I expressed my disagreement with his decision and shared the many outraged calls and emails I received from my constituents. The leadership of the General Assembly needs to be sensitive to the concerns of our constituents on this matter, especially in the midst of this deep and long recession.

So, I've not yet found another elected official willing to take DiPalma's astonishing step of defending Ruggerio's hire of his union pal's son at an absurdly high salary, but I've also not seen indication of any sparks for further action. I'll soon be posting a chart of people I've contacted and their responses (or lack thereof), as well as contacting more elected officials and other people involved in state and local politics.


June 8, 2011


Both Sides of the Labor Mouth

Justin Katz

This has got to be my favorite argument that labor reps are making now that the problems are no longer deniable:

"If you incentivize and stop burning your overtime, you'll get $6 million in the blink of an eye," [union lawyer Joseph] Rodio said Tuesday. Officers see the loss of prized overtime as a concession.

I think it was Rodio who told Dan Yorke, the other day, that the problem is that the city of Providence was irresponsible in the salaries and overtime that it gave to union police officers. Of course, the union has fought and will fight any attempts to achieve reasonableness, but hey, that's the system.



An Acute Example of the Broader System

Justin Katz

If you skipped the historical essay to which Marc linked on Monday, give it a read. It concerns the making of the pension mess in Providence, and its most valuable insight, in my view, is the light that it shines on the entire dynamic created by public sector unions.

The defining statement comes from firefighter and Local 799 union President Stephen Day, who was a member of the 1989 Providence Retirement Board that then Chief of Administration John Simmons said "broke the city":

"All we did" on Dec. 6, 1989, says Day, "was vote in broad daylight and do what we had the right to do. If we had the authority to do this, we were going to do it. You can't fault someone for being aware" of the laws. "I don't regret it at all."

Of course, union leaders typically have good reason to be aware of the law, because they work so hard in such a long-term coordinated fashion. Step one was to give the unions the controlling hand on the Retirement Board:

During the 1970s, Senate Majority Leader John P. Hawkins, a former Providence firefighter himself, and other senators began advocating legislation that would add two union representatives to the city's Retirement Board, thus tipping the balance. The legislation eventually passed around 1977.

Step two appears to have been to insert some innocuous-seeming language in the city's home-rule charter, and step three was to lob a court case into the system (to a judge with who knows what motivation) to change the nature of the board's authority:

The [spring 1989] case involved a Providence police officer, Walter Bruckshaw, who, along with 100 other city employees, wanted to buy credit in the city pension system for work they had done for other government agencies. The Retirement Board denied them. The court ruled the city's home rule charter, which went into effect in 1983, granted the Providence Retirement Board control over city pension decisions.

And voila. Day and his counterpart in the police union, Richard Patterson, ran for seats on the board promising to "boost the pensions of current and future retirees. The result? Compounded cost of living adjustments (COLAs) of 3-6%, tripled minimum pensions for police and firemen, and reduced minimum years of service. As city administrators strove to control the bleeding, the unions maneuvered these issues into contract negotiations. Then came all of the individual Pension Board decisions:

In 1991, every police officer who retired in Providence –– 21 in all –– received a job-related disability pension from the Retirement Board.

Of the 53 firefighters leaving their jobs, the Retirement Board approved disability pensions for 48 of them.

So, yes, Day's statement about authority isn't without justification, but the authority ultimately comes not from the narrow scope of Providence politics and governance, but from the reality of public-sector unions in the first place. The unions get a seat at the negotiating table as employee representatives, and they get a hand in the political process that determines those with whom they'll be negotiating. That's simply the incentive structure of the system, and as becomes more undeniable with every passing month, the incentives are far too strong even for fiscal reality and inevitability to overcome.


June 3, 2011


To Whom Chafee Would Give a Refund

Justin Katz

Some last-minute budget amendments that Governor Lincoln Chafee has submitted to the General Assembly are telling with regard to his attitude and priorities:

In another budget amendment, [Budget Officer Thomas] Mullaney announced a "medical-benefit holiday" for state workers, that will spare them, for one pay period, of having to contribute to their health insurance benefits. ...

The reason: the state's numbers crunchers said they initially overestimated by $3.086 million how much the state is likely to need to cover the cost of the self-insured benefits.

So, in the governor's view, when the state overestimates the cost of employee benefits and budgets accordingly, it should in some way transfer the excess to employees. That's certainly defensible, and it might even be advisable, but then we move on a few paragraphs:

Asked how Chafee intends to pay for the 25 new DMV staffers and other additions to his original spending plan, spokesman Michael Trainor pointed to the recent upswing in revenue collections in the months since Chafee laid out his $7.66-billion budget for the fiscal year that begins on July 1. His new proposal stands at $7,753,482,420.

State budget analysts now believe revenue will run $53.8 million ahead of earlier estimates for the year that ends June 30, and $65.9 million ahead for the year that begins July 1.

That is, when the government collects more in taxes and fees than it expects, in the governor's view, it should spend every penny, mostly in ways that will build in the expenses for future budgets to, for example, pay for hired employees. As writer Kathrine Gregg goes on to note, the total increase in revenue projections is $113.3 million, which "could be used to offset the projected $331-million deficit next year."

Not if this governor has his way.


May 25, 2011


Selling Pension Reform: The No-Blame Game

Marc Comtois

When traveling the state and talking to various union groups, it's understandable--politically, yes, but also pragmatically--that General Treasurer Gina Raimondo is refraining from playing the blame game (well, except for various "politicians" of the past). She needs unions on board to make reform happen and if the rank and file can understand the scope of the problem and be persuaded that there is no malice in reform, then perhaps union leadership will not resist. So, we have this:

[S]he stressed that politics, not public employees, are to blame for a “broken” pension system that is endangering the security of their retirements, while also threatening to crush taxpayers with billions of dollars of debt.

“If there’s anything to blame, it’s politics,” Raimondo told more than 300 members of Local 580 of the Service Employees International Union gathered at the Cranston Portuguese Club off Elmwood Avenue. “For decades, politics has trumped honest, financial accounting.

“The fault does not lie with you. ...You have done nothing wrong. You have played by the rules,” she said. “The fault lies with a poorly designed [pension] system that has been faltering for decades.”

She's correct in that union members did nothing explicitly wrong in paying into the pension system crafted and promised by their leadership and mostly Democratic politicians. But she's also glossing over things. After all, union members did have a role to play in the "politics" she condemns. They are, at the least, implicitly responsible for the current pension mess for supporting and electing the union leadership and Democratic politicians that crafted this fiasco. The same leaders who don't necessarily play by the same rules.:
Both of the SEIU’s national pension plans issued “critical status letters” to their members in 2009​—​the Pension Protection Act requires such letters to be issued when funds can cover less than 65 percent of their obligations. The SEIU, however, maintains a separate pension plan for its national officers that was funded at 98.3 percent, according to the latest data.
Or actively undermine Raimondo's proposals while standing right next to her:
Frank Flynn, the president of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers, told his retirees that the potential pension cuts that Raimondo outlined a day earlier, including a suspension of cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) for retirees are “just examples. They are not recommendations at this point,” he said.
For Raimondo, it's certainly easier in the short-term to suggest to people that they are victims than to tell them they are at least partially to blame for the events that have led to their current problem. For union members, it's easier being a victim than confronting the fact that you were naive, duped or made bad choices in trusting who you did with your future.

As for the politics, in the long term, if real reform happens, then this soft-sell tour may not insulate Raimondo from union ire (though it will ultimately be the General Assembly's stamp on the reform). Then again, there is no historical or political reason to believe that the General Assembly will be proactive, so, while I don't doubt her sincerity at all, politically it looks like she'll be able to present herself as a pro-union, "pragmatic progressive" reformer and maintain her future political viability.


May 6, 2011


Sleepy Public Construction Methods

Justin Katz

I've had occasion to drive through the construction site of the new Sakonnet River Bridge in Tiverton quite a bit, lately, and no matter how many times I see it, I never fail to be impressed with the structural inefficiency of the work habits. The other day, I saw three employees gabbing over two who were doing masonry work while two stood nearby to direct traffic in those infrequent instances when a construction vehicle had to cross the sparsely traveled back road and a police officer sat in his car. One wonders if that's where WPRI reporter Tim White's latest catch got the idea that it'd be just fine to sit in his car to eat, read, and sleep for three or more hours per day:

That dozing fellow is Department of Transportation engineering technician Kevin Coulombe, who is responsible for inspecting road and bridge materials. White notes that Coulombe oversaw the Barrington Bridge project "which was $11 Million over budget and took twice as long as expected."

According to Transparency Train, Coulombe's 2008 salary was $50,712, so clearly he's no Stephen Iannazzi. Perhaps if he actually works his full six hour day (or whatever it is) he can reach that high level of extreme competence.



But Who Dropped the Anchor?

Justin Katz

RI General Treasurer Gina Raimondo uses an apt metaphor to describe the significance of the state's public pension problem:

"If you remember one thing from me this afternoon, remember this," Raimondo said, speaking bluntly: "fixing this state's pension system is not an issue, it is the issue. Our state retirement debt is an anchor holding our state back and preventing our growth into the future."

She goes a bit far, to my mind, in that state and municipal governments have sunk myriad anchors over the year — of taxation, regulation, mandates, and so on. Pensions are notable because they provide a stark dollar amount of looming debt. How much the state has lost in economic activity because its policies are constructed to pool power in the hands of a few narrow classes (mostly related to tax-revenue-related employment in one way or another) is not so easily calculable.

Perhaps out of political calculation or perhaps because she's not ready to begin discarding the worldview that her progressive supporters recognized in her, Raimondo leans quickly away from the larger problem underlying the state's pension difficulties:

She acknowledged the challenge is complex and emotional. "I am extremely sympathetic to our state employees and our teachers. They did everything they were told. They have paid into the system as they were told. They have worked hard faithfully every year. It's not their fault. And we should not blame employees. The fault is that the system was designed poorly. And if you're looking for a culprit, I believe that culprit is politics."

For some 30 years, she said, elected officials extended benefits for retirees without putting enough money aside to pay for them.

Let's not soft-pedal this. Among the "everything they were told" was voting for particular candidates for political offices at both the state and municipal levels and engaging in such activities as strikes and work-to-rule in order to foster an environment favorable to their side of negotiations. (Indeed, the number of politicians who have been union members over those 30 years is probably too high to count.) With only so much they could give away to labor in the open, those friendly politicians gave away money that wouldn't come due for years to come.

The culprit may be politics, as Raimondo insists, but it has been a politics dominated by and consciously perpetuated by employees and their unions. The current crop of such politicians cannot ignore the pension problem much longer (despite the hypnotic cooing of union propagandists), and although it's possible that they'll change what needs to be changed without naming it, that outcome isn't very likely.


May 3, 2011


The Advantaged Class at the Town Level, Too

Justin Katz

Providence Journal reporter Mark Reynolds dipped into the pension situation in Johnston, on Sunday, focusing on this case:

Fire Lt. William R. Jasparro was 41 when he ended his 20-year career as a Johnston firefighter in 1990.

Jasparro's retirement package paid him about $18,255 per year [with cost of living adjustments] — based on half of his final years' earnings. He went to work in construction and later took a job at the state's Central Landfill, which ultimately paid him $80,000 a year.

Most folks would be satisfied with a "retirement" benefit payable for 30-plus years (plus health care coverage for life), assuming he lives to the median age for men and doesn't hand it off to a spouse. Eight years into his retirement (or perhaps "second career" would be more accurate), Jasparro sued to be bumped up to a disability pension, which would have yielded 100% of salary, tax free. At least by the article's description, it doesn't sound as if he had much of a case, but the town settled, giving him 67% of salary, tax free.

It occurs to me that Rhode Island would profit from a town-by-town investigation, with the results aggregated somewhere to give the public a fair sense of just how pervasive such deals are. How many people are collecting retirement benefits while working in another branch of the state's public sector? It'd be interesting to know. For example, another Johnston retiree, 51-year-old former police detective and union president John Nardolillo, is now a police officer in West Greenwich. Whatever his salary is, there, he's taking home $33,982 based on his previous career.

Growing up, I planned to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and adjust my income expectations accordingly. Rhode Island's public sector clearly has more than its share of people whose focus is mainly on working the system. And there's a lot of system to work. As much attention as I pay to such matters, I don't believe I've ever come across this factor, before:

Also, under Rhode Island law, the state pays the tuition for the disabled firefighter or police officer and his or her children to attend any Rhode Island state college.

It'd be interesting to see a total cost of that benefit and have the list of beneficiaries combed for young retirees who go on to second careers or intensive weight-lifting hobbies.


May 2, 2011


The Message of Union Defense

Justin Katz

A whopping 300 union teachers and organizers showed up for a weekend event at URI's Ryan Center to back the opinion stated, as follows, by National Education Association Rhode Island President Larry Purtill:

In Rhode Island, he said, many teachers distrust state Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist and her aggressive approach to changes that echoes the priorities of U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

These include rigorous teacher evaluations, removing ineffective teachers, overhauling the nation's worst-performing schools and expanding public charter schools.

Message: We don't want change! Especially if it means evaluations and targeting those union members who are most vulnerable... because incompetent.

There is, however, one theme that's worth teasing out of the bunch, because it relates to a frequently made point:

Paul Taillefer, president-elect of the Canadian Teachers Federation, noted several key differences between the two countries, including Canada's more robust teacher selection, preparation and mentoring programs, the high regard society has for teachers and a stronger social safety net for students.

"We have medical and food programs that extend beyond the school walls that help students and level the playing field," he said. ...

"Her favorite refrain is, 'We can’t make any excuses,'" [North Kingstown High School history teacher Jay] Walsh said. "Well, we aren't making any excuses. When we ask these questions, we are trying to acknowledge that what we do in the classroom is connected to many other things outside of the classroom."

I don't support pursuing a government as broad as Canada's, but if the problem hindering our students' success lies outside of the education system, then we need to change the way we allocate resources to address that. If teachers aren't the key, then we should decrease our spending on them and target factors that really would help us, as a society, achieve our objectives.


May 1, 2011


So Next Month's Field Trip is a Tea Party Rally, Right?

Monique Chartier

Obviously it will be, if the goal really is for Pennsylvania's children to participate in "good citizenship, free expression, fairness and thoughtful deliberation" and not that they are blatantly being used as pawns on an egregious scale to advance a selfish agenda.

On Tuesday, across the state of Pennsylvania, unions and other Left-wing organizations will be boarding buses and heading to the state capitol in Harrisburg to engage in a mass rally to fight for economic and social justice and against budget cuts. The rally, is being organized by the Coalition for Labor Engagement and Accountable Revenues (CLEAR) which is comprised of government unions, such as AFSCME, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), PSEA (part of the NEA), SEIU, as well as the AFL-CIO, IAFF, UFCW and others. ...

In addition, there will be elementary schoolchildren bused in from all over the state.
In Lancaster, PA, concerned parents contacted the local newspaper with their concerns, which caused one school to cancel the “field trip”:

Plans to have Wickersham Elementary School students participate next week in a rally opposing cuts in the state education budget have been canceled in the wake of complaints from parents. ...

In a letter to parents accompanying the permission slip, James said the trip would provide an opportunity to “model the role of good citizenship, free expression, fairness and thoughtful deliberation.”

“Please join us as we … travel to Harrisburg to let our voice be heard for a responsible budget for public education,” he urged parents in the letter.



April 30, 2011


Where Rhode Island's Tax Dollars Go

Justin Katz

Cranstonite John Sauro was a year and some older than I am when he retired from the Providence fire department with a disability pension in 2000. Now 48, collecting a tax-free disability pension of $45,600 per year (on top of $1,800 that the city pays for his health care each month), Sauro spends his time on light hobbies like lifting 205 pounds on the incline bench at the local gym:

Target 12: Feel the Burn: wpri.com

I'm not sure why their shouldn't be criminal charges for what appears to be blatant fraud. Instead, according to WPRI reporter Tim White, Sauro walked right through a 2008 ordinance that required him to recertify his injury. If the system is that easy to skirt, then it might as well be considered part of the scheme.


April 26, 2011


An Illustration of RI's Advantaged Class in Cranston

Justin Katz

Like the swapping of high-paying public jobs for the sons of union leaders, the fact that Cranston is currently paying $67,107-86,778 annual pensions to six former police chiefs feels emblematic of the state's broader systemic corruption:

In the past 20 years, Cranston has hired — and retired — six police chiefs.

Most served three years or less at the helm of the Cranston Police Department and they ranged in age from 48 to 51 when they retired. Their pensions are based on their salaries on the day they retired — with no minimum tenure or averaging of final years of pay.

The retirements placed six top-salaried employees on Cranston's pension payroll with guaranteed minimum 3-percent cost-of-living raises each year for life.

There is clearly a class that lords it over Rhode Island. Get into the club, and you're set for life. Otherwise, you'll spend your years in the state with a target on your back... or rather, on your wallet. All but one of these ostensible community leaders retired in his 40s.


April 20, 2011


Is It Really Profit if There's Future Retirement Debt?

Justin Katz

Fredric Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, might just get to the heart of the pension/retirement issue when he explains the following, by way of arguing that the U.S. Post Office is a profitable enterprise:

Congress requires the postal service to put $5.5 billion of its earnings each year into a separate account to "pre-fund" future retirees' health care insurance far into the future.

No other business or government agency has such a requirement. The postal service won't actually spend the money it puts away for "pre-funding" until many years from now.

Yet it counts as a loss on its balance sheet today.

Whether it's accurate to say that no other organization faces such a requirement (which is also different from saying that none utilize the methods anyway), I don't know. The question that comes to mind is: why shouldn't government agencies and businesses put aside money for benefits to be paid to current employees when they retire? Inasmuch as the payment is obligatory, the expense is being incurred in the present through the continued employment of the worker.



The Priorities of the Bargaining Unit

Justin Katz

Maybe it's just an overzealous union leader, but it's hard to believe that this isn't a parody:

The Scranton police union has filed an unfair labor practice complaint against the city for an off-duty drug arrest made by Police Chief Dan Duffy in March.

The complaint, which was filed with the state Labor Relations Board on April 14, takes issue with the chief arresting a man who was allegedly in possession of marijuana because the chief is not a member of the collective bargaining unit and was "off duty" when the March 20 arrest was made. ...

... the union president said the chief, as member of management, should not actively root out crime or randomly patrol neighborhoods while off duty because it violates union agreements that protect rank-and-file officers' employment. The union is concerned city administrators will have more leverage to lay off police officers because "Chief Duffy will step in" and do the work, Sgt. Martin said.

Somehow, the principle that labor agreements should come before public safety, and anything that increases the latter, doesn't seem quite right. One might even call it immoral and wonder whether collective bargaining in the public sector doesn't tend toward that sort of view.


April 19, 2011


Meet the New Toady, Same as the Old

Justin Katz

Charles Wales, of Cranston, makes the argument that they were, indeed, the bad old days back before public-sector unionization:

Yes, they were indeed bad times: Elected and many non-elected persons held sway over municipal departments. Favors, assignments and promotions were granted, often without the smallest indication that merit was considered. Lackeys, sycophants and toadies were the winners from the lowest worker up to department heads. City departments had become the playthings of those ranging from the very prominent to shadowy figures patrolling in the political background.

My fellow non-union Rhode Islanders may wonder, upon reading that passage, what has really changed. Well, obviously, what's changed is that unions are now integrated with that corrupt spoils system. Remember Mayor Laffey's battles over the crossing guard union? His run-in with the fire fighters? And let's not limit ourselves to Cranston, especially when we've got the Iannazzi-Ruggerio connection so fresh in our minds.

If the situation was as Wales describes it, one could argue that having employees who weren't part of the spoils system helped to permeate government with whistle blowers on the taxpayers and voters' side. Now it's possible to collectively buy them off... "possible" being used, here, in exclusion of the question of whether the local society can afford to support the system in perpetuity.


April 18, 2011


Re: Local Governments Founded in Deception

Justin Katz

Rhode Island Association of School Committees Executive Director Tim Duffy commented as follows to the post in which I suggested that pension problems are a self-inflicted wound among governments, especially local governments:

The wound is not a locally self-inflicted one. School committees are not responsible for pension debt. We do not negotiate these benefits with unions. The rates we pay are determined actuarially and that is driven by factors set in state law. How long it takes an employee to become vested, when they can retire, when they can begin to draw down a pension, what % of pay the pension is set at, how much their pension increases annually, COLAs, are all embedded in state statute. During the 1990's recession the state changed the employer contribution ratio, from 60% state – 40% local to 40% state – 60% local. So when the retirement board changes the actuarial assumption, as they should, and it results in an increased unfunded liability, locals get to bill the pay.

A lot of communities are doing less with more, but our hands are tied by collective bargaining statutes that create an unleveled playing field in favor of the unions. Teacher unions can employ work to rule as a protest against management and hurt students in the process. Illegal teacher strikes, while infrequent, don't result in any financial penalty for teachers. Binding arbitration awards for police and fire have largely ignored a community’s ability to pay and in many instances have set conditions for retirement, selected costlier health care providers, and set manning and staffing levels.

When the legislature passed 3050 lowering the property tax cap, a bill we supported, it also required the state to fund mandates passed by the General Assembly or initiated by regulations of a state agency. The FY 2012 budget, like budgets before it, does not appropriate money for mandate reimbursement. In many instances local government is failing, but not necessarily due to any fault of locally elected officials. Rather much of the failure can be laid at the feet of state leaders who have passed the accountability buck down to the locals while denying them the authority to act in the interests of their citizens, taxpayers and students.

That's a reasonable response, but it requires a certain amount of acceptance of Rhode Island's paradigm for governance. Having watched school committees play at bringing negotiations to a close while continuing to promise that any raises would be retroactive, no matter how many times the union scuttled an agreement, I'm not willing to buy into the game.

More importantly, local government has played its role in the system of unions dominating the Statehouse and the Town Hall, as well, cycling taxpayer dollars into public-sector coffers.
As the elected officials closest to the voters, school committees (and town councils) should have pushed back harder. So, "self-inflicted" may be too strong, but only if one excludes passivity.

As the General Assembly has changed the pension system detrimentally to municipalities, those local governments should have taken steps to decline participation in the system altogether. If that didn't prove feasible, they should have insisted that new costs be worked into existing personnel costs, pushing salaries and other benefits down, as well. Let the unions decide whether they'd rather take their winnings in cash, benefits, or retirements.

There are surely dozens of actions, practical and political, that school committees could have taken to fight back. To my experience, they've been content to play along, complaining about labor and the legislature, to be sure, but also observably happy to have places to which to pass blame.

And if the system had pushed back more, then at the very least, those with an investment in the pension system wouldn't have been so complacent about its being sacrosanct.


April 13, 2011


RE: Paying the Pension Piper - Board Approves ROI Assumption Reduction

Marc Comtois

Earlier today, the pension review board was presented with an actuarial study concerning the RI Pension system. After the presentation, the board voted 9-6 to reduce the assumed rate of return on pension investments from 8.25% to 7.5%, which was the figure recommended by the study. The ProJo has the roll call:

• General Treasurer Gina Raimondo, serves as chairwoman YES

• Richard A. Licht, state director of administration YES

• Thomas A. Mullaney, associate director of the state budget office, designated by the state budget officer YES

• Daniel L. Beardsley, president of the R.I. League of Cities and Towns YES

• Four public appointees -- two by the governor and two by the state treasurer, all subject to Senate approval (years in parentheses represent when terms expire)

Gary R. Alger (2011) YES

Frank R. Benell Jr. (2013) YES

M. Carl Heintzelman (2011) YES

Jean Rondeau (2012): YES

• Two active teacher representatives; Finelli serves as vice chairman

William B. Finelli YES

John P. Maguire NO

• Two active state employee representatives elected by working teachers union members

John J. Meehan NO

Linda C. Riendeau NO

• Louis M. Prata: active municipal employee representative elected by working union members NO

• Two retiree representatives elected by the plan retirees

Roger P. Boudreau NO

Michael R. Boyce: NO

Sorry union delegates, covering your eyes and ears isn't going to make the problem go away.


April 12, 2011


A Union Ratchet

Justin Katz

Yes, a bill is a long way from a law, and this one, which Andrew caught the other day, has only one sponsor, Spenser Dickinson (D, South Kingstown), but it really is quite a suggestion:

When a contractor employing members of a recognized union and providing services for more than twenty (20) hours a week to another person, firm, or corporation is replaced, and a new contractor engaged, the employees of the succeeding contractor will be admitted to membership in the union representing the employees of the prior contractor unless already unionized, as set forth herein.

The bill goes on and on, encompassing every conceivable scenario: not only spanning the completion of one contract to the beginning of another, but also requiring that the full-time employees that a company might hire after having contracted for unionized services immediately become part of the union.

One suspects that Mr. Dickinson's contracting company is a union shop, and although I'd wager we won't see this particular bill become law, it's helpful to have a glimpse, every now and then, of the sorts of goals that shrewder and more subtle political minds have targeted.



Dependence on Corruption

Justin Katz

Not to belabor the conversation about high-priced union executives, but certain aspects highlighted in our comment section point directly toward one of Rhode Island's major problems.

As Marc mentioned, yesterday, the head of Local 1033 of the Laborers' International Union, representing 900 municipal workers, Donald Iannazzi, makes $265,870. It's worth pointing out that the city's charter caps the salary of the mayor of Providence at $125,000. That is, the system by which Providence operates allocates more than twice as much money for the salary of an employee representative than for the person who has the responsibility of running the organization for which those employees work.

Moreover, the current mayor, Angel Tavares, gave himself a 10% pay cut. That's certainly relevant to attempts by commenter Russ to distract with comparisons of high-priced CEOs in private industry. Most private companies make their money by developing, manufacturing, or processing something. As obscene as some executives' compensation packages may be (and as representative of the need to increase other organizations' ability to compete as it is), the comparative pay of the CEO and the general workforce has to be considered relative to the value and profitability of the product.

In a labor union's case, the "product" is, in large part, the pay of the general workforce. So, it's a bit more egregious for the union leaders to coast along with their fortunes as workers give concessions. And to the extent that labor leaders are responsible for the broader well-being of their employees, they should have been the ones demanding full accounting of the pension system and, in Providence specifically, evidence that the city was in good health.

Now throw in Iannazzi's job swapping with fellow Laborers' International administrator and RI Senate Majority Leader Dominick Ruggerio. Ruggerio's son works for Iannazzi, and now Iannazzi's son pulls in $88,112 at the age of 25 as a "special assistant" to Ruggerio. For all of the talk about classes that union members foment, that's precisely what Iannazzi and Ruggerio represent: An insider class to whom economic reality does not apply.

They get away with it, though, because as Michael exemplifies with his tangential comment to Marc's post, too many people are reliant on the corrupt system. If they aren't enraptured with talk of unique rights and battle with corporate big-wigs, caught up in sweeping rhetoric that they must take an ever greater portion of taxpayer dollars in order to stand as the last bulwark of the middle class, they are dependent on union vein-tapping and persuaded that, but for the union, they'd be working for free.


April 11, 2011


Cuts for the Little Guy, Not for the "CEO"

Marc Comtois

Sheesh. I just found out the CEO of a 900-employee operation, who just cut employee pay and increased their health care payments, pulls down $265,870 a year. And while his workers are all worried about pension problems and their retirement future, he's looking to retire next year at 55 and has few of their worries. Meanwhile, he got his kid a cushy $88,112 job working for a buddy and he employs his buddy's kid. Typical rich guy stuff, huh? Must be nice. I'll tell ya, there's nothing worse than those country clubbers.


April 8, 2011


Buying Into the Pension System, 'Cause We Can Afford It!

Marc Comtois

"Bill would help Teachers Retire Early" says the ProJo headline to Randall Edgar's piece. Really? How about "Bill Would Increase State Pension Obligation", because that's what it really does.

Looking to expand on an option that is already available to most public school teachers who have worked in private schools, state Sen. Frank A. Ciccone III is sponsoring a bill that would allow teachers who have worked in “for-profit” schools to purchase retirement credit in the state Teachers Retirement System.

If adopted, Senate bill 0145 would allow those teachers to buy up to five years of retirement credit by paying the “full actuarial value of each year” they want to add, just as most teachers with private school experience can do now.

Ciccone, a Providence Democrat, said he sponsored the bill for a constituent, Jane Bernardino, who told the Senate Finance Committee Thursday that it would cost her about $70,000 to $75,000 to buy enough credit to retire, assuming the contributions were based on 20-percent of her current salary.

“I’ve been teaching for 31 years,” she said. “I only have 25 years invested in the retirement system.”

Good deal, pay $70-75k now, retire five years early and get your entire investment back within a couple, three years. Meanwhile, taxpayers get to subsidize your retirement for a couple extra years. It's great that our pension system is in such good shape.



A Tale of Pensions

Justin Katz

Ted Nesi has allowed far-left radical Tom Sgouros guest-posting privileges to his blog, which the latter used to offer an excellent example of his typical rhetorical style. Sgouros likes to explain complicated issues as if he's writing for children, so as (it appears) to leave the adult reader with a "well, gee" feeling and to breeze by the relevant points and objections.

First, a view from a high level: The essay is 1,055 words, and Sgouros spends the first 296 (28%) tallying an "unfunded liability" for education and roads. The next 125 words (12%) explain why he thinks the perspective that he's just described, and funding such expenses with investment income, would be "stupid."

With the next 125 words, Sgouros introduces his actual topic, pensions, and the principle that he's attempting to inject into thinking on the topic: "the goal is not full funding of the system; our goal should be simply making sure the checks don't bounce, at the lowest cost to the taxpayers, employees, students in the schools and drivers on our streets." He rephrases the question for another 138 words, and now two-thirds of the way into his essay, begins to let the reader in on what he's suggesting:

The people who say we can't re-amortize our pension obligations because it would make it more expensive would have you believe that we are going to pay off the liability by 2029, as called for under the current schedule. In truth, it's an absurd argument because neither option is going to happen. The cost of paying off the unfunded liability is what's breaking our backs, not the cost of servicing current obligations. Both options involve making escalating annual payments that are not within the bounds of either fiscal or political reality.

Translation: Treating current pension obligations as debt is completely unworkable. In fact, he goes on to compare the above choice to his own choice between two private jets that he couldn't afford to charter, anyway. Let's fund our pensions, he states, "at the lowest cost possible and not fret that because we can't afford the expensive way to do it, we can't do it at all."

Just in case the reader is wondering whether we can afford to pay retirements directly from current revenue, Sgouros preemptively offers the number of the upcoming year's pension expenses: $800 million. That's fully 10.4% of the total budget that Governor Chafee has proposed, but Sgouros has a ready explanation for its being so large. Governor Carcieri. Through "abrupt" changes to employee benefits, Sgouros argues, the state pushed a bunch of state workers into retirement. He doesn't bother to mention that we'd still be paying them as employees if they hadn't retired. He also doesn't elaborate that these folks would have retired in the relatively near future, anyway, and therefore merely joined the expense pool a little earlier, but that's not important, to him.

What is important is that he exit his argument rapidly, at this point, without offering a clear statement of his proposal and its costs. What's important, to Sgouros, is that we stop all this crazy talk about adjusting benefits to make the obligation more reasonable and just pay the obligation, year to year, without assessing just what it is our elected officials have promised. If we look at it as a debt that elected officials have incurred while failing to fund it year after year, we might begin to wonder why our children should be saddled with political hand-outs from old politicians. If we come up with a big scary total of what we owe in pensions, the public might demand that the benefits be reduced, but if we take it in annual billion-dollar bites, maybe apathy can continue to win out.

Sgouros closes as follows:

In other words, shortsighted and hasty changes enacted by people who did not really understand the situation have made the system’s problems much worse. Do we really want to do that again?

See, they didn't understand the problem. Not like Sgouros does. Can't you tell by the way he just explained it all in terms comprehensible to a twelve-year-old? Come now. It's nap time. Put your lunch money in the bag.

Look. I don't know the unabridged history of pensions in Western civilization, but it seems to me that we fund them the way we do so that the employing organization doesn't have every employee on its books for the rest of his or her life. The employer and employee put aside money as part of the employment arrangement while it is active so that the obligation (or liability) is covered by the time he or she departs the company.

The problems are, one, that a system that guesses what the investments will be able to fund and promises benefits at that level makes it too easy to offer big promises, and two, that a society with a shrinking population and whose progressive changes to the civic order are destroying those qualities that enabled its dynamism will just not create the investment returns that such a system requires. That's why defined benefit programs are almost unheard of, these days, except among government workers who can work to elect their bosses, who then make unworkable promises and force taxpayers to come up with a method of funding them at some point in the future.

We fund schools directly because students are a continuous stream. We fund roads directly (well, pretend that we do) because they are an annual expense. We fund pensions through savings and investments because they are an expense that begins when the employment relationship ends. Sgouros wants us to think as pensioners as wards of the state for the rest of their life.

Of course, anybody familiar with his work is apt to conclude that he'd be just as happy to make everybody a ward of the state. After all, then he and his really, really smart buddies — who really understand the problems that we face — can adjust the system so that it works right. And isn't that what we really all want? To put aside the disagreement and allow the smart folks to do what we all know, deep down, needs to be done?

That approach is working out so well with President Obama, isn't it?


April 4, 2011


Pensions from the Top

Justin Katz

This paragraph from a weekend PolitFact points to the really disturbing part of news about $100,000-plus pension payments:

The Wisconsin report didn't compare starting retirement salaries. It simply catalogued the elements each state used to calculate the amount. To do the calculation, you take a worker's final average salary (usually the average of the last three, four or five years of employment), multiply that by the number of years of service, and multiply that by a percentage that varies widely.

In that light, the thing that ought to really bother taxpayers isn't so much the huge pensions (although they are rightly eye-catching), but the path that some people take to them. Take this guy, for instance:

Former House Speaker Matty Smith retired in 1993 with a $73,000 pension that reflected his 15 years as a legislator and his much higher-paying stint as state court administrator before he — and then-Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Fay — were forced to resign amid a scandal over a high-level cover-up of the theft of court money. ...

Smith's pension is based on his 15 years as a part-time legislator, his 5 1/2 years as Supreme Court administrator, his 4 1/2 years as a Providence schoolteacher in the 1960s, another 4 1/2 years of credit — he was allowed to buy at a one-time cost of $432 — for his years as an archivist and special lecturer in history at Providence College, and 6 months in the Army.

With 3-percent compounded annual increases, Smith's pension has grown to $100,078.56.

There's so much that's clearly wrong with this scenario that it feels redundant to list it all, but the largest part is basing a pension on a high-end political patronage job and many years as a part-time legislator. That alone creates incentive for corruption, because securing that golden retirement depends upon maintaining a political position for a long time and being in sufficient good graces with public administrators empowered to grant high-salary jobs to cash in those years of "public service."



Whose Voice Are We Hearing?

Justin Katz

Another interesting aspect of the article on Education Commissioner Deborah Gist's new regulations that Marc mentioned yesterday is the way in which one of the objections is answered in a separate article on the same page:

"If they gut collective bargaining, they are heading down a road to destroy public education," said Larry Purtill, executive director of the National Education Association of Rhode Island.

"Because in negotiating, you get the voice of the teacher who is in the classroom every day," he said. "And that's an important process. Without it, you take that voice away."

The other article is about negotiating difficulties between Central Falls Superintendent Frances Gallo and the union with which she negotiates. Gallo wishes to modify negotiations so that they follow a "streamlined compact," which would involve teachers, administrators, parents, and even students and vary from school to school:

"I think unions are an important check against the capricious actions of a supervisor," Gallo said. "But I also think unions come out more powerful [in a compact] because all 330 [teacher] voices are heard, not just the voice of the union leadership.... Dissent should be heard."

We could even bring in Julia Steiny, whose column on the facing page suggests that a rigid pension system that discourages changes in career path serve neither teachers nor students well:

When I write or speak about making pensions more portable and flexible, some teachers respond with effusive agreement. They say that they've had a great 12, 15, 20 years, but that now they're done. They want to do something else. But they can't afford to give up their investment in the teacher-retirement system, with its very attractive promises. They panic about becoming like the bitter burnout down the hall.

In general, I suspect most teachers would find much to like about life outside of the union pen, especially the best teachers.


April 2, 2011


A Subject for Saturday Daydreaming

Justin Katz

So the public-sector labor unions in Wisconsin, on top of threatening businesses that decline to take a side in their fight for a continued monopoly on government jobs, have found a judge to interfere in the legislative process in an unprecedented way and are now pushing to change the makeup of the state's Supreme Court to preserve the stay. But this part sets me daydreaming from within must-collapse-before-reforms-are-possible Rhode Island:

... In 2001, Utah made the collection of payments to union political funds optional, and nearly 95% of public school teachers opted not to pay. In 2005, Indiana GOP Gov. Mitch Daniels limited collective-bargaining rights for public employees, and today only 5% of state employees pay union dues.

Some union supporters recognize the problems with coercive dues payments. Tom Geoghegan, a noted union lawyer, wrote in the Nation magazine last November that it should be "a civil right to join, or not to join, a labor union." He said it was time to "repackage labor law reform, even over the protest of organized labor itself." He noted that workers in countries "like Germany are free not to pay [their dues]—and many don't." Indeed, the U.S. is filled with powerful groups, such as the American Association of Retired Persons, that thrive on voluntary payments because they are seen as providing genuine services to members.


April 1, 2011


Koch Brothers and Unions

Marc Comtois

Oh, the shades of gray!

A number of organizations are advocating a boycott of the products that come from companies owned by the Koch family. This is problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it could potentially hurt the wrong people.

The Koch brothers own Georgia Pacific. It is an American consumer goods company that makes everyday products like facial tissue, napkins, paper towels, paper cups and the like. Their plants are great examples of American advanced manufacturing. Incidentally,

GP makes most of its products here in America. The company’s workforce is highly unionized. In fact, 80 percent of its mills are under contract with one or more labor union. It is not inaccurate to say that these are among the best-paid manufacturing jobs in America.

This presents a dilemma and a paradox. While the Koch brothers are credited with advocating an agenda and groups that are clearly hostile to labor and labor’s agenda, the brothers’ company in practice and in general has positive and productive collective bargaining relationships with its unions.

While some companies are running from investment in American jobs, The Koch brothers’ Georgia Pacific just reached agreements with its primary union in the paper industry to invest more than a half a billion dollars in capital to essentially create two state-of-the-art machines that conserve fiber and energy at two separate union mills.

While certainly there are disagreements from time to time on what the right pension program is, or right wage increases and incentives, or the right formula for health care cost sharing, ultimately we end up with negotiated solutions.

That from Jon Geenen, International Vice President of the United Steelworkers. The difference, of course, is that the unions that the Koch Brothers have a working relationship with operate in the private sector, where reasonable negotiations between equal stakeholders actually take place. Keeping the management/employee relationship balanced is beneficial to the company and its employees. The Koch Brothers anti-unionism, if one is to judge by their actions, is focused on the public sector. While Geenan believes this "a dilemma and paradox", the Koch Brothers, and many other people, are not so conflicted. Like it or not, there is a difference.


March 30, 2011


Some Pension Crisis Solutions

Marc Comtois

Local 2882 President Cathy Paquette:

The answer to the pension problem … is, if you hire more state workers ...You would get more people paying into the pension system, and you won’t have any unfunded liability.
Yeah, I get it. More workers now to pay for current retirees. Then we just keep hiring more, every year, to pay for the increased future liabilities. And so on. Makes perfect sense.

Cynthia Volante, social worker, Department of Human Services:

It’s time our elected leaders began to hold the people who wrecked our economy accountable and demand from them they clean up the mess they created and stop coming after the people who serve the state. We [are] already paying more for property taxes, fuel, food and our children’s education. Enough is enough.
Question: What if "the people who wrecked our economy" are "our elected leaders"?



How the Game Is Stacked for the Teachers' Unions

Justin Katz

Predictably, teacher-legislator James Sheehan (D., North Kingstown) is vocally opposed to Providence Schools' attempt to save the necessary money while causing the least amount of harm to students. At bottom, Providence's approach is an attempt to keep the teachers who offer the most value per dollar, which will also allow it to keep more teachers, because the highest-paid and most-senior teachers are not necessarily immune. Sheehan thinks that the law requires Providence to raise taxes and cut services so that it can keep its most expensive teachers whether or not they're the most effective:

In the Richard Phelan v. Burrillville School Committee decision, on Aug. 26, 1991, the commissioner of education held that: In conducting our inquiry as to whether a bona fide financial exigency exists in a particular case, we will consider such factors as the money-saving measures other than tenured-teacher dismissals implemented by the school committee, and the proportion that the amount saved as a result of the school committee's money-saving measures, including the amount saved from the dismissal of tenured teachers, bears to the budgetary shortfall. In short, a school board/committee may only fire as many teachers as is necessary to cover the budgetary shortfall.

Firing all Providence teachers does not meet the latter standard of proportionality, especially when one considers that the dismissal of some hundreds of teachers, as opposed to all 1,926 teachers, would likely have been sufficient to cover the expected school-budget shortfall. Moreover, even these dismissals do not take into account the savings generated from the proposed school closings as well as other cost saving measures.

If financial exigency does not permit the mass terminations of all Providence teachers, as it appears, then Providence teachers must be dismissed according to the contract, namely on a seniority basis.

I'd argue that the district really does have to fire all teachers so that it can rehire the faculty that it requires to meet its budgetary and educational requirements. That there is likely to be substantial overlap of the new faculty with the terminated one is merely a testament to the value of district-specific experience.

Of course, the longer-term necessity is for school committees to stop agreeing to contracts that attempt to lock them into stultifying personnel practices. Unfortunately, Rhode Island's so-called leaders seem not to recognize pitfalls until they hurtle off of them. Or perhaps too many of them, like Sheehan, have a financial interest in maintaining the practices that are pushing the state to its doom.


March 27, 2011


Re #1 to a Question from the Woonsocket Fire Department Restructuring Discussion

Carroll Andrew Morse

In response to Monique's post on the restructuring of the Fire Department by the Woonsocket City Council, commenter Tom Kenney asked...

Are you willing to negotiate with the unions for those concessions or is your answer the same as many conservatives are proposing...do away with collective bargaining altogether?
Here's how I would answer the first part of that question, if it had been addressed to me.

1. I would not be willing to "negotiate" when obvious mistakes need correcting. For concrete examples of what I mean by obvious mistakes, think of 1) substitute-teacher pay in Providence 2) the stories from Massachusetts about firemen going out on disability at a higher pay-grade than their official rank, because they were doing a higher-rank desk job as a temporary fill-in when they became injured.

If there are practices that increase costs to the public, without improving the effectiveness of public services, then the public doesn't have to "give something back" to have them fixed. Relevant to the original conversation in Monique's thread, if it is true that there are contracts that allow overtime to be paid because of some paper-distinction about whether someone should be on or off duty during a particular hour of the week, not because of the total numbers of hours worked in a week, this is the kind of provision outside of any legitimate need for negotiation. (This is different from saying there shouldn't be any such thing as overtime).

2. I would not be willing to enter negotiations that begin with unions taking a position that "we're entitled a big piece off-of-the top of the tax-levy beyond the salaries for the positions that are established because of decisions made 20 years ago, and this cannot be altered except maybe by changing the size of the piece off-the-top by a percentage point or two".

I believe that history teaches that this dynamic is a major source of the poisoning of relations between public unions and the public; a full explanation of the historical dynamic I am referring to is here. This does not mean that I do not believe that steps have to be taken to take care of people who have relied on the good sense of the "negotiators" of Rhode Island's past (ha ha ha ha) to provide for their futures, but going forward into our future, steps need to be taken now to prevent this issue from continually recurring.

Finally, I believe that if the barriers between public safety unions and the public described above were to be removed, members of public safety unions would find a base of support for their work that is broad and strong amongst the public, and that is a better long-term bet than is relying upon promises made by top-down and very shortsighted political machines.


March 23, 2011


A Chance to Mend the Teachers' Health Insurance Board

Carroll Andrew Morse

A bill will come before the Rhode Island Senate Health and Human Services Committee today, S0483, that would if passed alter the mandate of the "Uniform Public School Employees' Health Care Benefits Program Committee" (aka the "Teachers' Health Insurance Board"). This board was created by the legislature two sessions ago over a veto by Governor Donald Carcieri and is comprised of representatives of private organizations -- no gubernatorial appointments or Senate confirmation involved -- who have been granted the power to create binding rules on local school committees for selecting teachers' health-insurance plans.

In case you are wondering which organizations participate in this board and whom they have selected as their representatives, the current membership is available on the Secretary of State's website in the minutes of the January meeting

Ned Draper, RIASBO, Business Managers
Ron Tarro, RIASBO, Business Managers
Larry Purtill, NEA, National Education Association
Bob Walsh, NEA, National Education Association
Bob O’Brien, RISSA, Superintendents
Mike Clarkin, RISSA, Superintendents
Ben Scungio, RIASC, School Committees’ Association
Cathy Kaiser, RIASC, School Committees’ Association
Frank Flynn, RIFT, RI Federation of Teachers
Jim Parisi, RIFT, RI Federation of Teachers
Ken DeLorenzo, Council 94
Donald Ianniazzi, LIUNA
It really puts a new spin the understanding of what union leaders mean when they advocate for "collective bargaining", when you can pretty clearly see through an example like this one that the goal is "collective bargaining, in the cases where we can't get outright legal authority to require the public to provide what we tell them to".

Three Democratic Senators, Hanna Gallo (D-Cranston), Frank DeVall (D-East Providence), and Louis DiPalma (D-Little Compton/Newport/Middletown/Tiverton) (not Senators thought of as members of the Michael Pinga caucus, by the way, which means the bill has support from more than the usual RI Senate stalwarts) have submitted a bill that would make the role of this board purely advisory, freeing school committees to exercise their independent judgment on behalf of their constituents, and protecting basic governing principles of separation-of-powers and that decisions involving expenditures of public money should made be by publicly-elected representatives.

We could have an interesting debate about what the proper term is for describing the form of government where leaders of a limited set of restricted-membership organizations get to make decisions that require public monies to be spent on their own restricted-membership organizations -- but it is not democracy, in any understanding of the term.

Let's pass S0483, and make this debate into a truly academic one.

UPDATE:

National Education Association Assistant Exeuctive Director and Government Relations Specialist Patrick Crowley informs via the comments section that there is a consensus amongst his and other unions in favor of the legislation changing the Uniform Public School Employees' Health Care Benefits Program Committee to an advisory status only.


March 22, 2011


At Least It's Being Considered

Justin Katz

The legislation has so little chance of coming anywhere close to enactment that proposing it is mainly theatrics, but it's definitely a show worth performing, if only to remind people that the process exists to make it happen:

[The bill by Rep. Joe Trillo (R, Warwick)] would rewrite the rulebook on negotiations with public-employee unions, limiting contracts to one year, limiting talks to the issue of wages, making all contract provisions "null and void" when a contract expires and requiring city or town council approval of contracts negotiated by school committees.

The bill would also end payments for unused sick time, bar unions from deducting dues from members' wages, require an employee to work at least 30 hours a week to receive health care and retirement benefits and put all new hires into a 401(k)-style defined-contribution retirement system, like those common in the public sector.

Labor's choke-hold on Rhode Island has to be loosened, but for any catalyst to have a chance, it will have to be much more subtle. Of course, that means that, even if enacted, it would be much too slow.


March 21, 2011


Binding Arbitration for Municipal Employees

Carroll Andrew Morse

A second bill to be heard by the Labor committee tomorrow (H5700, h/t Mike Puyana) looks like an attempt to create binding arbitration for municipal employees who are not police officers, firefighters or teachers. There is a scattering changes made by this bill, but I believe this strikeout is the key one...

28-9.4-13. Appeal from decision. -- (a) The decision of the arbitrators shall be made public and shall be final and binding upon the municipal employees in the appropriate bargaining unit and their representative and the municipal employer on all matters. not involving the expenditure of money.
If I am reading this correctly, this would extend a binding arbitration provision that currently exists in Rhode Island law regarding non-financial matters concerning municipal employees to financial ones.



Binding Arbitration for Municipal Employees

Carroll Andrew Morse

A second bill to be heard by the Labor committee tomorrow (H5700, h/t Mike Puyana) looks like an attempt to create binding arbitration for municipal employees who are not police officers, firefighters or teachers. There is a scattering changes made by this bill, but I believe this strikeout is the key one...

28-9.4-13. Appeal from decision. -- (a) The decision of the arbitrators shall be made public and shall be final and binding upon the municipal employees in the appropriate bargaining unit and their representative and the municipal employer on all matters. not involving the expenditure of money.
If I am reading this correctly, this would extend a binding arbitration provision that currently exists in Rhode Island law regarding non-financial matters concerning municipal employees to financial ones.



The Latest Proposed Government Privilege for Rhode Island's Unions

Carroll Andrew Morse

A bill (H5701) which would expressly give union contracts higher authority than local ordinances and city and town charters will be heard tomorrow by the House labor committee (h/t Mike Puyana)...

Notwithstanding any provision of law to the contrary, in the event of any conflict between the terms of a collective bargaining agreement between a public sector employer and a public sector employee organization and terms of any charter or ordinance of any city or town, the conflict shall be resolved in favor of the collective bargaining agreement.
Granting private, restricted-membership groups special privileges for overriding the decisions of elected governments is not compatible with the fundamental tenants of democracy.


March 15, 2011


The Providence Substitute Situation and Demanding Negotiations to Correct a Mistake

Carroll Andrew Morse

Justin's post from yesterday mentioned that Providence Mayor Angel Tavares' decision to send dismissal notices to all current Providence teachers relates directly to the cost of substitutes. According to data available from the Rhode Island Department of Education website, Mayor Tavares has picked a reasonable area for reform, as the per-pupil costs of substitute teachers in Providence have for the past decade been significantly above the state average…

YearProv. Per-Pupil
Substitute Teacher Costs
Rest-of-RI Per-Pupil
Substitute Teacher Costs
2003-2004$356$119
2004-2005$431$124
2005-2006$366$128
2006-2007$436$132
2007-2008$503$140
2008-2009$416$137

In terms of total dollars, this amounts to between about $6 million and $9 million more being spent by Providence per-year than would be, if substitute costs were at state average…

Year Prov/RI Difference in
Substitute Teacher Costs
Number of
Providence Students
Annual Prov. Cost
Above State Average
2003-2004$23726,690$6,338,404
2004-2005$30725,497$7,816,854
2005-2006$23826,716$6,362,091
2006-2007$30426,531$8,057,344
2007-2008$36325,986$9,420,456
2008-2009$27924,664$6,870,397

Putting things into a budgetary perspective, if Providence's substitute costs had been reformed in the first year of the Cicilline administration (humor me here) and brought into line with the state average, and all other school costs were held equal, the Providence education budget could have been expanded from its FY2003 level to its FY2009 level (the last year for which data is available) with less-than-1% annual increases.

This problem is more than just fiscal. Paying two to three times the state average for substitute teachers is not an "inefficiency"; it is a mistake. It makes public services more costly without doing anything to improve their quality. A school administration shouldn't have to "give something back" in order to correct an outright error that provides no value and only costs to the public.

There can be little doubt that the repeated drawing of lines in the sand by union leaders, behind which everything about a job intransigently is placed -- including practices that in no way serve the public interest -- has contributed greatly to Mayor Tavares' decision to send dismissal notices to the entire Providence faculty. His drastic, across-the-board action is no less likely to bring about change than would an effort to get union cooperation on an isolated issue, where a union is inclined to protect its economic benefits, despite no one else benefitting in any way from the current situation.

In theory, it doesn’t have to be this way. Public-sector unions could realize that their special position within government monopoly systems for delivering public services entails some responsibility for considering the public interest when determining acceptable "negotiating" goals, and that certain options that lack discernable public value need to be closed off. But I don't know that this theory will ever match up to reality.

Stephen Beale has more information on substitute teaching policies in Providence, at GoLocalProv.



State Labor Board: Prosecutor and Judge (twice)

Marc Comtois

I guess I'm not as up on the workings of the State Labor Board as I should be. I was unaware that the State Labor Board could "issue a complaint" against someone, then hold a hearing to determine if that same complaint was valid in the first place.

The state Labor Relations Board has issued a complaint against Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist for “creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation” at the state Department of Education during the tumult in Central Falls last year. The board is holding a hearing at 9 a.m. Tuesday at its Cranston headquarters....After an investigation that included testimony from both sides, the Labor Relations Board issued its complaint in January....Both sides will be asked to testify under oath Tuesday.

After the hearing, the state Labor Relations Board will determine if the complaint should be upheld or dismissed at the next board meeting.

This sounds like a process problem or, dare I say, inefficiency, to say the least. Basically, regardless of the merits of the complaint, is it really the most efficient (not to say unfair) system that has the same individuals hearing the same issues by the same people two times for the sake of...what? Possibly changing their minds? Does that actually ever happen?



Like a Profession, or Something

Justin Katz

The specifics could be adjusted elsewhere, but the general attitude that Julia Steiny describes at Blackstone Valley Preparatory Charter School, although there's no revolutionary "paradigm change," as the education academics like to contrive, seems like a profound shift. Note, especially, the handling of the teaching professionals:

... at Blackstone Valley the two-teacher classroom [with more students] is the beginning of a leadership-development continuum designed to grow each teacher's responsibility, autonomy, compensation and personal goals. New or "fellow" teachers plan and teach, but also learn alongside an experienced "lead" teacher. As lead teachers become even more practiced, they might become grade leaders for common planning time, or run professional development, or research a new technique and teach it to the others. Eventually, master teachers could become a Head of School. ...

So everyone in the organization has goals. Chiappetta says, "Some of our people want to be lifelong classroom teachers, so we'll support them becoming master teachers. Others say, 'I want to go to med school in a few years and be a pediatrician, with teaching experience under my belt.' Right now, three teachers leave early to take classes for their graduate degrees, and make up the time on Saturdays. We want to help you invest in yourself and move forward."

Gone is the rigid put-in-your-time factory model of public schools in general. At least by the impression that Steiny gives, the school hires the best candidate for each position, and being human beings, they're each potentially approaching the job from different backgrounds and with different plans. The administrators keep the project on track and are accountable for their results, because if their faculty doesn't succeed, students won't sign up.


March 14, 2011


What Elected Officials Have Negotiated For

Justin Katz

Anchor Rising readers are already familiar with the explanation of the problem basic problem with public-sector unions in a democracy that Andrew Klavan offers in the following video, but it's worth a watch nonetheless:





This article describing why Providence Mayor Angel Tavares had to give teachers termination notices, rather than layoff notices, provides excellent evidence of the results of the tilted system:

If they are laid off, teachers are placed on a recall list. Those teachers who do not wind up with full-time jobs by the beginning of the school year are placed in the group of "regulars in pool." By agreement with the union, these substitute teachers have to be called in to fill temporary vacancies before any other category of teachers. ,,,

"Regulars in pool" are the most-expensive substitutes because they are paid at their full step. In addition, regulars in pool can also receive family health-care coverage, a longevity bonus and an advanced-degree bonus, depending on how many days they work. ...

But here's the real reason why regulars in pool are more expensive than the other substitute teachers, according to Clarkin:

"The district calls in the most expensive [subs] because they have to pay them anyway," Clarkin said. "If you need a sub, they get brought in first."

So teachers who are laid off tend to stick around in the system at full pay even if they don't work. Typically, not enough teachers would be laid off to fill up the substitute list, but with school closings, that outcome is likely next year.

Any one of high salary, lavish benefits, or job security would be tolerable if school committees had negotiated with one of the others as a priority. But the push back against unions is occurring because they've managed to transform negotiations into a process of moderating the rate at which they get all three.


March 11, 2011


Wrapping up Wisconsin

Marc Comtois

Now that it's official, here's what they did in Wisconsin regarding public employee unions.
1) "...the bill meant that the state wouldn't have to lay off public employees."
2) "...[took] away the ability of unions to bargain over pensions and health care." Just like the Federal Government employees. This was an attempt to gain flexibility not provided by 3-year (or more) contracts. Health care and pension costs have climbed faster than contracts make accommodation for.
3) "...limit pay raises, which can still be negotiated by unions, to inflation." Of course, if the cap in a collectively bargained agreement is set by CPI/inflation, what's the point in collectively bargaining?
4) "...requires public-employee union members to contribute 5.8% of their pay to pensions". Rhode Island workers would dream of that number.
5) "...pay 12.6% of health-care premiums out of their wages, up from 6% on average". Again.
6) "...eliminates automatic collection of dues by the state". That's a hit to organized union leadership.
7) "...requires each public union in the state to get recertified every year by vote." Again.

As William Jacobsen points out, the rubber will hit the road when:

...tens of thousands of Wisconsin public employee union members...will have the choice for the first time in memory of deciding whether to join the union and pay the union dues, which have been estimated in the $700-1000 per year range.

The public employees will have to make a choice, take a pay increase or pay the union.

I think we know how that vote will turn out, and whether the employees -- once given a choice -- will buy what the unions are selling.


March 10, 2011


Chafee Shows Us Who's Boss

Justin Katz

Another interesting fact emerges when comparing Governor Carcieri's last five-year forecast with Governor Chafee's first. This table shows the degree of change that the former has made from the latter forecast:

2012 2013 2014 2015
Personnel expense -$16.8 M -$12.3 M -$27.9 M -$45.5 M
State operations (including personnel) -$43.7 M -$38.4 M -$53.6 M -$71.3 M
Aid to local governments $13.6 M $69.1 M $100.1 M $139.7 M

So, for 2015, if we find the difference between the amount that Chafee intends to increase revenue ($302.5 M) over and above the amount that he plans to reduce the deficit ($240 M), we get $62.5 M. Add that to his reduction in operations (however fanciful that may actually prove to be), and we wind up with $133.8 M, which is almost the amount by which he's increasing the aid to local governments, most of which winds up in the hands of municipal-level unions, including his biggest supporters, the teachers' unions.

So, tax and fee payers are paying the entirety of Chafee's deficit reduction, and state workers are picking up the bill for a good chunk of the wealth being funneled to their comrades at the local and city level.



National Solidarity, Forever (and Blind) - Coming to Providence

Monique Chartier

GoLocalProv reports exclusively.

The American Federation of Teachers is poised to unroll a $1 million to $2 million ad campaign to fight Providence Mayor Angel Taveras over the mass terminations of city teachers, sources tell GoLocalProv.

The substantial media buy could escalate a standoff that has already seized the national spotlight, making Rhode Island one of the key battlegrounds between unions and budget hawks determined to rein in deficits and unfunded pension liabilities.

“Unions will fight this war on as many fronts as they have to, regardless of whether it’s their ‘home turf,’” said Jennifer Duffy, a senior editor at The Cook Political Report. “This is a battle about survival to them. It’s just that fundamental.”

People, repeat after me: We're dead broke.

By the way, note the re-emergence of a certain long lost political consultant.

Guy Dufault, a retired publicist who has worked with labor unions, said the situation could escalate into an all-out PR war. “There’s no question the wholesale terminations were an attack on unions. You can’t deny that,” Dufault told GoLocalProv. “From a precedent-setting standpoint, if these terminations are then turned around and used to get rid of senior teachers, I think it would be war.”

Unfortunately, he forgot to update his talking points before coming out of retirement.

He said the real fight is between the haves and the have nots—rich Republicans and the workers the unions represent.

That's rich! Keep talking, Guy; you're a real asset ... to somebody, anyway.


March 7, 2011


A Fantasy Compromise

Justin Katz

Earlier, I mentioned Julia Steiny's contribution to the belated march of red flags throughout the Providence Journal. Steiny's piece is interesting because she attempts to draw a line through the ranks of teachers:

... in the shrill, righteous rhetoric, sometimes screamed by both the left and the right, teachers are lumped together as if they are a homogenous group, with the same interests. Good teachers deserve far better. Academically, they're the best allies of the kids. Fiscally, they're our best buy.

Steiny elides the fact that the teachers have effectively assented to this treatment by, first, joining together into a collective and, second, failing to exhibit deep differences of opinion among themselves. It isn't really fair to fault the "righteous rhetoric" when educators present a unified face.

To be sure, Steiny notes that in "pay-to-play states, teachers can refuse to join" unions, but "payback for bucking the union can be ferocious." How much more ferocious things must be in states, like Rhode Island, in which union membership is compulsory. Indeed, I wonder whether it's possible to go from there to a "right to work" scenario in which teachers have a right to form unions but also a right not to participate in them, as Steiny suggests. In Rhode Island, the unions are already formed, which means that teachers would have to break away one by one. That sounds like a recipe for a divided workforce devoting far too much behind-the-scenes energy to the labor battle.

It's actually surprising that Steiny doesn't agree, given other observations in her article:

Unions are private-sector businesses with leaders that make fat six-figure salaries. If they do not give their teachers good customer service, state laws should not keep them in business. A pot of compulsory dues allows unions to ignore dissenting rank and file and use the money to, for example, fight much-needed reforms to professionalize hiring, or to weed out bad teachers, or to extend the school day (which every charter school has already done). Unions cling to hiring by seniority with a death grip, even though it is clearly detrimental to education.

Surely, Steiny has had some taste of the tactics that such vested interests will use against those who speak against them. Is that a battle that we want to impose on our best educators?

For their part, they've arguably already proven their disinclination for the fight by failing to speak out already.



The Line of Awareness Crossed Too Late?

Justin Katz

If the Sunday Providence Journal is any measure, commentators as a class have moved toward greater concern about the effect of Rhode Island's stacked public-sector deck. From Froma Harrop to Julia Steiny to Mark Patinkin. Here's an interesting bit from Patinkin's offering, which imagines the Starship Enterprise reaction:

"But things seem more peaceful and stable than Planet Wisconsin, which I heard was in upheaval over budget issues."

"Au contraire, Captain. The unfunded pension liability in Wisconsin is $252 million. Here in Planet Rhode Island, the state treasurer herself puts it at $5 billion or more. That's 'billion' with a 'B,' Captain." "Impossible, Spock."

The main difference is that peculiarities of Rhode Island politics filled all of the important policy-making seats in the government with people who have proven themselves inclined to ignore problems for as long as possible in order to maintain the status quo. We're already in worse condition than states that are taking steps to solve their budget problems, and we're digging in for a while longer.


March 4, 2011


The Union Rhetoric and Financial Reality

Justin Katz

You know, this sort of talk can only expand the sense of unreality between unions and the general public:

"Something is insane in Providence," [American Federation of Teachers President Randi] Weingarten said, standing on the steps of City Hall. "On a week where teachers and students were taking a well-deserved break, a secret plan was being hatched in Providence. They thought no one would be there to hear it. Fire everyone — that was their plan."

Maybe it's because my family hasn't been able to afford to go anywhere during vacations since my honeymoon a dozen years ago, but it strikes me as peculiar to assume that February vacation finds full regiments of teachers flying off to vacation spots around the globe. It seems, rather, that a better time to slip secret plans through would be just before they leave or just after they return.

Moreover, Weingarten manages to remind the general public that the protesting horde just wrapped up another full week off — a winter break, not to be confused with the Christmas break or the soon to arrive spring break. Let the kids decompress, by all means, but are Rhode Island's schools running so smoothly that there's no need to fill time out of the classroom with strategy sessions, evaluation of successes and failures, and professional development — all within scope of the enviable employment packages that teachers already receive?

In similar regard, this statement from a parent at the rally emphasizes the point:

"Mr. Mayor," said Maria Almestica, "we don't want 35 kids in a classroom. This is not OK. Our children should be learning, not worrying. You're messing with their futures."

The children shouldn't have to worry that the city in which they live will not remain financially solvent, and they shouldn't have to worry that their state cannot produce adequate employment to allow them to remain within its borders when they enter the workforce. The status quo of the Rhode Island public sector is not sustainable, and at bottom, that is what's messing with students' futures.


March 3, 2011


Union Rhetoric and Fiscal Reality

Marc Comtois

There was a rally for Providence teachers yesterday and union leaders, who never met a crisis they didn't like to exploit, regaled the crowd with unsurprising rhetoric that served to add heat but shed little light.

AFT Union President Randi Weingarten:

[The Providence teacher dismissal notices are] the most wrong-headed thing I have seen in a season of wrong-headed actions against American workers....Something is insane in Providence...On a week where teachers and students were taking a well-deserved break, a secret plan was being hatched in Providence. They thought no one would be there to hear it. Fire everyone — that was their plan....Mass firings don’t fix the budget. They say, ‘This is a city that doesn’t care about schools.’
Got that? A liberal urban mayor and his staff of like-minded folks were hatching a "secret plan" that no one wold "hear". To seriously think that this is a purposefully malicious act on the part of the Mayor and his staff is ridiculous. Apparently, the best way to keep it secret is to announce it at press conferences and public meetings. Maybe the execution wasn't perfect, but a progressive conspiracy against a bloc of progressive political supporters this ain't. And, for the thousandth time, a notice of potential "dismissal" is a far cry from being "fired."

RI AFL-CIO President George Nee:

You agreed to Race to the Top. And it got you fired. Mr. Mayor, support collective bargaining. Let’s not go down the road with Wisconsin.
Logical fallacy alert. (If one supports reform it doesn't logically follow that one will be fired). Everything that has been done has been done as per the agreement that was collectively bargained. The teachers were dismissed because layoffs wouldn't have allowed for the flexibility required to balance the budget.

This is the new reality and it's not just the Democratic Mayor of Providence who is staring at deficits and proposing cuts. Democratic Governors in New York, Maryland, California, West Virginia, Missouri and Connecticut (just to, you know, name a few) are also proposing job cuts and pensions and salary changes to help balance budgets.

So, rhetoric or reality? Union-busting, secret plans hatched by a liberal Democrat and his staff in the middle of a public meeting and presented at a press conference? Or dealing with budget deficits in one of the few ways available as per a collectively bargained contract?


March 2, 2011


When the the Rules Don't Work to the Teachers' Union Advantage, Obviously the Rules Must Immediately Be Changed

Carroll Andrew Morse

In yesterday's Projo, Linda Borg reported that Providence Teachers Union President Steve Smith wants Mayor Angel Tavares to reconsider his decision to formally dismiss all of the teachers in the Providence School System...

The Providence Teachers Union president offered the School Board another option Monday night: send out letters that include the possibility of layoffs and terminations....

Smith, who met with Taveras on Sunday, said the mayor offered to recall approximately 1,400 teachers, but Smith proposed another solution: including the option of layoffs in a new letter.

However, as noted later in the story, the conventional reading of Rhode Island law says that it's too late to initiate a change...
After the public comments, School Board President Kathleen Crain stressed that that board’s hands were tied by a state law that says teachers must be notified of their employment status by March 1.
Hold on though -- a group of Democrats at the State House have suddenly decided that March 1 is obviously too early a date for making decisions for the next school year, and have already proposed changing the notification date for layoffs and dismissals (House Bill 5540)...
This act would extend the notification date for the dismissal, suspension or lay-off of teachers from March 1 to May 15.
So as long as Rhode Island legislators have had the epiphany that the March 1 date isn't sacred and can be changed, shouldn't we also be considering moving the notification date past the end of the school year, and at least pretend that this change is not being proposed solely for the of benefit particular union in a particular situation?

Changing the law to create a personnel process less disruptive to education process is deserving of discussion. Changing the law to benefit a single organization in its particular maneuvers is not.

ADDENDUMS:

Last month, a bill was introduced to the RI House that would move the notification date to June 1 (H5297). It was scheduled for a hearing that was postponed at the sponsor's request (J. Russell Jackson of Newport). Does this mean that today's bill indicative of some kind of negotiation going on in the legislature about a new date, or is this a routine case of multiple bills being submitted to the RI legislature on the same subject with rank-and-file legislators letting leadership decide which one, if any, will get a vote?

Also last month, Julia Steiny discussed the early notification date and its ramifications in her Projo column, available here (h/t Marc).

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Another Acronym to Track

Justin Katz

My Patch column, this week, discusses the latest acronym with which active citizens must acquaint themselves:

... OPEB stands for "other post-employment benefits" and, in Tiverton for example, includes health, dental and life insurance covering employees and their families after their retirement.

According to a press release announcing the issuance of the final report from the Rhode Island Senate Municipal Pension Study Commission, the unfunded OPEB promises that cities and towns have made to their employees amount to $2.4 billion. As the Providence Journal highlighted when reporting on the release, this is on top of about $2 billion in unfunded pension liabilities that cities and towns have incurred. ...

Eventually, of course, the bills begin to come due. Tiverton currently covers its OPEB responsibilities on a year-to-year, pay-as-you-go basis, amounting to nearly a million and a half dollars annually. For fiscal 2010, the expense was $1,362,886. That's more than 4% of the tax levy, for that year. It's also only 42% of the GASB-suggested payment (technically called an "annual required contribution"), which was $3,222,448. A payment of that size would have been 10% of the levy.

In fact, if Tiverton were to make the "required contribution" to all of its post-employment obligations, it would be storing away about 18% of its tax levy, each year, to keep public employees retiring young.


March 1, 2011


Unions: Cause or Coincidence?

Justin Katz

Thomas Russell of Barrington pushes a logical error frequently confused for an argument:

I am (unfortunately) old enough to remember the state of education before the birth of teachers unions. Teaching positions were treated as patronage jobs, and salaries were so low that many graduates only turned to teaching after they failed to find work doing something else.

It is ironic that so many people seem to want to return teachers to that status even as they proclaim themselves to be champions of education improvement.

Education has so dramatically changed in ways entirely apart from the employment arrangements of teachers that it's nearly got to be a deliberate avoidance to voice Russell's point. Most profoundly, the importance of education is much more frequently proclaimed, and for a broader cross-section of Americans than it was in those pre-union days. That is, society has come to value education (at least in the abstract) so hugely that the value of those who provide it is unlikely to decrease just because they don't periodically go on strike, work to rule, or otherwise bully school committees into signing unaffordable contracts.

Personally, I hope and expect education employment reforms to elevate teachers' status, because they will no longer be associated with such unseemly union behaviors... not to mention union characters who need not be named, here.

Of course, this accepts Russell's statement of history for the sake of argument. I, myself, am too young to remember those olden days, but the statements of respect for teachers that one frequently hears from folks who were their students suggest that his assertion is, at best, exaggerated.


February 24, 2011


Human Nature and Unions

Justin Katz

That was the topic Andrew introduced when he called in to the Matt Allen Show, last night. Stream by clicking here, or download it.



More Union Differences

Monique Chartier

Further to Marc's post, David Brooks outlined additional differences between public and private labor unions in a piece Tuesday about the Wisconsin situation.

Private sector unions push against the interests of shareholders and management; public sector unions push against the interests of taxpayers. Private sector union members know that their employers could go out of business, so they have an incentive to mitigate their demands; public sector union members work for state monopolies and have no such interest.

Private sector unions confront managers who have an incentive to push back against their demands. Public sector unions face managers who have an incentive to give into them for the sake of their own survival. Most important, public sector unions help choose those they negotiate with. Through gigantic campaign contributions and overall clout, they have enormous influence over who gets elected to bargain with them, especially in state and local races.

As to that penultimate sentence, with school committees around the state littered with teachers, union members and/or their spouses as well as prominent paid union staffers sitting in the General Assembly, Rhode Island is Exhibit A of public sector unions "helping choose those they negotiate with". The result of that "help" has been decades of short-sighted elected officials who have irresponsibly bestowed upon the state expensive government, chronically unbalanced budgets, high taxes and even higher unfunded post employment liabilities.

Returning to the difference between solidarity public and solidarity private, I would add just one more item to all of the excellent points raised by Brooks, Goldberg and Comtois: along with us non-unionized folk, private unions are on the issuing rather than the receiving end of the disbursements that fund public compensation and benefits.



Rhode Island Union Rally Gets National Notoriety

Marc Comtois

As first reported on the Matt Allen Show, Adam Cole was in a confrontation with a union brother at the recent union solidarity rally held at the State House. National blogs are picking up the story, particularly the quote from a union brother, "“I’ll f**k you in the ass, you faggot!” Nice. Here's the video (confrontation starts around the 7 1/2 minute mark).

Another, longer video shows similar attitudes though, to be fair, it also shows that Cole and his fellow camera-wielders were somewhat confrontational during the pre-rally--asking about the Tea Party (and at least one mentioning that President Obama isn't a U.S. citizen and some One World Order stuff....Oy). That being said, it doesn't excuse a union brother threatening to "take them outside and stick it [the camera] up your a**" (about 7 minutes into the aforementioned longer video).


February 23, 2011


An Intro to the Sources of Public Unrest with Public Unions

Carroll Andrew Morse

Let me try and find a basic principle of conservative philosophy that I believe that many public union members will agree with, that human nature is fixed, that the fundamental nature of 21st Century Americans is not intrinsically different from the people of centuries past. If we today do have it better than the previous generations, it is because our predecessors developed for us through hard experience some decent ideals to live by (after living through other ones that didn't work so well), and bequeathed to us a set of institutions capable of nurturing and growing those ideals.

But if human nature remains the same, then we know that in any era -- present era included -- that when you tell a certain class of people, be they royalty, guild members, corporate leaders or union members, that they have a privileged position in the governing process -- and especially in appropriating resources from the general citizenry -- they will tend to take more and more, until the general citizenry starts to push back. Public employee unions are no more immune to this dynamic than are any other form of human organization. And, over the past 50 years, public employee unions in the United States have been given, or perhaps taken, a privileged position in the process of dmeocratic governance.

This, more than the immediate set of fiscal particulars, is what is driving the conflict that has exploded in Wisconsin and Indiana, and is what needs to be rebalanced, in order to resolve the situation.

Now, I know that public employee union members authentically bristle at being called a "privileged class", so I will lay out exactly what kinds of governing privilege I refer to, and especially how those privileges conflict with the foundational ideas and processes that make a democratic system work…



The Union Difference

Marc Comtois

Once again--because public employee union leaders are doing their best to conflate the two--let's re-emphasize that there's a difference between private sector and public employee unions. Further, as Dan Yorke brought up this morning, despite proclamations made at rallies, most of the middle-class isn't unionized (nor intends to be). Starting with the latter, while it's true that public employee union members are in the middle-class (some are even in the upper middle class), that's different than implying that most of the middle class are union members. They're not

In 2010, the union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of a union--was 11.9 percent, down from 12.3 percent a year earlier, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today....In 2010, 7.6 million public sector employees belonged to a union, compared with 7.1 million union workers in the private sector. The union membership rate for public sector workers (36.2 percent) was substantially higher than the rate for private sector workers (6.9 percent). Within the public sector, local government workers had the highest union membership rate, 42.3 percent. This group includes workers in heavily unionized occupations, such as teachers, police officers, and fire fighters. Private sector industries with high unionization rates included transportation and utilities (21.8 percent), telecommunications (15.8 percent), and construction (13.1 percent).
Second, Jonah Goldberg summarizes the difference between public and private unions:
Traditional, private-sector unions were born out of an often-bloody adversarial relationship between labor and management. It's been said that during World War I, U.S. soldiers had better odds of surviving on the front lines than miners did in West Virginia coal mines. Mine disasters were frequent; hazardous conditions were the norm. In 1907, the Monongah mine explosion claimed the lives of 362 West Virginia miners. Day-to-day life often resembled serfdom, with management controlling vast swaths of the miners' lives. Before unionization and many New Deal-era reforms, Washington had little power to reform conditions by legislation.

Government unions have no such narrative on their side. Do you recall the Great DMV cave-in of 1959? How about the travails of second-grade teachers recounted in Upton Sinclair's famous schoolhouse sequel to "The Jungle"? No? Don't feel bad, because no such horror stories exist.

As Goldberg explains, President Kennedy saw political opportunity in allowing government workers to unionize so he proclaimed that they could via Executive Order. We know that even Franklin Roosevelt didn't think public employee unionization was a good idea. Neither, as Goldberg writes, did George Meany (the first AFL-CIO leader), who said that it is "impossible to bargain collectively with the government." Because there is a huge difference in what goes on at the bargaining table between a private union/employer and a public union/government bureaucrat. Goldberg again:
Private-sector unions fight with management over an equitable distribution of profits. Government unions negotiate with friendly politicians over taxpayer money, putting the public interest at odds with union interests, and, as we've seen in states such as California and Wisconsin, exploding the cost of government.
That's the fundamental difference and that's why--despite my personal experience--I do support private unions, but not public.

ADDENDUM: Yorke makes the cogent point that RI union members are actually doing themeselves a disservice by calling for solidarity with their Wisconsin "brothers and sisters." For while the Wisconsin members have been dodging realistic contracts for some time now, RI unions have "come to the table" and made concessions and currently contribute to their own benefits at a level just now being approached by the Wisconsin members.


February 21, 2011


Getting to Graduation

Justin Katz

In addition to everything else on the educational plate, Rhode Island needs to increase its graduation rate, even as it requires a diploma actually to mean something:

Statewide, 76 percent of the Class of 2010 graduated within four years, up a percentage point from the previous year.

More than 2,900 of their classmates didn't receive a diploma last year, although a small number of these students stayed for a fifth year in hopes of graduating.

If these fifth-year students graduate in June, they will be counted in the state's five-year graduation rate next year.

The 2010 five-year graduation rate, which uses a formula to include both the Class of 2010 and students from the Class of 2009 who needed an extra year to graduate, was 79 percent.

The article notes some helpful activities at Davies Career and Technical High School in Lincoln, but it comes back to the same ol' problem:

The program added 90-minutes to the school day and cost about $90,000 extra for teaching and transportation. But, the director said, the investment paid off.

Everything costs extra money, and it's money that administrators and school committees have already spent on lucrative contract deals. Rhode Island has to change its paradigm to an assertion that school employees are paid to accomplish an objective, and they'd better do so within the resources already allocated.


February 20, 2011


Wisconsin Doctors' Notes; Wisconsin Protests: It's for the Chi-hhhilll-dren

Monique Chartier

The protests at Wisconsin's capitol have been carried out for the children. Truly! Just ask the Reverend Jackson and the protesters.

Speaking to a near-capacity crowd from the second level of the Capitol rotunda, the civil rights activist [Jesse Jackson] led protesters in chants of "Save the teachers. Save the children." Protesters swayed as Jackson led them in a rendition of the song, "We Shall Overcome."

Isn't it beautiful?! All of this agitation has nothing to do with the preservation of advantageous compensation terms or the bargaining structure that ensures its perpetuation. It's all about "saving the children".

Oh, and you know about those "sick" teachers who bunked work to attend the protests, forcing the cancellation of classes at several Wisconsin schools? They don't need to worry about the repercussions of an unjustified absence from work because

doctors from various hospitals set up a station near the Capitol to provide notes covering public employees' absences from work.

The bill would strip public unions of most of their collective bargaining rights.

For most of the past week, thousands of union members and their supporters have protested Walker's measure at the Capitol. Some have called in sick so they could demonstrate here.

On Saturday, family physician Lou Sanner, 59, of Madison, said he had given out hundreds of notes. Many of the people he spoke with seemed to be suffering from stress, he said.

The issuance of bogus sick notes to excuse the classroom absences of hundreds of unprofessionals resulting in the hampering of the education of thousands of students: prima facie, it's for the children! Right, doctor?


Video Addendum - Snap diagnosis of Walker Pneumonia


February 19, 2011


Fund: Why Wisconsin?

Marc Comtois

John Fund explains why Wisconsin is such a big deal to liberal/Democrat/unionists. First, though, he summarizes what got their panties in a bunch:

Mr. Walker's proposals are hardly revolutionary. Facing a $137 million budget deficit, he has decided to try to avoid laying off 5,500 state workers by proposing that they contribute 5.8% of their income towards their pensions and 12.6% towards health insurance. That's roughly the national average for public pension payments, and it is less than half the national average of what government workers contribute to health care. Mr. Walker also wants to limit the power of public-employee unions to negotiate contracts and work rules—something that 24 states already limit or ban.

The governor's move is in reaction to a 2009 law implemented by the then-Democratic legislature that expanded public unions' collective-bargaining rights and lifted existing limits on teacher raises....The labor laws that Wisconsin unions are so bitterly defending were popular during an era of industrialization and centralization. But the labor organizations they protect have become much less popular, as the declining membership of many private-sector unions attests. Moreover, it's become abundantly clear that too many government workers enjoy wages, benefits and pensions that are out of line with the rest of the economy.

The symbolism and history of Wisconsin as being in the vanguard of Progressivism is playing a key role:
The Badger State became the first to pass a worker-compensation program in 1911, as well as the first to create unemployment compensation in 1932. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees—the chief national union representing non-federal public employees—was founded in Madison in 1936. And in 1959, Wisconsin became the first state to grant public employees collective-bargaining rights, which influenced President John F. Kennedy's decision to grant federal employees the right to join unions three years later.
Further, Governor Walker's reforms will undercut some of the, um, "advantages" union organizers have enjoyed:
Walker would require that public-employee unions be recertified annually by a majority vote of all their members, not merely by a majority of those that choose to cast ballots. In addition, he would end the government's practice of automatically deducting union dues from employee paychecks. For Wisconsin teachers, union dues total between $700 and $1,000 a year.

"Ending dues deductions breaks the political cycle in which government collects dues, gives them to the unions, who then use the dues to back their favorite candidates and also lobby for bigger government and more pay and benefits," [Labor historian Fred] Siegel told me. After New York City's Transport Workers Union lost the right to automatic dues collection in 2007 following an illegal strike, its income fell by more than 35% as many members stopped ponying up. New York City ended the dues collection ban after 18 months.

Myron Lieberman, a former Minnesota public school teacher who became a contract negotiator for the American Federation of Teachers, says that since the 1960s collective bargaining has so "greatly increased the political influence of unions" that they block the sorts of necessary change that other elements of society have had to accept.

Walker hopes to change that.



When the Numbers No Longer Add Up

Justin Katz

The timing of Wisconsin's contribution to the era of global protest coincides profoundly with a new report on pensions from the Rhode Island Senate:

The new report also factors in the cost of other post-employment benefits, which cities and towns, as well as the state, have only recently begun to show on their accounting statements. With those costs added to the pension costs, whether state-managed or locally managed, the annual payments needed to keep pace with current and future retirement benefits begins to eat up a significant portion of some local tax levies.

What sorts of numbers are we talking about?

While the unfunded liability for locally managed pension plans totals about $2 billion, the unfunded liability for other post-employment benefits totals another $2.4 billion, according to the report. This does not include the millions of dollars in retirement obligations that cities and towns share with the state for teacher pensions.

From the sampling of numbers reported in the Providence Journal, there appears to be significant variation from municipality to municipality, but the average city or town would have to devote about one-quarter of its annual budget to support employees who are no longer working. Pawtucket, Central Falls, and Johnston would need 59%, 57%, and 47%, respectively. And, again, that's excluding payments that the state subsidizes.

Keep in mind, too, that government continues to operate and to grow. This is an after-the-fact payment to those who've already retired.


February 17, 2011


On Wisconsin

Marc Comtois
On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!
Plunge right through that line!
Run the ball clear down the field,
A touchdown sure this time.
On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!
Fight on for her fame
Fight! Fellows! - fight, fight, fight!
We'll win this game.
I mentioned Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's budget plans that include a reconfiguration of state employee union benefit packages and collective bargaining, in general. Union members aren't happy, with teachers staging sick outs and protests being held. About that. Remember how we were all told that it was a time for reasoned, responsible debate? Apparently that didn't get through to Wisconsin unionists.
Here's a summary of why they are upset:
Pension contributions: Currently, state, school district and municipal employees that are members of the Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS) generally pay little or nothing toward their pensions. The bill would require that employees of WRS employers, and the City and County of Milwaukee contribute 50 percent of the annual pension payment. The payment amount for WRS employees is estimated to be 5.8 percent of salary in 2011.

Health insurance contributions: Currently, state employees on average pay approximately 6 percent of annual health insurance premiums. This bill will require that state employees pay at least 12.6 percent of the average cost of annual premiums....

Collective bargaining – The bill would make various changes to limit collective bargaining for most public employees to wages. Total wage increases could not exceed a cap based on the consumer price index (CPI) unless approved by referendum. Contracts would be limited to one year and wages would be frozen until the new contract is settled. Collective bargaining units are required to take annual votes to maintain certification as a union. Employers would be prohibited from collecting union dues and members of collective bargaining units would not be required to pay dues. These changes take effect upon the expiration of existing contracts. Local law enforcement and fire employees, and state troopers and inspectors would be exempt from these changes....

Limited term employees (LTE) – The bill would prohibit LTE's from being eligible for health insurance or participation in the Wisconsin Retirement System.

State employee absences and other work actions – If the Governor has declared a state of emergency, the bill authorizes appointing authorities to terminate any employees that are absent for three days without approval of the employer or any employees that participate in an organized action to stop or slow work.

Quality Health Care Authority – The bill repeals the authority of home health care workers under the Medicaid program to collectively bargain.

Child care labor relations – The bill repeals the authority of family child care workers to collectively bargain with the State.

University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics (UWHC) Board and Authority – The bill repeals collective bargaining for UWHC employees. State positions currently employed by the UWHC Board are eliminated and the incumbents are transferred to the UWHC Authority.

University of Wisconsin faculty and academic staff - The bill repeals the authority of UW faculty and academic staff to collectively bargain.

University of Wisconsin law professor Anne Althouse has more pics and vids. This is only the beginning, too, as both Republicans and Democrats--including the Obama Administration--look to re-tool teacher compensation and work rules and implement various reforms.
On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!
Stand up, Badgers, sing!
"Forward" is our driving spirit,
Loyal voices ring.
On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!
Raise her glowing flame
Stand, Fellows, let us now
Salute her name!


February 15, 2011


Card Check Unions, and Maybe More, Come to Rhode Island

Carroll Andrew Morse

The House of Representatives Labor Committee is hearing a bill today on card-check unionization for public employees (H5134). Under the proposed law, secret ballot elections during a unionization process could be bypassed by public employees, if 70% of the members of potential bargaining unit publicly affix their signatures to “authorization cards”. No analogous card-check procedure for decertification of a public employee union is provided for in the proposed law.

If I may be informal, one question raised by the introduction of this bill is “why bother”, i.e. how much further does public employee unionization have to go in Rhode Island? When I put that question to an individual familiar with various issues of interest to Rhode Islanders, the response was to point me to a clause that would be added to the definitions section of the law…

(9) “Public Employee” includes an individual employed by the state, subdivision of the state, or quasi-public entities.
Currently, there is no explicit definition of "public employee" in the law, and given the location of this clause, this new definition would extend not only the card-check provision to employees of quasi-public entities, it would extend the entire labor relations act to the employees of quasi-public entities.

So how far, exactly, would adding quasi-public agencies expand the scope of public-employee unionization in Rhode Island?


February 12, 2011


Wisconsin Governor Takes on Unions to Solve Budget

Marc Comtois

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is squarely taking on the unions to help fix his state's budget problems (h/t).

Elements of Walker's proposal include state employee wage increases limited to the rate of inflation unless approved in a voter referendum. State workers -- other than police, fire, and inspectors -- would lose many bargaining rights and could opt out of paying union dues after current contracts expire, with dues no longer collected automatically.

State workers will have to raise the amount they contribute to their pensions to 5.8 percent of salary, and double their contribution to health insurance premiums to 12.6 percent of salary. Wisconsin's unfunded pension liability is $252.6 million, according to Moody's Investors Service.

People aren't happy:
The proposal drew outrage from labor unions and Democrats in the state, which has a $137 million budget deficit in the fiscal year ending June 30 and larger deficits to come.

"If Republicans get their way, workers will no longer be able to negotiate over the hours they work, the safety conditions they labor under or the health insurance and retirement benefits they and their families depend on," Senate Democratic Leader Mark Miller said in a statement.

Republicans--who control the state legislature--anticipate a tough road but think they have no other real options.
"We are out of money and the options are few. We can either raise taxes -- which is absolutely off the table -- reduce spending or lay off workers," Jeff Fitzgerald, the Republican Speaker of the State Assembly, told local radio.

"I expect the Capitol to explode" with protests, Fitzgerald said. "It's going to be a very difficult week."

Nonetheless, it is expected that the Governor's plan will pass.


January 27, 2011


Give Them Time... and Money

Justin Katz

Although writing from Michigan, Kyle Olson has it right when it comes to his perspective on education happenings in Central Falls:

Central Falls students deserve a high-quality education. But instead, families are told to be patient as administrators and the teachers union hold meetings and create 45-page reform plans. And now the federal government gives the district a big check, which simply buys the defenders of the status quo more time.

At the School Committee meeting in Tiverton, this Tuesday, the committee and administrators turned part of their budget discussion into a plea that they lack the resources for early interventions that might improve results, particularly standardized test results, for students down the line. They talked about revenue sources that Portsmouth has that Tiverton doesn't; they speculated as to why Portsmouth's per-student cost might be lower, including the possibility that the town has fewer special education students. (Some quick research that I did online while they talked showed that a good portion of the difference is specifically in instruction, meaning the cost of teachers.)

As far as I'm concerned, that's all beside the point. Each town and city has the tax base that it has and the student population that it has. The principle studiously ignored during such discussions is that organizations must be built to do the work that must be done with the resources that they actually have. If that means that a particular district must pay teachers significantly less in order to hire math coaches or whatever else might be needed, then so be it.

The approach to labor and salary that has become part of public school culture begins with the premise that teachers should make roughly the same wherever they work, and the unions manipulate politics and local budget processes in order to prevent any real systemic balance of price, resources, and value. Pouring more money — whether local, state, or federal — into the equation causes the price of educators to go up and when the flow of revenue ebbs, programs and services go on the chopping block so that salaries never have to adjust downward.


January 17, 2011


An Inevitable Course, Once on It

Justin Katz

Iain Murray and Vincent Vernuccio remind us that public sector unionization is not an age-old practice:

Public-sector unionism is a relatively recent phenomenon in the United States. In 1959, Wisconsin became the first state to allow its public employees to unionize, and other states then followed suit. In 1962, Pres. John F. Kennedy issued an executive order allowing federal employees to join unions. Since then, union membership in the public sector has grown by leaps and bounds. In January of this year, for the first time, government-sector union membership was larger than union membership in the private sector. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 22.2 million government workers in the U.S. Almost 8 million of them are unionized, compared with only 7.4 million in the private sector. These unions are at the forefront of the movement for more expansive and expensive government. They use forced dues to lobby for greater pay and better benefits.

Of course, they've covered a lot of ground (and absorbed a lot of the economy) in that time. As the authors note, "government employees have, for years, cared more about their compensation than most taxpayers have." They are among the biggest wielders of political money, and they aren't likely to loosen their grip, nor politicians to force them to do so, unless an equivalent opposition arises:

... Politicians kowtow to government-employees' unions, who in turn support their election campaigns. Once those pro-union candidates are elected, they can provide more pay and benefits to the unionized government employees. The union then collects dues from its members, which enables it to give more political support to the politicians, and the cycle goes on.

Those in such unions don't like to hear it, but in the long-term, it is not proven (and reason exists to doubt) that their practices can coexist with a vibrant capitalistic and democratic society.


January 7, 2011


Supporting the Untouchables

Justin Katz

As periodically happens, Mark Patinkin has dipped into politics to voice the thoughts of many a conservative... or many a reasonable Rhode Islander:

Just as troubling is the size of these pensions. By year 10 of retirement, off that $89,273 base salary, [Providence Deputy Assistant Fire Chief Dan] Crowley will draw a $66,796 pension now that he's remained in management. He would have drawn a fatter $79,049 had he accomplished his "demotion." But my goodness — even the "humbler" $66,796 takes your breath away. Off an $89,000 base? Aside from CEOs, show me the private sector pension that's anywhere near that rich. No wonder property taxes are unaffordable in this state. How can it feel to be struggling on $40,000 a year while having to support $70,000 pensions for retired city employees, some of whom are in their 50s and working second professions?

I can attest that it's maddening. Worse still are the accusations from those who enjoy playing with other people's money that those of us who wish to apply the brakes "hate the community." Yup, that's the game: If you can't afford the ever-escalation and recession-proof livelihoods of public sector workers, it's an affront to the notion of town spirit, as it were, even if part of the frustration is the fact that higher tax rates make it more difficult to participate in town-based activities, like youth sports.


December 31, 2010


Damn the NYC Sanitation Department

Monique Chartier

... not because their catastrophically timed labor action caused death, injury and serious inconvenience to hundreds of thousands but because they have succeeded in the impossible: casting the micro-megalomaniac mayor of that city in a favorable light by exculpating him.

The New York Post reports.

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts -- a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.

Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.

Now how can we blame Bloomberg for the snow removal disaster???

On a more serious note, civil lawsuits against both the sanitation labor union and individual members are almost certainly on the horizon. And the calls for criminal charges are not out of line. Individuals so charged need to keep in mind the discredited status of the defense, "I was just following orders".

Solidarity Forever is great up to the point that it endangers human life. Though an exceedingly rare occurance (pay and "purchased" politicians aside, most organized professionals take rather the opposite view of their position), NY Local 831 decisively and repugnantly crossed that line this week.


December 28, 2010


Let Imbalances Correct Themselves

Justin Katz

One hears in this op-ed by David Mabe the thinking behind centralization's inevitable failure over time:

Even in these times of high unemployment, forecasts of labor shortages are becoming more prevalent. New England has long boasted a highly educated population relative to other parts of the country, but the retirement of Baby Boomers and net loss from population migration suggest that the demand for skilled workers will increasingly outpace the supply. These and other looming demographic shifts threaten to hamper regional recovery efforts. ...

Universities, and especially community colleges, according to Modestino, should focus on degree-completion initiatives, increased financial assistance for students, and greater opportunity for career training and professional collaboration to fill looming workforce gaps; such areas of focus would produce a "win-win-win" for employers, for the regional economy, and for the students themselves.

Where the "win-win-win" inevitably falls apart is a mismatch of incentives. When the mandate comes from the government to "do something," taxpayers end up funding the sorts of education that young students prefer (light and easy to pass) and the courses that educators, on the whole, prefer to offer (subjective and difficult to quantify). The result is another cost layered into the economy with inadequate translation into economically productive jobs.

Let private industry work independently with educational institutions to finance the aid and courses that they specifically need, then let students choose those subsidized paths... or not. "Degree-completion initiatives" will move students toward that piece of paper, but not necessarily toward the skills that they actually need.


December 23, 2010


The NEA's Penchant for Bad Analogy

Justin Katz

Another RI Blogger has caught an interesting bit of the education debate:

Ok, I can understand why the assistant executive director of the teachers’ union would be upset, for one [Teaching for America teachers] are not dues-paying NEA members. If additional teachers are needed, of course he will want more full time, dues-paying teachers employed. Second, many of the numbers and results that these TFA teachers are showing are making his members look bad. TFA injects energy into the schoools that even they admit isn’t sustainable by the same people long term. Yet we keep the teachers in the classrooms for 20 years or more.

One other aside that is wrong with Crowley's analogy is teaching is an art and being a surgeon is a science. Do we require painters to get an education so they can be professional painters? Do we require singers and other musicians? No. Those are arts that you either can do or can't do. Either you can teach, or you can't. An education can get you better at it, but skills in the arts is something that you have.

He's reviewing an article about the innovative teacher-recruitment organization by David Scharfenberg in the Providence Phoenix, and the comment is from National Education Association Rhode Island Assistant Executive Director Patrick Crowley, who predictably is sour on the notion of expediting the teacher-certification of college graduates from other fields:

To contend that a college graduate with no formal training is qualified to teach, he suggests, is to contend that teaching is something less than a profession; a task worthy of amateurs. It is an attitude, he says, that would seem absurd in other fields.

"I know how to use a knife and I went to college," he says. "That doesn’t mean I can be a surgeon."

I'd suggest that Crowley's analogy is actually flawed in a way that doesn't require any such distinctions between art and science. Indeed, the art-science duality is an overstated factor in general, since most professions contain elements of both. Even a painter does well to understand the science of art — the theory and history behind the craft. The art of a profession comes in finding a way that one's own proclivities can be leveraged for maximum benefit of the end goal — whether that is creating compelling canvases or conveying intellectual concepts to children.

To return to the surgeon-teacher comparison, one could argue that teacher education programs are akin to curricula that give would-be surgeons in-depth review of the use of scalpels and patient-relations as their main focus, while a hypothetical Surgeons For America takes biology majors and allows them expedited lessons in the practice of working with an actual human body. Put differently, the question is whether it's better for a surgeon to know how to manipulate the organs or to know what the organs actually do and where they actually are.

Both routes will work, but in certain subjects, at least, it's not unreasonable to expect a content expert to be able to master the practice of teaching more effectively than an education-theory expert could master the content. After all, even those educated in the science of teaching have to learn the practice over time.


December 22, 2010


Watching the Slow-Motion Crash of the Regionalization Train

Justin Katz

It may not add up to a silver lining, but hopefully folks are beginning to see why Anchor Rising contributors have been very suspicious of calls to regionalize or centralize government and its services:

[League of Cities and Towns Executive Director Dan Beardsley] also spoke of new limits on municipal contracts to ban: automatic renewals for expired agreements; retirement benefits that exceed the statewide standard, should one be adopted,and provisions such as minimum manning rules that limit municipalities' ability to close or reorganize departments.

Beardsley said those changes were needed to undo years of bad laws and, in his opinion, excessive arbitration decisions that had unreasonably increased municipal benefits such as pay for unused sick time.

[AFL-CIO President George] Nee said the contracts were the result of both sides agreeing to the terms, and it was disingenuous for municipal officials to blame unions for the deals they signed themselves.

Frankly, Nee's right. The people whom Rhode Islanders have allowed to operate local governments have acceded to union demands much too enthusiastically. Moreover, they haven't adequately pushed back against mandates and statutes at the state level that have tilted the game board in the direction of unions and other special interests. Only when things begin to fall apart do they begin to strike poses of complaint.

But note, in that process, that the state has not been the source of reason. The larger, superseding government and its officials have been drawing municipalities in the harmful direction, not striving to hold them back. What on Earth makes folks think that giving them more direct control — as with statewide teacher contracts, more say on healthcare programs, and a stronger position in local affairs — will be to the better?

Even just a few paragraphs away, we get this:

John C. Simmons, executive director of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council, said while proposals in the report for a city merger or for a regionalization of services were interesting, other options might be considered, too, such as the state simply taking over all city services in Central Falls.

All that means, it seems to me, is that the unreasonable costs of Central Falls' agreements will be spread across the entire state. Hiding those costs and deflating accountability is clearly not the way to bring the city or the state toward the practice of better decision making.



Call in the Gov

Justin Katz

This'll be a useful test case for Governor-elect Chafee:

On the snowy steps of the high school, Frank Flynn, president of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers, said he had called Chafee Tuesday morning and asked him to convene a group of teachers, school and district administrators, union leaders and state education officials to "move this school forward, because the students of Central Falls deserve nothing less."

The governor-elect indicated he would help, Flynn said, although no details have been settled yet.

The image comes to mind of Chafee in a vintage campy Batman costume running to a special phone in his office. It will be interesting to see how quickly the new governor implements the union-friendly changes that we're all expecting.

Step one, most likely, will be for him to step forward and bring everybody "to the table" in a one-sided equivalence that turns the notion of transforming Rhode Island's school system right around. The question is how quickly those intransigent bureaucrats and administrators who insist that reform must mean reform will be pushed out of their seats.


December 21, 2010


Setting Up the Failure

Justin Katz

Although the majority of the teachers probably just wanted to keep their jobs, observers with a cynical (I would say "realistic") opinion of labor unions likely foresaw the Central Falls teacher absences issue back when Superintendent Fran Gallo unfired the high school faculty back in May. There is no way union organizers want the transformation model of reforming the school (or any model, really) to work, particularly as it's been initiated from the education commissioner down, and I'd suggest that the employee attendance record at the school proves that enough teachers are willing to pull the union rope to cause problems:

The high rate of teacher absenteeism has sparked a new wave of outrage and fed the ongoing debate about how to improve the nation’s worst-performing schools.

Bitterness remains over the mass firing of all the school’s teachers in February, jobs that were eventually won back through a compromise agreement in May. In exchange for their jobs, the teachers agreed to a list of changes administrators said were necessary to turn around the school, which has among the lowest test scores and graduation rates in the state.

Some teachers resent the new requirements, which include tutoring and eating lunch with students each week, attending after-school training sessions and being observed by third-party evaluators. In all, about 15 teachers resigned between June and November; two others retired. One position remains unfilled, according to school officials.

As you may recall, the other alternative was the "turnaround model," by which the entire teaching staff would have been fired, and no more than 50% could have been rehired. One suspects substantial overlap among three groups:

  • The retirements and absentees
  • Teachers who look to the union playbook for ensuring the failure of reform
  • Central Falls High employees who would not have been rehired under the turnaround model

The lesson for Rhode Island administrators and commissioners is clear: Making those who oppose reform integral to it is not likely part of a formula for success.

ADDENDUM:

And let's not allow the issue to slip into the background without marveling at this deal:

According to the contract, teachers receive 15 sick days a year at full pay and are allowed to accumulate up to 185 sick days — which takes slightly more than 12 years of service to accrue. They also receive two personal days each year.

Veteran teachers with at least six years of service are also entitled to 40 days of extended sick leave at full pay; teachers with 15 or more years are entitled to 50 days, also at full pay.

If I'm reading that right, in a (give or take) 180-day school year, a Central Falls teacher can theoretically have 237 available paid days off. Presumably, there are procedures in place to review extended sick leave, but by the numbers, a teacher could work just six weeks a year for two years.


December 14, 2010


Dangerous Initiatives Set to Rear Their Heads

Justin Katz

I'm at the Tiverton School Committee meeting, and three of our General Assembly representatives are reporting on goings on at the State House: Rep. Jay Edwards, Sen. Walter Felag, and Senator Louis DiPalma. Some highlights of interest to Anchor Rising readers:

  • During pension discussion Superintendent Bill Rearick mentioned that the savings on teacher pensions last year are swinging the other way, with an 18% increase, this year, and other municipalities should expect the same.
  • Edwards has heard that binding arbitration for teachers' unions is back on the table, this year.
  • He has also heard that a statewide teacher contract is also making its way toward the legislature.
  • DiPalma noted that the union-heavy healthcare consolidation committee will be putting forth its recommendations in June. (For information about why that's bad see here.
  • Edwards further noted that he believes House Speaker Gordon Fox Majority Leader Nicholas Mattiello to be "conservative" on issues related to teachers' unions.

ADDENDUM:

This is barely related, but I"m squirming in my seat, so I've got to express the thought to somebody. After an administrative presentation of the high school's activities related to New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) accreditation, the committee is discussing all of the factors related to all of the usual priorities of education: academics, civic awareness, and so on. All well and good, but I can't help but wonder what this has to do with 31% proficiency in math and 21% proficiency in math.

Everybody's very animated and interested in the discussion of how to provide a "21st Century Education," but I think the tendency is to skip past the basics.

ADDENDUM II:

Per Mr. Edwards's correction in the comment section, I've corrected the last bullet point above. See here for elaboration and video.



Pawlenty:"The moral case for unions...does not apply to public employment."

Marc Comtois

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty went over familiar ground regarding public employee unions and leads him to conclude:

The moral case for unions—protecting working families from exploitation—does not apply to public employment. Government employees today are among the most protected, well-paid employees in the country. Ironically, public-sector unions have become the exploiters, and working families once again need someone to stand up for them.
Key to his conclusion is his comparison of what was and what is when it comes to the make up of unionized America. It's worth highlighting. First, what was:
When Americans think of organized labor, they might think of images like I saw growing up in a blue-collar meatpacking town: hard hats, work boots, tough conditions and gritty jobs. While I didn't work in the slaughterhouses, I did become a union member when I worked at a grocery store to help put myself through school. I was grateful for the paycheck and proud of the work I did.

The rise of the labor movement in the early 20th century was a triumph for America's working class. In an era of deep economic anxiety, unions stood up for hard-working but vulnerable families, protecting them from physical and economic exploitation.

What is:
Much has changed. The majority of union members today no longer work in construction, manufacturing or "strong back" jobs. They work for government...Since January 2008 the private sector has lost nearly eight million jobs while local, state and federal governments added 590,000.

Federal employees receive an average of $123,049 annually in pay and benefits, twice the average of the private sector. And across the country, at every level of government, the pattern is the same: Unionized public employees are making more money, receiving more generous benefits, and enjoying greater job security than the working families forced to pay for it with ever-higher taxes, deficits and debt.

This is why Franklin Roosevelt thought public employee unions were a non-starter. For his part, Pawlenty explains the politics of how this happened--despite the warnings of FDR--and offers some ideas for what needs to be done to fix it.


December 2, 2010


How Are Union Members Like Mushrooms?

Justin Katz

National Education Association of Rhode Island President Larry Purtill has sent a message to members of his union:

Despite these results, I knew that those who disagree with our vision and mission would not stop their attacks. What I did not suspect was the ferocity that those attacks might take. On the air, outrageous comments have been made about staff and our organization and certain talk shows have fueled the fire with over-the-top remarks. The facts are these: UniServ Director John Leidecker has been charged with a misdemeanor relating to emails. The specifics of the charge are still unclear, and he will be obtaining his own legal counsel to represent him in this matter. No other employee or leader of the organization was involved in the alleged activity, and John is continuing to work while waiting for resolution of this issue.

Those who wish to know just how unclear the charges against Liedecker are can get exact quotations from some of the evidence on WPRI.com (see here and here.

A positive outcome from this controversy would be an increase in the number of teachers who come to see Liedecker's behavior not as some aberration, but as a perfect fit for the pattern of practices in which their union's leaders engage. Liedecker, along with his associate, Pat Crowley and others, is a familiar face at every hostile union event. He was even one of two NEA agitators to attend a speech by Providence Journal editor/columnist Ed Achorn at the Barrington library a while back; curiously, he left shortly after I began liveblogging

This — not some antipathy toward teachers or their profession — is why many of us take such a sour view of education unions.



Spin, Not Denial: Walsh on the Leidecker Charge

Monique Chartier

Bob Walsh, Executive Director of the NEA RI, whom we all wish a speedy recovery from his procedure today, called in to the WPRO Dan Yorke Show yesterday morning. After clarifying that his "medical leave" involved a previously scheduled surgery and not a ploy to distract from the NEA's travails, he went on to address the arrest of NEA RI Assistant Executive Director John Leidecker.

I can't say too much about the incident, so to speak, other than I have great faith that John Leidecker on my staff [edit - or is that "and my staff"?] will be fully exonerated and this at best would be would be in the sophomoric prank category, not anything to do with communicating fraudulent information to voters. Most people in Representative Gablinske's position laugh such things off. I mean, if I send you an e-mail, Dan, and said I was corresponding from Dan Yorke with a different name, you would probably laugh or be mildly annoyed. Instead, Representative Gablinske sends State Police officers to our office to pick up Mr. Leidecker's computer, which seemed to be a bit excessive, but they're just doing their job. ...

But this will have its day in court. I have great faith that this matter will be disposed of and seen as frivolous on Representative Gablinske's part.

What's interesting here is that, rather than issuing a blanket denial or - more realistic - aver that he knows nothing about this matter, the Executive Director of the NEA RI, at four distinct points, attempts to play down or minimize the alleged activity.

sophomoric prank

laugh

a bit excessive

frivolous

It appears that we are past the question of culpability and on to damage control.


November 30, 2010


The Ability to Take Leads to Tone-Deafness

Justin Katz

Sure, President Obama's proposal to freeze the pay of federal employees is an attempt to start the debate in a position much more favorable than a reasonable political compromise would suggest. The bottom line is that the federal government has to do less and, therefore, require many fewer employees.

Still, even as that debate plays out, it's worth allowing ourselves to be astonished at the tone-deaf comments of public-sector union leaders:

A pay freeze could affect thousands of federal employees for years to come as their retirement benefits are dependent on the "High 3," the highest average basic pay they earn during any three consecutive years of federal service.

"I don't think it's quite right; we're going to get slammed with that," said Roland B. Sasseville, the current Pawtucket chapter president of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association. "If they freeze it now, [federal workers] are going to have a lull in their earnings."

"A lull in earnings"? A lull in earnings while so many Americans are, at best, watching their quality of life — current life, right now, not some long off retirement that they may never live to see — decline year after year while they sink into debt-chained servitude? Such are the sparks of revolution.


November 29, 2010


A Right-Reform Fly on the Wall

Community Crier

Remember when a raucous School Committee meeting in East Providence gave reason to hope that the game might be up for the National Education Association's unchallenged control of Rhode Island education? If so, odds are that Anchor Rising plays in that memory. We liveblogged, photographed, recorded, and analyzed. And it made a difference.

Two days later, East Providence union president Valerie Lawson and NEA lawyer John Liedecker were on the Dan Yorke show, with Jim Hummel filling in. Lawson was explaining that the teachers would never shout down a member of the public who held the microphone; rather, teachers were a little overenthusiastic in cheering for the next person in line to speak. Hummel played a clip of audio from the recordings linked, above, that proved Lawson to be lying, and Liedecker had to jump into the conversation to change the subject.

The point is that we were there, and because we were there, people had access to the truth about what happened. That is why it's so important that Rhode Islanders who want to pull the state back from the brink help us to create a full-time job within Anchor Rising. So that we'll be there when it matters.

Please email or call (401-835-7156) Justin to pledge support for 2011. We're still a long way off, but pledges only commit you to payment if we achieve our goal.


November 18, 2010


Foretelling the Future in Cranston

Justin Katz

Steven Frias, a Steve Laffey ally of old and author of a book on Cranston's political history, relates the origin of school committees' authority to negotiate contracts (even though they can't tax to pay for them) and binding arbitration for police and fire. Sadly, there are some discouraging parallels to our proximate future:

The leader of the state association of firefighters pledged to "mount a lobbying campaign for compulsory binding arbitration that will shake the foundations of the state capitol." In 1968, police officers and firefighters descended upon the State House to support binding arbitration for police and firefighter unions.

In response, the General Assembly passed the desired legislation over the near-unanimous objections of municipal officials, who said that binding arbitration would take away the ability to set tax rates from elected officials and from average citizens at town financial meetings. But a compliant Republican governor, John Chafee, signed the bills into law with no formal explanation while his spokesman suggested that binding arbitration should be "given a try."

With binding arbitration came longevity bonuses, minimum manning, and lifetime healthcare benefits regardless of age of retirement. No doubt, some of the usual suspects are hoping that the late governor's son will oversee a repeat of the process for teachers across the state, although they've already got most of those benefits, so the objective is to build a firewall around them. Or at least we can hope that their objective doesn't go beyond that.


November 13, 2010


Turning the Strike Tables

Justin Katz

Helen makes an interesting suggestion:

Would a strike of non union people be illegal? If everyone who is not in a union stopped working, if business owners refused to open, would that be illegal?

It would certainly be a show of private-sector weight were the Rhode Island economy simply to stop for a couple of days. Just the mere fact of the sort of organization and unity of purpose would send shivers down the spines of those who rely on their ability to siphon their livelihoods through taxes and public fees.

On the other hand, announcing such an event and having limited participation would have the opposite effect — affirming for those in power that they are, indeed, in control. When one considers that a great many people cannot afford to lose a day's income and that, unlike unionized workforces, they would have nobody with whom to negotiate to receive retroactive pay.

Of course, one truth hovers over the entire discussion: Were emotions so elevated as to make such an event possible, we who desire rightward reform in the state would have been able to accomplish more by the usual route of the election.

Sadly, the more likely outcome is an unorganized, but de facto, strike as productive people leave the state.


November 10, 2010


The Transition to Reinvigorated Decline

Justin Katz

Bob Walsh is on Governor-elect Lincoln Chafee's transition team? National Education Association Rhode Island Executive Director Bob Walsh is preparing the way for Rhode Island's next governor? Boy, they (you know whom I mean) aren't even trying to hide it anymore.

Two hyperbolic scenarios arise in my imagination. In the first, a simpering Chafee begs, "Please, Mr. Walsh, don't make me put you on my transition team. They'll know!" In the second, he ambles into Walsh's office: "Gee, Bob, you're so smart and savvy. I really need your help to bring me the final steps to the State House." Being thoroughly convinced of Chafee's cluelessness, I suspect the latter is closer to the truth.

And so, Ed Achorn writes:

The real problem comes when [Chafee] turns to fiscal and economic issues. He ran on a platform of hiking the taxes of some of the state's poorest and most vulnerable people to, in effect, redistribute their meager wealth to some of its richest political interests — the public-sector unions. Rather than insist on deeper staff and benefit cuts at the local level, Mr. Chafee favors a 1 percent sales tax on essential items such as food and medicine.

But that's only the tip of the iceberg. He also favors expanding binding arbitration, which is at the top of the unions' wish list, because it tends to benefit them at taxpayer expense.

Will he also support another union scheme — postponing contentious pension reform by refinancing the state's pension debt? That delay would add billions of dollars to the obligations of Rhode Island taxpayers and make our problem vastly more difficult to solve.

Today's paper articulates what we who've paid attention have known all along: that Chafee owes his success to the public-sector unions:

Here's the way it worked: the big unions — including the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association of Rhode Island, the United Nurses and Allied Professionals and District 1199 of the Service Employees International Union — contributed tens of thousands of dollars to Ocean State Action which, in turn, spent the money on Chafee's behalf. ...

The NEA "advocacy fund" gave Ocean State Action $102,000 to help Chafee; the Federation of Teachers, $50,000; the SEIU, $9,500, UNAP, $2,500 and the Ocean State Action coalition, which includes nonunion groups such as Clean Water Action and Marriage Equality Rhode Island, contributed $35,500 toward its "victory campaign." The Sierra Club kicked in $250, and the National Organization for Women, $125.

From its headquarters next door to the NEA on Bald Hill Road in Cranston, Ocean State Action then spent roughly $187,228 to help Chafee, according to its latest "independent expenditure" filings with the state Board of Elections.

And then there's the built-in campaign force — and a certain number of guaranteed votes — of people who make their comfortable livings from government coffers.

You know Rhode Island has made a reckless pick for governor when you find yourself hoping that the General Assembly will offer a reasonable restraint...

ADDENDUM:

It's not as immediate a concern, in the context of a state governor, but let's not forget that Chafee has also tapped former Planned Parenthood Medical Director Pablo Rodriguez, as well. It says nothing positive about our pending — looming — governor that he's seeking transition assistance from a man who finds affirmation in his experience of performing abortions in a room filled with Christian images.


November 5, 2010


Union Theory Proven

Justin Katz

The best election-results quotes from Rhode Island conservatives/reformers came out of East Providence:

[Soon-to-be-former School Committee Chairman Anthony] Carcieri laughed in the face of defeat and said, "The public has spoken, so get your checkbooks out. We'll be paying a lot of taxes in the near future."

Soon-to-be-former Mayor Joseph Larisa points to the deeper lesson of the election:

... Larisa said the results show "East Providence is now bought, owned and paid for by organized labor. This election proves that misrepresentation and money can buy elections in East Providence."

Actually, the more significant proof that the results offer is of the rationale for banning public-sector unions. In this case, the unions didn't like the parties with whom they were negotiating, so they've elected themselves new ones. Union members are fully within their rights to do so, but to allow them an organized — often statewide or national — movement funded via negotiated salaries and mandatory dues tilts the balance to an unjust degree.

In effect, public-sector employees are doubly represented, as employees and as employers taxpayers. Since it would be contrary to principles of democracy to disenfranchise them, it would be fair and reasonable to bar their unionization.


October 28, 2010


France Has Nothing on the RI Public Sector

Justin Katz

Folks are rioting in France because they feel retirement at 60 to be a birthright. In Rhode Island, public-sector unions promote the birthright of retiring much earlier, collecting pensions, and starting second careers. That's what was on Mark Patinkin's mind yesterday:

Sarkozy is worried that 60 is a ruinously young age for pensions in France, and yet we have 43-year-olds collecting on the back of taxpayers. The question isn't whether firefighters deserve it, it's whether taxpayers can afford it. We can't. The result, said Van Noppen, is that cash-poor city governments have been forced to reduce the count of employees who do work in order to pay the pensions of 43-year-olds who don't. At least they don't work for the taxpayers; they've gone on to second jobs even as they collect pensions. It's an irony: The point of pensions was not to feather the nests of productive workers, but to support those too old to work, or who earned a cushion for their legitimate golden years. I've never seen 43 — or 54 — described as the start of the golden years.

This system has to change dramatically. Now.


October 16, 2010


Union Versus Husband

Justin Katz

The proper scope of union activities has been a topic of conversation, around here, lately, and I've been drawing my line mainly where the union become a broader advocate for its members in the public, specifically political, sphere. Here's a particularly curious instance:

I'm Jade Thompson and my husband, Andy Thompson, is running for the Ohio House of Representatives. I am a teacher at Marietta High School. Imagine my chagrin when my friends and colleagues began showing me the awful attack ads against my husband which they had received in the mail. Now imagine my dismay when I saw that those defamatory mailers were paid for by the Ohio Education Association — my teachers' union. In effect, they are using my union dues to attack my husband! This is a new low, even for the OEA.

The worst part is that Mrs. Thompson cannot withdraw her support for the union without leaving her job — indeed, without pretty much abandoning her career.


October 11, 2010


The Give Me Mine Vote

Justin Katz

It's pretty clear, from a recent Brown University poll that about one-fifth of the electorate in Rhode Island are in the die-hard public sector camp:

On the other hand, a large percentage — 73.3 percent — opposed raising the state sales tax, while 18.9 percent supported the idea. And 74.7 percent opposed raising the state income tax, while 19.3 percent supported the idea.

When asked about measures that would affect state employees, 46.6 percent supported unpaid furlough days, while 38.4 percent opposed the idea, and 57.9 percent supported a defined-contribution pension plan for new state employees, while 21.1 percent opposed the idea.

Basically, 20% of survey respondents want higher taxes to support the deals currently offered to public-sector employees. I can't say, of course, how much overlap there is between wanting to increase the sales tax and wanting to increase the income tax, but I'd wager that it's significant — constituting, overall, a statement of "whatever it takes." That's a significant portion — especially given its greater likelihood actually to vote and to become active before election day — but it's not overwhelming.

The route to countering that bloc will be to isolate their issues in the face of a single candidate — who, incidentally, has made it abundantly clear that he's their guy:

... during and after the Marriott Hotel lunch, [Lincoln] Chafee insisted that [Frank] Caprio’s $100 million in promised [pension] savings are illusory, because his plan "won't standup to legal scrutiny."

"It's hard to believe that a court would agree that somebody that has been paying into a certain pension fund for 30 years, all of a sudden has a new pension plan. It's hard to believe a court, beyond the fairness issue, would say that is legal," Chafee said.

Determining, beforehand, that the union's ever-present threat of expensive litigation will prove indomitable is a classic ploy of union-bought candidates for office. It simply is not difficult to believe that an objective judge would allow the state to change the terms of an insupportable pension system, at least for investments not yet made. In other words, the fact that employees have been paying into a system does not mean that they have a legal right to see that system perpetuated. Some aren't yet vested, which means that they don't even have a claim to the fruits of their investments thus far, and others can be told that different rules will apply to payments made from this moment forward.

The more extreme measure — which may yet prove necessary — would be to transfer the vested payments into a defined-contribution plan that is financially comparable, but with better terms for the state. But I don't think any candidates have gone that far.


September 21, 2010


Under Union Governance

Justin Katz

Janet Daley's reminiscences of union-run England as it was some decades ago sound eerily familiar, although even Rhode Island, among the states, still has far to fall before matching her experience:

In the 1980s, as now, the justification for nihilistic persecution of the innocent citizen was The Cuts: the diabolical reductions in spending which the Tory government was reputedly making to public services. Except that it wasn't. For all the determined rhetoric, the Thatcher government never succeeded in reducing public spending. Funding for the NHS — which became, in the language of the spinners, a "toxic" issue for the Conservatives — increased in real terms every year under the Tories.

What produced (or facilitated) the mythology of "Tory cuts" was the capping of local council rates: in order to curb the robber baron antics of Loony Left councils, whose escalation of the rates was killing whole swaths of urban Britain by driving out businesses and property owners, the Conservatives placed a limit on what we now call council tax. The consequence of this was that local councils had to make cuts in services. In the great spirit of Left-wing social conscience, the Labour ones made sure to cut the most high-profile, front-line services in order to milk the public outrage that would do maximum political damage to the government. So it wasn't the gender equality outreach officers who were first to go: it was Meals on Wheels.

No, we don't yet have overt extortion from public trash collectors, who'll dump garbage on the lawns of low "tippers," as Daley describes. But tactics such as targeting critical, rather than frivolous, services are the same and the end goals are related.

Public-sector unions create a structure that institutionalizes and perpetuates the concept that public employees can exert political pressure to ensure special deals for themselves — although they call them just deserts that they've earned. When financial reality requires "Tory cuts," it's natural for public employees to consider proving to voters just how critical their services are.

We should take England's experience as a warning against broadening the reach of government (as into healthcare) and, by extension, the unions that come to dominate it.


September 20, 2010


The Union's Political Game is Twisted from the Beginning

Justin Katz

I don't think WRNI reporter/commentator Scott MacKay would take offense at the suggestion — or bother to deny — that he's got a union-friendly worldview, but I wonder whether it's occurred to him that this imbalance in political influence might be structural and unfair in its core:

Union activists and their allies in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party won some big victories. The legislature that takes office in January is likely to be more liberal that the one that adjourned in June.

There is no secret as to why this happens; forget the peddlers of arcane conspiracies. The liberals and labor union members take elections seriously. While the business leaders squawk, labor leaders walk, as in door-to-door campaigning in districts across the state. ...

But there is a solution to the State House labor-business imbalance. Business advocates should leave their boats on the moorings some weekends and try selling their case to door to door to average voters.

Put aside the class-warfare angle. What MacKay elides, here, is that labor leaders and their activist allies make their livings by the activities for which MacKay applauds them. Business leaders — whether of the boat-owning sort or the just-getting-by-working-eighty-hours-a-week (and daily-thinking-about-leaving-the-state) set — must engage in politics on their spare time and with money piled upon the already burdensome costs of operating in Rhode Island.

Not only that, but when it comes to public sector unions, their politicking directly helps them to increase their revenue. And it is ultimately taxpayers' money that is being used to fund campaign activities on behalf of candidates who wish to transfer more of it to their union supporters.


September 16, 2010


Who's the Industrialist?

Justin Katz

Always desirous of sharing the wise observations of my fellow Rhode Islanders, I recommend Raymond Palmieri's recent letter to the editor:

Union leadership now plays the role of the industrialists.

The Aug. 25 Wall Street Journal reported that the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees Industrial Union (SEIU) "have a combined $88 million or more to deploy in this year's election cycle." That is money spent to keep its hold on favored politicians and maintain its strong influence in both our federal and state governments. Union leaders freely spend hundreds of millions of dollars of their members' money supporting political candidates and agendas that many of their members may not agree with. They have no say in the matter.


September 12, 2010


The Fight Changes Over Time

Justin Katz

A common theme that one sees in the talk of the history of movements and political factions — and on which I comment frequently — arose in a recent Bob Kerr column:

"They knew nothing about the history of labor," [Studs] Terkel recalled. "The young have no sense of yesterday. She was sort of a yuppie girl, and she said she hates unions, they're terrible. So I asked how many hours a day she worked and she said eight hours. And I asked why she didn't work 15 hours a day. People did. I asked her how she thinks she got to work eight hours a day. People were hanged for that right. She had not the slightest semblance of what the labor movement is all about. You look at newspapers in this country and you'll see a business page, but there's no labor page. I think in some sense we've lost a sense of history, of who we are."

The flip side of ignorance of history is elision of the present with it. That members of a "labor movement" once fought for then-needed and now-appreciated rights and privileges, doesn't mean that those who now occupy their positions are driven with the same motivation or fighting for the same purpose. That fifteen-hour workdays were too long does not mean that forcing the public to pay for eight and only receive six hours of work from its employees is reasonable. (Let's put aside, for this post, the question of whether unions' means of achieving more reasonable labor practices were the best means available.)

The sorts of people who are happy to oppress their fellows to advance their own ends won't tie themselves to particular approaches or political categories. Across generations, they'll gladly take on the rhetoric and putative calling of those who fought their intellectual forebears.

Nobody questions that the young do not appreciate history, but sometimes those among their elders who've chosen a particular thread of heritage with which to associate lose a sense of how things change.


September 6, 2010


Motivation in the Private Sector

Justin Katz

Both sides of the coin that the Providence Journal editorial board describes in this passage from an unsigned essay concerning public labor in Central Falls are overly broad assertions, but the sentence that I've italicized seems especially presumptuous:

... as virtually anyone who has dealt with public employees at the state and local levels can attest, don't expect many workers to take a relaxed view toward the "no-overtime" rule. As soon as a municipal office's closing time arrives, they tend to be outta there fast. People in the private sector, driven by financial fear, tend to extend their time a bit to provide customer service to help keep their enterprise afloat.

No doubt, some private sector workers put in extra time out of worry that management will otherwise crack down on them, and others are surely afraid that a failure to go work beyond minimum hours will cut into the entire company's competitive edge, but I'd wager that going above and beyond is motivated in the majority of private sector cases by ambition. Employees putting in extra effort, that is, are more likely to be hoping to advance than hoping not to backslide.

The inverse is the common complaint, among managers and ambitious workers, about unionized labor. Sure, they secure baseline rules for employees, but that baseline can also be a ceiling for those who wish to get ahead.


August 31, 2010


One Workforce for the Price of Two

Justin Katz

Providence real estate agent Mark Van Noppen notes the numerical consequence of one aspect of the city's labor practices:

Not a bad gig: Become a Providence firefighter at age 20, work the 23 years required to collect a pension and retire at 43. But Providence taxpayers — its property owners — have to pay a pension to that retired 43-year-old for at least 20 years more than they should. There are 2,905 retirees in the system. City councilors say that there about 250 firefighters waiting only for the full passage of their contract before retiring.

The city now pays for more than two health-insurance plans for every full-time permanent worker still on the job. Try running a business with that anchor round your neck!

He closes by noting that local politicians appear willing to let this train run the state right off a cliff, rather than muster the will to make dramatic corrections. As I've long been arguing, the gravy coalition may have so strong a grip on the levers of power that its constituencies simply outnumber those who live and die by the economic health of the state, creating the self-reinforcing conclusion that those who wish to strive and thrive do best just to leave.

In that way, public discussion of what reforms would be reasonable wallows in the shallows of "don't touch mine." Why, for example, shouldn't it be the case that pensions and retiree healthcare starts at a certain age no matter the year that an employee transitions out of his or her job? The fact that firefighting, for example, takes its toll on the mind and the body shouldn't mean second careers must be fully underwritten for those who've put in their time with public service. Go on and enter that new phase of life, but you'll still have to wait until a minimum age before you're considered "retired" for pension and public healthcare purposes.

Even to make such suggestions is considered a hostile attack, and too few Rhode Islanders will dare to come to their defense for reforms ever to be seriously entertained, even, ironically, if those expecting the fantastic deals will ultimately see them undermined by their own weight.


August 28, 2010


Some Sacrifice

Justin Katz

Sometimes people have to say what they have to say, I suppose, but this comment out of Cumberland really points to the different world in which some Rhode Islanders live:

School Supt. Donna A. Morelle stated that the committee and the administration "are greatly appreciative of the sacrifice made by the teachers."

So what "sacrifice" are the teachers making? Giving up a vacation week or two? Higher health insurance payments? More realistic retirement expectations? Not quite (emphasis added):

Teachers this year will defer half of a 2.5-percent salary increase, half of an increase that comes with a new salary step and half of the payment teachers with credits or degrees beyond a bachelor’s degree receive, according to Roderick McGarry, president of the Cumberland Teachers Association. ...

Also in the agreement, announced Monday after the Cumberland Teachers Association and School Committee approved it Wednesday, is waiving a 2.5-percent salary raise in the academic year that begins September 2011.

The new accord adds another year to the contract, which the union president stated would give teachers additional security through the 2012-2013. Teachers will get a 1-percent salary increase in the first half of that year and an additional 1.5-percent salary increase in the second half, McGarry said.

So payments expected during the coming school year will be deferred until the future (when, the school committee inexplicably assumes, finances will have improved), raises next year will be eliminated (although the teachers will presumably see an actual increase because the deferral will end), and their guaranteed raise in the subsequent year will be less than expected. In effect, the contract uses accounting gimmicks to downplay the fact that union members will be receiving 1.25% raises (on top of step increases and other remunerative opportunities) during an era of crippling government deficits, high unemployment, and general economic malaise.

That, in the public sector, is called "sacrifice."


August 27, 2010


Extreme Screening: Only One Gov Candidate Gets a Questionnaire or Invite from the NEA RI

Monique Chartier

... before the endorsement (of that same candidate).

The gubernatorial campaigns of John Robitaille (R), Ken Block (M) and Frank Caprio (D) have all confirmed the absence of an NEA RI candidate questionnaire in the inbox and the non-ringing of the phone for the invitation to be interviewed that never got made.

In fact, following upon the AFT endorsement in late July, the Block campaign specifically asked the NEA RI for an audience. The silence from that organization continued uniformly deafening. And John Robitaille clarified that while he is seeking no union endorsements, he has agreed to meet with any labor union which extends an invitation to him and, on that basis, has met with the executive boards of the SEIU and Carpenters Local 94.

When a company or government agency has an RFP for which they have a certain vendor in mind, they might tailor the RFP as much as possible towards that vendor. Most of the time, though, they at least go through the motions of offering the RFP publicly or to all qualified vendors.

In this case, however, the "agency" or "company" is comprised of rank-and-file union members. Did the NEA RI leadership individually poll every single member to determine that support for Senator Chafee was 100%? Or did they make the top-down decision to formally "vet" only one candidate for consideration?

If the latter, wasn't that a little disrespectful of their membership?


August 22, 2010


A Show of Pension Reform

Justin Katz

As you read the article, your mind is just beginning to recover from this:

In a theoretical case of a 20-year-old firefighter hired today, retiring in 2030 on a base pay of $100,000, and collecting a pension for 30 years, the difference between compounded and simple is $41,129. At age 70, in the year 2060, the firefighter’s pension would be $181,000 on a simple 3-percent COLA and $222,129 on a compounded COLA.

When reporter Donita Naylor hits you with this:

[Providence Councilman John] Igliozzi, who also serves on the boards that oversee retirements and pension investments, said that with 30 firefighter positions going unfilled and 250 firefighters becoming eligible for retirement in the next two or three years, "almost half the Fire Department is going to be new" hires.

One reels. The first paragraph presumes a person retiring at forty years old and doubling his annual income — while doing nothing — by the time most of his contemporaries will actually begin considering retirement. On the compounded scale, the firefighter will have received $4.49 million dollars in pension payments by his seventy-first birthday. On the simple scale, he'll have received $4.13 million. And this is presented as pension reform?

Sure, the numbers add up. On the compounded scale, those 250 folks soon to replace proximate reitrees would cost $1.12 billion by 2060, while on the simple scale, they'd cost $1.03 billion, savings of $90 million ($3 million per year), but that's still $1.03 billion for 250 people for 30 years of no work, after only 20 years of work. And who's to say what life expectancy will actually be by that point.

It appears that, after decades of politicians' making pension promises with which they wouldn't have to deal, the current crop is promising reforms that won't take effect until most of them are dead, and still won't amount to much by way of savings.

Want more? As far as I can tell, these numbers don't include benefits like healthcare.

As soon as possible, pensions should be shifted to 401(k)s. At the very least, they shouldn't begin to pay out until a certain age, no matter when the person opts to retire.


August 19, 2010


A Question on Pensions

Justin Katz

I actually agree with former Johnston Policewoman Michele Capelli's lawyer that the town has no right to demand that she repay a disability pension excess that was given to her erroneously — much less simply remove it from her bank account — unless there was some criminal activity involved in giving her the money in the first place. Johnston should improve its system for tracking such things and move on from here.

But the same article gives some information for which, I realize, I've no basis to know how to feel:

As of June 30, 2009, the town had 27 disabled retirees earning an average monthly disability pension of $3,088, according to records.

An average of $37,000 per year isn't all that much, assuming the retirees aren't actually receiving the money as gravy on top of other income, and we should definitely provide for public servants who are hurt in the line of duty. But is that number of retirees high? I don't know. Compared with my own experience in construction, it certainly seems like a lot of people to be paying for not working, but I wonder if a study has been done of other Rhode Island towns as well as municipalities in other states.

That's really the relevant question, and it seems like the sort of thing that somebody in the press, the government bureaucracy, or a think tank should be concerned about. Oh, to have a think tank's resources!


August 14, 2010


Union Cites "Management Rights", Blocks Unionization Attempt

Marc Comtois

Did you hear about the guy who tried to unionize the unions office and got fired (h/t)?

Jim Callaghan, a veteran writer for the [United Federation of Teachers] union, told The Post he was booted from his $100,000-a-year job just two months after he informed UFT President Michael Mulgrew that he was trying to unionize some of his co-workers.

"I was fired for trying to start a union at the UFT," said a dumbfounded Callaghan, who worked for the union's newsletter and as a speechwriter for union leaders for the past 13 years.

Callaghan said he personally told Mulgrew on June 9 about his intention to try to organize nonunionized workers at UFT headquarters.

"I told him I want to have the same rights that teachers have," said Callaghan, 63, of Staten Island. "He told me he didn't want that, that he wanted to be able to fire whoever he wanted to."

Unions are all about management rights when they're the management, I guess.
Callaghan said that yesterday morning, he was hauled into a meeting with UFT officials, including CFO David Hickey, and told only that he was being fired from his job and had a half-hour to clear out of the office.

"They gave me no reason, no letter, no cause at all," said Callaghan, who insisted that he has received no reprimands or notices about problems with his work. He noted that he wrote six stories in the most recent newsletter for teachers.

Callaghan said the union-busting bullying continued after he was told he was fired, when UFT leaders called in a detail of six uniformed cops to remove him from his office because he wasn't leaving fast enough.

Callaghan said he decided to unionize the 12 UFT writers after a colleague was fired last year without cause.

"We have no protections and no disciplinary process," he said.

The UFT had no comment, but noted that overwhelming majority of their employees are union members. Callaghan plans on complaining to the National Labor Relations Board that the UFT union is anti-union.


August 12, 2010


Government Giveaways... to Itself

Justin Katz

Matt and I discussed the federal government's billion dollar giveaways to states to make up for their poor management and failure to adjust to the economic times, on last night's Matt Allen Show. Stream by clicking here, or download it.


August 5, 2010


Topics Local and International

Justin Katz

Last night Monique and Tony Cornetta talked, on the Matt Allen Show, about Iran, teachers' unions, and partisan ethics. Stream by clicking here, or download it.


August 4, 2010


Warwick School Committee Chooses the Tough Path

Marc Comtois

Faced with an insurmountable $13 million cut in state and local funding, the Warwick School Committee voted to freeze pay and impose a 20% health care co-pay for all of its employees last night.

Before the vote, School Committee Chairman Chris Friel stressed that these are not actions the district wants to take but it has no choice faced with insufficient funding for its budget of about $161 million for the current fiscal year, which began July 1.

He said the district did not want to cut programs that directly affect students, such as sports, gifted classes, mentoring and all extracurricular activities.

Unions are not happy.
The action is in apparent violation of the School Department's contract with its roughly 1,000 teachers represented by the Warwick Teachers Union, with teachers slated to lose a 2.75 percent raise this year....The leaders of the two unions that represent almost all school employees - the teachers union and the Warwick Independent School Employees union - vowed that they will respond with swift court action.

"I feel stabbed in the back," teachers union president James Ginolfi said, noting that the first he and other union executives heard of the School Committee's plan was less than an hour before it took action in executive session.

"We listened to what they had to say and said we'd get back to you," Ginolfi said, adding that the school board is sending a public message that it has no regard for a legal agreement. "I am shocked," he said.

The union has been playing the "we'd get back to you" game or the "we're willing to listen" game for some time now. The School Committee is obligated to have its budget finalized shortly after the City Council approves the school budget and was already late in doing so. They couldn't wait any longer. The situation called for urgency and the unions seemed to be content with playing the same collective bargaining games that worked in the past (see the "Addendum" in the extended post for a timeline). That isn't working any more. It's apparent that the Warwick School Committee felt like there wasn't much expeditious movement occurring on the other side of the table and felt like the only path left open--a tough one--was to unilaterally make these cuts and changes. That's something that the Warwick City Council backed away from. Whether the solution is viable depends on the next stop in the process: the courthouse.

Continue reading "Warwick School Committee Chooses the Tough Path"

June 29, 2010


What's Worth Economic Disruption in a Recession

Justin Katz

This mindset is well beyond my capacity for sympathy, and almost incomprehensible:

Trains stood still and children played instead of going to school as workers around France went on strike to protest President Nicolas Sarkozy's plans to raise the retirement age to 62.

Neighboring countries suffered along with Paris commuters as walkouts by drivers delayed or canceled trains from Italy and Switzerland. Some flights were dropped or delayed. ...

The ranks of demonstrators swelled in comparison to a similar protest May 27. The Interior Ministry put the number of protesters around France at 797,000—double the number in May.

Such incidents should stand as a warning to the United States — a path not to take (any farther).


June 6, 2010


Tightening the Union Loop into a Noose

Justin Katz

It could just be that I'm in my annual phase of presummer burnout, or it could be an indication of the complexity that Big Government imposes on a democratic society — to such degree that it ceases to be possible for the individuals who comprise that democracy to function as they must — but the number of fronts for manipulating the public sector feel like they've been multiplying, lately.

The issue that brings that statement to mind is the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE) legislation that Democrats have brought to the table in Washington, which Bradley Smith describes, here. Given my usual areas of focus, this part earned a bracket in the margins of my issue of National Review:

DISCLOSE's partisanship is apparent in its different treatment of corporations and unions. Every major federal campaign-finance-reform effort since 1943 has attempted to treat corporations and unions equally. If a limit applied to corporations, it applied to unions; if unions could form PACs, corporations could too; and so on. DISCLOSE is the first major campaign-finance bill that has not taken this approach. For example, it prohibits corporations with government contracts of as little as $50,000 from making independent expenditures in elections or engaging in "electioneering communications." This very low threshold would bar not only large contractors such as Boeing but also thousands of small businesses from exercising the rights recognized in Citizens United. Yet no parallel provision exists for unions that bargain with the government for multimillion-dollar benefit packages. Corporations that received TARP funds are prohibited from spending, but unions at those companies — which in many cases benefited far more from the bailouts than shareholders — are not.

Smith doesn't go far enough, to my mind, by raising this as a matter of teams in a partisan dispute. It's actually part of a broad effort to shift the role of unions in our political society. Recall a post from November that noted, tangentially, that hospitals receiving federal money are barred from lobbying the government while their workers' unions are not (see "addendum," below). As the federal government continues to grow — especially in the amount of our economy for which it takes direct authority — the loop whereby businesses rely on the unions with which they negotiate to lobby the government will tighten into a noose, excluding organizations that are not unionized and siphoning off more money for politicians, bureaucrats, and the unions that serve as the middleman transferring economic wealth to the public sector.

ADDENDUM:

I've said before that among the greatest advantages of blogging to a mixed audience is that one is more likely than not to have errors or inadvertent stretches corrected. In that vein, Stuart called me on the statement about hospitals receiving federal money being barred from lobbying the government. Going back to my initial citation, I see that I paraphrased the following poorly:

SEIU's corporate campaigns, however effective, are nothing new. Stern's real breakthrough came when he realized that labor could offer a carrot as well as a stick Around 50 percent of SEIU's members work in the health-care industry as nurses, hospital attendants, and lab techs. The facilities that employ such workers benefit from a number of government programs. SEIU's pitch was simple: Let us organize your workforce, and we'll use our lobbying power to push for increased government spending on health care.

It worked. Fred Siegel and Dan DiSalvo recently observed in The Weekly Standard that, "under the brilliant leadership of Dennis Rivera, [SEIU Local] 1199 built a top-notch political operation, and with the hospitals, which were barred from political activity, formed a partnership to maximize the flow of government revenue." The alliance has been so successful, they wrote, that New York now spends as much on Medicaid as California and Texas combined. Rivera now serves as the SEIU's point man on national health-care-reform legislation, with over 400 union staff members working full time at his disposal. Sen. Chuck Schumer called him "one of the few key players" shaping the final bill.

In essence, I joined concepts that were only related: The union offers lobbying clout, but the political activity from which hospitals are barred probably doesn't have to do with the federal dollars that the lobbying seeks, but rather with such things as bans on non-profit political activities. My understanding is that unions are not so restricted.

So, the statement in specific was incorrect, but the point remains valid. To the extent that government restrains the employer in political activity and speech, while leaving unions exempt from those restraints, the union and the government gain leverage versus the productive organizations.


June 4, 2010


Cross Every Picket Line

Justin Katz

Circumstances have made me slow to respond to this, and my position will hardly be a surprise, but I did want to express — ahem — solidarity with RIGOP Chairman Gio Cicione (as well as the RI Young Republicans) on the matter of crossing a union picket line to hold a Central Committee meeting at the Westin Providence hotel:

Explaining why the state Republican Party, along with the Rhode Island Young Republicans, decided to hold its State Central Committee meeting at the hotel, party chairman Giovanni Cicione said: "If Democrats continue to torture every local business with threats of strikes and boycotts, especially in the midst of this recession, Rhode Island will soon find itself with no employers left."
I'll go further: All taxpayers should make a point of doing business with companies that are facing union strikes. Trying to hurt employers in the midst of this recession is among the most asinine strategies that Rhode Island's unionists have yet conceived.

June 2, 2010


When Management Acknowledges Its Own Cards

Justin Katz

Two factors are obvious in making Rhode Island school committees behave as if authority over the jobs is ultimately a weak card in negotiations: Some members see giving as much money as possible to teachers as one of their rightful objectives (whether they're teachers, themselves, or have some other reason for alliance), and other members are people who see their positions as a matter of community service, and they entered them not expecting to have to stand against organized, bare-knuckle negotiators.

Of course, Rhode Island has also set up a series of implied rules and what one might call "legal insinuations" that have led motivated school committee members to hesitate. That's why it took East Providence's challenging those insinuations — and winning — before its school committee could arrive at this point:

While it seems one-sided, the pact secures teachers' salaries and benefits. The School Committee imposed its 2009 salary and benefit cuts after the previous contact expired.

Read the article for the details, but the point that I wish to highlight, here, is that running the school system is not exactly a powerless position, when it comes to negotiations. It's well past time for Rhode Islanders in positions of authority to stop shirking their responsibility to think and act independently of the deadly, draining illusion drawn for the benefit of the state's public sector unions.


May 26, 2010


A Freeze Would Preserve Everything

Justin Katz

Well, it's certainly not rocket science, but it's nice to know that New Jersey's Governor Chris Christie and I have come to the same conclusion when it comes to schools' supposed funding problems (subscription required):

In the last three years, state and local government-employee compensation grew 9.8 percent, compared with 6.9 percent in the private sector. That’s $1.43 in compensation growth for public employees for every $1.00 in compensation growth for private employees.

Those raises cost money, at a time when state tax revenues have taken a hit because of falling incomes and less consumption. For a time, states were able to close much of the gap with stimulus dollars. In New Jersey, now that the stimulus is running out, teachers' unions are urging the extension of a "temporary" tax increase inflicted last year upon residents making over $150,000 annually, and the elimination of the school-funding cut.

As Christie noted, this tax increase (as well as teacher layoffs and cuts to spending on classroom supplies) can be avoided by means of enacting a pay freeze. An April Rasmussen poll found 65 percent of New Jersey voters support a teacher-pay freeze. But while a handful of local unions agreed to accept one, the vast majority balked at the governor's demand. In return, Christie urged voters to reject proposed school budgets in elections on April 20. (In New Jersey, school budgets must be approved by voters annually.)

It has amazed me that school committees across Rhode Island have been talking school closures and the elimination of extracurricular activities. Requiring public-sector staff to experience even just a small amount of the economic pain makes all the problems go away. Of course, that's assuming that there really are problems. A frequent complaint about school departments is that their budgets are entirely their own concoction, and it's clear whose side school committees and administrations are on, for the most part, when it comes down to it.



The Subtle Tactics of the NEA

Justin Katz

In an article about securing union approval of Rhode Island's application for federal Race to the Top education funds:

[NEARI President Larry] Purtill also said he is carefully monitoring the acrimonious situation in East Providence, where the School Committee last year unilaterally cut teachers' wages, forced teachers to pay more of their health insurance costs and recently threatened to cut wages again. East Providence is a NEARI local.

The Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals had their Central Falls problem resolved, and the NEA wants its sweetener, too. Race to the Top is looking more and more like a poison pill.


May 16, 2010


Central Falls: Tomorrow's News Today

Justin Katz

The press releases are coming out concerning an administration-union deal in Central Falls. First in the emailbox was the union's take:

The Central Falls Teachers Union and the Central Falls School District reached a tentative agreement Saturday to implement a transformation plan for Central Falls High School for the 2010-11 school year in a way that involves all stakeholders—administrators, teachers, students and parents—to create a pathway toward excellence for everyone at the school.

Both the school district and the union agree that while this has been a difficult process for everyone involved, the negotiations resulted in a newfound appreciation for shared responsibility, and a solid commitment to bring lasting solutions that will improve teaching and learning at Central Falls High School.

As part of that agreement, which is pending ratification, the current staff will return to the school without having to reapply for their jobs. Teachers will need to recommit to their jobs and interview with the new principal. The agreed upon plan would also incorporate important changes designed to increase student achievement. These include a longer school day, more after-school tutoring, a new evaluation system designed to inform teaching and learning, and targeted and embedded professional development, among other changes. Details of the agreement will be released following a ratification vote by Central Falls teachers at a meeting Monday. A press conference is scheduled at the high school at 3:30 p.m.

Followed, just now, by two cents from Education Commissioner Deborah Gist:

I am really pleased that the Central Falls School Department, under Dr. Frances Gallo’s leadership, and the Central Falls Teachers Union have come to a tentative agreement about a plan to transform Central Falls High School, and that they will do that work together. The ideal situation is when we can do this important work collaboratively, and that's why this agreement is so promising. ...

From the outset, I have said that my one commitment is to ensure that we provide the best possible education for the students of Central Falls High School. The tentative agreement reached today is evidence that all parties can put aside their differences and work in the best interest of our students. Now it's time to move forward and work together to make Central Falls High School one of the best schools in Rhode Island.

We'll see who got what, but I have to think that the teachers have become increasingly nervous as the applicant pool to replace them has approached the 1,000 mark.


May 11, 2010


Everything's Negotiable in the Race to the Top

Justin Katz

I'm not a fan of saying, "How high?," when the federal government says, "jump," and waves around a bunch of money. It's also detrimental to begin seeing federal dollars as some sort of cost-free windfall.

That said, the Race to the Top matter has brought forward the true face of labor unions and highlighted their strategies and motivation:

Recently, union officials have told Gist they want her to intervene in union-management strife in Central Falls and East Providence. While those two disputes continue, they said, they can't support the aggressive reforms Gist says are needed to fix failing schools. Gist and other state officials have said repeatedly that they cannot intervene. In Central Falls, the union local is fighting plans by Supt. Frances Gallo to terminate the entire teaching staff of the low-performing high school and hire back only 50 percent. In East Providence, the union is outraged the local school committee unilaterally cut teacher salaries and forced teachers to pay more into their health insurance. Both cases are currently in the state's courts.

"You want that $75 million? Well, make these two little problems go away. Make it clear who runs the show around here." (Not an actual quotation, by the way.)

Rhode Island's educational system is failing children and costing residents far too much — to the point that, in combination with other factors, it's strangling the state's economy. The law will decide what local remedies are allowed. To unions, though, that's not good enough. Any chance to extort for the result they want is legitimate, in their eyes.

And that, in case you needed further example, is why it's so dangerous to look toward consolidation and the movement of governing authority to higher tiers of government.


May 4, 2010


"Do you have to love labor unions to be a good Democrat?"

Marc Comtois

Blogger Mickey Kaus is running for U.S. senator in the Democratic primary in California and thinks its time for the Democratic Party to re-think their relationship with unions (h/t).

It's time for Democrats, even liberal Democrats, to start looking at unions and unionism with deep skepticism.

I don't mean we should embrace the right-wing view that unions are always wrong. Unions have done a lot for this country; they were especially important when giant employers tried to take advantage of a harsh economy in the last century, not only to keep down wages but to speed up assembly lines and, worse, force workers to risk their lives and health. If you think about it, unions have been the opposite of selfish. By modern standards they've been stunningly altruistic, lobbying for job safety rules and portable pensions and Social Security and all sorts of government services that, if they were really selfish, they might have opposed, because if the government will guarantee that your workplace is safe and your retirement is secure, well, then you don't need a union so much, do you?

I agree. Unions fought the good fight "back in the day" and served as a much-needed check on corporations as they gained hard-won victories for workers. Government regulations and oversights were instituted. But once those battles were won, union leaders expanded the definition of "union rights" and warned of bogey men so that they can keep the membership always fighting for something more and keep themselves in power. But this has led to problems for private sector unions whose demands resulted in a sort of workplace stasis.
At the same time unions were winning government protections, changes in the economy were making mainstream unionism itself an impediment to growth. We are no longer living in a World War II world in which big, slow-moving bureaucratic organizations are the engines of prosperity. Only fast-moving, flexible organizations prosper today. Technology changes too rapidly. Firms have to be able to make snap decisions: expand here, contract there, change the way they work every day. That was the lesson of Japan--how 1,000 little improvements in productivity can add up to a big advantage.
As Kaus explains, too many unions are stuck in the 1950's and their solution is to keep doing what worked in the '50's. Yet, even though times have changed, more strident unionism is "the official Democratic Party dogma. No dissent allowed." As market forces have shrunk private sector unions, government unions continue to grow, funded by tax dollars appropriated by the Democrats they've hired. In particular, Kaus is no fan of the modern teacher unions:
When I was growing up in West L.A., practically everyone went to public schools, even in the affluent neighborhoods. Only the discipline cases, the juvenile delinquents, went off to a military academy. It was vaguely disreputable. Now any parent who can afford it pays a fortune for private school. The old liberal ideal of a common public education has been destroyed. And it's been destroyed in large part not by Republicans but by teachers unions.
He also knows that some Democrats recognize the problem:
"The deal used to be that civil servants were paid less than private sector workers in exchange for an understanding that they had job security for life. But we politicians, pushed by our friends in labor, gradually expanded pay and benefits...while keeping the job protections and layering on incredibly generous retirement packages that pay ex-workers almost as much as current workers. Talking about this is politically unpopular and potentially even career suicide...but at some point, someone is going to have to get honest about the fact."

That quote is from Willie Brown, a Democratic hero, explaining why the state may go the way of Vallejo and General Motors. Easy for him to say; he's retired. But you won't catch any Democrats who are running for office saying it. They're too dependent on organized labor's money and muscle.

I doubt that Kaus will win his bid for Senate and I also doubt that there will be a serious rift between the union leaders and Democrat politicians any time soon. After all, the system works for them.


April 27, 2010


SNL: The 2010 Public Employee of the Year Awards

Marc Comtois

The nominees:

Markeesha Odom: Works at St. Louis DMV. At 24 years old, already twice name Missouri's surliest and least cooperative state employee.

Dennis Cosgrove: School custodian in Queens, NY. Set a record with 3200 hours on the job. All on overtime! Like many NYC custodians, Dennis is a year round resident of Florida.

Anthony Scalise: A clerk in the probate court of Mercer County, NJ. Elevator inspector for the city of Trenton and on 100% disability from his first city job in the sanitation department where an accident left him with a crippling fear of cats.

Watch below for the winner!


April 26, 2010


Making Committees Choose Between Funds and Friends

Justin Katz

Chris Powell notes a strategy worth considering:

Nominations for Connecticut's mayor of the year should include Wallingford's William W. Dickinson Jr. for proposing, in the town budget he recently submitted to the Town Council, to reduce the school board's budget by exactly the amount the board planned to pay raises to teachers. The mayor thus clarified that school budgets aren't being cut but rather that school systems are being cannibalized by their employees.

The statement could be even more effective in towns that are between contracts — such as Tiverton. Especially in the case of financial town meetings, taxpayers could send a clear message that they've got a preference for certain line items in the district's budget.

When school committees are unwilling to force concessions beyond the point at which their budgets grow 6% (and are failing to achieve even those) during an historic recession and 2% inflation, it seems to me that some undeniable lessons from the people paying the bills are in order.



Labor Peace, Town or State

Justin Katz

Julia Steiny makes a reasonable point about the ability of the General Assembly — with limits and mandates for local teacher contracts — to ensure "peace at the local level," but her assessment doesn't go quite far enough:

And this is the point: labor peace must be bought. And nothing is excluded from negotiations. Everything is subject to bargaining rights.

To prevail in negotiation, weak-kneed management has often won what it wanted, extra minutes of instruction or commitments to professional development, by giving away expensive perks such as more generous sick leave. To hide or delay paying for the give-away, perks were often additions to retirement benefits.

The operative clause is that "labor peace must be bought"; if it isn't bought at the local level, it will be bought at the state level. As we've recently seen, AFL-CIO honcho George Nee sneezes, and Providence quakes. If reformers somehow manage to push contractual limits through the General Assembly, it will only happen on the terms of National Education Association Rhode Island Executive Director Bob Walsh. And we can be sure that those aren't terms that we should prefer to what we can secure with labor decisions close at hand in our own communities.

Look. The basic calculation is as follows: If the people of Rhode Island don't care enough to counterbalance the unions when it comes to electing school committee members, and if there aren't three to five residents willing to stand against union aggression as elected officials in each municipality, then the even larger court of the state government is not a place that we want the ball in play.


April 23, 2010


Re: The Biggest Faction in the General Assembly

Justin Katz

The comments to Marc's post on the number of General Assembly members who benefit from public pensions are understandable, but most miss the point. Cutting the General Assembly's pay and authority isn't going to address the essential problem — namely, that an official position that doesn't pay much will attract those who have other motivations, including other ways to profit. It's nice to think that "community service" will suffice, but devoting so many hours to such a position over a limited number of months per year puts quite a cost on that service. Retired teachers and such whose unions have given them so much have motivation to put in time for "union service," but most Rhode Islanders simply cannot justify the time.

As to cutting the legislature's authority, while that may be a laudable goal, we'd have to begin by cutting the government's authority. Otherwise the power currently held by a large number of legislators would be given to a handful of administrators and bureaucrats. In other words, change in that direction would have to go in the other direction.

Frankly, I'd be willing to argue for paying the General Assembly members more given two reforms:

  • Representation is aligned directly with cities and towns, making it clear whom members represent, and providing a clear path from local politics to state politics.
  • The "part-time" of the legislature is spread out across the entire year, with fewer hours per week. In other words, make the schedule more in line with what working people can manage.

Unfortunately, the people who would have to enact such changes like their current advantage, so such reforms would be the project of decades, and I'm not sure Rhode Island has that long.


April 17, 2010


Union Comfort Would Be Evidence of Danger

Justin Katz

My main argument against looking toward centralized levers — whether in Providence or Washington — to reform education has essentially been that national teachers' unions are better situated to manipulate higher tiers of government than are concerned residents acting through democratic processes. Within the scope of town politics, an active group can have some hope of countering union propaganda, legal, and bullying tactics — not the least by changing the composition of elected bodies. At the state level, the excess funding that the union system creates for activist administration and lobbying will be of greater value.

That's not to deny that voters and a handful of forward-looking government officials could throw an important curve into the game, before the unions adjust their focus to those officials' offices. That possibility is perhaps what evoked union concern about RI Education Commissioner Deborah Gist's application for federal Race to the Top funding, and its absence is what ought to concern voters about the shift in tone for the second round of competition for those dollars. It's now clear that union support was critical for the causes of the two states that won initial funding, and that support will require that unions have an advantage in the centralization process:

During frank discussions, several speakers said fear and a sense of alienation kept most of the state's teachers union locals from supporting the first application. Of particular concern was a pledge to make student test scores and other evidence of student growth count for more than half of a teacher's evaluation. But the application was vague about exactly what factors would be used to assess a teacher's performance.

"There was a tremendous sense of fear," said Mike Crowley, president of the Rhode Island School Committees Association. "There was fear not knowing what this evaluation will look like. I think [teachers] want to come to the table, and we, as school committees and superintendents, also need to understand it, since we will be expected to carry it out."

The only way toward substantial reform is from the bottom up. Town residents must insist on evaluations that take student achievement into consideration, implemented by accountable administrators with the authority to make substantive changes. State and federal strategies that have any hope of winning union support will only tie the hands of local school administrations.


April 15, 2010


Magic Numbers and Pension Politics

Justin Katz

Rhode Island GOP Chairman Gio Cicione makes a good point about pensions and General Treasurer Frank Caprio:

In fact, Mr. Caprio knew better a long time ago. As early as April 2002, when he was Senate finance chairman, Mr. Caprio indicated that an 8.25 percent return had "proved to be an overly optimistic assumed rate of interest for the fund" (reported in The Journal on April 17, 2002). Nonetheless, throughout his career in the General Assembly and his tenure as treasurer, Mr. Caprio promulgated this budget fantasy to mask the truth from taxpayers and from public employees who will depend on the state pension fund to provide their retirement benefits.

As a candidate in the upcoming gubernatorial election, and with the pension fund in trouble, Mr. Caprio is working now to appear fiscally responsible, but he has a lot to explain about his two-decades-long political record of endangering the retirement of public employees and increasing the pressure on taxpayers to fill the holes in the fund.

I'd expand the criticism to anybody in government who complied with the conspiracy to behave as if such expectations were founded in reality. Anytime people in government — or in any capacity — get to make up numbers that determine what they can do with the money at their disposal, others should be skeptical. They should be especially wary if the predictions are anything other than clearly conservative.

We are where we are, however, and it appears that Big RI Labor is content to lean on public officials to find some way through the mess that they've jointly created. Since the magic of government accounting cannot reach beyond the printed page into actual transfers of funds (at least in sufficient amounts), it's going to come down to one of two options: Taxes are going to have to increase greatly, or pensions are going to have to be trimmed. Union members should not risk tremendous confidence that it will be the former.


April 14, 2010


The Little Policy Details That Say So Much

Justin Katz

Sometimes, in the noise and rancor of politics and budgeting, one's attention becomes monopolized by particular details. Consider the following:

[The state's public-employee unions'] chief target: a proposal to limit annual pension increases to the first $35,000 in retirement pay initially. The $35,000 would go up each year, in keeping with the Consumer Price Index, and legislative budget writers stripped from their final bill a provision that Carcieri sought — to reinforce a right they already have to adjust these cost of living adjustments of up to 3 percent annually.

By way of comparison, Massachusetts has, for more than a decade, limited its annual pension increases to the first $12,000 in retirement pay.

There's no excuse for so much of what goes on in Rhode Island. Oh, there are rationalizations and complaints, and they'll continue to float to the surface as bubbles long after the state has drifted to the bottom. But the poor leadership and self-serving lobbying have no justification but greed and corruption. One class rallies and demands the continuation of ill-advised and unsustainable handouts, and another class suffers until its members reach the threshold of whatever's keeping them in the state.

The cycle continues, and down we go.


April 10, 2010


What Are You Working Toward?

Justin Katz

Scott Adams really captured something with this edition of his Dilbert comic strip:

Dilbert.com

Our progressive readers will no doubt declare this to be the reason that unions and government are necessary parties in the employment exchange. From my perspective, it's the reason that government ought to make it easier for all of us Dilberts to step out on our own and compete with our oppressive bosses — or at least work for some entrepreneur who can profit by luring dissatisfied talent from incumbents.


April 9, 2010


NEARI Report: the Supplemental Budget Process (and Much More)

Monique Chartier

The following was sent this afternoon to members of the National Education Association of Rhode Island.

I am not sure what was reported in the paper this morning since reporters were posting stories as they were briefed, but some of those turned out to be premature. The House Finance Committee did vote out the supplemental budget in an extraordinarily short time once it began. We arrived at the State House around one and they did not start their scheduled 11 am meeting until after 8 pm. For all those not yet eligible to retire, the COLA was changed to apply only to the first $35,000 of retirement income. This number would be indexed, which means it goes up each year. The eligibility age to receive the COLA was raised to 65. (Reps Fierro, San Bento and Savage voted against the changes.)

Reps received more phone calls and emails than ever before in such a short time, but we cannot stop now. We all need to remember that when this first leaked out on Monday the COLA cap was at $12,000 with no indexing. I truly believe your efforts had an impact – now we need to push them to vote “no” for any changes at all. Enough is enough and it stops now. Keep calling and emailing. It will be critical over the weekend as those reps leaning our way need our support and we need to turn the others around. We do have support in the House, and the Senate has been fighting this all along.

All the unions impacted are asking their members to come to the State House this Monday after work to lobby and show opposition to these changes. They are caucusing at 3 pm and meeting at 4 pm. Since the House vote will be Tuesday, this will be our opportunity to raise our collective voices. You and your members need to be there. We have been sending a very strong political message that a vote for this is a vote against public employees, teachers, and working women and if you do so, do not expect our help in November. We need your help on Monday delivering that message!

To show how unions working together can have an impact: at 4 pm a new budget item appeared out of nowhere that called for all municipal employees to contribute a minimum of 15% toward health care despite any collective bargaining agreements. At 7 pm, George Nee, president of the AFL-CIO, was called to the speaker's office and was told to tell the other union leaders that that item was off the table. (The only mildly pleasant moment of the evening came around 9 pm when a reporter for the Journal was running around the hearing room looking for that article since they has already posted it as a major headline a few hours previously.)

There was one other surprise that the reps on the Finance Committee did not know about, and I think they were not even sure about it when they voted. All teacher and school employee contracts must now be approved by both the local school committee and town council/city council with at least one public hearing held prior to the vote. If that ends up being the case, I believe we move to do away with school committees because they will have become useless in the process. (I know what you are thinking.) In addition to opposing the COLA changes, ask your reps to oppose Article 9 as well.

I mentioned this past Monday earlier and now it seems like such a long time ago. In three days time, though, we held two conference calls, send an all member email, blogged, tweeted and everything else in between. It all led to a member response level never seen before. I want to thank you and ask you not to stop. Remind your colleagues to do the same. To do nothing means we agree with what is happening and I know you don't.

A special thanks to local presidents, officers and staff who have been working to put an end to this. We need to be as energized as ever. I am certainly ready to take our opposition to the next step and beyond when you are, but right now it starts with more phone calls and a huge turnout on Monday.


April 8, 2010


The Union Does School Administration

Justin Katz

It was hard not to give some credit to the union-run New England Laborers/Cranston Public Schools Construction Career Academy when it gave some of its money back to the town to maintain sports programs. Of course, one wondered why it would have extra money — charter schools aren't fully private schools — but the sentiment wasn't without its noble tinge. Well, Cranston School Committee member Stephen Stycos says there's more to the story, and as usual, it begins with an apparent conflict of interest:

I questioned the change and argued that if the Laborers charter school had $193,840 for the union, it should also give $193,840 to the Cranston public schools. [Michael] Traficante, who chairs the charter-school board of directors and the Cranston School Committee, and is an employee of the Laborers union, countered that the former superintendent promised the union would only have to pay for the "construction craft laborers instructors" for the school's first five years.

And here are some of the results:

Mr. Traficante, however, said the Laborers charter school wanted to help with Cranston's financial woes and came forward with a transfer of $187,218. In response to questioning from several School Committee members, we discovered that this "gift" was the state's reimbursement for special-education services already paid by the Cranston public schools. Had the charter school kept the money, it would have been paid twice for the same special-education services — once by its partner, the Cranston Public Schools, and once by the State of Rhode Island. Since Cranston pays for the special-education services, Cranston should automatically receive the money. ...

(The construction craft laborers instructors, however, who are hired by the union, receive a school-year wage and benefit package equal to $97,751, while a comparable technical assistant at Cranston's vocational school earns $45,870 in wages and benefits.)


April 2, 2010


Get That Board a Rubber Stamp

Justin Katz

This is curious:

A state advisory board on Monday opted not to vote on a potentially controversial plan to overhaul the state’s unemployment law.

Thus, the matter will be left to legislators and Governor Carcieri to decide without benefit of the board’s recommendation. ...

The reversal came after [Chairman William] McGowan acknowledged having heard from a number of small businesses that were opposed to the tax aspects of the plan, and after it emerged that at least two of the board’s members were prepared to vote against the plan.

I could be wrong, but it sounds to me like it's a bad plan, given the economy, and the board members weren't going to give the lawmakers the political cover that they wanted, so they canceled the vote.


April 1, 2010


The Risk of a Recreational Medicine

Justin Katz

My ambivalence about legalizing marijuana carries into this legal development, but I post it mainly as an interesting civic conundrum:

Tens of thousands of Californians are obtaining medical marijuana recommendations from physicians so they can use pot without fear of arrest.

But they still can lose their jobs.

California's Proposition 215, passed by voters in 1996, approved the use of marijuana for a wide range of ailments. But it doesn't require employers to make accommodations or waive any workplace rules for legal cannabis users.

On one hand, if employers feel that use of a particular substance, even outside of work, represents a potential risk of any kind, they ought to be able to continue testing for it. Employees are free not to work there, to take the initiative to compete in the market, or to attempt to affect the business by influencing its customers. On the other hand, although I always found (more than a decade ago) that pot does affect one's mental alertness even after its effects have worn off, but then, so does alcohol.

Whichever way the coin falls, though, I hope that this remains a state-by-state issue.


March 29, 2010


Balancing Public Sector Pay From the Town to the Nation

Justin Katz

I've already been arguing, at the town level on up, that the economic downturn needn't tax the future, through debt, nor decrease programs that local folks want. Glenn Reynolds offers a bit of evidence that I'm right:

What if government workers earned the average of what private workers earn? States and localities would save $339 billion a year from their more than $2.1 trillion budgets. These savings are larger than the combined estimated deficits for 2010 and 2011 of every state in America. In a separate survey, the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis compares the compensation of public versus private workers in each of the 50 states. Perhaps not coincidentally, the pay gap is widest in states that have the biggest budget deficits, such as New Jersey, Nevada and Hawaii. Of the 40 states that have a budget deficit so far this year, 28 would have a balanced budget were it not for the windfall to government workers.

Rhode Island has been giving away the store, on this count, and many of the paying customers have been leaving, making matters worse. It's well past time to turn that all around. Perhaps folks who've just gone along to get along are starting to understand what's been happening as the decades have rolled on by.


March 26, 2010


Hey, Don't Worry About Federal Ed. Money

Justin Katz

Even if Rhode Island doesn't win federal largess for its education improvement plan, as Marc is suggesting we will not, we still have every reason that we've always had to hold our heads high, such as this one that Julia Steiny mentioned last Sunday:

After the 1960s, many states went back to their labor laws to limit, assertively, the scope of bargaining. Apparently, Rhode Island now has the broadest labor laws in the country. Virtually nothing is off the negotiating table.

Oh, wait...



First to Unemployment

Justin Katz

Rhode Island should not, under any circumstances, increasingly burden the state's employers with the costs of its unemployed, but clearly, something must be done to adjust for our long-term burden of unemployment. This conversation is therefore very necessary:

The state Department of Labor and Training on Wednesday proposed sweeping changes to Rhode Island’s unemployment-insurance system to try to restore the state's unemployment trust fund to solvency.

The plan would gradually raise the state unemployment tax paid by more than 30,000 employers in Rhode Island and cap or reduce benefits that an unemployed worker could receive.

The mix of solutions is a matter for extended debate, but this suggestion makes absolutely no sense to me:

Benefit changes would apply only to people filing claims in the future, not to those currently collecting, officials stressed.

Frankly, I see no justification for that distinction, except (maybe) to keep the state from having to recalculate anybody's benefits. It's not as if the currently unemployed invested more into the system, and it's not as if those who are still working will have additional time to prepare for a change in unemployment benefits that they don't yet know that they'll require.

Under the same logic, one could argue that no businesses that are currently making payments for their unemployment insurance should see an increase in their rates.


March 21, 2010


Re: Pensions; Why Should Healthcare Be the Only Calamity on Your Mind, Today?

Monique Chartier

Further to Justin's post, in the matter of the Chapter 9 bankruptcy by the City of Prichard, Alabama, a judge ruled ten days ago that public employee retirees do not have any greater standing than other creditors.

A bankruptcy court judge denied a motion Tuesday that would force Prichard to pay its pensioners, saying they do not qualify as administrative claims -- or day-to-day obligations -- of the city.

The judge gave the city until May 19 to file a reorganization plan.

Returning now to Rhode Island, asked on the Helen Glover Show a couple of weeks ago about the thought process of the all-powerful Speaker of the House on the matter of our under-water public pension system, former Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey replied,

I think actually Gordon Fox ... understands the depths of the problem. I think he's just going to play his game of roulette, also, where he's going to try to be in office as long as possible and he has to be beholden to the special interest public union leaders. And he thinks they control their votes. And so that's what he's going to do. He simply is just going to play out the game. And with $6.6 billion in assets, he thinks he can play it out until he gets out of office and leave it for somebody else to deal with.

Could Smith Hill leadership really harbor the notion that they could skate by this situation? Especially in view of the sharply escalating, budget-busting contributions that are required from the tax-payer as long as pensions are not addressed?

Alternately, could they be waiting for enough Rhode Island cities to declare Chapter 9 and for the fiscal situation on the state level to deteriorate so badly that they have to say to their public employee supporters, "Sorry, we have no choice but to ..." But to what? Whatever solution they may propose at that point, almost assuredly, it won't be as "nice" as the ones on the table now. And no one denies that those already stink on ice. Accordingly, though it might be tempting politically, would waiting for the disaster to actually strike really be such a wise course?



Pensions; Why Should Healthcare Be the Only Calamity on Your Mind, Today?

Justin Katz

As you can see, I'm catching up on the items in my "to blog" pile. Here's a pension-related exercise in predictive mathematics (paragraphs copied out of order):

For more than a decade, the state has anticipated annual returns of 8.25 percent for its giant fund — currently valued at almost $7 billion — needed to cover retirement payments for thousands of retired state workers and teachers. ...

The difference between Rhode Island’s 8.25-percent projection and [Wilshire Consulting's] 6.9-percent suggestion could mean tens of millions of dollars for state and local governments already facing mounting pension costs. ...

While losing $2.4 billion during the near-collapse of financial markets between January 2008 and January 2009, the pension fund earned an average of 2.79 percent each year over the last 10 years, according to information provided by the state treasurer’s office, which manages the fund.

To repeat: A pension fund predicted to return 8.25% annually actually returned 2.79%, so the solution with which government officials are toying is changing the prediction to 6.9%. See, in government, predictions can be tweaked to coincide with political feasibility, not actual results. It's not like we're talking about real people's lives, or anything.


March 20, 2010


The Dangling President

Justin Katz

Let's order things clearly: It was objectionable for a Central Falls high school teacher to dangle an Obama doll upside down with a sign saying "Fire CF Teachers," because it involved the students in a union dispute. Talk of its being a hate crime is utterly outlandish:

To Clifford Montiero, president of the Providence branch of the NAACP, the effigy represents a lynching of a black man, and brings back painful memories of decades of injustices.

"In my mind, this is a hate crime, and the teacher should be charged," Montiero said. "This teacher feels he can demean the president of the United States, an African-American who has overcome all this hatred. It is wrong. And when you take a nonviolent environment like a classroom, and introduce violence and hatred into it, you have crossed the line."

Even calling the thing an "effigy," as the Providence Journal does, goes a bit far. I look at the picture and I think Laugh In, not Mississippi Burning, with the President popping out to offer a one liner.


March 18, 2010


Meant to Be Versus Is

Justin Katz

Not unexpectedly, my column in last month's Rhode Island Catholic was my first to garner a letter to the editor of that paper. I'm not sure, though, that William Schecher, of Smithfield, understood what I was trying to say when he writes:

The whole purpose of unions is to join together for the common cause of protecting and advancing the welfare of all workers, whether they belong to a union or not. This begins with a local union, whose members’ freedoms and initiatives must come together in solidarity as one, in negotiating contracts either in the public or private sector, or on a local or national level.

That may, indeed, be "the whole purpose of unions" in an idealized ideological vision (or in literature that unions push on their members), but it is not the reality of their activity. Indeed, my argument was that it's not a likely outcome based on the incentives of their structure.

A union aggregates the power of its members for concentrated political and economic force. Union leaders often use their political capital in ways that have little to do with their members, and they must devote much of what's left to keep the workers under their umbrella feeling as if they benefit financially by their membership.


March 15, 2010


More Re: Committee Wins

Justin Katz

Here's the decision from Superior Court Justice Silverstein: PDF.

About halfway through the document, it appears that Silverstein would draw his lines very tightly around his ruling in favor of the school committee:

Under the language of § 16-2-9 a school committee must bargain in good faith with certified public school teachers in accordance with Title 28 and honor current collective bargaining agreements. However, under a narrow set of circumstances, when such collective bargaining negotiations have reached an impasse and there is no longer a valid collective bargaining agreement, a school committee must comply with the mandate in subsection (d) and avoid maintaining a school budget that results in debt.

However, in most of the substantive ways in which Anchor Rising readers might want a little bit of breadth to the ruling, they won't be disappointed. For one, the judge determined that a never-ending contract is not implied by existing laws (citations deleted):

Although the Union contends that the Committee was under a statutory duty to continue to adhere to the terms and conditions of the expired CBA until a successor agreement was realized, the Court disagrees. Title 28 does not contain such a mandate pertaining to school teachers' labor contracts, and in fact under § 28-9.3-4, "no contract shall exceed the term of three (3) years." Further, when previously discussing the effect of an expired contract this Court found it to be no longer valid and cited to Providence Teachers Union v. Providence School Bd., City of Cranston v. Teamsters Local 251, In Providence Teachers, when discussing the effect of a general arbitration clause in an expired contract, the Court stated that "[a]n expired contract has by its own terms released all its parties from their respective contractual obligations, except obligations already fixed under the contract but as yet unsatisfied." Here, the CBA by its terms expired prior to the implementation of the disputed salary and benefits changes. Therefore, the Court finds that the CBA was no longer binding and the Committee did not "abrogate any agreement reached by collective bargaining."

And when a school committee finds itself facing a budgetary shortfall (determined as a measure of its best knowledge on the date that it takes action), and when the contract has expired, employees don't have an overriding claim to district money beyond other line items under the committee's control (citations deleted):

The Union has continually argued that there were other avenues that the Committee could have taken to reduce the FY 09 deficit. However, this Court remains mindful that under § 16-2-9 the Committee is vested with the entire care, control, and management of the interests of the East Providence public schools. Further, under the same provision the Committee has both the power and the duty to adopt a school budget. Accordingly, this Court will not discuss whether the changes to the teachers' salary and benefits were the only or even the best possible way to comply with the balanced budget mandate of § 16-2-9(d). However, this Court does note that the parties stipulated that the teachers' salaries and benefits consumed 63% of the Committee's total revenue from all sources for FY 09. Therefore, given the mandate in § 16-2-9(d) that a school committee "shall be responsible for maintaining a school budget which does not result in a debt" and the evidence before this Court that the Committee was, in fact, facing a debt for FY 09, this Court declares that the Committee acted lawfully under Title 16 by implementing the teachers' salary and benefit changes.

Lastly, Siverstein found that the State Labor Relations Board cannot, in effect, make law to suit its rulings (citations deleted):

The Court is mindful that when deciding such questions, the SLRB is empowered under § 28-7-22 to issue orders and award the relief it deems to be appropriate. However, our Supreme Court has cautioned that "[n]o state official by administrative action can affect the substantive rights of parties as they have been set forth by an affirmative act of the general assembly." Further, as indicated supra, administrative agencies are bound by statutory schemes and a decision or award is invalid if the decision or award contravenes a statutory scheme.

March 13, 2010


La Cosa AFTstra

Justin Katz

Columnist Mark Patinkin has been focusing on the teacher dispute in Central Falls for weeks, now, but an essay on teachers who (quietly) disagree with the union's activities brings to the fore a central reason that many of us have a constitutional aversion to unions:

"As a C.F. High School teacher I agree with you," the e-mail said. "The Union blew it. The only mistake you made was writing that we voted it down. This is untrue because we were never given the chance to vote. The Union leadership made the decision for us and many of us are not happy."

Why not express that unhappiness?

"Many fear Union retribution," the letter said. ...

"You have to understand," one wrote, "not only would I be going up against my own teacher's union, I would leave myself open to abuse from every teacher's union in the country and perhaps beyond."

No doubt, some union organizer or other has pointed to Patinkin's column, and will point to this very post, as evidence that breaking ranks and speaking out will only open the union to political attack. One can hardly dispute that "solidarity" is part of what empowers unions to accomplish what they do. That doesn't, of course, mean that members or society at large should want them to accomplish those ends. Indeed, the insidious problem of silence is that it allows union reps to pick their own objectives and limit all internal objections to a controlled, intimidating environment.



Keeping the Pension Blood Flowing

Justin Katz

I didn't want to let this one slip by without mention:

The business-backed [Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council] found that the state taxpayer contribution to those pensions nearly tripled over the last decade, jumping from $79.9 million in 2001 to a projected $218 million in the coming year. ...

... Overall, state personnel expenditures will consume $1.7 billion in the coming year, according to the report, which found that retirement costs are the fastest-growing component of personnel spending.

This trend just can't be maintained. Voters have to learn to look past this sort of rhetoric from unionists:

Yet [National Education Association Rhode Island Executive Director Bob] Walsh acknowledges that the report will fuel criticism that his workers' benefits are too rich, especially given the shift in the private sector.

"Just because the private sector jumped off a financial bridge, does it mean we should follow?" he asked...

People who benefit from big government like to argue that voters can, by their votes, decide to do anything: Private businesses determined that they couldn't sustain generous pension benefits, but voters and their representatives can just choose differently. In a limited, short-term sense, I suppose that's true. In a sense that acknowledges reality, however, the laws of economics will decide differently, or at least exact a price that voters wouldn't have been willing to pay had they been well enough informed to anticipate it.


March 10, 2010


Spin on the Health Panel

Justin Katz

Rep. Joseph McNamara (D, Pawtucket) — himself the Alternative Learning Program Director for the Pawtucket School Department — recently published an op-ed defending legislation that he submitted (and which passed) that created a healthcare panel to design insurance benefits for all of Rhode Island teachers. (The legislation, incidentally, inspired the introduction of our legislative stooge list.) The intention of his essay is to lull Rhode Islanders back to sleep, on this matter, but he shouldn't succeed.

Most centrally, his argument cites internally incompatible benefits to the legislation. First:

... the Department of Education studied the issue and found that combined purchasing of health benefits for education employees could save up to $15 million a year.

Yet, second:

... the legislation provides that "choice of benefit plan designs, medical insurance cost-sharing, payment for waiving medical insurance, eligibility for receiving benefits and providing benefits for retirees shall continue to be negotiated" by the districts.

If districts remain able to choose different programs from different insurers, then the maximum savings cited by McNamara cannot be achieved. In other words, the law can only function by limiting school districts' options. Indeed, that is its plain purpose. Note this sly admission that the law amounts to another unfunded mandate:

... it includes the requirement that the value of at least one of the plan designs "shall not be greater than the lowest" plan in effect today.

I don't have the time, just now, to sort through every district's actuarial report, but general familiarity with the issue is enough to suggest that the "lowest plan" is hardly a discount program. If there were such a plan currently in effect, McNamara would surely have cited it as evidence; that he doesn't offer any details for this claim suggests that vagueness suits his political purposes. Essentially, the legislation ensures that the now-mandated health insurance benefits will never decrease, except perhaps minimally with inflation. As for districts' ability negotiate cost-sharing and so forth, here's the actual language (PDF):

Choice of benefit plan designs from those approved in accordance with section medical insurance cost-sharing, payment for waiving medical insurance, eligibility for receiving benefits, and providing benefits for retirees shall continue to be negotiated pursuant to sections 28-9-3 and 28-9-4.

28-9-3 and 28-9-4 do not lay out rights to negotiate certain parts of a contract. Rather, they deal with arbitration. I'm open to correction from legal experts, on this, but defending how one takes the phrase "pursuant to," it would be plausible to argue that the only way to reduce healthcare costs within McNamara's legislation would be through arbitration.

It's a simple matter of reasoning: During a time of growing dissatisfaction with the imbalanced remuneration of public-sector employees, one such employee introduced legislation mandating health insurance benefits with heavy influence from the relevant unions. Keep your eye on that ball; the rest is just fancy footwork.

(Of course, since the legislation passed, attentiveness must be to having it repealed and removing all .)


March 9, 2010


Taking the Discouraged into Account

Justin Katz

Back when I made my (thus far) erroneous prediction that Rhode Island's unemployment rate would hit 14 or even 15%, I didn't take into account the effects of discouraged workers. Doing so, the rate would actually be much higher than that.

It is, without a doubt, a confounding variable, which is why I'm not so sure that this statement can be considered to be accurate:

Forecasters say a larger work force is a positive sign in that it shows that formerly discouraged workers who had given up searching for work are confident enough in the job market to start looking for employment again, even if it takes time to find it.

Put aside questions about the encouragement that we ought to take from the impressions of discouraged workers about the prospects of the economy. I've seen no evidence in print or in life that such confidence in the job market is actually a factor.

It seems more plausible, to me, that "discouraged workers" are seeing their allotted time of unemployment benefits running out and are therefore redoubling their efforts. If that's the case, then one effect of extended jobless payments has been to temporarily shrink the workforce, which is arguably a good thing in the short-term, although the long-term effects of taking that money out of the economy and habituating people to not working may swamp any advantage.

It may also be the case that spouses and children are entering the workforce because the primary household earner has been having such trouble. In other words, an increasing workforce, in the current economic circumstances, could be either a good sign or a bad one.


March 8, 2010


General Assembly Waiting for Problems to Fix Themselves

Justin Katz

Honestly, I don't know how Rhode Islanders can read articles like this one without wanting to storm the State House. In brief, the General Assembly is now letting months pass by without resolving this year's nine-figure budget deficit, and every day of delay makes the task more difficult, thus building political tolerance for the most dim-witted (but typical) solutions:

Key legislators acknowledge that the delay has forced them to consider options that may balloon future deficits, such as refinancing the payment plan for the $4.33-billion unfunded portion of the pension system for state workers and teachers.

Any homeowner should know that the possibility of refinancing the house to pay the grocery bill ought to be evidence that it's time to cancel the premium channel package from the cable company, but the General Assembly marches on, even after years of one-time fixes that have without doubt harmed the lives of future Rhode Islanders — applying stimulus funds to programs that will require continued revenue once the federal largess dries up, sacrificing future tobacco settlement money at a loss, and so on. At a first-year savings of $40-45 million, reamortizing the pension debt wouldn't even come close to addressing the $220 million budget gap, yet it's the only big idea floated as a possibility in the article. And here's the shiny new House Speaker, Gordon Fox (D., Providence):

"No COLAs for life, for instance, for me is a non-starter," Fox said. "Do you want someone when they're 80 years old to be living in poverty? I don't think we, as a society, want to do that."

Being inclined to be charitable, I'm not sure whether to ascribe that statement to stupidity or dishonesty. Eliminating automatic cost of living adjustments (COLAs) to pension payouts in no way prevents the General Assembly from enacting such increases in pension benefits as will prevent 80-year-old former state employees (many of whom would have been retired for more than twenty years, at that point) from starvation. Thus far in his time as speaker, the only case that Fox has competently backed is the case for relocating beyond his taxation reach.

Meanwhile, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Daniel DaPonte (D, East Providence, Pawtucket) dips into the musty playbook for the "blame the governor" card:

"People understand that it's the chief executive and department heads that manage the state on a day-to-day basis," DaPonte said. "The General Assembly does not run departments. We pass a budget, and year after year after year, departments overspend."

I'd replace "understand," in that quotation, with "have been misled into believing." It is the General Assembly that tells the departments what work they must do and what money they must hand out. And that's the one area the shysters refuse to go, because it's how they buy their offices.


March 6, 2010


Long-Term Unemployment, Private Sector Only

Justin Katz

By now, you've likely decided whether or not you agree with the statement that the Obama administration's approach to "stimulus" was meant not so much to stimulate growth in the private sector economy as to shore up the public sector and insulate government at all levels from the real effects of the recession. Whether the private sector will begin to grow again of its own accord and bail out the borrowing of the public sector remains to be seen.

George Mason University Economics Professor Alex Tabarrok is specifically worried about the bifurcation of the workforce:

... I am more worried, however, about the long term consequences of creating a dual labor market in which insiders with government or government-connected jobs are highly paid and secure while outsiders face high unemployment rates, low wages and part-time work without a career path. ...

Moreover, once an economy is in the insider-outsider equilibrium it's very difficult to get out because insiders fear that they will lose their privileges with a deregulated labor market and outsiders focus their political energy not on deregulating the labor market but on becoming insiders ...

Once again, we in Rhode Island have an especially relevant perspective on the direction in which the country is now headed, inasmuch as we've tested the waters, found them frigid, and continue to beckon in the other states anyway. We're well accustomed to arguments that the problem is that public-sector union jobs kept up with inflation while private-sector employment did not, and that we shouldn't respond to the latter by bringing down the former. We've all heard the "I got mine" responses that lie behind all related debates with supporters of public-sector unions.

It can be disorienting how quickly the very same advocate can switch from proclamations about fairness to denials that inequitable balances in the pay and benefits matter for measuring government employment packages. All we can do is stiffen our jaws and patiently explain that the objective isn't to tear down the publicly backed segments of the middle class; it's to prevent financing that group from strangling the economy that ultimately must support it.


March 4, 2010


Issues on Suburban Minds: Regionalization and Arbitration

Justin Katz

I know many of the right reform crowd in Rhode Island disagree with my general take on regionalization, but I'm relieved to see this, from Tuesday's Newport Daily News:

Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed, D-Newport, and Rep. Deborah L. Ruggiero, D-Jamestown, met with members of the Town Council and School Committee before the regularly scheduled council meeting to discuss legislative issues. Both legislators said they would not support any regionalization of municipal functions unless the communities involved agreed to the consolidation. ...

Weed and Ruggiero both agreed that the impetus should come from cities and towns.

I'm even more relieved to see this:

When Weed asked school officials for a list of their legislative priorities, several members held up wrists bearing plastic handcuffs.

"No binding arbitration," Kaiser said, referring to legislation that would require binding arbitration for teachers. "This is not the time to handcuff school committees."

Council President Michael Schnack agreed. "There is no negotiating with binding arbitration," Schnack said. "You get a terrible contract and terrible results."

Weed said she did not think the idea had a lot of legislative support.

Of course, continual vigilance will be required. A lack of legislative support is not necessarily a good enough reason for legislation to fail.


March 3, 2010


When Union Leaders Head for a Cliff

Justin Katz

Mark Patinkin tells an interesting anecdote in relation to the Central Falls teachers' firing:

I have been in a union for 30 years, and have come to feel that in standoffs with management, members often get into a collective self-righteousness that makes them vote against their individual good. ...

In the mid-'90s, I was reading a union publication that proudly featured a service being offered to striking journalists in Detroit. The service was a mobile food pantry in the back of a truck. It was visiting a picket line. There was a picture of newspaper people "shopping" for handout food in the pantry. They needed the service because they'd been out of work for a long time.

My reaction: Why is the union proud of this?

I'm not sure how Mark's union is or was structured, but in unions with national organizations behind them, once you get beyond the particular employer, striking doesn't affect the union leadership. Indeed, the disruption and realization of the threat contribute to their power.



C.F. Teachers Union: Two, Four, Six, Eight; When in Doubt, Litigate!

Monique Chartier

From yesterday's ProJo 7 to 7 News Blog.

The Central Falls Teachers' Union filed three unfair labor practice charges with the state Labor Relations Board Monday, its first move to appeal the mass firings of 93 teachers, support staff and administrators at the city's only high school.

And the basis for the charges?

Marcia Reback, president of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers, which represents Central Falls, said the local filed three charges against Central Falls school district: failure to negotiate; refusal to provide information to the union; and the terminations themselves.

This seems pretty easy to dispense with.

1. Central Falls did, in fact, negotiate with the union, earnestly and at length.

2. You can't negotiate without providing information.

3. Terminations are the natural conclusion to unsuccessful negotiations IF the ultimate goal - a good education, for example - is something more than perpetual employment at an ever rising price.

Who is ultimately to blame for these unsuccessful negotiations is a separate matter. By refusing to put this matter to a vote of its members, it is the C.F. teachers union which is to blame. That they failed to put it to a vote has turned out to be a bad mistake, one that the union hopes to correct with litigation. (Whoops, no, my mistake. Let us not forget that all of the union's actions, including the overwrought candlelight vigil, are - all together now - "for the chiii-hilll-dren".)



Management-Union Friendship and Money Seeking

Justin Katz

Linda Borg's Sunday Projo article, "In Providence, more collaboration than conflict," weaves a tale of cooperation between the the city's schools superintendent and its teachers' union leadership:

Call it a tale of two cities.

While the superintendent and union president have been going at it in Central Falls, Brady and Smith have worked together on a plan to radically reshape five of the state's lowest-performing schools.

Her Saturday article, "Providence teachers face job uncertainty," gives some indication as to why. First of all, Providence has already effectively experienced the "turnaround model" that has Central Falls roiling:

Teachers, however, had to reapply for their jobs, and only 50 percent of the existing staff chose to do so. What made Hope High School successful was that, in the end, the teachers who stayed were committed to making radical changes, from moving to longer class periods to spending more time planning instruction.

Union President Steve Smith credits "the faculty" with initiating that idea, but whatever behind-the-scenes maneuvering there may have been, it was ultimately a difference in the union's behavior, not the district's plan. Further along in the same article, we find a clue that might explain the two sides' inclination to cooperate (emphasis added):

But for teachers to embrace dramatic change, they want the district — and the state — to give them the resources they need to get the job done, Smith said. He is bringing those concerns to School Supt. Tom Brady so that the School Department can push for federal monies to pay for additional support, whether it's creating alternative classrooms for disruptive students or remedial classes for students who are performing below grade level.

Let's take as given that the cooperation in Providence is desirable, whatever its motivation. We still should consider such evidence as the newly proposed funding formula. Providence has been underfunded, and no doubt stands to drink deeply from any pool of Race to the Top federal money that comes to the state. The Department of Education has determined that Central Falls, by contrast, is already receiving much more state money than is "fair."

In summary, the Providence union has already acquiesced to the sorts of changes that the Central Falls union is fighting, and education leaders on both sides of the negotiating table in Providence have reason to expect their good behavior to be rewarded mightily.


March 1, 2010


Rocky Waters in the Dem-Union Love Affair

Justin Katz

I'd like to believe reports that big labor is in throes of disappointment with Obama and the Democrats:

Labor’s high hopes for major gains under President Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress have dimmed, raising fresh doubts about union leverage even in the best of political times.

I'd suggest that the "best of political times" is not likely to coincide with the worst of economic times, which has surely limited the Obama administration's ability to hand over the keys to the treasury. After all, the Democrats had to use much of the political capital they'd allocated for labor by preserving the jobs of public-sector union members under the deceptive guise of "stimulus."

I love this part, too:

Some labor experts say unions have come up flat in mounting an effective liberal response to conservative "tea party" activists who helped Republican Scott Brown win the special Senate election in Massachusetts to succeed Democrat Edward M. Kennedy, who died last year. An AFL-CIO poll showed that 49 percent of union households supported Brown.

"There’s been no indication that there’s muscle behind their money," said Leon Fink, a labor historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "There was no equivalent mobilization for public works or for a progressive health care measure."

Not to give anything away to the opposition, but the tea parties' success manifestly isn't a story of superior organization and "activism," as generally understood. The unions' problem on this count may be observed a layer below the surface of the above paragraphs: The unions are trying to mount a "liberal" response when many of their members have different ideological tendencies outside the direct application to their careers.


February 28, 2010


February 27, 2010


630AM/99.7FM Host John DePetro at RISC's Winter Meeting

Justin Katz

John DePetro took on the role of first featured speaker at the Rhode Island Statewide Coalition's 2010 winter meeting, described in my liveblog of the event. (More video in the extended entry.)

Continue reading "630AM/99.7FM Host John DePetro at RISC's Winter Meeting"


Board of Regents Member Angus Davis at RISC's Winter Meeting

Justin Katz

NOTE: Any members of the media who couldn't make it to the meeting and rely on this video for future reports are encouraged to do so, but a brief note of the video's source would be appreciated.


Rhode Island Board of Regents member Angus Davis came out with guns blazing in a surprise speech at the Winter meeting of the Rhode Island Statewide Coalition, as described in my liveblog of the event. (More video in the extended entry.)

Davis was especially animated when discussing an email from gubernatorial candidate Linc Chafee at the beginning of this clip.

Yesterday, I received an email from Senator Chafee. In this email, Senator Chafee asked for clarification on whether or not teachers had really been offered 100% job security, describing it as, quote, the basic question that must be settled, unquote. He said he does not want to, quote, inherit the labor mess, unquote, as he works to build a more prosperous Rhode Island as governor.

What kind of leadership thinks the basic question about a school in which only half of children graduate and 90% can't do basic math — what kind of leadership thinks that the basic question involves job security for its adults rather than the educational outcomes for its children?

Continue reading "Board of Regents Member Angus Davis at RISC's Winter Meeting"


Central Falls Superintendent Frances Gallo at RISC's Winter Meeting

Justin Katz

NOTE: Any members of the media who couldn't make it to the meeting and rely on this video for future reports are encouraged to do so, but a brief note of the video's source would be appreciated.


Herewith, the video of the speech given by Central Falls Superintendent Frances Gallo at the Winter meeting of the Rhode Island Statewide Coalition, as described in my liveblog of the event. (More video in the extended entry.)

Although the entire speech is notable as the most comprehensive statement of Supt. Gallo's position that I've seen (and I don't claim to have searched high and low), the beginning of this segment may be a new news item:

I'll answer now, although I was never asked by anyone: No. We can't mediate now. I'll say it clearly, and I mean no offense to anyone, but those ads continue. What kind of an effort at true desire for change when you keep those ads.
Continue reading "Central Falls Superintendent Frances Gallo at RISC's Winter Meeting"

February 26, 2010


Yeah, We Have No Idea

Justin Katz

Here's another instance of the disconnect of the labor unions:

"We think it’s an outrage," Jane Sessums, president of the Central Falls Teachers Union, said, as hundreds of union supporters from across the state began flowing into Jenks Park. "Our members are feeling awful, devastated. How would you feel, being terminated?"

One gets the impression that, on some level, they don't believe that anybody ever gets laid off anywhere. Some construction companies in the Newport area have laid off almost as many employees as work in Central Falls. The worst part is that the teachers could have avoided the whole thing if the unions weren't so intent on standing their ground in hopes of averting a statewide conflagration of concessions and reform.



Not Much of an Education Story

Justin Katz

We're in sad circumstances when this hardly seems like much of a story at all:

The [Cranston] School Committee Tuesday approved a nearly $123.6-million budget that eliminates high school teams, the enrichment program [aka, honors programs], the elementary school strings, band and choral program, and lays off about 16 employees.

The teams cut are: freshman baseball, basketball and football; girls junior varsity field hockey; golf (coed); tennis (boys and girls); and indoor track (boys and girls).

Rhode Island students are being palpably harmed because adults lack the imagination and political will to beat back other adults' greed. Which brings us to Pat Crowley testifying before the RI House Finance Committee:

The education cuts would apply immediate pressure on municipalities to raise property taxes, cut staff or reduce student programs, according to Patrick Crowley, assistant executive director for the National Education Association of Rhode Island.

What's missing from Crowley's list is something that officials fear to make a public point about: reductions in remuneration. The reason is that it's the obvious necessity. They behave as if negotiations and concessions are some mysterious bending of reality that happens when officials and union leaders get together for verbal fencing behind closed doors. They're wrong, and they should fear (as I do) that continuing failure to step forward into the light and declare the game over will result in voters' demanding a Central Falls in every town.


February 25, 2010


Jobs Americans Won't Take?

Justin Katz

This little blurb stuck out as I sifted through the newspaper, the other day. Why should this be so:

Despite high unemployment in Connecticut, Census jobs are going begging.

The Hartford office of the U.S. Census Bureau is struggling to fill between 1,000 and 1,500 temporary jobs that pay $15 to $22.75 an hour.

More than 4,200 have applied for the jobs, but the census office needs to recruit more by April 27 because most will drop out or never show up for the jobs.

Are people becoming used to idleness and dependency, or is something else going on here?



From the Garden to the Ocean

Justin Katz

One must suspect that Ed Achorn is link-seeking when his column addresses both state-government dependents and the state of my youth, New Jersey:

Ultimately, while the public-employee unions and other government-fed special interests keep fattening up, the middle class suffers from a loss of jobs and opportunity, and the poor suffer from a loss of charitable dollars. The quality of life goes down, as money to pay for vital government services disappears, leaving a state with poor roads and bridges, aging school textbooks, leaking roofs and canceled sports programs, while the politically connected demand the same plush benefits they have long received.

In the comments to my Sakonnet Times letter, a teacher is claiming that he can't possibly survive with a 5% cut. The disconnect from what the rest of us have been experiencing is palpable. There's just not much more my family can cut from its budget, and nothing more we can trim and still justify living in a state that won't recover from its economic slump for years to come.

We have to turn things around quickly, in Rhode Island, because the downward spiral is self-propelling; the faster it goes, the faster people will leave, and the faster it will go. It isn't a matter of whether public-sector employees can afford a cut. If current trends continue, the cities and towns and the state will find it more difficult to pay them every year.



Politics & Pupils

Justin Katz

Monique and Matt talked Central Falls and Chafee on last night's Matt Allen Show. Stream by clicking here, or download it.


February 23, 2010


The Cause of the Firings

Justin Katz

Every working Rhode Islander, and all of those looking for work, can see the disconnection of Central Falls union rhetoric:

"We still hold that this termination of the entire faculty is a violation of the contract and contrary to state law and federal law as well," [teachers union President Jane] Sessums said. "This is a termination of the entire faculty without cause, we believe."

You want cause?

  • Only 4% of students proficient in math in 2008-2009, up from 3% the year before, with 75% "substantially below proficient."
  • Only 45% proficient in reading.
  • Only 29% proficient in writing.
  • Only 17% proficient in science.
  • A 48% graduation rate.
  • A 50% failure rate for the current school year.

As a body — and it is the teachers' decision to be handled as a collective union — the teachers are failing. Every year, every day, students are deprived of a successful educational experience. That must change, and since the union's been blocking the avenue for change that doesn't entail a mass firing, a drastic step must be taken.



The Same Old Local Political Roundabout

Justin Katz

As circumstances deteriorate, it's instructive to observe the varying reactions and strategies for handling them. In Tiverton, the established order, so to speak, has redoubled its efforts to keep the negative focus on Tiverton Citizens for Change in the hopes that people won't notice that the plans for improvement bear a striking resemblance to the plans that got the town into its current mess. I've got a letter pointing out the 'round-and-'round nature of the debate:

On January 27, 2009, the school committee approved a largely retroactive contract for teachers that ate up about $300,000 of that year’s budget, added approximately $150,000 to the current year’s, and is contributing more than that to the $600,000-plus increase in salaries and benefits budgeted for the next fiscal year. At a November 2008 meeting, Ms. Pallasch argued for approval, saying, “Let's start working on the new one, and give ourselves a little bit of room to refocus on the classroom and away from the adults.” The argument was that we should resolve the running dispute while there was still time to negotiate the subsequent contract amicably.

At the time, I spoke up to predict that the union would not negotiate. Rather, it would wait out the recession based on the obvious reasoning that it could avoid concessions during hard economic times and — as we’ve taught its members to expect — receive retroactive raises when times improved. I also handed out a chart showing that there had been no abatement of the increases in teacher salaries and benefits in the past decade. Indeed, the per-pupil dollar amount had gone up more (54%) than the same number for the state as a whole (40%). Over the same period, the chart showed that most other expenditures had hardly moved.

Well, negotiations did not resume with an amicable tone. Indeed, in August, the union pointed out a clause in the contract extending it for another year. The school committee had somehow missed the trick that it was supposed to notify the union of its intention to negotiate the next contract a full month before the previous one was actually approved. Changes in healthcare copayments for which the committee had budgeted went out the window. So did negotiations.

And the usual suspects are back, making all of the union's arguments for it in advance of the debate. Wealthy people wanting to increase taxes rather than stand firm with the organized labor behemoth that has soaked up a growing portion of our educational and municipal funds.

The system is broken. Revving it up for another season is not the solution.


February 22, 2010


"Rally For Fairness" - Solidarity to Descend on Central Falls

Monique Chartier

[This fascinating e-mail was forwarded to me tonight. It has presumably been circulated to all members of NEARI.]

As you are aware, Commissioner of Education Gist and Superintendent Gallo of the Central Falls School District are set to fire all 74 of the district's high school teachers tomorrow. In one of the most blatant acts of anti-unionism in decades, the leadership of the district has decided, instead of providing the resources necessary for a quality education, to point fingers and blame teachers for the administration's lack of appropriate action. Join with teachers, parents, students, union members and concerned individuals at a rally tomorrow to support the Central Falls teachers.

The Rally for Fairness is tomorrow, Tuesday, February 23, 5 PM, at Jenks Park on Broad Street in Central Falls. It is time your voice is heard in the struggle to protect collective bargaining and ensure every student has the resources available to succeed. The district is moving forward with this inappropriate and illegal action even though, following teacher evaluations over the past two years, not one was put on corrective action. It is moving forward without following due process, engaging in nothing more than a union busting tactic.

For more information go to www.CentralFallsKidsDeserveBetter.com. There you can sign a petition in support of the teachers and learn more about the schools in our state's smallest community. You can also stay updated by following Central Falls High on Twitter and checkingthe NEARI website, www.neari.org, tomorrow for the latest on the rally and directions. We encourage you to follow NEARI on Facebook and President Larry Purtill on Twitter for this and other valuable information.

Your local president has been invited to a meeting at NEARI this Thursday, February 25, with Commissioner Gist. It is an opportunity for him/her to ask questions and raise concerns about the events taking place in Central Falls and Rhode Island's Race to the Top application. You can also see your local president, if you have not already done so, to lend your name to those of your colleagues who are concerned about the content and process involved in submitting the application. Concerns over the lack of collaboration in writing the grant, the use of test scores to make up 51% of a teacher's evaluation, automatic termination after two ineffective years of evaluation, elimination of the I Plan and certification tied directly to evaluation, and the drive to make one out of every five schools in Rhode Island a charter or mayoral academy are just a few of the issues in the grant application.

It is up to you to speak out against these hasty political changes that will not improve student performance. NEARI supports highly effective teachers in every classroom, a strong evaluation system, and appropriate professional development. What we don't want to see are teachers and staff blamed for a lack of resources and a weak political will to do what is right. Join with your colleagues so you do not become the next Central Falls, East Providence or Glocester.



Toward More Christian Unions

Justin Katz

My February column for The Rhode Island Catholic takes up the subject of the Church's support for labor unions:

Catholic theology enters the political mix with the holding that God works through the individual conscience. What organized labor does, in the ideal, is to combine the power of individuals to construct a stronger, more substantive assertion of human conscience. In the workplace, the purpose is to counterbalance the economic power of business leaders or the political power of government officials.

The problem is that these sources of power are not parallel. A company gains influence by increasing the importance of its products and services to the market. The source of a business's power is therefore manipulable as a means to an end and constrained by regulation, competition, and employee morale. The source of a government's power is the entire society, and we rightly constrain its actions through civic structure. The parallel dynamic and constraints for unions are complicated by the doctrine that people — union members — must always be ends in themselves, with inviolable rights to pursue their own interests. And it's a much more comfortable (and remunerative) project to extort money from local communities than to fight foreign tyrannies on behalf of a distant workforce.


February 21, 2010


The Unions Cannot Survive a Perpetually Down Economy

Justin Katz

The thing that most irks me about unions in general and public-sector unions in particular is their way of obscuring natural alliances for the benefit not of their members, but of their organizers and political allies. Now, I can't speak to the in-fights that union discipline may be keeping out of public view (although I suspect many union readers just chuckled at the notion of such organization), but the workers should realize and begin reacting — soon — to the dire straits into which their leaders are steering them.

Consider this ho-hum article about inadequate funding for public-sector unions in Rhode Island:

The study shows that Rhode Island has no reserves for state employees' retirement benefits and handles them on a pay-as-you-go basis. ...

Karpinski, who oversees the state's pension plans but not other retiree benefits such as health insurance, said that due to some pension reform measures and full annual payments to the plans, the state system is on the road to recovery. But, he stressed, the key question is, can it keep the momentum given the tough financial times the state is facing?

As Rhode Island government and political structures are currently compiled, state workers must begin to consider the possibility that their pensions will evaporate entirely. There are no reserves, and "catching up" requires an economic recovery that nobody sees on the horizon — nobody, that is, who hasn't been seeing one on every horizon for the past two years. If the state responds per its habits and attempts to squeeze more revenue out of residents and businesses, they will leave, and leave the state worse off for it.

The only long-term hope for the unions is to become free-market advocates extraordinaire, with a little bit of faith in the winds of economic freedom. Rather than sticking by the tried-and-doomed alliances that have left them trying to subsist off a rotting economic carcass, they must realize that, when times are flush, nobody cares much about their greatly remunerative deals. Lower taxes. Eliminate mandates. Erase regulations.

Private citizens are only loosely tied to the state. Union members are lashed to it with career investments and retirement plans. They need the economy to take off. The reason for optimism is that Rhode Island is such a naturally attractive place to live and do business that throwing of the unnecessary governmental weights will make recovery light work. The reason for pessimism is that union culture leaves labor leaders' way of doing business as secure as, well, as secure as established politicians in Rhode Island.


February 19, 2010


Learning to Hear the Union

Justin Katz

Mike at Assigned Reading is dead on that the Newsmakers head-to-head between Central Falls union representative Jim Parisi and Superintendent Frances Gallo is very revealing about the two sides' priorities. Perhaps the most crystallized example of unions' determination to spin rather than inform — because everything's "negotiable" — comes at approximately 9: in the video:

Asked about the extra tasks that the administration is requesting from teachers, Parisi says:

What people aren't informed of is that Central Falls teachers already have more common planning time and professional time than any other public school district in the state, because we were a willing partner to make that happen. How come the union and its teachers don't get the credit for something like that?

Sounds like a reasonable statement, no? The teachers are already working hard, compromising, so that they can accomplish as much as possible for their students. Well, the spin unravels when Gallo explains:

That time is taken out of the school day — out of the instructional school day. We're trying to add the time to the after school time so that the instructional day remains such. We actually have an instructional day of just over four hours.

In other words, that state-leading planning and sit-down time was negotiated as time away from the most difficult part of the job: interacting with the students. A union will brag about helping its clients to lower their blood pressure — leaving out, of course, that it does so with a knife.


February 17, 2010


Trading Schools for Raises

Justin Katz

The Newport Daily News isn't very friendly about putting information online, so I don't have a link to the story, but I read this weekend that the Tiverton School Committee is floating the idea of closing the town's high school. In hopes of saving $450,000, as I recall, the town would either send its students elsewhere or bring in a charter school company to run things.

Meanwhile, in West Warwick, closure of an elementary school is expected to save $750,000, with the students dispersed to other schools and fifth graders heading to middle school. A reader emails:

So you are looking at placing 10 and 11 yr olds with potentially 15 y/o kids in the middle school. It gets even worse, its one thing to save the $750,000 but to then budget $900,000 in Teacher Step raises is mind boggling. Closing a school to fund Teacher raises, West Warwick is currently in the top 5 in salaries, with the top step at approx. 79,000 and health care contributions this year at 10% and next yr at 15%.

Here in Tiverton, the proposed increase in salaries, for next year, is $535,954. In other words, multiple Rhode Island communities are toying with the idea disrupting the lives of the students for whom they have responsibility in order to fund pay increases for well-remunerated public-sector workers in the middle of a painful recession and the economic collapse of the state. As if to add insult to injury, evidence of the quality of education in the state continues to be negative, such as this from the Providence Business News:

According to the College Board, 1,766 students in Rhode Island's class of 2009, or 17.3 percent of the class, took at least one A.P. exam during high school, compared with 26.5 percent nationwide. That was up from the 1,555 students in the class of 2008 who took an A.P. test and 1,112 in the class of 2004. ...

The organization said 10.7 percent of last year's class — or 62 percent of A.P. test-takers — earned a passing score of 3, 4 or 5. That was up from the 9.5 percent who passed at least one the prior year, but lower than the 15.9 percent of students who did so nationwide.

If we're to resist the urge to let emotion run away with us, we must admit the probability that some of the school closure talk is little more than a ploy to rile the public to accept tax increases and shame the teachers' unions into accepting concessions. Even so, the current dynamic is unacceptable: that the anxieties of residents are being manipulated in an attempt to achieve the obvious and reasonable step of holding salaries flat, or even trimming them a little, for professionals who, as a group, are failing their students.


February 13, 2010


The Union Chooses Firings

Justin Katz

Anybody who's surprised that the teachers' union in Central Falls has chosen to stare down mass firings and do battle rather than submit to some eminently reasonable additional responsibilities should think through the future scenarios of the game.

With administrators now standing firm on key planks that were previously popular political catch phrases, the unions are going to challenge authority way up to the top — to Education Commissioner Deborah Gist and beyond. Their secondary strategy will be to delay significant changes until they have an opportunity to change the players. They've lost no ground in the General Assembly, either in recent elections or in the selection of the new speaker of the house, and they've an opportunity to affect the governor's office, this year, which means access to the Board of Regents, from which the commissioner ultimately derives her authority.

If the unions can delay the mass firings, through friendly labor review authorities and the courts, for even just one year, they'll have time to re-rig the game entirely in their favor. If they lose on questions of authority, they'll use their political clout to turn the top-down model to their favor. In other words, when voters, school committees, and district administrators seek localized, bottom-up reforms, the newly enhanced authority of the state and the education commissioner will be used to squelch the movements before they can begin.

Consider the thoughts of the only Central Falls teacher whom I've seen offer public comment outside of the union channel:

Sheila Lawless-Burke, an English-as-a-Second Language teacher, said teachers are not opposed to working harder — or longer; they simply want the opportunity to negotiate the details of their contract, not have it imposed from above.

"It's all about the politics," she said, "about making Fran Gallo look good. The issue is having the right to negotiate. Once we allow the superintendent to get her foot in the door, where will it stop?"

Even under circumstances of dire failure, the unionists want to assert their rights to drive up costs and usurp management authority. What Lawless-Burke ignores is that politics is the game of figuring out "where it will stop" when differences of opinion negate a hard rule. It will stop when the public decides that the superintendent has exceeded her mandate. That's how politics work.

It's also the reason that local administrations and the state education bureaucracy should devote some of their attention to fostering community-level involvement of additional players. I mean not only extending some budgetary authority for the schools to town councils and mayors, but also opening channels of communication and cooperation from taxpayer groups and the like.

The top-down reforms, in other words, require a complementary bottom-up foundation, not only to solidify local support from the folks who ultimately pay the bills, but also to rope in stakeholders who will cry out when the unions attempt to manipulate the game at the top. The unions may succeed in reversing Commissioner Gist's reform efforts such that the options offered to failing districts all entail additional benefits for union members, but they'll find it much more difficult to silence constituencies who've been allowed into the decision-making process.



Hurting a Dedicated Constituency

Justin Katz

In an article about the ways in which Democrats' preferred policies hurt black Americans, Kevin Williamson emphasizes union racism and especially the minimum wage:

THE first answer many economists will give to that question is: the minimum wage. Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate who spent much of his career showing how government programs reliably end up hurting those they are intended to help, was scathing on the subject, calling the minimum wage "one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books." And he's not alone: Acongressional survey of economic research on the subject, "50 Years of Research on the Minimum Wage," has a string of conclusion lines that read like an indictment, the first three counts being: "The minimum wage reduces employment. The minimum wage reduces employment more among teenagers than adults. The minimum wage reduces employment most among black teenage males." Other items on the bill: "The minimum wage hurts small businesses generally. The minimum wage causes employers to cut back on training. The minimum wage has long-term effects on skills and lifetime earnings. The minimum wage hurts the poor generally. The minimum wage helps upper-income families. The minimum wage helps unions." Helping the affluent and high-wage union workers at the expense of the young, the poor, the unskilled, and small businesses: That amounts to a lot of different kinds of injustice, and it also amounts to a wealth transfer from blacks to whites. ...

And it's not just that the minimum wage prices some low-productivity workers out of the labor market: It's that it prevents entry into the labor market in the first place for the most marginal would-be workers. If Will the candy hustler's real economic output is worth $6.67 an hour, his implied wage on the subway, he's unemployable with a $7.25 minimum wage. He can sell candy on the subway, but he can't sell candy for Big Candy Corp., make connections, learn what it's like to go to an office every day and have a boss, get references, get promoted, and sign up for the tuition-reimbursement program. And that, not the paltry lost income of a minimum-wage job, is the price he pays. Very few American workers actually earn the minimum wage--about 1 percent, in fact--but the minimum-wage job is a gateway into the labor force for many young workers. The value of your first job isn't the money you earn from it: It's your second job, and your third. With the right experience and network, a candyman like Will can do well for himself. But without that first job, he has a much higher chance of becoming a statistical blip on the long-term unemployment charts than a middle manager at Hershey or a salesman at Cadbury.

Perhaps for reasons of length, Williamson doesn't even touch on the deleterious effects of liberal social programs (from the welfare state to easy divorce to abortion on demand) and extra-statutory principles (like identity politics) that have destroyed family structures in minority communities. If the Ku Klux Klan had called grand meeting in the middle of the last century to contrive a national conspiracy that would effect long-term evisceration of blacks' progress, the bigots could hardly have done so more effectively than the American Left.


February 12, 2010


A Clash of Realities in Central Falls

Justin Katz

You'd think some higher-up planner in the teachers' union would begin advising members that it's time to back off for a while for the purpose of public-impression rehabilitation. Apart from the wholly inappropriate imagery of using a candle-light vigil for a union action, the particulars of the circumstances in Central Falls are absolutely certain to elicit a response of "are you kidding me" from any Rhode Islander not in the thrall (or payroll) of the union.

First there's the performance of the high school (news report and Dept. of Ed. PDF):

  • Only 4% of students proficient in math in 2008-2009, up from 3% the year before, with 75% "substantially below proficient."
  • Only 45% proficient in reading.
  • Only 29% proficient in writing.
  • Only 17% proficient in science.
  • A 48% graduation rate.
  • A 50% failure rate for the current school year.

Then there are the salaries:

The average teacher's salary at the high school ranges between $72,000 and $78,000 a year, because most are at the district's top step, Gallo said.

That's without incorporating benefits and all of the other perks of being a public school teacher. Then there are the demands for doing what any professional should be expected to do when collectively performing so abysmally:

Gallo said she offered to pay teachers $30 an hour for two additional weeks of training in the summer. Gallo also said she would try to find grant money to pay teachers for 90 minutes a week of after-school planning time, also at $30 an hour.

But she says she has no extra money to pay for other changes she is pushing for, including lengthening the instructional day by 25 minutes, so teachers work 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. instead of 7:50 a.m. to 2:25 p.m. She wants teachers to formalize a rotating tutoring schedule, so a teacher is available to help students for an hour before or after school, and she wants teachers to have lunch with students one day a week.

"Right now, they have no duties," Gallo said. "But I don't want them to see lunch as a duty. I want them to establish true relationships with not a few students, but all students." ...

Union officials have been pushing for $90 per hour and want the district to pay for more of the additional responsibilities.

Then there is the transparent mealy-mouthedness from the union, with this on the one hand:

James Parisi, a field representative of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Allied Health Professionals, said that Gallo had asked teachers to work a longer school day, attend after-school training and set aside two weeks in the summer for professional development. Parisi said the union balked because the district wasn't willing to pay teachers enough for the additional time and work.

And this on the other:

"We've been supportive of the transformational model, we think it's the right path," [Central Falls Teachers' Union President Jane] Sessums said. "But we need more details. We've never been opposed to the additional time that is needed. Our concern is that we really get an opportunity to understand what is necessary."

It's time for those teachers who've retained a modicum of professional integrity to step forward and tell the union to back off. They've a responsibility to improve the school in which they work without proclaiming that poor performance should justify even more reward.


February 11, 2010


Contrasting Candlelight Vigils

Monique Chartier

On Tuesday, a candlelight vigil was held for the five people killed in a fire over the weekend.

Also on Tuesday, the Central Falls teachers union held a candlelight vigil because they had received layoff notices.

Projo.com actually had a picture and story about each vigil on the front page last night which accented the comparison.

Let's assume for a moment the worst motives on the part of the superintendent: she laid all teachers off on a whim, not because the district has been chronically low performing. (John Depetro just pointed out that 50% of students in the Central Falls system are failing.)

Even under the hypothesized circumstance of a completely baseless layoff, isn't a candlelight vigil overly dramatic and inappropriate? Don't such vigils usually pertain to more profound matters of death, war or a violent crime spree?


February 10, 2010


Even FDR Was Wary of Public Employee Unions

Marc Comtois

This article by Rich Lowry and this piece in the Wall Street Journal both alluded to Franklin Roosevelt's wariness towards public employee unions. I was surprised. So I dug around and found one source that supports this claim. In a letter to a public employee union, Roosevelt explains that, yes, they do have a right to organize, but there are some restrictions:

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.
Well, that hasn't really come to pass now, has it?
Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government."
Interesting that he viewed strikes by Federal employees in such a way.



Ahh, the Transparency of the Campaign Finance Reform Inspired 527 Schemes

Marc Comtois

We've heard the caterwauling in reaction to the recent Supreme Court ruling regarding corporate political donations. But, whether you like the idea of big business giving directly to political candidates or not, you have to admit that at least it's a relatively transparent process. A simple check of any number of sources will readily reveal who gave how much to whom. The same cannot be said of other organizations--particularly 527's. Here's a good example of the shenanigan's that go on (emphasis is mine):

Continue reading "Ahh, the Transparency of the Campaign Finance Reform Inspired 527 Schemes"

February 9, 2010


Post-Contract Expectations Make All the Difference

Justin Katz

Megan McArdle highlights an important distinction between union and individual employment contracts:

Obviously, people who are not in unions write employment contracts, which are similarly hard to write. But non-union employment contracts operate in an environment where both sides often hope to continue the relationship beyond the initial term. This offers quite a bit of good-faith flexibility, because people who are too rigid about the exact letter of their contracts are apt to find that their contract isn't renewed. Even in contracts with a very definite term, there are reputational considerations. That's just not how unions operate, because the union can't be fired by the employer. When the contract expires, you're going to negotiate another contract. The result is that people in non-union employment contracts can tolerate quite a bit more ambiguity on both sides than people in a collective bargaining situation.

That's the dynamic that the school committees and town councils of Rhode Island must address. If intransigence from the unions may result in reconfigured hiring policies or a more stringent baseline for the next contract, they'll be more apt to be reasonable — and their members will be less inclined to such practices as work-to-rule.


February 8, 2010


State Exceptions to Unemployment

Justin Katz

Owing to some legislation put forward by union-friendly state Senator John Tassoni (D, Smithfield, North Smithfield), I've been poking around state law related to unemployment insurance. Tassoni's bill would remove the word "private" from the following paragraph related to the state's workshare program:

"Eligible employer" means any private employer who has had contributions credited to his or her account and benefits have been chargeable to this account, and who is not delinquent in the payment of contributions or reimbursements, as required by chapters 42 – 44 of this title.

The obvious question is why public employers wouldn't be eligible for this program in the first place, and I can't say that my digging has led me to an answer. It has, however, unearthed a peculiar exemption. Government employers don't have to make regular contributions to the unemployment trust fund and can instead reimburse the fund for benefits paid to laid-off employees. Why should that be allowed?

My understanding is that employer payments into the fund are invested (assuming a positive balance) and are not reimbursable upon the closing of the business. When a particular employer lays off workers, its payment rate goes up (in the same way that auto insurance goes up after an accident or ticket), and when the fund is low, employers have to pay more in order to build it back up. Public-sector employers that make pay-as-you-go reimbursements to cover executed benefits do not contribute to the body of money that earns investment returns, and since they don't make regular payments, they would not pay more no matter how many employees they lay off or how low the fund might be.

This doesn't appear to be relevant to Tassoni's bill, however, because it would still only apply to an employer that has "contributions credited to his or her account." The new question is therefore what proportion of public employers make contributions, and the previous question about the reason for their initial exclusion from the workshare program remains.

Of course, the issue of more general concern is why the state's largest employer — i.e., the state and its subsidiaries — wouldn't have to participate in a program that is ostensibly set up to spread employment risk.


February 3, 2010


Making the Trial Their Expense

Justin Katz

Chris Powell offers it in a different context, but his idea would be a brilliant defense against the ever-looming sledgehammer of litigation threats in contract disputes:

The boards that have capitulated to the lawsuit threat say it is all a matter of avoiding litigation expense. But if a board really believes that First Cathedral is so preferable as a graduation site and that the religious objection is so contrived, it could stand its ground without incurring much expense at all. For a board would not have to prove its case in court; the plaintiffs would have to prove theirs. A board could put up as elaborate a defense as it wanted, or none at all. The plaintiffs almost certainly would call school officials as witnesses anyway, and so without special expense they would have a chance to tell the court how they saw things. Maybe volunteer counsel could be found for the board. Damages seem unlikely. It’s an issue likely to come up again elsewhere, so it may be worth adjudicating.

In any event, a school board that capitulates only to avoid the expense of litigation here is advertising wimpiness, advertising that it does not have the courage of its convictions and thus inviting a lot more litigation over grievances far less serious than this one.

If it gets to the point of being a choice between capitulation and lawsuits during negotiations, seek volunteer lawyers (perhaps from a local taxpayer group) to offer the minimal defense that would procure a ruling. That way, unions bear costs and face risks when filing suits, and the elected officials do not. (Well, of course there's always some risk, considering that judges can do just about anything, these days.)


February 1, 2010


Formulas, Formulas....funding, weighing and otherwise

Marc Comtois

I was surprised to learn that Warwick is alone in "weighing" its students based on whether or not they have an IEP (Individual Education Plan). It goes like this: kid with normal educational needs = 1; kid with IEP = 1.5 (and sometimes 2). So, as the Warwick Beacon reported last week, "there are 10,482 students enrolled in Warwick schools. Or are there 11,582 students?" Obviously, with a cap on class size of 28, this can affect how many teachers can be hired. To use an extreme example, If there are 28 IEPs, that really means there are 56 kids, and thus two teachers are required.

[T]he school administration is looking at all ways it can save. Increasing class sizes by eliminating weighting isn’t likely to occur until after the teacher contract expires in August of 2012, if then. Nonetheless, the weighting system that is unique to Warwick is being considered. It’s not the first time.

For as long as school human recourses and counsel Rosemary Healey can remember, elimination of weighing has been on the list of School Committee demands at the opening of contract negotiations. That demand has always been dropped for some other concession.

She said the weighing system was introduced in the 1980s and has been a part of the teachers contract ever since.

How expensive is it?
No one has figured out the precise cost of weighting students, but it is estimated to have resulted in the hiring of an additional 110 teachers. Each teacher is estimated to cost the department $100,000 based on salary and benefits. That’s an annual cost of $11 million.
According to Richard D’Agostino of the Warwick School Department, 20% of Warwick students have IEPs. And that's down a few percentage points since Warwick instituted a more comprehensive screening process! I don't doubt that there are legitimate benefits to IEPs for those who truly need them, but I don't like the way this emotionally-loaded "bargaining chip" is being played.
Teachers Union President Jim Ginolfi likewise acknowledges the prevision may be unique to Warwick, but also in part credits it for making the system outstanding.

“I think Warwick is in the forefront. Warwick has always been in the forefront with special education students”, he said. Elimination of weighting would not correlate into a reduction of costs since the district would still be obligated to meet the requirements of those students with an IEP, says Ginolfi.

“They’re going to need more time to devote to those students”, he reasons....Ginolfi argues that there is flexibility with weighing.

He observes the district has options. It can put all special education students in a single class; it can move IEP students into resource classrooms for special instruction, and it can introduce special education teachers into classrooms where there is a mix of IEP and regular students.

Until they enter negotiations Ginolfi can’t say whether weighing is one of those issues the union would hold out for. As for trimming costs, Ginolfi offered no suggestions.

“Education is expensive”, he said, “and that is why we need a (funding) formula at the state level.”

Ginolfi's "options" are calculated to be unappealing to parents of kids with IEP's, who (understandably) won't be happy about what sounds like "warehousing." But that will all have to wait, because the real unionist solution boils down to: "Sorry, can't help ya...let's wait for contract negotiations or a funding formula."


January 31, 2010


A Refresher on Teacher Salaries

Justin Katz

Pat Crowley's in the comment section slinging mud at my numbers. For consistency's sake, here's the relevant chart for the state as a whole:

Crowley's claim is that the increases in teachers' salaries are not keeping up with inflation. One could argue the relevance of that fact on the grounds that everything else must therefore really not be keeping up with inflation. One could argue the relevance of that fact, I should say, if it were a fact. There are two ways in which Crowley likes to make the inflation claim deceptively. The first, less applicable here, is to look at the category of "instruction" and draw his inflation numbers from that.

When he tried this trick back in 2007, I explained that, while the "instruction expenditures" category increased 19.8% from 2000 to 2006, in comparison with 19.9% inflation, teasing out teacher pay showed their salaries increasing 28.1%. Last year, I put the point in graphical form:

Another method that Crowley employs, that is probably more relevant in the current context, is to lump all teachers together to hide the continual increases in all of their salaries. I've looked at this, too, and the trick is that Rhode Island has been on a teacher-hiring spree:

Obviously, hiring young teachers will bring down the average salary. Indeed, the more teachers we hire, the more it appears that their pay isn't going up:

Of course, the system must then deal with this mass of teachers as they progress through their sometimes double-digit salary increases, what with cost-of-living adjustments and steps combined. Brace yourselves, Rhode Island; salaries and benefits are going to be absorbing much more of the budgets for your students' schools, and the odds that the very same teachers will be able to turn around their abysmal results with even fewer resources are slim to none.


January 30, 2010


The Usual Ommission from School Budget Fights

Justin Katz

Anchor Rising readers shouldn't have any trouble guessing (let alone discerning) what's missing from this report out of Cranston:

Wednesday night, on what was the first chance for the public to speak on the proposed budget, students, coaches and parents flocked to Cranston West's auditorium, where the School Committee budget hearing was moved to accommodate the expected crowd.

Many donned team jerseys (revealing a clear home-team advantage) and defended the value of sports and the added push that rivalry brings.

"Don't expect us to give up without fighting for what we have worked so hard to build up," Deanna Archetto, a senior who swims for Cranston West, told the School Committee.

"There have to be other options that don't involve chopping from the bottom," she said.

The $1.1-million in proposed cuts — which include the elementary school enrichment program along with strings, band and chorus, following the recommendations of a court-ordered performance audit — follow the state Supreme Court ruling last month that found the district ignored the financial reality, continued to overspend its budget and then sued the city for additional money.

For readers who may be new to the site, I offer this clue:

At a time when the executive director of the National Education Association of Rhode Island is playing games with an application for nine-figures of federal assistance so as to keep his union's members above accountability,* residents who wish to protest cuts to sports and other services should target their ire where it belongs.

* Which is not to say that I support the continued federal takeover of our educational system. I'm merely pointing to the clear priorities of the teachers' union.


January 27, 2010


Bankrupted for Solidarity

Justin Katz

Ted Nesi reports:

The increase in the share of all Rhode Island workers belonging to a union posted an even more dramatic increase, jumping to 17.9 percent. ...

In New England, no state had a larger share of workers in a union than Rhode Island. It was followed by Connecticut (17.3 percent), Massachusetts (16.6 percent), Vermont (12.3 percent), Maine (11.7 percent) and New Hampshire (10.8 percent).

The Labor Department also reported that the median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers were $908 for union members last year, compared with $710 for employees not represented by a union.

Given that a majority of union workers are now employed by government, the declining pool of non-union workers is increasingly having to fund the livelihoods of their better-paid neighbors. Moreover, with unions by definition highly organized, where public policy is apt to lean in their favor, in opposition to the private sector, especially within the public sphere, where market forces apply only weakly.


January 26, 2010


Unspinning the Union

Justin Katz

Capers Jones responds in an edition of the RISCy Business newsletter to the pension-related spin of Patrick Crowley, of the National Education Association, Rhode Island. After citing a number of statistics related to public-sector employees and education with which all Rhode Islanders should be passingly familiar, Jones writes:

These statistics show that government pensions have been impacted by the rapid increase in government employees compounded with the rapid increase in government salaries and benefits. This information indicates that it is time to do a serious analysis of how many government workers are actually needed to run our towns, schools, and the state itself.

For more than 30 years Rhode Island has experienced meteoric increases in government and educational employment compounded by much higher salary increases than private business. Now these two compound issues are coming together in massive and unsustainable pensions. Nationally, unfunded government pensions are approaching a trillion dollars and may trigger the fiscal collapse of more than half of the states.

The sooner those whom Crowley ostensibly represents realize that collapse of their system and of the local economy is the only likely outcome of a failure to reform, the better it will be for everybody.


January 22, 2010


A Local War Against Reality

Justin Katz

In keeping with the War on Reality theme, our state's most egregious propagandist has been striving to insert another grain of sand into the minds of Rhode Islanders who don't like to think too hard:

The key feature of the pension system is that the bulk of the funding comes not from the taxpayers but from the workers themselves and the investment decisions made by the pension fund. This is why for every one dollar spent by the taxpayers on the public retirement fund there is $4.56 generated in economic activity — money that is spent in local economies and in local businesses. A return on investment like this is something the state should celebrate, not denigrate.

Luckily, even the General Assembly is not wholly amenable to Patrick Crowley's charade:

"That dollar comes from someone," [Rep. Laurence] Ehrhardt [R, North Kingstown] said. "Doesn't it then have the same effect on the other end?"

"No, it doesn't" Crowley responded.

Ehrhardt listened to the explanation but gave no ground.

"I have a graduate degree in economics," he said when Crowley had finished. "I completely disagree with you."

Need this be explained? Every dollar that a union member puts into the pension fund comes directly out of the economy in the form of taxation or spending that he or she might otherwise undertake. The same is true of every dollar that the taxpayer contributes. (Actually, the taxpayer contributes it all; one major aspect of Crowley's scam is to treat these as separate contributions.) Where those dollars would be spent, rather than invested, they necessarily take away from expenditures on which Rhode Islanders place a higher value, whether dire necessities or quality of life indulgences, and where they would be invested, anyway, there's no reason to assume that a pension fund will have better returns.

I fear too many of our fellow residents, especially those who occupy seats in government, will be all-too content to store Crowley's grain of imaginary sand and allow it to turn into a pearl for unionized public sector workers and bankruptcy for the state.


January 19, 2010


What Consolidators Are Missing

Justin Katz

I suppose this Projo editorial opposing the newly legislated board for statewide health insurance benefits for teachers is better late than never, but the editors continue to keep two and two from being joined:

Obviously, Rhode Island can do much better than rushing through a new system whereby a panel of special interests reward themselves at the taxpayers' expense. The approach adopted is, in essence, a new and costly mandate on local communities, with less, rather than more, local input into spending decisions that affect the bottom line.

That will always be the case, once the messy reality of human self-interest is introduced to the shiny machinations of planners. Better policies on a case-by-case basis may delay the deterioration as power and money are consolidated, but they will never prevent it.

More importantly, though, we all should have learned by now that there are other aspects of Rhode Island's government that must be fixed prior to consolidation. Handing a mandate to consolidate to the ruling class that has brought Rhode Island to its knees is like buying a home-owner's insurance policy from the thief who just broke in and stole all of your belongings.



Blame and Motivation in Education

Justin Katz

Friday night's Violent Roundtable on the Matt Allen Show featured Rhode Island House Minority Leader Bob Watson and legal analyst Lou Pulner, and I was surprised to find Pulner nearly standing alone when the conversation turned toward the teachers unions' blocking the state's federal Race to the Top application (on which the RI Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals has just changed its position):

Matt Allen: The teacher unions in Rhode Island are stuck, because they do not want teacher evaluation to be dependent upon student performance. I guess Deborah Gist's proposal is 51% of teacher performance and evaluation will be based on student performance and standardized tests.

Lou Pulner: Gee, what a bummer that would be, huh? Think about it --- that we're actually going to rate our teachers based upon how they're students are doing in class and on exams.

Bob Watson: And you know what's always interesting is you wonder if you inventory the rank and file, how many of them are in agreement with the positions that the teachers union's take.

LP: I'll bet you 80%. They don't want to lose their job because they're doing a poor job.

BW: On certain core issues, I think you're right. But then there are other areas, I think that there are certain areas where some of the better teachers --- and I happen to have a brother that's a teacher and a sister that recently retired, my mother's a teacher, having retired, so I've got some bias, I suppose.

MA: My soon-to-be wife is also a public school teacher.

LP: But she's not political, you told me.

MA: She's not political.

BW: And when I knocked on doors in East Greenwich and campaigned for office, I found one of the predominant ...

LP: Where is your brother a teacher?

BW: In Cranston.

LP: OK. Good schools. East Greenwich, good schools. But if your brother were a teacher in Central Falls or Pawtucket, maybe you wouldn't be taking this position.

BW: As I said, one of the predominant second incomes in East Greenwich is a teacher's salary, and I've often found myself talking to a teacher from all sorts of parts of the state. They live in East Greenwich; they may teach in Central Falls. They have the same interests in having quality teachers in the schools, because when the good teachers are in a classroom next to a teacher that's slacking off and just not carrying their weight, trust me, all morale is reduced.

LP: But what happens, then, Bob? Then they bump in to a Classical High School because they have seniority.

BW: When it comes to certain issues relative to compensation, they share common ground, but I also think that, were it put out to a vote --- maybe it would have to be a secret vote, not one of those hold a paper card up in a room full of peers --- but if it were to come to a vote, I think more teachers than not would support this.

LP: But we're talking about a hundred million dollars that could come to the state of Rhode Island for educational purposes.

MA: Here's the thing, and I gotta tell you my soon-to-be bride's job has affected my opinion on this, because I get to see the inside, and let me just tell you this. Let me offer you up a piece of information. I know --- this is not from her, but from other situations that she's told me about --- where you have classrooms that might as well be hospital wards, because they are required by law to teach all sorts of kids and in all sorts of situations and all sorts of backgrounds and everything else.

LP: But special-ed can be backed out.

MA: Let me tell you something: Special ed is not backed out. Special ed, at least where she teaches, is in the classroom, with everybody else, and so you have these kids in this room, and they all have to pass the same standards that everybody else does, and then you gotta... you know... what kid didn't take a shower this morning, what kid didn't get breakfast this morning, what kid had to deal with a mother's boyfriend that night, what kid had to deal with this and the other thing, and one kid's got restive leg syndrome, so he can go and do jumping jacks in the back of the classroom whenever he wants to do it.

LP: Matty, I love you, but pillow talk aside between you and your betrothed is the fact that we need $100 million to enhance our education here in the state of Rhode Island, and the fact is that teachers ought to step up, and maybe they ought to work a little bit harder to make sure the students in their class are achieving.

BW: You know, Lou... show me a bad student, and I bet there's a bad parent at home waiting for that kid.

LP: Every time? Not every time.

BW: More times than not, Lou, and let's face it: We have too many people having children, and they don't keep the responsibility of raising those children properly.

LP: That's the babies are having babies argument. You're getting violent, Bob; you're getting violent right now. [Laughter.] This is VRT at its best.

BW: I can't use words on the radio, but I want to make my point: blame the parents; don't blame the teachers. A lot of good teachers try to do what they can, and Matt just explained just a typical day in a classroom.

LP: Bob, you don't think there are teachers in there who have the same curriculum and the same syllibus for forty freakin' years, and they're going through the motions.

BW: Because certain things don't change. Math doesn't change. Reading, writing, arithmatic shouldn't change.

MA: Let me just say this: I think that there's a happy medium. I think that student performance should be a factor. I just don't know how much of a factor it should be.

LP: For $100 million, I say raise it up a notch.

MA: I think we do need to go through and separate the wheat from the chaff, though, in the teachers' ranks, because some people I hear about need to go.

Coming from the legislative leader of the opposition party in Rhode Island, Watson's position is just not acceptable. Indeed, if it's an indication of the alternative that voters have in November, parents needn't wait until then to determine that they have to move or find a way to pay for private school. Watson's commentary is so knee jerk as to be dumb and so biased as to be offensive.

According to the latest Infoworks! document (PDF) from the state Department of Education, fewer than one-fifth of Rhode Island high school students are proficient in science, and just about one-quarter of them are proficient in math. Are 75-80% of Rhode Island's public school students living with bad parents? Or is Mr. Watson a bit too sanguine about 40-year-old lesson plans? (I use that reference emblematically, not literally.)

Matt's introduction of the conditions in some classrooms only highlights the critical factor. Note that he had to become intimate with a teacher before hearing about the challenges that education policies can present for them. As somebody who pays attention to local news, he's surely been very well aware of proposed salary cuts and healthcare copay increases, but when was the last time teachers worked to rule because their working conditions made it impossible for them to perform?

Perhaps if teachers' pay were strongly tied to the performance of their students, they'd be taking the lead in education reform, rather than standing in its way as a unionized matter of course. That probability brings us to the bigger problem of our blameless system. Let's quote Watson again:

Blame the parents; don't blame the teachers.

In the archetypal example of the Rhode Island Way, Watson here attacks the one group in the educational chain that is not on a government payroll. The General Assembly blames the towns, because after all, they have direct control over contracts and policies. The school committees and administrations blame the General Assembly for mandates and insufficient funding and the unions for contractual demands that drain control and resources. The teachers blame all of the above as well as the parents.

Well, if the folks on government payrolls have no power to improve the quality of education in the state, then those payrolls ought to be decimated. They're a waste of money. Redirect the resources to "good parents," so they can select an appropriate private school, and to social workers, so they can assist the "bad parents."

But I don't believe that the blame lies solely with the group whose main interest in the education system is through the well-being of their children. If we step back from the finger pointing and look at the situation as adults seeking to develop a functional educational machine, it is clear that mechanisms for incentives and accountability must be introduced. Evaluate teachers almost entirely on their performance, with formulas that adjust to the actual students — their challenges and their prior performance — and give the ultimate say to administrators, who are in a position to know all of the less-tangible considerations. On the other end, keep the General Assembly and federal government out of the equation.

In that way, the communities that are most affected on a personal level will have the ability to trace and change problems from the school committee dais down to the classroom in a chain accountability rather than evaded responsibility.


January 14, 2010


Labor Gets its Special Health Care Deal

Marc Comtois

At the end of this post I alluded to the special deal that unions--after much b***ing and moaning-- have extracted from Team Obama Health Care Force. In short, the tax on so-called "cadillac plans" won't be applied to collectively bargained health plans. Heritage's James Sherk observes:

What a deal. Unions want the health care spending, but they do not want to pay for it. Obama gave them just that. It also makes for a great recruiting pitch: join a union, get a tax cut.
No doubt. But wait, there's more!
That is just one of the many handouts unions get in the health care bill. It sets aside $5 billion to subsidize the costs of employer health benefits for early retirees. Few nonunion employers, of course, pay pension and health benefits for workers to retire at 55.

Or consider the small business exemption from the employer mandate for businesses with less than 50 employees. All businesses, that is, except construction companies. The costly employer mandate applies to any construction firm with more than four workers. Why would Congress kick small construction contractors when they are down? Because the construction unions asked Congress to. They did not want their small competitors to get out from under the bill’s costs and gain a competitive advantage. What if those costs put small contractors out of business? That is just too bad.

Nothing like looking out for the little guy, eh? But back to the exemption: Daniel Foster looks at the tea leaves:
Look for Obama and Congressional Democrats to the expand the union carve-out to cover a swath of the "middle-class" (the universal solvent of American politics), so they can camouflage this massive giveaway to a pet constituency.

One House Democrat is already saying a "consensus" could be built around such a scheme by further increasing the Medicare payroll tax and applying it to capital gains to make up for lost revenue.

This would amount to nothing less than a bill of attainder against on all constituencies that are not especially useful to the president and his party.

The shell game continues.


January 4, 2010


Why the Proposed Teachers' Health Insurance Board is an Unconstitutional Violation of Separation of Powers

Carroll Andrew Morse

A non-trivial question concerning the new teachers' health insurance board proposed by the legislature but opposed by the Governor is which branch of government it would belong to.

It's obviously not the judiciary.

And as currently structured, the board cannot be an offshoot of the legislature. A legislature has no power to delegate its statewide lawmaking authority to a group of non-legislators operating outside of the normal lawmaking process -- unless it is through the rule-making authority of an executive branch agency.

That leaves the executive branch, which makes sense, as this new board is basically a regulatory agency charged with overseeing the actions of school committees in certain aspects of teacher contract negotiations. However, the legislature does not have the power to designate anyone it chooses as makers of administrative rules that ultimately carry the force of law; according to the principle of separation of powers, this power can only be delegated to a constitutionally recognized executive.

This aspect of separation of powers, fundamental to the structures of our state and Federal governments, is spelled out directly in Article IX Section 5 of the Rhode Island Constitution…

The governor shall, by and with the advice and consent of the senate, appoint all officers of the state whose appointment is not herein otherwise provided for and all members of any board, commission or other state or quasi-public entity which exercises executive power under the laws of this state; but the general assembly may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they deem proper, in the governor, or within their respective departments in the other general officers, the judiciary or in the heads of departments.
Rhode Island legislators have no basis for ignoring Article IX and replacing the Governor with labor unions or other organizations in making appointments to state boards (no matter how much they might like to) unless they're claiming the authority to create new branches of government without needing a constitutional amendment.


January 3, 2010


Re: Is a New Way for Labor to Limit the Options

Justin Katz

Turning on my home computer after a weekend on the road, I was relieved and concerned to see the legislative bomb that Andrew has spotted. Relieved that we've come across this in time to shine some light. Concerned because I recall glancing at these bills back when they were on the agenda and making the conscious determination that I didn't have time to sort through them for pluses and minuses; the reform movement, in Rhode Island, really has to find some way to finance folks who'll take it upon themselves to comb proposed laws for this sort of thing.

Having reviewed the language, I'd add one more reason that legislators who refuse to let the veto stand should face a heavy political cost. Note this language in the House version:

... School district employees whose collective bargaining agreements expire on or after July 1, 2010 shall, upon expiration of such collective bargaining agreements, receive benefit plans authorized in accordance with chapter 27-72. ...

Upon implementation of the uniform health care benefit plan designs or at such other time as specified herein or as specified in sections 28-9-3.2 and 28-9.4-3, all public school districts and charter schools shall implement one or more benefit plan design(s) authorized in accordance with this chapter.

Not only does this law place any healthcare benefits in the hands of a union-dominated board accountable only to union members, it mandates that schools must offer them. Whether there's a feasible public or private alternative or schools just can't afford healthcare benefits anymore, they'll have to provide them. And not only union schools, but charter schools, as well. Once again, the sinking ship of state reveals the rats trying to shore up all that they can, rather than helping to keep the vessel afloat.

Again, now that it's been vetoed and noticed, any legislator who helps to make this a law should find him or her self out of office at the earliest opportunity.

ADDENDUM:

We can also take this legislation as evidence that reformers must be very, very careful about any budgetary or developmental strategy that calls for consolidation.


December 28, 2009


The Members' Interests Are Not Primary

Justin Katz

Mike, of Assigned Reading, noticed a strange omission of activism on the part of his and other teachers' unions:

Teachers enjoy some of the best benefits available. And as a result, we working class Americans will be subjected to a 40% premium tax, a punishment for having healthcare plans better than most Americans.

One would think the teachers’ unions in particular would be loud and vocal in their opposition. This would be true if the teachers’ unions were most interested in teachers. But when push comes to shove, the unions will put down their arms if it helps secure a victory for the Democrats.

I wonder if union organizers ever get heat from their members for activism that is either unrelated to or actually hostile toward their interests. The impression, from outside, is that there's a sort of compromise between teachers unions and teachers, such that the former pull all kinds of stunts and compromise the quality of education in order to provide ensure incessant growth for the remuneration of the latter, who pay dues more as a fee for service than as a cost of entry. In other words, the union gets to do whatever it wants, because it's really an independent organization from the workers whom it supports.

Somehow, I don't think it's supposed to work that way.


December 18, 2009


If the Legislation Weren't So Irredeemably Stupid...

Justin Katz

... I'd wonder whether we had an effect on this issue. Governor Carcieri has vetoed the apprenticeship gift to large, union contractors legislation:

In accordance with the provisions of Section 14, Article IX of the Constitution of the State of Rhode Island and Section 42-1-4 of the Rhode Island General laws, I transmit, with my disapproval, 2009 H 5582, "An Act Relating to Labor and Labor Relations."

This act would decrease the ratio of apprentices to journeymen in various fields of trade and industry.

Although I am a strong supporter of apprenticeship programs, and believe that such programs are necessary to maintain and foster a dynamic workforce in the building trades, this bill is flawed and could have some unintended consequences.

Apprenticeship ratios should provide ample opportunities for young people to enter the ranks of the skilled workforce and at the same time allow for a level of supervision and on-the-job training commensurate with their needs. It is unclear that the ratios proposed in this bill strike that delicate balance.

If the ratios allow for too few people to enter the building trades it will be nearly impossible to replenish the aging workforce in this area. It is also important to acknowledge that there is a cost to operating an apprenticeship program, and that cost must be borne by someone. Labor unions, though not exclusively, have traditionally operated many of the apprenticeship programs. In doing so, they bear a cost that other contractors and companies -- those that do not operate such a program --- do not incur.

In closing, although I am sympathetic to the concerns expressed by the proponents of this legislation, I am equally concerned that the proposed remedy may have unintended consequences that could harm many businesses and workers. I look forward to working with the various impacted parties to hopefully find some other more balanced solution.

I should also note some inside information that the legislative supporters of this bill — including House Majority Leader Gordon Fox, who proved himself unfit for public office in his passionate speech on its behalf in the special session, this autumn — wanted to make a performance of their support but didn't really want it to become law. Two lessons from that suggestion: legislation can be a dishonest business, and the unions shouldn't fall for the fake support from the recipients of their support and largess.


December 7, 2009


We Need a Taxpayer Grievance

Justin Katz

How can an entity — whether a business, a town, a nonprofit, whatever — operate like this?

[Little Compton Firefighter Fred] Melnyk was off duty at the time, out of uniform, and had been in the fire-station earlier at 11:16 when the medical incident in question was called in. An emergency medical technician (EMT) with cardiac training, Mr. Melnyk immediately responded to the call by himself, driving the Rescue 1 to the scene at John T. Martin Road, one mile from the station.

He later found himself stranded there when two other firefighters, who had arrived in two separate fire trucks, fresh from finishing another nearby incident, took Rescue 1, with a patient inside, and drove to Charlton Memorial Hospital, 30 minutes away.

That left Mr. Melnyk with the two parked fire trucks that needed to be returned to the station. With him was the fire chief and his command car. A decision was made (that Lt. Woods later grieved) that Mr. Melnyk, still off duty and at no cost to the town, would drive the two trucks back to the station, and not leave them parked on John T. Martin Road, a task Mr. Melnyk accomplished in two trips, ferried back to the residence by the chief in the command car.

Lt. David Woods has filed a grievance claiming that he should have been called in for his four-hour minimum of overtime pay, receiving $127.36 for around twenty minutes worth of work.


December 5, 2009


A Process of Suffocation

Justin Katz

The relationship is perhaps not entirely direct, but two stories from last Saturday's paper strike me as thematically related. First:

Because of poor design and construction and lack of maintenance, the underground parking garage at the Providence railroad station has suffered so much structural damage caused by leaking water that the state Department of Transportation says it might have to be closed.

The 360-space garage is a key transportation facility whose importance is likely to increase. It's the most convenient station parking and is full of commuters' cars on weekdays. The station will see more use, and presumably need more parking, when the state extends rail service south of Providence over the next two years.

At a time when Rhode Island desperately needs to ensure smooth sailing for the economy, public transportation infrastructure is crumbling. And second:

The head of the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority's biggest union has threatened a strike if state officials remove binding arbitration, a mechanism for settling deadlocked contract disputes, from state law governing the authority. ...

RIPTA officials said that the possibility of eliminating binding arbitration for RIPTA employees came up at a meeting of a legislative committee looking into the authority's operations. RIPTA officials said they were asked to take the issue before the authority board of directors. The legislators suggested that RIPTA request that arbitration be removed from the authority's enabling legislation.

Even just a hint that officials might be considering the possibility of potentially revisiting binding arbitration sparked threats of the union's nuclear option. (Gee, that binding arbitration thing must really not be in a union's interests!)

In sum: During the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, with the state kept solvent merely through the ill-advised deficit spending of a radical U.S. president, as our transportation infrastructure falls apart under our desperate feet, public sector unions have their eye firmly focused on their own grubby hands. Rhode Island can't afford to tolerate this extortion and abuse any longer.


December 4, 2009


Regionalization Won't Make the Unions Go Away... Quite the Opposite

Justin Katz

Somehow, this strikes me as a preview of the "benefits" of regionalization in Rhode Island:

Just hours after he closed the Douglas Avenue fire station, Mayor Charles A. Lombardi ran into a legal stumbling block from the firefighters union Wednesday afternoon and he agreed to temporarily reopen the station. ...

Firefighters want [Providence County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey] Lanphear to keep Lombardi from shutting down the station and reassigning personnel, about 12 employees, to three other stations in town.

Note that this wasn't even about eliminating positions — just moving work locations. The only savings that regionalization might promise, in such instances, is to spread out the cost of lawyers for participating towns and cities. Of course, the whole point of regionalization is to instigate this sort of change, so municipalities would be sharing an increased expense.

Prior to any regionalization efforts, towns and cities will have to begin asserting themselves in contract negotiations to regain management rights. My suspicion is that, once they've taken such a step, regionalization will look like far less of a panacea, because the situation would have already improved dramatically.


November 30, 2009


The Union Shadow Government

Justin Katz

The "must read" label is a bit too easy to throw around, but a post on BigGovernment.com concerning union expansion — like a cancer in the canals of government bureaucracies — deserves it. We begin with this reminder of a peculiar story that some of you might have heard recently:

This past September Lisa Snyder, a 35 year old Michigan mother, made the news when she received a disturbing letter from the Michigan Department of Human Services. In it, the letter warned her that she was in violation of the law. Her offense? Watching a handful of neighborhood kids each morning for about 20 minutes as they waited at the end of her driveway for the school bus to arrive, with the blessing of their parents. State law in Michigan prohibits the home supervision of unrelated children for more than four weeks in a year without a child care provider license. Turns out a neighbor had complained and the Michigan Department of Human Services, the watchdog for home child care licensing, intervened by sending the warning letter. In Michigan, state employees for the DHS are represented by the United Auto Workers (UAW) labor union. Coincidentally, the union that represents the state’s home child care workers? Also the UAW.

Bring that mentality into the realm of healthcare, and the image begins to be frightening. Consider:

Also in Michigan, a story of three women who run their own independent businesses out of their homes, caring for neighborhood children. They each recently received a letter indicating that they are now dues-paying members of the Child Care Providers Together Michigan union — a complete surprise to them.

After a 2006 Executive Order by the Michigan Governor awarded the union (a partnership of UAW and AFSCME) bargaining rights for home child care workers, all it took for the union to convert all 40,000 child care workers to dues paying members was 5,900 signed union authorization cards. That left some independent home child care workers, who'd for years considered themselves self-employed, feeling dismayed and stunned.

A neat chart illustrates the path whereby government subsidies that parents used to help pay for independent child care services brought the self-employed professionals who accepted the payment under the dark shadow of "public service." In its current form, healthcare reform would move anybody who deals in health and wellness into the target zone of aggressive and politically powerful unions. In theory, in keeping with the Michigan example, "card check" would make it possible for a minority of people within a particular industry could unionize the entire group.

Such a structure would be good for people who like consolidated power within their own reach, but bad for the economy and bad for freedom.


November 27, 2009


The Focus of the Advocates

Justin Katz

Julia Steiny's column last Sunday focused on declining numbers of students in Rhode Island, but the paragraphs on the cause stick in the mind:

Mather elaborates, "In general terms, people leave New England because of job growth elsewhere. Many young people go to New England for college, but when they're finished or ready to start a family, they go where there are more opportunities, more affordable housing, and a warmer climate."

Well, but NCES shows that also-not-warm mountain states Idaho and Colorado both will enjoy double-digit growth, 26 and 19 percent respectively, between 2006 and 2018. Even Nebraska and Minnesota are growing.

So yes, says John Simmons of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council, the state's economy is the issue. He sighed as he rattled off a laundry list of badly needed changes to the state's tax structure, health-care system, pensions, and onerous regulatory burden. "If we don't begin to make changes today, by 2012, the problems become unsolvable. This has to be faced."

If it were actually true that, as outgoing National Education Association General Counsel Bob Chanin put it, "what unions do first and foremost is represent their members," it seems to me their focus would be wholly different. They wouldn't be funding left-wing Web sites and advocating for growth-killing progressivism.

Over at Assigned Reading, Mike, himself an RI teacher, reacted to a speech by American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten thus:

Weingarten reveals through her speech what is an essential conflict: teachers unions only play for one team. Teachers unions have become arms of the Democratic party, activists for liberal causes and champions of politicians on the left. By aligning themselves with one side, they have effectively created enemies of the other. And they are major players in the blame game.

It isn't only the divisiveness and political activism, per se, to which union members ought to object, in this. They should find it unacceptable that the union organizations to which they pay so much in dues, and whose baggage they must carry, locally, are ideologically hindered from advocating for policies that would help membership in the long-term — policies that increase the wealth of taxpayers and expand the class of young clients.


November 24, 2009


Losing Sleep Over and Paying Attention to Education

Justin Katz

I've got a letter in the online version of the Sakonnet Times (prospectively in the print edition out tomorrow) that begins thus:

Residents who wish to understand the gradual deterioration of Rhode Island's public school system need only contrast school committee meetings addressing two issues: teacher contract negotiations and abysmal standardized testing results. The passion that sets the auditorium on fire when adults' high pay and lavish benefits are threatened with mild budgetary restraint is nowhere to be found when, say, only 25.8% of eleventh graders prove proficient in science (down from 30.5% the year before).

I go on to make some general suggestions regarding the necessary shifts in attitude and policy.

While I'm on the topic: The Tiverton School Committee's workshop on merit pay is tonight at 6:30, in the high school library.


November 18, 2009


Moving Money Around in Different Ways

Justin Katz

This quote from John Derbyshire's book, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, which I found via a review by Kyle Smith, in National Review, gave us opportunity for discussion and encouragement 'round the construction site:

American parents are now all resigned to beggaring themselves in order to purchase college diplomas for their offspring, so that said offspring can get low-paying outsourceable office jobs, instead of having to descend to high-paying, unoutsourceable work like plumbing, carpentry, or electrical installation.

In order to extend our conversation, I did a quick online search to see if anybody's posted a little more context and noticed — as I increasingly have — that the entire book has been posted online by Google, with searchable text. I'm torn.

It's great to have the high caliber of books bumping up Web content, and for hard to find literature, it's certainly a useful service. Everything that's entered the public domain would have to be fair game (and much of it was already online, somewhere). But I worry that nobody will ever manage to develop financial incentive to write books if they're readily available for free.

To be sure, it would be uncomfortable to read an entire publication in the format provided by Google, but e-readers are increasingly popular, and computer screens are increasingly readable. Our society is going to have to work something out, but with the current speed of technology, making the ability to process and distribute content at high speed, an entire literary culture could fall away while the lawsuits and compromises run their course.


November 6, 2009


Swing and a Miss

Marc Comtois

This morning, the NEA's Pat Crowley's lamely attempted to use Alinsky's Rules #5 (Ridicule) and #11 (" Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it") on Education Commissioner Deborah Gist and put up a post that displayed the sort of empathy and prudence we've all come to expect. In the post, Crowley vaguely alluded to getting the "Gist" (ha...ha...) of what the new Education Commissioner abilities were and then linked to this video with no further explanation. I suppose the reader was to anticipate that some egregious evidence contra the new commish was about to be laid out.

Instead, we saw a video that originally accompanied this story from the Washington Post from February this year (and which was mentioned in this story from the Johnston Sun Rise in October).

A few years ago, Deborah [Gist] said, she was flipping through a copy of the Guinness book and realized she didn't want to grow her toenails to epic lengths and had little chance of running 100 meters in less than 9 seconds. "Then I got to this record and it said 'Most Kisses in a Minute.' I've kind of been known for being affectionate in my kissing, and I thought, 'That's it. That's the one.' "

All she needed was 109 people -- you see, the record is for most consecutive kisses by different people.

On Saturday, about 140 people gathered at the house....She withstood the onslaught, and Vince and I clicked 118 kisses, minus six disqualifications, for a total of 112 and a record (pending Guinness's approval).

The event raised $20,000 for the Wellness Community, a cancer-support organization in Bethesda.

Gist was inspired to raise the money after her uncle died from cancer. I guess Pat thought this all was supposed to cast a negative light upon Gist, though I'm not sure what conclusions were to be drawn.

Understandably, the commenters to Crowley's post also apparently missed why this was so important to Pat and many praised Commissioner Gist for being light-hearted and caring (and even a community organizer!). I wouldn't have even commented on it...except now the post and the comments it generated have disappeared--"- This diary has been removed "--though reference to the comments can be found by checking some of the user profiles (like here, here or here) and this comment also mentions the disappearance of the post.

Why the post and comments were removed is obvious; it ends up putting Crowley, not Gist, in a poor light. But instead of blank space, maybe an explanation is warranted, guys? Regardless, it would appear the commissioner is winding Pat up so much with talk of teacher evaluations and dropping seniority that its affecting his well-known judgment and tact....ahem...or maybe he's just jealous that he didn't get a chance to kiss the commish himself.


November 3, 2009


Chariho Teachers Approve Contract: Stepping Away from Steps?

Marc Comtois

As the ProJo reports, the Chariho teachers have approved a new contract (PDF) that includes nearly the complete eradication of the traditional increases (go "here" to see what I mean by "traditional") in the hard-coded contract step increases. This is what the Chariho contract looks like:

chariho-teach-09.JPG

Usually, a step contract would have something like a 2.5% annual salary increase for each pay step. Not here. This time the teachers' union and district agreed on a step schedule that remained constant over three years for steps 1-8, decreased for steps 9 and 10, fluctuated for step 11 and (apparently) added a new step 12 in 2010-11.

As I've shown by including the "Yr X Raise" column, that doesn't mean that teachers aren't getting a raise every year, it just means the usual increase in pay that comes via a step increase isn't being further compounded by a raise on each step, too. As an example, I've highlighted (in blue/green/red) what the "real world" salary increases would be for a new teacher as they progress to 2011-12 under this contract. Being guaranteed over a 6% increase per year still ain't a bad deal.

Whether or not we agree with the amount of increases from step to step, it is significant that there is no raise being applied from year to year for each step. Whether or not this will inspire--or embolden--other districts to follow suit will be interesting to see.


October 29, 2009


Update: Permanent Contracts Sent Back To Committee

Carroll Andrew Morse

Here is the status report on the permanent contracts bill, from the state legislature's website...

Senate Bill No.713
BY Perry, Levesque C, McCaffrey, Miller, Sosnowski
ENTITLED, AN ACT RELATING TO LABOR AND LABOR RELATIONS - CERTIFIED SCHOOL TEACHERS ARBITRATION
(would amend section 28-9.3-9 to provide that if a successor collective bargaining agreement has not been agreed to by the parties)
{LC1814/1}

02/26/2009 Introduced, referred to Senate Labor
04/01/2009 Scheduled for hearing
04/01/2009 Committee recommended measure be held for further study
06/03/2009 Scheduled for hearing and/or consideration
06/03/2009 Committee recommends passage
06/04/2009 Placed on Senate Calendar
06/11/2009 Senate read and passed
06/16/2009 Referred to House Labor
06/25/2009 Scheduled for hearing and/or consideration
06/25/2009 Committee recommends passage in concurrence
06/25/2009 Placed on House Calendar
10/29/2009 Placed on House Calendar
10/29/2009 House voted to recommit to House Labor

Total Bills:1

Legislative Data System Room 1 10/29/2009
State House, Providence, Rhode Island 05:41 PM

This should finish the issue for this session, barring a literal back hallway meeting of the Labor Committee, which is still procedurally feasible -- but no longer politically feasible.



Where Even the Watchdogs Are Corrupt

Justin Katz

WPRI's been promoting its newest Target 12 investigation as "The Biggest Yet"; reporter Tim White sends along some specifics in advance of the official revelation:

CRANSTON – The Rhode Island State Police have opened a criminal investigation following a Target 12 Investigation into government waste.

The investigation, which airs tonight at 11 p.m., reveals four state workers at the Department of Labor and Training at home or on personal errands while on the clock. The investigation implicates the entire "Fraud Unit" at the DLT, a division designed to root out unemployment fraud and phony disability claims.

State police Lt. Colonel Steven O’Donnell says they were approached by state officials after Eyewitness News presented the DLT with their findings. O'Donnell says detectives are looking into possible charges of obtaining money under false pretense.

The four employees, identified by Eyewitness News as Debra Lombardi, Allyn Bosworth, David O'Brien and Claribel Terrero are suspended with pay pending the outcome of both the internal and criminal investigation, according to DLT spokesperson Laura Hart.

Their supervisor, Katherine Catanzaro has temporarily been reassigned, Hart says.

Target 12 obtained time sheets and itineraries of the fraud investigators that show they were not only on the clock when they were at home or on errands, but the itineraries reveal they claimed to be out on an investigation at the time.

On Sunday, I wondered whether it's possible to recycle something so thoroughly rotten as the Rhode Island government. When even the people assigned to seek out fraud are behaving fraudulently, the wondering may cease; tear the whole thing down and start again.



Update: Yorke Reporting that the Permanent Contract Won't be Passed Tonight

Carroll Andrew Morse

Dan Yorke of WPRO (630 AM) is reporting that he has spoken with House Speaker William Murphy's spokesman Larry Berman, who says that the permanent contract bill has been placed on the House calendar for procedural reasons only, because it needs to be officially tabled before the end of the session.



Perpetual Contract: Making a Spark in a Gunpowder Factory

Justin Katz

Andrew's news might explain the lack of the usual angst from the state's unionists over legislative assurances that binding arbitration is dead, for the time being: The unions' first choice — perpetual contracts — is alive and well. You'll recall that the deadly bill, S0713, passed the Senate and the House Labor Committee and then mysteriously disappeared during the time of tea parties and ramping up town hall anger.

Binding arbitration grew in it's place, of course, and wouldn't it explain a lot of strange behavior from the General Assembly and the unionists, especially those associated with the National Education Association, if the pair of bills are a connivance to inflate an over-sized union life-raft as the ship of state goes down? Get everybody to react to binding arbitration and then send in the more vicious animal through the back door. Ed Achorn's column on binding arbitration reads even more darkly in this new context:

Many Rhode Islanders, suffering from "learned helplessness" and biding their time until they too can join the great middle-class migration from the state, have given up whimsical notions that legislators here would ever serve the public interest. In their view, the politicians will never be happy until the sign that adorns Dante's Inferno is placed along all roads and highways leading into the state: "Abandon hope all ye who enter here."

If this legislative ghoul does come to life, this week, the backlash should be quadruple what it would have been against binding arbitration: not only based on the demerits, but also in reaction to the deception.



BREAKING: The Permanent Contract is Still Alive in the Legislature

Carroll Andrew Morse

Following a comment from "Madmom", I checked the General Assembly's official online calendar, and found this...

Senate Bill No.713
BY Perry, Levesque C, McCaffrey, Miller, Sosnowski
ENTITLED, AN ACT RELATING TO LABOR AND LABOR RELATIONS - CERTIFIED SCHOOL TEACHERS ARBITRATION
(would amend section 28-9.3-9 to provide that if a successor collective bargaining agreement has not been agreed to by the parties)
{LC1814/1}
02/26/2009 Introduced, referred to Senate Labor
04/01/2009 Scheduled for hearing
04/01/2009 Committee recommended measure be held for further study
06/03/2009 Scheduled for hearing and/or consideration
06/03/2009 Committee recommends passage
06/04/2009 Placed on Senate Calendar
06/11/2009 Senate read and passed
06/16/2009 Referred to House Labor
06/25/2009 Scheduled for hearing and/or consideration
06/25/2009 Committee recommends passage in concurrence
06/25/2009 Placed on House Calendar
10/29/2009 Placed on House Calendar


Total Bills:1

Legislative Data System Room 1 10/29/2009
State House, Providence, Rhode Island 10:06 AM

This is not the binding arbitration bill, but the bill that says that expired contracts remain in force, if no new agreement is reached. The verbiage added to state law is...
(f) In the event that a successor collective bargaining agreement has not been agreed to by the parties, then the existing contract shall continue in effect until such time as an agreement has been reached between the parties.

CONTINUING...

Speculation: The argument you will hear made in support of this bill is that the legislature needs to freeze everything as is, while it figures out how to create new rules for cities and towns, new rules intended to limit the decision making authority of the democratically elected local governments on local budgets. (Of course, you won't hear this last part in any of the "we temporarily need permanent contracts" arguments I suspect will be heard today. Also, remember that even if this is pitched as a "temporary" fix, temporary permanent contracts are likely to last "only" as long as the temporary increase in Rhode Island's sales tax passed 20 years ago and still going strong has lasted).

The people need to take a direct message to the legislature: Fix your own fiscal mess first, before you even begin to consider extraordinary measures like stripping locally elected officials of the authority to make meaningful fiscal decisions for their communities. Don't deny local representatives of the people the ability to decide how to spend the people's money on local matters.

AND FINALLY (FOR NOW)...

No matter what trickery the legislature attempts with this bill, today is not the end of this matter. This bill will certainly be vetoed by the Governor, meaning that another session will be necessary for a veto-override. This does not mean that people can afford to wait to express their opposition on this matter beginning right now, but as we head into the 2010 elections, every candidate for General Assembly needs to be asked to explain to what degree they believe that state-authorized unelected arbitrators and permanent contracts should be allowed to override the power of elected officials, when it comes to making the best decisions for their cities and towns.


October 28, 2009


The Audacity of the Union

Justin Katz

If you've paid even moderate attention to union squabbles in this state, you've got to drop your jaw at some of the pro-binding arbitration ads that the National Education Association is putting out. Look at the clippings at the top of the picture highlighting all of the lawyers fees and other bad effects of recent negotiation disputes; all of them originate with the unions. They file the lawsuits. Their intransigence leads to work-to-rule.

I'm also reminded of a comment that local Tiverton unionist and guidance counselor Lynn Nicholas made when the union was pushing for retroactive pay, last year. The audio is available at the end of this post, but the relevant portion is as follows:

Has anybody... tried to figure in what it's going to cost for lawyers fees once we get back into arbitration? Have you begun to think about that?

Two observations: First, lawyers are still needed in arbitration and the steps leading up to it, and negotiations that ultimately land on an arbitrators desk for a binding decision will surely be hard-fought. Second, the cost of lawyers that the union intended to impose on school districts has been a repeated threat during negotiations; are we to believe that the unions are going to give up this weapon — indeed, promote its relinquishment as a salable benefit — for an arbitration regime that won't unduly benefit them?

Let the word go out: No legislator who votes for binding arbitration should be considered worthy of being reelected, no matter what else he or she might do while in office, because not only would that have been a vote to benefit the unions at the expense of the residents, but it would also affirm deceit as a central tool in Rhode Island's political system.


October 26, 2009


Preemptive Support for Evaluations

Justin Katz

Is it too cynical to be suspicious of union enthusiasm to develop evaluation standards for teachers?

The Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals has received a $200,000 national grant to develop a much more demanding method of evaluating and mentoring new teachers. The union will work closely with four urban school districts: Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls and Woonsocket.

"The union is tired of being portrayed as a protector of bad teachers," said union president Marcia Reback. "We have no interest in having incompetent teachers in our classrooms. We want to have good, rigorous, substantial evaluations."...

The peer-evaluation system would work as follows: a consulting teacher would observe, evaluate and mentor between 8 and 10 novice teachers over the course of a year. In the spring, the consulting teacher would recommend whether the new teacher should be awarded an additional contract. A board comprising administrators and union representatives would make its recommendation to the superintendent, who, in turn, would offer advice to the local school committee.

So a group of union reps and administrators (often previous members of the union) translate a union member's review of another union member to the superintendent, who brings it to the elected representatives on the school committee. Sounds like an attempt to derail evaluations that would involve more stakeholders, such as students, parents, and taxpayers, at a more fundamental level.

It always rankles, by the way, to hear union executives talk about "our classrooms." Perhaps public clarification of ownership is in order.


October 24, 2009


Okay, I'll Bite

Justin Katz

Presumably, Pat Crowley — by his strenuous logical standards — would also believe that we needn't listen to pacifists, or even military minimalists, were we to consider dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran:

Look, if the answer is you simply don't believe teachers have the right to collectively bargain, I wish you would stop beating around the bush and just say it. If so...fine, then there is no need to debate the merits of binding arbitration with you. We can simply move on.

Yes, teachers should have a right to bargain as a collective, but individual teachers should have a right to bargain as individuals, and districts should have a right to construct the policies that will best serve their students and their communities. The unionist might object that the collective couldn't function without including every potential employee, that giving management an alternative would decrease the union's leverage, but we're talking rights, here, not the policies that most benefit labor organizations.

Personally, I believe that unions have become a cesspool of stultifying principles, metastasizing humanity's baser motivations and producing an hospitable environment for evil. I'd further decry the extent to which they tend to weigh public discourse down to the level of reasoning that Crowley exhibits in the linked post (and to which his boss, Bob Walsh, disappointingly gave voice in multiple appearances on WPRO, yesterday).

Only within the acrid womb of such a beast as a public-sector labor union could one be so immune to objectivity as to believe that all statements are necessarily cynical ploys that may be dismissed based on the underlying assumptions of the orator. The bottom line is that binding arbitration will have particular effects on contracts and therefore on municipal and state budgets. The National Education Association of Rhode Island desires those effects. Various allied citizen groups do not. Those who are not yet convinced, either way, should observe the debate and seek what makes sense to them in the exchange.


October 22, 2009


"Modified" Binding Arbitration: A Bad Idea is Still Bad Even if It's Tweaked

Monique Chartier

Following upon a very well attended hearing yesterday,

Opponents clogged the State House committee room, spilling into the marble hallway and lining the walls. Some held signs of protest above their heads for hours.

It was an unusual display for a workday hearing on a legislative proposal entitled simply, “School Teacher Arbitration.”

the Providence Journal's Steve Peoples reports this morning on the latest status of binding arbitration.

[Spokesman for House Speaker William Murphy Larry] Berman characterized the draft legislation discussed Wednesday as “a touchstone for a larger discussion of the issue itself,” suggesting a modified version may emerge.

Andrew had pointed out that binding arbitration undemocratically (and possibly unconstitutionally?) removes the expenditure of tax dollars from the hands of elected officials and places it in the hands of (usually biased) non-elected ones who do not answer to the taxpayer/voter.

And Justin highlighted the cost of such a system in Connecticut; namely, compensation adjustments that go only one way.

What would a modified version of binding arbitration look like? Compensation adjustments that continue to go one way, just at a slower rate? (As tax revenue on Smith Hill and around the state has been going in the other direction for the third year in a row, this doesn't seem terribly feasible.) Would elected and non-elected officials take turns writing checks on the taxpayers' account so it's non-democratic "only" 50% of the time? (Still sounds undemocratic to me.)

So let's throw it open to suggestions. How would you "modify" binding arbitration - still leaving in place the current precedents and arbitrators which tilt significantly to one side of the table - to make it a fair, equitable and democratic process?



Andrew & Matt Talk Binding Arbitration

Justin Katz

Last night's Anchor Rising on the Matt Allen Show was a bit more expansive than usual, as Andrew and Matt discussed binding arbitration's relationship to governing philosophy. Stream by clicking here, or download it.


October 21, 2009


ProJo Notices the Stacked Arbitration Deck

Marc Comtois

A couple days ago I noticed that, with the arbitration bill coming up, Sen. John Tassoni had just been approved as a mediator. (The ProJo story reporting this also mentioned a few others). That led me to remark that it looked like the arbitration/mediation deck was being stacked ahead of time. The ProJo editors have also noticed and they also bring up a good point: familiarity won't benefit the taxpayers:

Citizens also have a right to wonder: Just how fair would “unbiased” mediators be under such a system?

There’s good reason to wonder. Under the system, both sides of the table would choose an arbitrator. But here’s the rub: Chiefs of either the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers would be dealing with arbitrators over and over, while each city and town would interact with arbitrators only occasionally. This would place a strong financial incentive on an arbitrator to shade his or her calls toward the unions, in hopes of being hired the next time. Ruling against the taxpayers in one community would pose far less of a career risk.

UPDATE: Allow me to piggyback on this clarification from ProJo:

The Oct. 21 editorial “Sen. Tassoni’s new job?” — about legislation mandating binding arbitration in disputes involving teachers unions — referred to both labor arbitrators and mediators. While the binding-arbitration legislation has not yet been approved, typically state-approved arbitrators are chosen from among a group of different names than state-approved mediators. As the editorial states, Sen. John Tassoni has landed on the state’s list of qualified mediators.



Should Arbitration Rulings Outrank the Law? It's a Feature, not a Bug Say Advocates!

Carroll Andrew Morse

I'm not entirely sure how authoritative this reference is, but the website called Rhode Island Arbitration –dot- com is promoting the fact that the decisions of arbitrators can take precedence over the law…

Did You Know…Courts cannot overturn an arbitration award.

Typically, the courts cannot overturn an arbitration award because the arbitrator made a mistake of law or fact. Even if a court would have decided the case differently under existing law, the court will still enforce an arbitration award that differs from what it would have decided.

The site has a definite astroturf feel to it, so the above "feature" may not be referring specifically to the law in Rhode Island.

But it sure does give a strong hint as to how much power arbitration advocates feel should be given to a few individuals over the lives of others, outside of any regular framework of electoral or legal accountability.


October 19, 2009


Binding Arbitration, the Board Game

Justin Katz

Let's you and I play a game. We'll start out with you giving me a certain sum of money. Then every five minutes, I'll propose how much more money you should give me, and you can propose a slightly lower increase, and if I refuse to accept those terms, we'll take our disagreement to a "neutral" third party who'll give me the increase I demand about 60% of the time and give me the increase you offer the other 40% of the time. Sound good?

Not surprisingly, the Providence Journal's newest regular contributor, Tom Sgouros, union consultant and an intellectual force behind the 2008 Economic Death and Dismemberment Act, thinks that's a nifty way to resolve the hardest fought teacher contract battles. As he writes, with the folksy, personalized calm of an infomercial:

To me, binding arbitration seems as good a way as any to resolve these kinds of conflicts. In binding arbitration, two sides present their "last best" proposals to a neutral panel of three arbitrators (one chosen by each side and one chosen by both) who decide between them. The arbitration statute spells out the permissible grounds for a decision, too, so it's not as if arbitrators can just make up stuff.

Of course, as Andrew put it on Matt Allen's Violent Roundtable, Friday night, we don't take that approach in other public interactions. The General Assembly doesn't take issues that it's having difficulty resolving to a "neutral" third party to set policy on, say, prostitution, gambling, or a school funding formula. The people whom we elect and hire just have to work things out or pay the political consequences. Also of course, as I describe in the current issue of Providence Business News, binding arbitration seems somehow always to result in an increase in teacher remuneration, in Connecticut, even in the most struggling towns. And it's never below a 2% raise. Curious.

The tack that the union backers have decided to use in opposition to such observations is to explain that binding arbitration is not to blame (or credit) for Connecticut's having the highest-paid teachers in the nation, the Education Enhancement Act of 1986 is. That's fine, so far as it goes, but the point isn't that binding arbitration will give Rhode Island that last little kick to the top, from the fourth highest-paid teachers in the nation to the absolutely highest-paid teachers. The point is that binding arbitration would prevent communities from adjusting remuneration downward when the towns run out of money, the parents realize that less and less money is available for the programs that define a well-balanced and opportunity-rich education, or the residents realize that their big bucks are buying pitiful proficiency in math and science.

And union-promoted clichés notwithstanding, teachers are very well paid and are not likely to suffer a change in that reality. Sgouros makes a play for just such an insinuation, with the following:

In 1986, despite seven years of binding arbitration law, Connecticut teachers were only 19th in the country in surveys of teacher pay. The average teacher salary then was around $13,000, and it was not hard to find teachers moonlighting as weekend bartenders, editors, writers, and construction workers, where they were paid more than in their "main" gig.

In the interest of charitable discourse, we'll assume that it was an innocent error that Tom cites the number for the average beginning teacher salary but calls it the average salary overall. Perusing data compiled by the American Federation of Teachers, one finds that the average salary in Connecticut was actually around $27,000 (11th highest in the nation) — and let's not forget that we've seen roughly 96% inflation since 1986, so those salaries are actually twice as valuable as they seem, from our current perspective.

As for beginning teachers — fresh out of college, or in the middle of a career change — having to work additional hours at a second occupation, well, such is not a foreign experience to other young professionals. Stepping back from the pro-union rhetoric, emphasized in the binding arbitration debate, it's clear that what's being requested is not fairness, but continued treatment as some special class removed from the experiences of fellow Rhode Islanders.



RE: Binding Arbitration

Marc Comtois

As Monique notes, the bill requiring binding arbitration in union/town disputes is slated to be heard this Wednesday. You can also hear NEA/AFT funded radio advertisements touting the bill. I wonder why labor unions--which traditionally take pride in being negotiating pit bulls--are apparently going all warm and fuzzy over the prospect of a supposedly fair and equitable process? What happened to taking pride in all of their victories? Well, in addition to Justin's explanation, could it be they know what the local roster of arbitrators looks like?

State Sen. John Tassoni, a Smithfield Democrat who until last spring was a senior business agent for the largest state employees union, has landed on the state’s list of qualified mediators to call when there is a state or local labor dispute.

Though his newly formed company — The Sentinel Group — has not yet won any state or local mediation contracts, it is now within a small, select group that the state purchasing office has deemed qualified for use. Tassoni has offered his services for $125 an hour, $1,000 a day.

Some on the list are better known than others, including Bernard Singleton, a state pensioner, former top official in the National Education Association of Rhode Island and state labor director in the DiPrete administration; and Gerard P. Cobleigh, who is one of the lead lawyers for the largest of the state employee unions and Tassoni’s former employer: Council 94, American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees.

Deck = stacked? It would seem those "in the know" know that the winds are shifting in a particular direction, regardless of the "hearing" on Wednesday.

UPDATE: NEA's Bob Walsh writes in the comments that I'm "mixing up mediation and arbitration, and mediators and arbitrators." I'm not mixing it up. I understand the difference: Mediators try to help parties come up with a mutual decision; arbitrators are selected by both parties to make a decision for them. As the ProJo report continues, it seems like the qualifications for mediators and arbitrators are similar and that they come from the same pool:

The minimum qualifications to get on the state’s list of potential mediators include “a bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university” and five years experience “as an arbitrator and/or mediator for labor management matters, or a lawyer representing parties” in such matters.

Tassoni is a 1976 Smithfield High School graduate, who lists the New Horizon Computer Learning Center in Cranston, the George Meany Labor Institute in Washington, D.C., and the Institute for Labor Studies and Research in Cranston as his higher-education experience.

As for his “relevant skills and experience,” his resume notes that he is chairman of the Senate Committee on Housing and Municipal Government, and a member of the Senate Labor Committee who has over the years, in his union roles, had to “negotiate union contracts and resolve union grievances” and research, prepare and present cases for arbitration.” {emphasis added}

So, is there any chance that cross-pollination between mediators/arbitrators occurs? That's the impression I get. If not, my apologies.


October 18, 2009


Broke by Binding

Justin Katz

I've got an op-ed in the upcoming Providence Business News addressing a topic that's on a great many Rhode Island minds: binding arbitration.


October 16, 2009


Work of the Hand Is Not Exclusive of the Mind

Justin Katz

Marc's post on education and "dirty jobs" — the entire recent discussion about college and the necessity thereof — brings to mind this passage from Walter Rose's wonderful book The Village Carpenter, which reflects on Rose's family business as the era of the automobile and the machine came on strong:

These words are not to the old who, like myself, have passed the years of prime, but to the youth, whose years of promise lie before him. He seeks to acquire a personal knowledge of the craft, the ability to achieve as others have done and still do. Is he prepared to pay the price, in time and study of the principles of the craft, and the details of its execution? In my father's day seven years of apprenticeship was not thought too long to obtain this knowledge. When I was a youth the term had become reduced to four or five years. To-day there is a general disinclination for any apprenticeship at all, and a sad misconception as to the amount that has to be learned. But all the quickening processes of science have failed to train the human mind at a more rapid pace, and those who have studied woodcraft for half a century find themselves still learning and quite unable to pack all their knowledge into a nutshell for the convenience of a beginner. The training is not that of the university; it is, however, quite as exacting in its own way and so merits equal recognition and respect, and it is encouraging to note that this idea is slowly gaining ground.

Slowly,indeed. The Village Carpenter was originally published in 1937.


October 13, 2009


Is the Gig Up for the RI Education Industry?

Justin Katz

It's worth your time, if you haven't already read through the Sunday Providence Journal article about RI Education Commissioner Deborah Gist's elevation of the state's standardized test requirement for prospective education students to the highest in the country. The college and university estimates of how many students would miss the mark are head shakers, but of particular value is revelation of the gig, the game, the scam of educator education:

"Everybody understands what Commissioner Gist wants to do and I think her goals are laudable," [acting higher education commissioner Steven] Maurano said. "We absolutely want to work with her to do whatever we can to improve the quality of teachers in Rhode Island Schools. The concern that the institutions have is that if you raise the score for the Praxis I too high in one fell swoop, we will deny a significant number of students the opportunity to get into teacher prep programs."

Limiting the "opportunity" to enter into teaching programs is kind of the point, isn't it? It gets better:

Teacher training programs argue that there are several other safeguards before a student graduates, including requiring that students pass a series of exit exams in specific subjects toward the end of their program, called Praxis II, and perform student teaching for a semester.

Rhode Island requires high cut scores for these exit exams and they are a better indicator of the kind of educator a new teacher will become, say Byrd and Eldridge.

Reporter Jennifer Jordan doesn't explore how the percentage of students who pass the exit exams correlates with the estimates of how many would fall short of higher entrance scores, but the underlying argument is telling. Those who run training programs want a low bar for the students rushing to give them money, but a high bar for achieving the goal that motivated the exchange. In typical Rhode Island fashion, the objective appears to be to introduce waste (of time, money, and human potential) for the benefit of those who live off of it.

The most suitable names for such behavior might make a good question in the vocabulary portion of the Pre-Professional Skills Test.


October 12, 2009


An Association of Associates

Justin Katz

I've procured a copy of the proposed change in the Ethics Commission's general advisory pertaining to union members' voting, as elected officials, on contracts and such that affect other locals of their unions (PDF). There's nothing in it that will surprise those who've been following along, and frankly, with the exception of replacing "adequate" with "expanding," it's hard to argue with this:

Individual labor union members pay dues to the local bargaining unit of which they are a member, a portion of which is retained by that local unit, with some other portion ordinarily flowing up to the statewide and, when applicable, nationwide, umbrella organizations. While each local bargaining unit and statewide organization is structured and functions somewhat differently, it is generally the case that one of the primary missions of any given union is to secure adequate compensation and benefits for its membership; this being the case, we opine that an individual dues-paying member of any given local bargaining unit is a business associate, as that term is defined by R.I. Gen. Laws section 36-14-2(3), of both the local bargaining unit to which the individual pays dues and the statewide entity to which a portion of those dues flow. What this means in practical terms is that when a duly-authorized representative of a local bargaining unit or its statewide affiliate is representing the local or statewide entity before a person subject to the Code who is also a member of that local or the statewide umbrella entity, the person subject to the Code must recuse from taking official action in accordance with R.I. Gen. Laws sections 36-14-5(f) and 6.

Closing any of these corruption loopholes (not unlike the prostitution loophole) that we're able will only benefit the state. Of course, it's probably too little, too late to prevent the state's financial collapse.


October 10, 2009


What Governs a Town?

Justin Katz

That layoffs of police in East Providence are "the first in years" in Rhode Island is surprising, but not particularly noteworthy. In fact, we should hope that organizations — whether companies or municipalities — will operate in such a way as to ensure consistent, long-term employment. It's difficult, however, not to see some sort of relationship with a story out North Providence:

[Mayor Charles] Lombardi said he held off on filling vacancies in the Police Department in recent months for financial reasons, which triggered several union grievances and set off a legal debate about the extent of his control over police staffing. Lombardi argues that the Town Charter gives the mayor discretion to determine whether a replacement will be appointed when a police officer leaves the department.

The police union argues that the department's organizational chart is governed by the contract, which prohibits "changes resulting in reduction in ranks" or "department strength."

Employment contracts should not be allowed to modify the rules by which a constitution or charter is operated. Elected officials lack the right — and should lack the authority — to negotiate such documents away.

Add this scheme to the list of practices that reformers must end if Rhode Island is ever to recover.



The Williams Story and a Different Caste

Justin Katz

The story of former RI Supreme Court Chief Justice Frank Williams's second family is certainly worthy of the adjectives that have thus far been used to describe it — "odd," "creepy," and so on. With or without further details, though, it's essentially a window into another world in which such creatures thrive, and in which such facts as this swill about:

They brought in $198,000 in salaries last year, according to personnel data gathered by state controller Marc Leonetti. Pamela DosReis, 44, earned a $58,000 base salary, plus $9,709 in overtime and bonuses.

Her husband, Frank, 45, had a base salary of $50,455, plus just shy of $80,000 in overtime and bonuses.

On a personal level, one can congratulate the DosReises for their good fortune in acquiring attractive financial circumstances. As the people funding those circumstances, suspicion and recriminations are more in order, whether focusing on a powerful man who could pull such lucrative strings, on a system that makes an elite of public servants in an economically struggling state, or both.


October 8, 2009


A Little Less Tilt on the Union Playing Field

Justin Katz

Perhaps there is hope that the winds are changing (too slowly, of course) in Providence Journal reporter Steve Peoples' story on the RI Ethics Commission's movement toward a decision that would expand the prohibitions against union members' participation, as public officials, in matters pertaining to other locals under the same umbrella organizations. A 2008 advisory opinion from the Commission provides a good example:

The Petitioner, Vice Chairperson of the Narragansett School Committee, a municipal elected position, requests an advisory opinion as to whether she may participate in subcommittee negotiations with the bargaining unit of the Rhode Island chapter of the National Education Association, to negotiate the Narragansett teachers’ union contract, given that she is a member of the Professional Staff Association at the Community College of Rhode Island, which is also represented by the National Education Association.

Heretofore, in the consensus view of 31 opinions since 1995, according to RI Ethics Commission staff lawyer Esme DeVault, the answer has been "go ahead," but would become, under the proposed change, "better not." Hopefully, the guardians of Rhode Island's public trust have caught on that unions are organizational structures, not vague clubs entailing mutual interests. Imagine the outcry from the usual suspects with union affiliations if a local manager of (say) a CVS were to involve himself as a public official in the affairs of a different CVS store in his hometown.

One option for resolving conflicts of interest that ought to be on the table, but isn't, is for those public officials to quit their unions without losing their jobs. Rhode Island is like one of those games in which two knobs tilt a maze through which the player must work a marble, only the knobs only change the degree to which the board tilts toward the union hole — never away.


October 2, 2009


Re: Solidarity in Kicking the Blind Veteran into the Street

Monique Chartier

Justin says

Think of the thoroughness of the union mentality (or dementality) necessary for no union members, of several occupations, to see the immorality of preventing disabled veterans from reaching the hospital or to take pains to minimize the effects of their "action."

Indeed, a mentality is at fault here but it is important to focus on the parties with the faulty mentality who bear direct responsibility for these unacceptable incidents. Commenters Joe Bernstein and RIBorn have identified them.

Joe B: On the other hand the misguided action by the transit workers is impacting people who are disabled as a result of serving this country who also have exactly zero involvement in the labor dispute.

RIBorn: While the state may have no control over the picketers, there should be discipline coming to the bus drivers and police officers.

In point of fact, those veterans would have safely arrived at their destination despite the picketing if another group had simply done their job: the bus drivers and, secondarily, those police officers who came to the scene and failed to abate the situation.

It's one thing for a group to picket. It's a completely different, much darker, thing for a second group to make the conscious decision to place the health and well being of disabled or ill veterans behind excessive deference to a particular group's first amendment expression.

Yes, over the course of two days, everyone realized their mistake. In the case of the bus drivers and police officers who have an official capacity and responsibility, one that specifically involves protecting public citizens and especially veterans, that was two days too long.

There's a time and a place for solidarity. This clearly was neither. Shame on those bus drivers and police officers for not immediately recognizing that fact and thereby allowing an allegiance to warp their priorities; i.e., to become a mindless mentality.


October 1, 2009


Solidarity in Kicking the Blind Veteran into the Street

Justin Katz

Somehow I missed the story from last week that Joe Bernstein raises in the comments to the previous post. The Providence Journal story appears to have run on Saturday:

On Monday and Tuesday morning, [blind veteran Michael] Graichen said Friday, the bus driver explained there was a picket line [at the VA Hospital] he wasn’t going to cross, and he let Graichen out at Roger Williams Hospital. ...

A VA spokesman said his efforts to speak with protesters on Monday were met with profanities. Bullhorns and shouting disrupted traffic on Chalkstone, said James W. Burrows, director of communications at the VA Hospital. When he called the police, he said Thursday, the responding patrol cars honked in solidarity with the protesting unions.

On Wednesday, a 12-foot banner was added to the display. It said: "VA Medical Center / Construction workers with NO Health Care Insurance. / Shame on the VA."

On Thursday, Burrows said, a Providence police officer responded to the VA Hospital to tell protesters they had to stay on the sidewalk and not use the bullhorn.

By Friday morning, the tone had changed.

Think of the thoroughness of the union mentality (or dementality) necessary for no union members, of several occupations, to see the immorality of preventing disabled veterans from reaching the hospital or to take pains to minimize the effects of their "action.". The kicker? The picket wasn't even over current jobs, but was anticipatory of stimulus dollars potentially flowing out of state.

Yet, we allow the organizations that foster such an atmosphere and mentality to interweave themselves, through metastasis, into such critical public roles as police, fire, and education.

ADDENDUM:

Comments Michael to the previous post:

It happened for a day, the bus drivers realized their mistake, the workers who were picketing apologized, in writing and the story should be over.

It appears to have happened for two days. More importantly, though, this was a "mistake" like mugging an old lady on a street corner is a "mistake." The point is that the perpetrator ought to know in advance that what he's doing is wrong.

And the story will not be over until the principles and practices of unionized groups are diverted from the culture of selfishness and aggression that fosters such "mistakes."



The Never-Ending Union Contract

Justin Katz

Marc confessed, on last night's Matt Allen Show, that he's tempted to forsake all and join a union, arguing that they're impervious: as individuals, union members get away with everything, and as bodies, their contracts can't be allowed to expire. Stream by clicking here, or download it.


September 30, 2009


RE: Warwick Crossing Guards - Contracts are Forever

Marc Comtois
The Board, therefore, finds that the Employer has engaged in unfair labor practices by refusing to bargain in good faith and by unilateral implementation of terms and conditions of employment, and by failing to participate in statutory dispute resolution procedures.
Thus has the RI State Labor Relations Board rendered its decision to reinstate the prior contract of the Warwick Crossing Guard union (Local 1033). "[T]he Employer [The City of Warwick} has engaged in unfair labor practices by refusing to bargain in good faith..." According to the "majority" of 3 on the Board (I looked at the rules and regs for the Board and could find nothing stating a tie goes to the union...), the City of Warwick didn't bargain in good faith because they "entered into negotiations with a mind 'hermetically sealed against even the thought of entering into an Agreement with the Union'." They support this with the following:
[T]he City Council issued a resolution directing the City's administration to "formally notify the Union representing the Crossing Guards that it [the City] is exercising its option not to renew the Collective Bargaining Agreement in order to explore the possibility of privatizing the Crossing Guards and the potential cost savings associated therewith..." (Union Exhibit 1-1) Despite this directive from the City Council, the Union and the Personnel Director did meet and confer and came up with a Tentative Agreement for submission to the City Council.
Apparently, while the City Council investigated other options, the City Administration (ie; Mayor Avedisian's office) was supposed to do....nothing. But, according to the Labor board, he couldn't "do nothing", because that wouldn't have been in good faith either! That's apparent from their subsequent "logic". Remember, they expressly pointed out that a contract between the City and the Crossing Guards had been in place for 30 years, uninterrupted. Thus, the presumption is that this is the irrevocable norm. Then, after explaining the "disconnect" between Mayor and City Council (which I posted previously), they go on:
The Municipal Employee Arbitration Act, like most public sector statutes, both in Rhode Island and across the nation, requires dispute resolution procedures prior to any declaration if impasse is possible. These procedures include mediation, conciliation, and arbitration. R.I.G.L. 28-9.4-10. These procedures are designed to ensure that the state's public policy for public sector collective bargaining is effective. The dispute resolution process is designed to encourage and indeed strive for a negotiated settlement of labor disputes. This Board has previously had the occasion to review the necessity of exhaustion of the dispute resolution process within the context of unilateral changes made by an Employer to the terms and conditions of employment. In the case of public sector employees, however, this Board has previously ruled that "exhaustive" bargaining necessarily includes any and all statutory dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation, conciliation, and arbitration. ULP 4647, Warwick School Committee, (1992) In addition, the "unilateral departure from the terms of an expired contract, prior to all available statutory dispute resolution procedures violates the obligation to bargain under R.I.G.L. 29-7-13. This requirement to engage in all available dispute mechanism procedures still exists today, despite the seemingly ever-increasing public hostility to public-sector labor relations.
There can be no doubt that what the Board is saying is that, even when a contract expires, it doesn't. Not until all avenues of renegotiation are followed, including arbitration, which, by the way, inevitably results in a brokered agreement, right? (When has arbitration "failed")? Thus, an expired contract is just as valid as a current one. With this logic, given that the City Council stated they were going to privatize, had Mayor Avedisian and his office NOT pursued a "just in case" negotiation, the union could have still taken the City of Warwick to the Board, who would have found in the union's favor because the City hadn't begun negotiations in the first place. And how about that last part of the above excerpt? "This requirement to engage in all available dispute mechanism procedures still exists today, despite the seemingly ever-increasing public hostility to public-sector labor relations." How brave is the Board of Labor Relations!

ADDENDUM: As the Warwick Beacon reported:

When neighboring Cranston chose to fire its crossing guards in 2005, the same union filed a complaint to the Labor Relations Board and won. That decision, however, was appealed to Superior Court, where the city was victorious. The State Supreme Court decided not to take up the issue, and Cranston won the day.

William Felkner, the president of the Ocean State Policy Research Institute, has criticized the Labor Relations Board for continually favoring the unions over management. Felkner said that over the last three years, management has a 7-0 record on all major decisions.

The 7-0 pro union record Felkner cites is supported by OSPRI's research into the RILRB's decisions, which they released earlier this year.

ADDENDUM 2: As to the mystery of why a 3-3 tie went to labor--and I'm just guessing--maybe RILRB Chair Walter Lanni made an "executive" decision and counted his vote twice? Lest we forget, as this ProJo op-ed reminds (concerning the RILRBs decision to allow home daycare providers to unionize...remember that one?), Mr. Lanni, a "representative of management" on the Board, "served on the executive board of his firefighters' union from 1973 to 1996; even as chief, he was a member of that union. Moreover, he and Mr. [Frank] Montanaro [now former AFL-CIO President] served together as Cranston firefighters for 10 years and are close friends."


September 29, 2009


RI Labor Relations Board: Tie goes to the Warwick Crossing Guard Union

Marc Comtois

As the ProJo is reporting the State Labor Relations Board has found in favor of the Warwick Crossing Guard union, 1 1/2 years after it appealed the City's decision to make the position non-union (and non-benefit). Labor won with a 3-3 tie, with Chairman Walter J. Lanni (Representing Management), Frank Montanaro and John Copabianco (both representing Labor) finding for the union while the Gerald Goldstein and Elizabeth Dolan (representing management) and Ellen Jordan (representing the public) found against it. (The third labor seat is not filled--maybe Montanaro and Copabianco effectively have 1.5 votes? Hey, just sayin', it's Rhode Island after all!). Basically, the Board takes the City to task for having the temerity to impose management rights:

The Union has proven, by a fair preponderance of the credible evidence, that the Employer committed a violation of R.I.G.L. 28-7-13 (6) and (10) by failing to engage on statutory dispute mechanism procedures and by unilaterally repudiating the employment relationship and unilaterally implementing new terms and conditions of employment for Crossing Guards.
The Board seems to have justified their decision by citing the 30 year history of collective bargaining for the position and the fact that the City Council apparently took too long to reject a tentative proposal negotiated by the union and Mayor Avedisian's office and, perhaps most importantly, of short-circuiting the aforementioned bargaining process by putting the work up for bid by a private contractor. The city is appealing the decision. The finding also calls attention to the divided management that goes on in Warwick, which seems to have been the chink in the armor that the union successfully exploited:
The record indicates, however, that no members of the City Council were members of the Employer's negotiating team. This Board is very concerned about the apparent disconnect between the City's "Administration" and the City's Political Leaders relative to the negotiation of this Contract. Forcing the Union to negotiate with representatives that have no real authority to negotiate is not indicative of good faith. In his email of November 14, 2007 to Union representative Donald lannazzi, Mr. Shelton states: "I don't pretend to have any idea whether or not this proposal will satisfy the Council and I know that it would be difficult for you to accept a deal without that assurance, but, given the circumstances, it's the best we can do." With all due respect to Mr. Shelton, whom this Board recognizes to be between the proverbial "rock and hard place", it is not acceptable for the City to conduct collective bargaining negotiations with its Unions through such a disjointed and ill-informed process. The reasonable inference here is that the true power to settle the Contract lies with the City Council, which has political differences with the Mayor's administration. This is an issue beyond the Union's control.
How many other cities and towns have the same situation? Sheesh. If you're going to negotiate with a union, you can bet they're gonna offer a united front. Wouldn't it behoove city management (Administration and City Councils) to do the same from the get go? Apparently so.

ADDENDUM: As commenters point out (and I should have!), the City of Warwick Charter includes a separation of powers such that the Mayor and his office negotiates contracts while the City Council ratifies. No cross-polination allowed.

ADDENDUM 2: I have been reminded that this situation was predicted by former Warwick City Councilman Robert Cushman.

In announcing the firings in a press release late Friday afternoon, Avedisian attempted to portray his action as an improvement over the privatization plan championed by Cushman and modeled on the actions taken by the City of Cranston, which replaced their crossing guards with employees of a private company, NESCTC Security Agency. But Cushman said Avedisian’s scheme raises more questions than it answers and may be nothing more than a phony effort by the Mayor to make it look like he is trying to save money when in fact he is seeking to preserve the status quo.

“By embarking on this plan, the Mayor faces two choices—he can hire new, inexperienced crossing guards which will put the safety of children at risk or he can hire the same crossing guards back to their old jobs without the benefits,” said Cushman. “I believe the Mayor’s game plan is hire the same people back without benefits, which will undoubtedly lead to an unfair labor practice and a court order which restores union status and benefits to the crossing guards.”




Is Walsh Pumping up Supporters or Simply Stating Fact?

Justin Katz

Hopefully, Bob Walsh is merely trying to manufacture a self-fulfilling prophecy, here:

"We are preparing, if there is a session in October, to be present and strongly advocating for binding arbitration," says Walsh, executive director of the National Education Association of Rhode Island. And, "we are fairly comfortable we have the commitments we need to get this passed."

Legislators shouldn't underestimate the extent or the staying power of objection should they so clearly prove themselves to be doing the bidding of the unions.



Problem Teacher Had Won Arbitration

Marc Comtois

Setting aside the question of why on earth is this woman teaching 7 year olds....

[Kathleen] Borgia arrested shortly after 9 a.m., after a police officer working a construction detail Monday morning noticed a white Mustang swerving in traffic and a witness called the police to report a white Mustang traveling erratically on Hope Street, Contente said. A patrol unit that saw the vehicle on Hope Street stopped the Mustang at State and High streets, Contente said.

Borgia has been back teaching second grade since the beginning of this school year, according to Andrew Henneous, a lawyer for the Bristol Warren School Committee. Her case is in the midst of an appeal, he said.

The School Committee fired Borgia in September 2008 for alcohol-related issues, and she appealed that decision to the American Arbitration Association, which reinstated her job in June, according to Henneous. The School Committee has appealed that decision, and the case is pending in Superior Court, he said.

Borgia has violated her probation on an earlier charge, Contente said. Borgia pleaded no contest in the fall of 2008 to a charge of violating a restraining order, according to Contente and court records. That case was filed for one year on Oct. 8, 2008. She was ordered to undergo batterers intervention and to have no contact with the victim, according to court records.

Borgia also pleaded no contest in August 2004 to a charge of felony domestic assault that was reduced to a charge of domestic simple assault, according to Contente and court records. She received a deferred sentence of five years and was ordered to undergo domestic-abuse counseling and alcohol counseling, according to court records.

Is this the sort of sound decision making we can expect from arbitrated teacher contracts? If neutral arbitrators will go to this length to give the "benefit of the doubt" to a teacher with an apparent history of alcohol-dependency and violence, what the heck will they do if they're allowed to decide on potential contract disputes between teacher unions and school committees? Methinks the ballyhooed "arbitration process" ain't quite as cut and dried as proponents would have us think.


September 28, 2009


The Public Sector Can't Have It All

Justin Katz

Comment-section conversation to the previous post, and to the prior post on the same op-ed, brings to mind the basic philosophical problem with public-sector labor, these days. It was once cliché to think of government jobs as akin to government bonds. The work (or the investment) isn't going to make one rich, but it is characterized by reliability.

Over the past few decades, especially in Rhode Island, the reliability of raises and other remunerative increases has made the public sector lucrative as well as secure. That's simply not a sustainable model, and it can't do otherwise than spark backlashes.


September 25, 2009


Council 94 Leadership Rediscovers Democracy - Membership of Largest State Union to Vote on Gov's Proposal

Monique Chartier

After huddling up in North Providence for a couple of hours this afternoon and listening to an explanation by a couple of HR people from the state of certain nuances of the proposal, the ProJo reports that

The leaders of the largest state employees union reversed course Friday afternoon and agreed to let their members vote on Governor Carcieri's $36-million pay-deferral plan.

And in reporting this development at the bottom of the hour, WPRO's Carolyn Cronin used the term "ballot vote", presumably meaning a secret vote; if so, this, too, is a good thing.


September 24, 2009


"Random Job Reassignment"

Marc Comtois

Council 94 now says they'll accept the Governor's proposal if he agrees to remove the "random job reassignment" provisions.

"We will move this proposal to an immediate vote of our full membership as soon as the Governor removes the one provision that has nothing to do with the state's budget."

"Council 94 is willing to make the financial sacrifices outlined in the most recent proposal in exchange for job security. But the threat of random job reassignment does not give our members job security.''

Read the section after the jump. Basically, it maintains bumping, gives employees two months heads up before a move and lays out other assurances. All so the administration can have the ability to move a qualified union employee from one department to another while also allowing them to maintain membership in their "home" union shop. Real "random." Read on....


Continue reading ""Random Job Reassignment""


Anti-Democratic Council 94 Rejects Governor's Offer

Marc Comtois

The ProJo reports on the decision by Council 94 to reject Governor Carcieri's cost-saving deal, while other unions approved it. The Journal quotes Council 94’s acting executive director Joseph Peckham as saying the 11 to 7 (or 6?) vote as “not even close.” Ooookay.

Peckham said he, Downey and Council 94 vice president Jonathan Braddock recommended a membership vote because “we believe[d] that it was the best that we could do under the circumstances.”

But the proposal went down 11 to 7, according to Ronald Bonsante, president of Local 2876, who was among the minority seeking a union-wide membership vote. “I think the members had a right to approve or reject it,” Bonsante said. “Now, [Carcieri is] definitely going to lay off.” (Another participant recalled only six yea votes.)

When asked what led to the defeat by the Council 94 leadership board, which represents about one-third of the state’s unionized workers, Peckham said: “The strong sense in the room was that state employees have given, and given, and given for the past two or three years, and they’ve given enough.”

“They have gone without pay. They have had pay cuts, because of the health-insurance increases in premiums. They have had their pensions reduced. We are in this like everyone else,” he said. “Most of our people are average working-class people who are trying to eke out a living.”

Ah, but the benevolent leaders didn't allow their average working-class members the chance to vote for themselves. As an anonymous commenter ("vito") to the ProJo story wrote:
[T]he definition of solidarity is we are willing to let the junior man go.
Ahh, brotherhood. The Council 94 leaders are all for democracy and leveling....except when they aren't. Instead, they're willing to play games with their own members livelihood for the sake of the greater union good.
But a number of Council 94 presidents, including the outspoken Salvatore Lombardi, said they would have voted for the deferred paydays this year and next had Carcieri not tried to attach what they considered a deal-breaker: a provision allowing him to move workers from agency to agency, union to union.

“This was supposed to be about saving money and furlough days. But they managed to slide in language about bargaining-unit rights and shifting people around which is more of a union-busting technique,” echoed Paul Levesque, an officer in Local 2876 representing a block of workers in the Department of Children, Youth & Families. “That’s how they bust unions, by splitting them up like that.”

Like there's a chance in hell of anyone "busting" a union in Rhode Island. Gimme a break. And how did they manage to "slide in" language while you were right there at the table? Look, I understand the paranoia that must be going on in the minds of the poor, besieged union bosses, but the idea of shifting people around to similar jobs in different departments--even if that means they'd be moving to different unions(UPDATE: According to Governor's rejected proposal, they would stay with their original unions)--would allow more people to stay employed in jobs for which they are already trained. Such flexibility would facilitate "bumping" by making it easier to place experienced employees where they're truly needed. But that would make too much sense.


September 23, 2009


Did the Governor Just Set a Time Bomb?

Justin Katz

Just out from the governor's office:

Today, Governor Donald L. Carcieri and several state employee labor unions, including the RI Alliance of Social Service Employees (Local 580), RI Laborers' District Council Locals 808 and 1033 (LIUNA), the RI Parole and Probation Associates (RIPPA), and the RI Employment Security Alliance (Local 401 SEIU), announced that a tentative agreement has been reached.

Under this tentative agreement, the respective labor unions have agreed to eight one-day pay reductions in FY 2010. In return, employees will earn 10 leave days, four of which can be cashed out at retirement or voluntary termination from state employment.

In FY2011, the unions have tentatively agreed to delay the implementation of the three percent COLA for six months to January 2, 2011, as well as four one-day pay reductions, in exchange for five leave days, four of which may be cashed out at retirement or voluntary termination from state employment.

The tentative agreements have been approved by the leadership of the respective unions, but must still be ratified by the members. These union leaders are recommending ratification of the agreement by the unions' members. The State is reaching out to the remainder of the State employee labor unions to offer the same agreement.

"The agreement by these labor unions demonstrates that they recognize the seriousness of our state's fiscal crisis, and they are willing to address the issues we are faced with today," said Governor Donald L. Carcieri. "I commend them for their leadership and cooperation in helping the state through this difficult time."

"For the remaining state employee unions, I extend an offer to participate in this agreement, and receive the same benefits, including deferred compensation, additional leave time, and job security, as those unions who have already agreed," continued Carcieri. "We have no objection to Council 94, or any other union, sending this agreement to its full membership for consideration. For those unions who reject the offer, we will continue with our layoff plans. To continue to ignore the fiscal crisis of our state and refuse to be part of the solution is short sighted, and only hurts hard working rank and file state employees."

"The most equitable method is for all state employees to participate in a plan of pay reduction days. Ratification of this agreement will keep people working, eliminate additional layoffs through FY 2011, and keep government services operating without interruption," continued Carcieri. "While as a state and a nation we don't know when our economy will recover and we don't know when our revenues will improve, this agreement will help us to manage through this difficult time without raising broad-based taxes."

"Both sides worked diligently, honestly, and cooperatively to come to terms on an agreement that responds to the State's fiscal problems and provides a mechanism to respond to budgetary needs while managing our existing workforce in a way that delivers services more efficiently while protecting the jobs of our employees," said Gary Sasse, Director of Administration.

Phil Keefe, president of the Rhode Island Alliance of Social Service Employees (RIASSE Local 580) stated, "We believe this agreement is good for our members because it will provide job security."

"This memorandum of agreement has resulted from intensive negotiations over the past several weeks in which all parties have dealt fairly and responsibly with the pressing issues of existing collective bargaining obligations, job security and fiscal reality. The outcome not only validates the process of collective bargaining, but also demonstrates that by working together, the State and its employees are capable of addressing and mutually resolving issues with which the problematic economic situation has presented them," said representatives of Local Unions 808 and 1033 of the Rhode Island Laborers' District Council.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but it looks to me like the governor essentially relied on a line of credit that the unions are extending to the state: Savings now for future paid days off and retirement/layoff/quit bonuses. Plus, it looks like the no-layoffs-through-2011 promise holds.

Abandon hope.


September 22, 2009


Performance Pay Doesn't Mean Cut-Throat Workplace

Justin Katz

Dan Yorke has been talking about the East Providence school administration's push for a pay-for-performance system for teachers, and one teacher from the district called in from her house in Barrington to explain that that sort of pay schedule doesn't work in her profession. Teaching is cooperative, you see, meaning that unlike other professions (apparently) the teachers have to work together, and if some know that others make more, they'll refuse to help.

If that's the case, then the people with whom we currently entrust our children's educations must be replaced immediately, because they lack the requisite maturity.

Now, I know all other fields of work pale in comparison with the divine calling that is public-school teaching, but in every job that I've ever had, whether carpentry, editing, graphic design, office help, retail seafood, or even private-school grade school, differing pay has had absolutely no effect on employees' ability to work as a team. (Boy, wouldn't professional sports be in trouble!) For one thing, pay-for-performance is not zero sum; high-performing employees do not take their additional money away from those who perform less well.

Indeed, it behooves those who earn less to help those who earn more so the latter will provide them assistance in return — both as a matter of course and explicitly to aid in advancement. The carpenters on my jobsite are always quick to help each other, regardless of pay, and they are also quick to seek the input of those whom they know to have more experience and knowledge. Heck, the carpenters are quick to help the electricians and plumbers, who make more money than us even if they're terrible! As long as the structure is perceived as fair and is available to everybody, nobody has cause for grievance against their fellow workers.

If the current crop of teachers in East Providence can't even match the cooperation of lowly construction workers... like I said, they've gotta go.



A Different (and Less Effective) Way of Doing Business

Justin Katz

I share Julia Steiny's aversion to teacher "bumping," of course, but her weekend column brings out the downright philosophical difference that exists in public education, as distinct from private-sector work:

A single regulation from the state, effective the moment each contract expires, would allow schools to get the best teachers they can, when vacancies occur.

But that leaves the problem of displaced, or "excessed" teachers.

Cohen believes that "If teachers don't find a position after a year, they should be cut. Chicago and Austin have negotiated contracts that say that after a year, you're dismissed from the system."

Hmmm. That's a bit harsh. I might give them two or three years, so the time is limited, but enough to burnish their credentials or skills if need be. In the meantime, they could have a permanent substitute position at one school, two at the most, where they can be a member of a school community, instead of floating among schools where they can't integrate into a school culture, or be properly evaluated.

For folks who live their professional lives out from under the government wing, the entire discussion seems other worldly. A professional is hired to do a particular job, not to be a part of a system. It changes the relationship between employer and employee entirely. The public education system is having enough trouble teaching students what they need to know to be successful in life without undertaking the additional mission of coddling adults.

If teachers are "excessed," it means one of two things. Either the specific district of which they were a part had no opening for their talents, in which case, their experience should help them to find another job. (And shouldn't job placement be their union's role, not the the system's?) Or they weren't up to the task that they were hired to perform, in which case, both they and the students are best served by the application of maximum incentive to improve or to find a more suitable area of focus or even a more suitable career.

It is, of course, in any organization's interest to foster among its employees a sense of belonging, and that cannot be accomplished if it is unwilling to expend reasonable effort to find mutually beneficial positions for those who've already been hired. Such decisions can only be made on a case-by-case basis, and any systemic effort to influence the outcome beyond the motivation for success is counterproductive.



Union and Democrat Party, Speaking with One Voice

Justin Katz

This past weekend's episode of Newsmakers, with AFL-CIO RI President George Nee, is worth a watch:

Nee is among the more reasonable-sounding of the labor representatives, but that presentation only emphasizes the absence of space between how he responds to questions and how any given Democrat partisan would answer them. Sure, he's the guy who said that the state needs more political competition between the parties, but some Democrats have said the same thing, and there's an underlying insinuation that the Republicans should become more like Democrats and, for one thing, court labor more enthusiastically.

His take on a "public option" in healthcare, for example, comes directly from a conversation with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: He cites public universities as an example thereof. Perhaps to the extent that "public" means "union jobs," the comparison has some validity, but in practice the two structures are substantially different. Notably, public universities are state-level operations, not federal.

More importantly, though, universities hire professors and not only put course offerings together, but fulfill them, as well. Health insurance is almost purely a matter of paper processing and funding. "Public option" doctors would not be competing with private-sector doctors to offer a more attractive healthcare regimen. Moreover, given the location-specific nature of higher education, translating such a thing into healthcare would represent a dramatic restructuring — with clients having to travel to a central healthcare campus, or the government seeking to place its doctors in every community.

Federal and state governments also have not built a web of regulations and mandates for higher education. Apart from accreditation and general business laws, colleges and universities operate under their own directives, which allows actual competition. In healthcare, so many offerings are explicitly required, and the incentives guiding the means of payment are so heavily manipulated, that the entire system is effectively becoming a "public option."

Somehow, I suspect that Nee, like any partisan Democrat, would not extend the principle of competition — which the left is happy to extol under the currently restrictive circumstances — if it meant permitting citizens to purchase plans more freely and companies to offer a greater variety.


September 19, 2009


The Importance of Putting Food on the Table Feelings

Justin Katz

As I prepare for the first of a bunch of working Saturdays undertaken out of dire financial need, I bring the words of RI School for the Deaf Occupational Therapist Meg Denton with me to ponder:

Today I was determined to be a "nonessential" state employee. I was told that I am required to accept 12 working days throughout the year without pay. It's not clear to me whether I am supposed to show up to work or not, but either way I will not be paid and I am labeled as nonessential. When I look up the opposite word, essential, in the dictionary, it uses words such as "indispensable," "elemental," "necessary." This word "nonessential" implies that an employee is dispensable, not necessary, not really needed. This is a really awful feeling.

Yes, I'd be upset about losing quite a bit of money during these furlough days, but what really bothers me is the use of language to describe essential and nonessential employees. In these economic times, I think that the governor of Rhode Island could have been more thoughtful in his use of language. Everyone is essential and we all really need to feel that now. Could he not have used a less disrespectful way of putting it, such as "state employees required to take furlough days"?

Her fellow Rhode Islanders are unemployed, underemployed, losing their homes; they're selling valuables, foregoing vacations, and trimming all disposable expenditures from their budgets; and Ms. Denton apparently has the emotional space to be offended by the governor's use of a widely known and well understood personnel term.

Referring to budget documents online (PDF), it appears that Ms. Denton's salary, this year, is $76,014, and the original request for 12 furlough days would bring her about $1,500 below her salary last year, of $74,160. (Let's not forget, also, that the average benefits package in her school is worth $33,504.) Little wonder she has the liberty to whine about a word. How would she feel about "coddled."


September 18, 2009


Why There's No Agreement Yet

Carroll Andrew Morse

Steve Peoples of the Projo identifies the main issue that, so far, has prevented the Carcieri administration and state employees labor unions from finalizing an agreement on a pay reduction with some deferred compensation for state employees, in order to avoid either shutdown days of layoffs...

The potential deal-breaker appears to be Carcieri’s bid for more flexibility than current union contracts allow to move state workers from job to job, agency to agency, and union to union.

For the first time, Carcieri said Thursday his no-layoff promise to the unions, for the next two years, was specifically tied to the unions’ willingness to give him more flexibility than he has now to move workers around....

Carcieri provided his own perspective, as he was leaving a business-sponsored health-care summit in Warwick: “They want a no-layoff [promise]. I said I could agree with that for this year, because we’re well into the year and effectively getting any layoffs done for this year, it would be problematic anyway to get significant savings. But they want a two-year deal. And all I’ve said [is], I’m happy to consider that, but if we’re going to have no layoffs for two years, we need flexibility, because even without layoffs there’s going to be changes going on and you need to move people around.”


September 14, 2009


Vlogging About Open Negotiations

Justin Katz

My latest video blog is about open negotiations, drawing on material from Tiverton, but applicable elsewhere.

I'd be especially interested in feedback on this one, inasmuch as I tried some new tricks (in an effort to throw myself at the learning curve) and am still trying to get a sense of appropriate content for the medium. Let me know your thoughts on any aspect of video that might inspire comment. In advance, I'll say that this is probably about as long as my vlogs will ever be, and yes, next time, I'll take a few minutes to shave beforehand. (Hey, it was a busy weekend.)


September 13, 2009


What Rhode Islanders Should Fear

Justin Katz

Here's a Dilbert cartoon from July that certain segments of Rhode Island society should consider:

Dilbert.com


September 12, 2009


Open Negotiations in Tiverton

Justin Katz

Yes, this is a local instance, but I've no doubt whatsoever that similar opinions exist — and the same arguments would be made — in towns across Rhode Island, were school committees to begin considering a demand for open negotiations.

I've posted video of the discussion about the topic at the last school committee meeting in the extended entry.

Continue reading "Open Negotiations in Tiverton"

September 11, 2009


Reckless Promises, Yes or No?

Justin Katz

Brian Hull summarizes the approaching resolution between the governor and the state's public sector unions thus:

Under the agreement, state workers would take eight unpaid days in this fiscal year and four unpaid days in the next fiscal year. State workers will wait an additional six months for their next pay raise. There will be no additional threats of furloughs, shutdown days or layoffs until June 30, 2011 (the next Governor's problem). And the workers will have the opportunity to recoup some lost pay or take bonus vacation days upon leaving state service.

The part about "no additional threats" strikes me as a surpassing reckless promise for the governor to make, in this economic and political climate, so I followed Brian's links. The source in all cases is Council 94 President Michael Downey, and at this point, an explicit promise appears to be more of a hope than a description.

One needn't be an anti-union zealot to see the danger of taking further reductions in labor costs off the table, and I suspect that when the details shake out, there will at least be escape clauses.



East Providence Moves Forward in Another Way

Justin Katz

From a press release just out from the East Providence School Committee:

The proposal calls for a collaboration among "stakeholders" in developing the system of evaluating teachers that will be the basis for paying them beginning in 2011. The "stakeholders" would include parents, teachers, administrators, the teachers' union and educational experts from Rhode Island and beyond.

The proposal would pay a top step "Master" teacher a base salary of over $80,000, higher than any other school department in the state.

"We're not just willing to pay for excellence, we want to pay for it," said Carcieri. "We have many, many teachers who are worth their weight in gold. It's time to stop pretending that all teachers are the same, and to reward those who go the extra mile, who really bring the best out in their students."

The details are the difficulty, of course, and the trick is getting the union to agree, inasmuch as folks will tend not to abandon a really good deal (as the teachers currently have) if there's any risk at all that obtaining a better deal will require work and will not be a sure thing. But this is a direction that the United States must pursue if it is eventually to cease its dereliction when it comes to educating younger generations.

My guess, though, is that it's yet another obvious and necessary change that is going to have to be implemented unilaterally.

Continue reading "East Providence Moves Forward in Another Way"

September 10, 2009


Mixed Messages from School Districts, and Final Decisions from the Judiciary

Justin Katz

Doesn't it seem that school districts somehow always just happen to find money? I mean, sometimes a car's brake lines just happen to go the day after it's been in the shop for a tuneup, but it's difficult to know what to make of the Woonsocket superintendent's claim that the district can now hire a few new teachers, as the state insists, without increasing the budget deficit:

Gerardi said those positions could be paid for with money that the district was receiving from the Northern Rhode Island Collaborative and by consolidating classes elsewhere in the system because of lower-than-expected enrollments that became apparent after the start of school.

For two other positions — an administrator for part of the literacy program and a librarian at the high school — Gerardi said the district believes it can show that more qualified people already on staff will be capable of fulfilling the responsibilities of those positions.

So was that collaborative money just going to be used for red balloons? Were those "qualified people" just going to be employed blowing them up? One begins to sympathize (just a little) with unions' feeling that school committees and the administrations that they direct preserve plenty of fat in their budgets that they can trim when required.

That impression adds a little bite to Education Commissioner Deborah Gist's reference, in this context, to state law requiring "maintenance of effort." It would be disconcerting to think that Ms. Gist sees the maintenance of effort clause as license to force districts to adhere to her demands.

Meanwhile, in East Providence, the embattled school committee is seeking a 3.5% increase in the municipality's contribution to its funding, even as the state demands that the city revise its plan for balancing its budget. Look, I'm thrilled about the list of items slated for increases:

The proposal calls for a 210-percent increase, from $250,000 to $776,962, in what was allocated for textbooks and instructional supplies this year. It also has more money for building and classroom maintenance (from $289,500 to $820,500); technology (from $214,682 to $489,682); and athletics and extracurricular activities (from $46,453 to $146,453).

But not only are these things that Rhode Island's townspeople should be considered as already paying for, but it can't do otherwise than leave it to judges to decide between this spending and increases in adult compensation packages. Maybe they'll rule the right way, maybe they won't. But it's way too easy to envision their joining with Gist in affirming the principle that budgets may always be balanced with an increase in taxes.


September 9, 2009


East Providence Plan Not Good Enough

Justin Katz

General Assembly Auditor General Ernest Almonte has rejected East Providence's budget balancing plan (PDF):

The City of East Providence and the School Department have a well established history of deficits. Unfortunately, the City has failed to adequately resolve its financial dilemma. The current Plan is similar to prior deficit reduction plans which proposed the sale of school buildings and dedicating meals tax revenue. I find this Plan does not provide sufficient detail. It includes speculative and uncertain elements, and does not provide calculations in support of the savings you assert will be realized. A serious deficiency in your Plan involves the teachers' union complaint pending before the Rhode Island Superior court and the State Labor Relations Board. The Plan's failure to provide for a contingency in the event the union prevails in this litigation is unacceptable. Clearly, a ruling adverse to the City would undermine your Plan. I expect the city to address its course of action if the union prevails in this litigation. The Plan also fails to eliminate the accumulated deficit by annual appropriation, over no more than five (5) years, in equal or diminshing amounts as required by law. ...

The school deficit has been accumulating for too many years and must be immediately addressed in a financially responsible fashion.

So, the school deficit must be addressed, but the city can't count on its being done via the single greatest expense in that budget.



Shutdowns, Furloughs, Deferred Compensation and the Price of Doin' Business

Carroll Andrew Morse

In the ongoing dispute over state-government shutdown days, as frequently occurs in public-sector union negotiations in Rhode Island, labor representatives are claiming they have a plan that will save just as much money as the plan put forth by government officials. Scott MacKay from WRNI's On Politics blog reports…

Union representatives now say publicly that they have offered Carcieri a way to save money -- using furlough days rather than a state shutdown. This was the path followed by then-Gov. Bruce Sundlun during the 1991 banking crisis, the last time the state had such a deep deficit. Under the furlough option, state employees could count the unpaid furlough days toward retirement benefits or as unpaid vacation days. Michael Downey, head of Council 94 of AFSCME, said the unions offered those terms to Carcieri but that he rejected them.
The Sundlun plan was actually a deferred compensation plan, where state employees worked unpaid days and chose amongst various options for getting paid for them later. The New York Times provided a brief summary of the details…
Eight more one-day furloughs had been planned, but on Friday the unions agreed to Mr. Sundlun's pay-deferral proposal, similar to an idea whose rejection by labor in February led to the shutdowns.

Under the agreement, the workers will forgo pay for eight days from now through June 30, the end of the fiscal year, and will give up pay for 19 days in the fiscal year beginning July 1. They will be able to regain the days as vacation time, in a lump-sum payment or as extra paid personal days off when they retire or quit.

The Times story isn't clear if this was a straight one-to-one trade of hours worked for deferred compensation collected -- that would seem to be the reasonable thing, but we don't always find our way to reasonableness here in Rhode Island. Still, it is possible that such a plan could be structured in a way that truly saved money in a current budget year, allowing state government to cut somewhere else in future years, in order to pay for the deferred compensation.

However, a Tom Mooney story from the Providence Journal on the same subject made it clear that Governor Sundlun didn't get his deferred compensation deal without having to pay a little vig to the unions, in the form of some additional compensation for two shutdown days that occurred, before an agreement was reached…

In the two shutdowns that were held - March 8 and 18 - employees did not get paid. But Sundlun, who's pay will also be deferred, suspended further shutdowns and started new negotiations with union presidents....

The unions also agreed not to seek compensation for the two previous shutdowns, and in exchange the state granted one additional day of paid leave.

With all of the possibilities that are available, in order to evaluate the reasonableness of a union alternative to the government shutdown plan, the public needs to know if the unions are asking for something extra in return for agreeing to some sort of deferred but more flexible compensation option and if so, how much. If the answer is truly "none", maybe something can be worked out.

Finally, another question worth asking based on the Mooney article, is whether this attiude expressed by a 1991 state union leader...

"I'm disappointed," said Joann Orsi, president of a Council 94 affiliate, Local 2870 in the Department of Health. "There are no benefits for state employees in that plan."

Orsi said she would have rather seen Sundlun lay off more of the state's 16,300 unionized workers "in the proper order" of seniority, rather than have her members have their pay deferred.

...is still at-all present amongst Rhode Island's current state-employee union leadership.


September 8, 2009


Public Business in the Open

Justin Katz

Arriving at tonight's Tiverton School Committee meeting even a few minutes before the usual time wasn't sufficient for me to catch most of the meeting. According to the current agenda, an executive session began at 5:30, with the public meeting scheduled thereafter, and the committee is almost all the way through the scheduled topics. Luckily, I didn't miss the planned discussion of holding NEA negotiations in the open.

To be honest, I thought there'd be more people here, for that item, but perhaps the prospect of waiting out a closed session of indeterminate duration dissuaded some folks.

7:15 p.m.

I brought the video camera, although I don't plan to tape these sorts of meetings from start to finish. The particular discussion, though, is one to which I'd like to be able to make reference later.

But it does raise an interesting new problem: Contrasted with a small audio recording device, a camcorder (plus tripod) cut a figure in the room, and while it isn't my intent to be a hidden-camera guy, I also don't wish to become a focal point in the room.

Consequently, I'll have to figure out how to choose seating. The current arrangement in the high school library pretty much forces me to capture any speakers in the audience from behind.

7:38 p.m.

This isn't a complaint, but there's an extended conversation going on about AP classes and exams. The conversation began because the trends in Tiverton aren't the best, but the conversation has become general about the essential concept of AP. It's more like something from a social gathering than a meeting of an elected body. Just an observation; I wouldn't have expected the interest to be so high.

9:44 p.m. (from home)

What an astonishing conversation about open contract negotiations. Some familiar faces — none of them direct NEA union members, as far as I know — came forward to argue that the school committee shouldn't even bring up open negotiations with the union because it would start things off on the wrong foot. Put the degree of assumption aside; the committee is already in court over something about union claims that Chairman Jan Bergandy is openly declaring to be lies. The notion of good faith in these negotiations is a fantasy, a sham.

But the same people went on to argue that giving the public more information is intrinsically bad, in part because of the possibility of differing interpretations. In other words, it's better to allow participants in closed-door discussions to tell the public what their interpretation is than to let we dolts in the electorate decide for ourselves.

The kicker was when school committee member Carol Herrmann argued that if Mr. Bergandy feels that he cannot trust the union negotiators, then perhaps he shouldn't be participating in the negotiations! Think about that. The union lied about something that he said (in his view), and he is now openly and fairly raising ways in which trust can be regained and ensured, and the response — from an ostensible representative of the public! — is that he's been tainted and ought to take himself out of the picture.

It was like watching the lunchtime supervisors in middle school argue that a beaten and bloody student should proceed into a dark corner with the bully in good faith, because, honestly, really, truly, this time the bully is interested in calmly resolving differences.

Some folks expressed concern that requesting open negotiations would create costly delays in the contract creation process, but let's be honest: As I warned the committee before it made the ridiculously poor decision to approve the last contract, the union is simply not going to negotiate until the economy recovers. Precedent has proven that they'll receive retroactive pay from the economic perspective of the date that the contract is approved (i.e., in good times), and as long as they're able to hold out, they will.


September 7, 2009


A Telling Exchange with the Unionist

Justin Katz

Yesterday, I related an anecdote in which I used my vehicle as a means of forcing traffic etiquette. The part of the tale on which National Education Association of Rhode Island Assistant Executive Director Patrick Crowley honed in was that I'd used my work van to get to a political event:

You are allowed to use your work van for political and blog work?

My response, of course, was that I own my work van and require nobody to grant me permission to use it however I like. It's a freedom thing, and I can't help but feel that these few sentences of banter trace back to fundamental differences in opinion about reality and the rights of man.


September 4, 2009


Weighing Down Public Investment, Whether "Stimulus" or Otherwise

Justin Katz

So, firefighters from three cities have joined the state carpenters' union in picketing the construction site of a new firehouse in Johnston — perhaps erroneously:

Two hours after the lines went up, Mayor Joseph M. Polisena said that when the town awarded its contractor to the low bidder, Iron Construction, two months ago, it clearly stipulated that all the work had to be performed by union members or by other workers at the prevailing wage.

"The town will not break any state or federal laws. We will ask to get a certified copy of the company payrolls, and if we find that prevailing rates were not paid, we will not release any money," the mayor said.

This part might not resonate with most readers, but it's a telling statement:

"We believe their workers are being paid half the standard rate," [union representative David] Palmisciano said. "They are undermining community standards."

For some context about "community standards," we should recall that union carpenters recently signed a new pact with the main contractors association, as follows:

The carpenters now get $30 per hour plus $20.45 per hour to cover health insurance and other benefits.

The new two-year deal, approved unanimously Thursday morning by about 400 members at the union hall in Warwick, calls for a $1.50-per-hour increase in the first year and an additional $1.75 the second.

That rate is easily double the "community standard" for private-sector carpenters, if those with whom I've discussed such matters are a representative sample. Heck, I'd wager that a good percentage of experienced carpenters in the state don't make, total, what the union carpenters get for benefits.

I don't raise this as a carpenter, because it isn't my intention to delve into the response that I'd give to the obvious retort, "So join the union." I raise it as a follower of public policy. What this dynamic means is that every dollar that the government spends on the labor component of carpentry contracts goes to half as many workers as it would in the private sector, or else it funds half as much work.

Progressives like to think that they're thereby taking money from the rich to give it to the middle class, but it's naive in the extreme to believe that the program works out that way when filtered throughout the economy. They're harming workers, most of all. They're also ensuring that the billions of dollars in government borrowing that's been sold to the American people as a plan to assist the economy are heavily diluted by unnecessary excess for favored groups.



The Hard Work of Educating

Justin Katz

The rhetoric about public-sector workers' doggedly, thanklessly doing the hard work that the community requires, recently promoted around here by Phil, comes to mind especially with the item that I've italicized in the following:

EAST PROVIDENCE — The city's teachers have voted to withdraw from volunteer activities in the district's schools.

The roughly 500 educators won't help with afterschool activities except for those that are accompanied with paid stipends, nor will they chaperone dances, buy supplies for their classrooms or participate on committees for curriculum development, accreditation or school improvement.

This isn't just a temporary imposition affecting only the irreplaceable educational experiences of current students — which is egregious enough; it's acceptance of decay in the system itself. Teachers may see school committees come and go, they may see budgets swell and ebb, but in East Providence, they apparently don't consider themselves to be guardians of the city's education system. Of what value are they, then, beyond replaceable cogs in the public machine?

Perhaps it should be encouraging that Education Commissioner Deborah Gist included the East Providence teachers' actions among the issues of concern that she highlighted at yesterday's Board of Regents meeting, but a contrast of emphasis emerges. In the case of Woonsocket, she threatened the superintendent's certification over the hiring decisions of the school committee. If she believes, as she states, that educators should never "make decisions that directly impact students" (in a negative way, we can assume she means), then perhaps she should be looking into revoking their certification when they behave as if their jobs are more a matter of entitlement than calling.


September 3, 2009


Public Sector Pay vs Private Sector Pay

Monique Chartier

Would it be an awkward moment to mention this?

State and local government workers are enjoying major gains in compensation, pushing the value of their average wages and benefits far ahead of private workers, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data shows.

The gap is widening every year, rising by an average $1.02 an hour last year and $2.45 an hour over the past three years. The better pay and benefits for public employees come as private-sector workers face stagnant wages and rising unemployment.

State and local government workers now earn an average of $39.50 per hour in total compensation, reports the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Private workers earn an average of $26.09 an hour.

But that's way back in February, 2008, you point out. Very well, let's fast forward to April, 2009. Unfortunately, the intervening year only exacerbated the situation. And residents of the state where the benny is king will not be overly surprised at the source of the widening differential.

The pay gap between government workers and lower-compensated private employees is growing as public employees enjoy sizable benefit growth even in a distressed economy, federal figures show.

Public employees earned benefits worth an average of $13.38 an hour in December 2008, the latest available data, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) says. Private-sector workers got $7.98 an hour.

Overall, total compensation for state and local workers was $39.25 an hour — $11.90 more than in private business. In 2007, the gap in wages and benefits was $11.31.

The gap has been expanding because of the increasing value of public employee benefits. Last year, government benefits rose three times more than those in the private sector: up 69 cents an hour for civil servants, 23 cents for private workers.




Union Bosses Win: 1,000 Brothers and Sisters to be Laid Off

Marc Comtois

After a long day, the state employee union leaders got their wish when Supreme Court Justice Maureen McKenna Goldberg overturned Superior Court Judge Michael Silverstein's decision and granted a stay of the implementation of Governor Carcieri's plan to have 12 shut-down days in an attempt to save money. The result: 1,000 state workers will now be laid off. In a statement (h/t Cynthia Needham at 7to7), the Governor wrote:

"It should greatly disturb every state employee and every Rhode Islander that labor leaders are willing to sacrifice people's jobs so they can maintain their stranglehold on the citizens of this state....This decision by Justice McKenna Goldberg may just be the straw that broke the camel's back, sending this state down the path to financial ruin, as it gives greater weight to union and special interest demands rather than the fiscal reality of the state and the employment of state workers. Preventing the state from moving forward with the shutdown days cripples our ability to address growing budget gaps, and stops the executive branch from fulfilling its constitutional duty to balance the state's budget."
Is it any wonder why labor unions are increasingly unpopular?



E.P. Teachers Offer "Kid-Friendly" Boycott of After School Activities

Marc Comtois

ProJo reports:

The city's teachers have voted to withdraw from volunteer activities in the city's schools.

The roughly 500 educators won't help with afternoon activities except for those that are accompanied with paid stipends, nor will they chaperone dances, buy supplies for their classrooms or participate in committees for curriculum development, accreditation or school improvement.

The changes are effective immediately and will affect all of the city's 13 schools. School begins Sept. 9.

"We're continuing all our contractual obligations and beyond," said Valarie Lawson, the president of the local teachers union, East Providence Education Association. The union adopted the policy at a Monday membership meeting.

"This is not work to rule," said East Providence High School history teacher Greg Amore, a member of the committee that developed the teachers' plan.

When teacher unions vote to do only what is contractually necessary, it is considered "work to rule" in education circles.

The city's teachers, however, will continue to write letters of recommendation for students, meet and talk with parents and be involved with parent-teacher organizations. They will also continue to offer after-school help, coach sports teams, correct papers and plan lessons at home, and participate in all paid extracurricular activities.

Amore said this plan is "kid-friendly."

Right.


September 2, 2009


Retired Teacher in Favor of Binding Arbitration. Surprised?

Justin Katz

It's disappointing to see retired teacher and principal John Savage (R - East Providence) release an op-ed in favor of binding arbitration on House Minority Office letterhead. The piece (provided in full in the extended entry) amounts to union spin issued in the name of the Republican Party. The substantive core of Savage's argument is as follows:

There is a belief that arbitration decisions overwhelmingly favor teacher unions. Over a span of ten years, (long enough to give us a respectable sampling) 636 teacher contracts were negotiated in the Nutmeg State. Only seventy-five (12%) of these contracts (756 individual items) were submitted to arbitration. Scorecard of decisions rendered: School Boards-379/ Unions-377. Let us probe deeper! Health Insurance issues: School Boards-52%/ Unions 48%, Working Conditions: School Boards 53%/ Unions 47%, Salary issues: School Boards 42%/ Unions 58%.

Well did those arbitrated salary decisions put the strain on municipal budgets? Maybe they did, but certainly not because of the arbitration. The arbitrated salary increases averaged 2.39% while the negotiated salary increases averaged 2.48%.

Savage offers zero, zilch, nada indication of his source or of the 10-year span that he's describing. He explains that binding arbitration became law in Connecticut in 1979, which ought to leave almost three decades of data. Why present numbers from only one third of those years? It's curious to note that, in this regard, the elected Republican representative's spin is more egregious than that of NEA Assistant Executive Director Pat Crowley, who at least divulged the years at which he was looking and used a span showing higher increases than Savage describes (my response here).

The lack of citation also makes it impossible to adjust for context. So School Boards won 52% of healthcare-related disputes, but that might mean they won the right to send out plan descriptions in digital form, instead of paper while the unions won the right to continue paying 4% coshares. Who knows?

One thing we can say is that, alone among the various categories that Savage lists, salary increases inherently compound. Health insurance and working conditions can change from year to year; salaries never, never go down in the world of public sector education.

If Savage is truly after a solution — for the benefit of Rhode Island's students — that will resolve contract disputes through "fair and evenhanded legislation," he could advocate for a ban on retroactivity. That would give the unions incentive to reach agreement, rather than to drag out "negotiations" for years on end to ensure that the cost of their labor never recedes.

The most fundamental problem with Savage's position is that he cuts out the consideration of most concern to those whom he ostensibly represents. That the arbitration produces slightly less remunerative results for unions tells us only that it kicks into gear where the terms of contracts are most hotly disputed. In other words, it's a safety switch that unions can hit when taxpayers manage to mount a truly substantive response to their steamroller.

Continue reading "Retired Teacher in Favor of Binding Arbitration. Surprised?"


A World of Labor's Own

Justin Katz

The union organizations probably have to go through these motions, if only to perform a tribal dance proving their value to members, but I wonder whether such news doesn't serve to remind taxpayers why they're increasingly annoyed with the existence of an alternate employment reality in the public sector:

With the largest state employees union rejecting a state-offered compromise that would let workers recoup some — but not all — of the pay they stand to lose during a government shutdown, the two sides are headed to court Wednesday over the union's bid for a temporary restraining order to block Governor Carcieri's 12 shutdown days.

As is often the case with cartoons, I think Jim Bush captures a swelling mood with this one (reprinted with permission):


September 1, 2009


The Price of Teacher Hiring Reform

Marc Comtois

The Providence Teacher's union isn't happy with new hiring rules put in affect this summer, according to this WRNI report from Elisabeth Harrison (h/t). The nut of it is, of course, the removal of seniority as the major factor in determining who gets hired. As Harrison reports:

An order from the State Department of Education...required district leaders to fill all vacancies in the district with the best person for the job instead of the most senior teacher as the teacher contract stipulates.
Apparently, around 100 Providence district teachers have been replaced by out-of-district teachers thanks to the new criterion-based hiring policy. Using this process, the schools got 96% of their first choices (100% of first two) while teachers got 86% of theirs. Steve Smith of the Providence Teachers union found the Superintendent's office uncommunicative and compared them to the Politburo. Helpful. Smith wanted to give some weight to experience, but, as mandated by the State, Providence had to get away from that method. And by the way, the non-working Providence district teachers continue to receive full pay and benefits while they sit in the reserve pool. Providence Superintendent Tom Brady explained that, basically, such is the price of transition.


August 31, 2009


Self Interested Members of Unions and Taxpayer Groups

Justin Katz

I'll be the first to acknowledge the prominence of self interest in the development and ascendance of local taxpayer groups. Members take up political arms, as it were, for a variety of reasons, and often those reasons are decidedly materialistic in nature. Therewith comes the sliver of truth to Phil's cartoonish characterization of the simmering conflict in multiple Rhode Island communities:

Individual union members are taxpayers and voters. They like all the rest of us act out of self interest. It is in their self interest to join the workplace union and be represented by professionals. Too bad this choice is not nearly as available in the private sector. They like the rest of us have the right to try to effect the policies of their government. They also have the right to effect the policies of their unions through democratic means as David writes, something that is not available to private sector workers unless they belong to a union or an association. Most of these public sector workers will work in their communities for 30 or more years. They will see politicians come and go. Teachers particularly will see administrators come and go. They will see many school committee people come and go. Also they will see the taxpayer groups that form and make their noise come and go. But through that time they will stay and continue to do the essential work in those communities. That and their selflessness in joining together as a group will sustain them and their respective communities. Not so with the taxpayer groups. As you mention, Justin, when times are bad, people pay more attention to their local government. That's not a bad thing at all, but do not try to equate that with the longtime commitment to a community of the teacher or other public sector worker. Formed out of anger and selfishness these taxpayer groups fall apart after a short time. It's hard to keep people worked up and angry enough to overcome their basic selfishness. They stay involved for a while and then move back to more comfortable pursuits or to things that meet their self interest more directly. Most people would rather be with their families than sitting in overheated rooms being bored to tears or trying to manufacture outrage that amounts to pettiness. How could anyone keep doing that for thirty years?

In this picture, the unions are sustained by their selfless devotion to each other and to the community, while taxpayer groups appear in a flash of anger and then dissipate, leaving no trace. The intricacies of human relationships between people of differing personalities, goals, and interests seems not to enter Phil's design.

Whatever the motivation for their formation, taxpayer groups pull together residents who share certain principles and worldviews, and not surprisingly, find themselves forming lasting friendships. Meanwhile, they learn the ropes of local politics and policies, and some percentage continue their civic involvement ever after. Such groups also build structures, from PACs to transparency mechanisms that a handful of them, at least, will think it worth the minimal effort to maintain. In short, pretty much for the lifetimes of those involved, the public eye will remain more open than it was.

But sure, I'll acknowledge that an improved economy and achievement of some threshold of repair to the damaged governing system will drain fuel from the political machine that makes such groups a force to be reckoned with. There is a need to fulfill, in a local society, and these groups arise to address it, and the time and effort involved act as a mechanism for defusing them when they are no longer needed.

That, in essence, is the problem with public sector unions. A union, by its nature, pushes for the benefits of its members, and when workers are oppressed and individually powerless, the society pulls them together in an organized way to address the problem. There is no mechanism, however, to cause them to dissipate or hibernate when their purpose has been served. If a union were to shift gears to neutral because the circumstances of its workers had achieved an equilibrium of comfort and occupational demand, the workers would soon do away with the costly advocacy structure. So, the unions keep the push going, so that they can convince their members of their value.

The community suffers, because the unions demand increasing percentages of local resources. They become, indeed, the focus of local government, and avarice sets in. Even in a short time of observation, I've seen too many union decisions favoring raises at the cost of young teachers' jobs to buy the selflessness argument. Moreover, anybody who's compared public-sector and private-sector jobs in Rhode Island can't but laugh at the notion that those in the public sector stick around for thirty years out of a sense of altruism and community.


August 30, 2009


The Unions and Their Jobs

Justin Katz

David makes a perspicacious comment to my post on the item in the teachers' contract that the school committee approved in January that effectively extended the contract for an additional year because the deadline for notification of intention to negotiate had already passed:

Actually, justin, you may be on to something. Union officials act as legal representatives for their membership and are charged with only that mission. The example that you wrote about- well that's all on the school committee for not knowing their own contract with the union. You insist on calling it a union contract when it is a contract between two parties. Both are held to its terms. Where you have something is in the reality that individual union members are often times members of the community where they work, and, are often times very interested and concerned about issues facing their community. In the case of teachers, police, firefighters, and social workers it is often the case that they are more concerned- because they have a closer view and knowledge of local issues and problems than say a Boston area worker who leaves their home in Tiverton at 6:30 in the morning and returns at 6:30 at night. Teachers often times know the community through the children better than anyone else. If you can convince those community members that their union representatives are the problem and change is needed in their own workplace than you will have a chance. Union members acting in the democratic framework of their union could help affect the changes you seek.

Realizing that it would be too much to hope that one party in these "fair-minded" negotiations would have clarified with the other that it was effectively approving the contract for an additional year, I do and did hold the school committee members responsible (and will, via future elections). Truth be told, I also allocate some blame to myself for having not been sufficiently familiar with previous contract language to have raised this question during public commentary. I suspect that might have been the one thing that could have scuttled what was clearly a fait accompli at the fateful January meeting.

With that clarification, I'd note that David is dead on to raise the importance of individual union members in changing the dynamic. Just as I'd be tempted to make it a civic requirement that every resident attend at least one school committee meeting during contract negotiation season, so as to observe, first hand, the undertone of violence that the union audience stirs up to waft onto the dais, I'd encourage teachers to spend some time pondering the structures and regimes of their non-educational organization.

As I've been given to understand, for example, a typical negotiation session involves the superintendent and couple of committee representatives at a table with two or three leaders of the local union, while a larger union negotiating committee waits in a nearby room, sometimes with a rep from the statewide organization manipulating the temper among them. (Pat Crowley, I understand, can be heard through the walls.) The small group will bring items back to the larger group and return with ostensible instructions, and ultimately the negotiating committee brings the result back to the entire membership for approval. Meanwhile, as we've seen in Tiverton, the union will go public with unverifiable claims and complaints that the entire school committee isn't available in the theatrically controlled space to negotiate the contract. (A con is much easier when there's no opportunity for head-clearing air.) Moreover, at no time is the administration or committee permitted to appeal directly to the professionals whose contracts they're negotiating.

While times were flush and the citizenry was inactive, this might have seemed like a fun pastime — and remunerative, too! Union members across the Rhode Island public sector should consider, however, the effect of shifting public opinion as taxpayer groups generate an institutional investment in continued awareness. That is to say that we aren't going away, and with the processes coming out, the folks who've ultimately suffered from the game are going to be less inclined to tolerate it.

Because the pendulum always swings too far, a clever gotcha in one year's contract could ensure that somebody with a set jaw and brow as furrowed as my own will end up at that negotiating table, demanding that public-access video cameras be set up to capture the edifying performance.


August 28, 2009


A Union Gotcha in the Contract

Justin Katz

Given recent developments, I thought I'd review my notes and the audio from the Tiverton School Committee meeting at which the members approved a largely retroactive contract. Several townsfolk warned the committee that approving the contract in the current economy was reckless. I specifically suggested that, former Vice Chair Mike Burk's suggestion to "hold the line" with the subsequent contract notwithstanding, the union would have every incentive to avoid negotiations at this time. But four of the five committee members thought it would be the fair, community-minded thing to pass the contract (PDF) and move on to negotiations for the next one — which should cover the upcoming school year — in a spirit of collegiality.

Well, the union must have been snickering behind its hand, with Article 31 of the approved document (carried over from the previous contract) in mind:

The provisions of this Agreement shall be effective as of September 1, 2007 and will continue and remain in full force and effect until August 31, 2009. Said Agreement will automatically be renewed and will continue in full force and effect for additional periods of one (1) year unless either the School Committee or the Association gives written notice to the other not later than December 1 of the year prior to the aforesaid expiration date, or any anniversary thereof, of its desire to reopen the Agreement and to negotiate over the terms of a successor Agreement.

Never mind that the contract wasn't approved until after the deadline, the union is insisting that notice was not given, so the contract remains in force until next year. As the Newport Daily News reports, that serves to keep all salaries where they are — with step increases continuing, of course — and prevent the school committee from realizing the increase in healthcare contributions for which it had budgeted.

Even union-friendly committee member Sally Black was "surprised" by the move. Gotcha.

See, to the union, talk of community, fairness, openness, honesty, education, and the good of children is merely a pack of cards to play. It's all about the adults and their remuneration and their benefits and their occupational comfort and soaking taxpayers for the maximum amount possible. If I were a teacher, I'd be ashamed to be associated with such an organization. As a taxpayer, I've certainly got my eye out for school committee candidates who won't be so easily fooled.

As services for students begin evaporating and taxes go up, parents and their neighbors should be careful to allocate blame where it belongs: With the calculating, manipulative union that represents the single largest expenditure in either of the town's budgets.


August 25, 2009


A Quiet Rumble in the Tiverton School District

Justin Katz

As I pulled up to the Tiverton High School at the usual time for a school committee meeting, I saw two of my Tiverton Citizens for Change co-conspirators leaving. The committee scheduled an executive session for 5:00 p.m. and had worked through all of tonight's interesting public discussions before 7:00. The key results, as conveyed to me in the parking lot:

  • Chairman Jan Bergandy read a letter from local union President Amy Mullen that suggested that the union and school committee had agreed to accept the current contract as expiring next year (a brazen ploy that surfaced out of nowhere a few weeks ago). Mr. Bergandy declared Mullen's statement to be an outright lie, and the committee authorized its lawyer to take some sort of action.
  • The committee agreed to issue a statement to the General Assembly opposing any sort of legislation calling for binding arbitration.
  • The committee also put on the agenda for its next meeting discussion of conducting union negotiations openly and in public.

August 20, 2009


It's That "Arbitration" Word

Justin Katz

Yeah, there are several distinctions that could be drawn, but it's difficult not to see this as a significant anecdote as the General Assembly plays with the idea of binding arbitration for teachers:

An arbitrator has blocked for the foreseeable future Mayor David N. Cicilline's attempt to switch the health-care benefits administrator for city employees who are represented by labor unions.

Arbitrator Girard R. Visconti declared in effect that by making the switch, Cicilline would have violated labor contracts by diluting employee health-care benefits. Cicilline had insisted repeatedly that there would have been no change in benefits.

The decision, which was distributed to the litigants Monday, is a sharp setback in the mayor's campaign to better reconcile employee costs with the city's ability to pay. Cicilline had claimed that switching from Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island to United Healthcare of New England would save the city nearly $6 million over three years.


August 15, 2009


Objectivity Isn't Always the Best Approach

Justin Katz

Like fairness, objectivity is a generally positive principle that needn't be — shouldn't be — the guiding principle in every circumstance. One circumstance in which a degree of subjectivity is appropriate, applied to a collection of objective criteria is the hiring of teachers, whatever their argument might currently be in Providence:

The union claims that Brady's hiring practice "eliminates in its entirety impartial and objective decision-making" because it requires the district to offer only an "adequate explanation" for teacher assignments.

So, as we've heard before, standardized testing is inappropriate because of all of the intangibles of teaching (i.e., it must be measured subjectively), and the hiring methodology of most of the rest of the economic world is inappropriate because it isn't sufficiently objective. Is Rhode Island done falling for this stuff, yet?


August 12, 2009


Re: Rhode Island Board of Regents Approves Teacher Evaluation Plan

Justin Katz

Whispers among administrative types are expressing skepticism about the regents' call for teacher evaluations (PDF). Perhaps, like Monique, the current system has beaten them down to the point of not believing such a thing to be possible, in Rhode Island, but they point to this paragraph as the potential trap door:

Establishing parameters for evaluation systems that are at the basis for the development, deployment, and advancement stage of the model begins with the development of standards for district‐based educator evaluation systems. This document presents a set of six draft standards that describe a high quality system. The draft standards identify expectations for all districts. RIDE will develop recommendations for how to support districts as they begin to implement these standards and processes that will lead to how local systems will be reviewed for compliance with the standards. It is important to remember that educator evaluation is only one element of an educator performance management system, but it represents a critical starting point.

The regents are telling districts to go out and negotiate these new standards with the unions and the state will figure out how to support them. It's a step in the right direction, certainly, but there's plenty of room for delays and game-playing.


August 11, 2009


Unions Sowing Fear in the Streets

Justin Katz

As a follow-up on the subject of organized labor stoking civil violence, it turns out that one of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) members who crossed into physical violence in St. Louis wasn't just a overexcited layman:

Elston K. McCowan is a former organizer - now the Public Service Director of SEIU Local 2000 - and board member of the Walbridge Community Education Center, and is a Baptist minister, has been a community organizer for more than 23 years, and now, he is running for Mayor of the City of St. Louis under the Green Party.

As Clarice Feldman observes, McCowan "is the union"; he's one of the guys who "issues the cards."

Join that with an SEIU memo in Connecticut that explicitly instructs supporters to "drown out" those who oppose the healthcare power grab. The line between "being heard" and "making not heard" is not so subtle. The former is an expression of democratic process. The latter indicates an intention to bully the opposition into simply staying home in the interest of their own safety.

In Michigan, a man who confronted Rep. John Dingell (D., Michigan) about the availability of resources, under Obamacare, for his son's cerebral palsy subsequently received a visit in the middle of the night. Welcome to hope and change.


August 10, 2009


The Origin of Civic Violence

Justin Katz

It does more than prove the group's extremely low opinion of its audience's awareness and intelligence that a propaganda video from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) ends with the scene just after a half-dozen of its members, with racial slurs on their lips, had beaten up somebody protesting Congress's intentions with healthcare. Just after the incident, an overweight man with a cane, and wearing an SEIU t-shirt, walks toward the dissipating scuffle; the video strongly implies that the violence originated with the conservative activists and victimized peaceful union demonstrators. After the fade to black, we hear, "You just attacked that guy," and the video's producers are content to let the viewer infer the opposite of the truth.

The larger point that this audacity proves is that the people behind organized labor have little concern for truth and will rush to rewrite history in the most brazen fashion. So let's recall the time line:

  • Per established strategy, the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats declared an urgency to pass healthcare-overhaul legislation before legislators' knees could be weakened by expected constituent opposition, or perhaps by simply reading and understanding the bill that they were being asked to transform into law.
  • Many of those constituents set out to have their voices heard before the Democrats' urgency crossed the line to a done deal. Not surprisingly, when they had an elected representative's attention, their passion came through.
  • Union thugs tipped one such event beyond the border into violence, although it should be noted that there's no indication that the conservative activists fought back with more force than necessary to stop an attack.
  • Now, union leaders wish to foster a sense of victimhood and impending threat among their supporters.

And now the face of Rhode Island union thuggery, Patrick Crowley, stops only a few breaths from declaring, "Get the brass knuckles, boys":

This is nothing.

And if this scares the people who support health care, or voted for Obama, or a good liberals/progressives, my question to you is: what are you going to do about it?

Are you going to send an email? Maybe call the RNC to complain?

Or are you going to do something more? Do you really think an email is going to stop people like this?

His latest update to the post shouts, "NOW WHAT ARE YOU PREPARED TO DO?"

And thus do leftist organizers usher in the fascism that motivates their lesser activities. Conservative citizens of the United States of America have showed no desire to step beyond letting their representatives know in no uncertain terms that they want the legislative process to work in their favor. Unions and progressives, by contrast, are itching for an excuse to roll over the objects of their hatred in a steamroller of fists and jackboots.

The most disgusting part is the complicity of school teachers, via their union, in promoting people who promote violence. It was the National Education Association of Rhode Island, after all, that lent Crowley an air of credibility.

Luckily, sunshine frightens a troll, so if anybody asks members of the right, "What are you prepared to do?," we can stand firm on principle. "Pull them into the light," we can say. Just keep talking (and taping). When the truth is on your side, it isn't a stretch to suggest that email is going to stop people like this.


August 7, 2009


Challenges Must Be Issued in Woonsocket

Justin Katz

Amidst all the talk about what can and might be cut in Woonsocket, this paragraph stands out:

The 40 no-pay days were intended to save about $5 million. Council President Leo T. Fontaine questioned why the committee considered that approach, saying it was a violation of federal labor law. Schools Supt. Robert J Gerardi Jr. said the plan was dead anyway, after an official notice from the Woonsocket Teachers Guild that it would not agree to it, leaving the committee trying to find other big-ticket items to eliminate.

Oh well. The union issued an "official notice"; gotta look in other places than the — by far — single greatest expense that the school district has in order to shave 10% of its budget. If that's the case, then elected officials in the town must, of course, take into account changes in the work environment in light of the cuts that have to be made.

For example, Superintendent Robert Gerardi suggested canceling all busing for all students except those classified as special education. Clearly, accommodations for parents would have to be made, to assist them in transporting their children. One helpful tweak might be to give them an extra two hours to get their kids to school in the morning, moving the lost hours to approximately twenty weekdays in the summer. On page 19, the teachers' contract (PDF via Transparency Train) states only that "the maximum hours of the school day and the number of school days shall coincide with the minimum established by the RI Board of Education."

Unless I've missed it, nowhere in the contract or in the law is a "school day" defined as occurring in tandem with a "calendar day." So, each school day would be scheduled to correspond with two calendar days, with an overnight recess. According to regulations (PDF), Commissioner Deborah Gist would have to sign off on any non-standard schedule, but she does have the authority to approve plans that maintain the number of classroom minutes over the course of the year.

I'm sure there are a number of similar... adjustments... allowable within the contract and the law that might persuade the union to be a little more altruistic. Call the strategy "employ to contract" or "employ to rule." A secondary benefit is that flooding the commissioner's and regents' offices with requests for waivers would shine a great bright spotlight on the degree to which the state is conspiring with unions to increase property taxes.

Moreover, it ought to go without saying that the school committee has an unequivocal mandate to change the terms of the contract that it offers the union next time around so as to reinstate all of the sports, extracurriculars, busing, and whatever else it shaves to meet its budget, in addition to a healthy cushion. That future contract ought to be compiled and published for the public's approval within a week. Six, ten, twenty million dollars would be easy to shake out of the deals that teachers currently get when their financial comfort is measured against the decimated education experience of young Rhode Islanders who can never have their childhoods repaired.



"Burdensome" Union Transparency Reforms to be Repealed?

Marc Comtois

Apparently, the Obama Administration thinks the transparency requirements for labor union leadership are too stringent:

John Lund, the newly appointed deputy secretary in the Office of Labor Management Standards (OLMS), told The Examiner that Obama Administration officials will conduct a thorough review of financial disclosure requirements in response to complaints from labor officials that Bush-era reforms are too burdensome.

Under former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, union officers had to account for all of their compensation benefits on LM-2 disclosure forms. These reports helped to create "red flags" that would alert investigators of possible embezzlement activity, according to Bush administration officials.

Chao also modified the LM-30 forms so that shop stewards would be required to report information needed to expose "no show jobs" in which paychecks go into union coffers instead of a real worker's bank account.

"Elaine Chao made an effort to hold the union leadership accountable to its members, [Rep. John Kline, R-MN] said. "So it's not surprising to find that with the change in administration the union leadership does not want to have these records. But if I were a union worker I'd want the OLMS office beefed up so someone was holding labor officials accountable....Labor union political action committees (PACs) donated over $66 million to members of Congress in the 2008 election cycle, with 92 percent of the money going to Democrats, according to OpenSecrets.org.

Yes, it's not like there wasn't anything to find:
Since 2001, over 900 union officials have been convicted on embezzlement, fraud and conspiracy charges {more here - ed.} and courts have ordered $88,280,099 in restitution to be paid to defrauded unions and other parties investigated by OLMS, according to DOL...."We are not just talking about someone at say the headquarters for the AFL-CIO or the Teamsters because these are locals all over the country, where people are taking money and it's very widespread, [Kline] said. "These disclosure forms exist to protect the union members. It does not seem to resonate that this kind of activity exists."

Although congressional Democrats posture as advocates for union workers, they are in reality doing the bidding of labor bosses who continue to resist heightened accountability and transparency standards, he said.

"When you hear rhetoric and talk from the Democratic side of the aisle about how they are in favor of labor and workers, what they are really talking about is the union leadership," Kline said. "I think this is underscored by the cut in funding for the only office that has the job of keeping an eye on union leadership and by legislation that takes away the secret ballot and puts in binding arbitration.

I wonder if things like corruption in Chicago-area unions have anything to do with it? Carl Horowitz of the National Legal and Policy Institute thinks so.
It's no secret many union pension funds lack the funds sufficient to cover their liabilities. And a major reason lies with the gullibility, and on due occasion dishonesty, of their fiduciaries. Major case in point: the theft of tens of millions of dollars from pension plans sponsored by six unions and entrusted to Chicago-based equity fund manager John Orecchio. On July 22, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois filed an information count against Orecchio, charging him with embezzling approximately $24 million from his clients. The action, which follows a similar Securities & Exchange Commission complaint of nearly three years ago, provides a window into the overlapping worlds of high finance and organized labor. It also should serve as a reminder to the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil Obama Labor Department that union members have a right to maximum transparency as to how their dues and retirement contributions are being spent.


August 6, 2009


A Fireside Chat with Dan

Justin Katz

Alright, there wasn't really a fire, but since we're talking radio, I like to imagine that there was one. Dan Yorke and I had that sort of conversation, yesterday, on 630AM/99.7FM WPRO. Those who missed it or who would like to revisit something (for kind or scurrilous reasons) can stream the whole segment (about an hour, without commercials) by clicking here, or listen to portions:

  • On Anchor Rising, my writing habits and schedule, and blogging specifics (traffic, money, etc.): stream, download (5 min, 49 sec)
  • On our blogging mission (or obsession) and the effect that AR and blogs in general are having: stream, download (3 min, 46 sec)
  • On profiting (or not) from online writing: stream, download (4 min, 03 sec)
  • A call from Mike and discussion of "excellence" in Rhode Island and the effects of local participation, with Tiverton Citizens for Change as an example: stream, download (12 min, 45 sec)
  • On Dan's opinion that RI reformers need a "big win" and my belief that we focus on smaller victories: stream, download (2 min, 52 sec)
  • On hopelessness and a magic wand policy change in Rhode Island (public sector union busting) and the problem of regionalization: stream, download (6 min, 48 sec)
  • On what to do about unions: stream, download (2 min, 18 sec)
  • On the coalition of problems in RI and whether all are addressable by the same principle (dispersing power and building from the community up, as well as a tangent about binding arbitration: stream, download (6 min, 2 sec)
  • On the Republican Party in Rhode Island and awareness of reform groups: stream, download (4 min, 7 sec)
  • On prescriptions for Rhode Island and the lack of leaders: stream, download (6 min, 34 sec)
  • A call from Robert and discussion of Republicans and the Tea Party as a political party: stream, download (3 min, 14 sec)
  • On the Moderate Party: stream, download (2 min, 9 sec)
  • A call from John and discussion of Steve Laffey's plan: stream, download (1 min, 42 sec)


The Other Side's Frightening Arbitration Numbers and Blindspot on Taxing the Rich

Justin Katz

Oh happy day! Patrick Crowley has endeavored to bend numbers to his purpose, once again, and as usual, he seems incognizant of the degree to which his data actually illustrates the problem that he hopes to dismiss as a paranoid fantasy. The fact that he doesn't provide his source simplifies matters, because we needn't be distracted by the complexities that municipal negotiations can entail.

So we note, from his Figure 3, that the ratio of arbitrated contracts to negotiated contracts during the decade beginning in 1995 is typically somewhere around 6 arbitrated to 50 negotiated. Clearly, in Connecticut (which appears to be the data pool), arbitration is the final resort for the hardest cases, where the town and the union each put up the greatest fight.

In that light, turning to Figure 1, it's stunning how well unions do in arbitration. On average, arbitrators awarded 95% of the salary increases that negotiations procured during a given year. That includes two years during which the raises granted in arbitrated contracts were 33% and 10% higher than those in negotiated contracts. If we leave those two years out, we find only a 13% penalty in arbitration (e.g., a 3.06% raise instead of a 3.48% raise); again, that percentage describes the raises that the contracts granted, and none of the cited contracts called for flat or negative salary growth (and probably doesn't account for step increases and longevity). It's also worth considering the possibility that the perks, compensation, and rights that the arbitrators gave to the unions with the other hand far exceeded the salary "compromise" in value.

On a different topic (while I'm absorbing the appearance of actual numbers on RIFuture), one of my biggest fans, Oswald Krell, declares that "the level of taxation is completely irrelevant to where rich people live." Huh. (Clarification, here.)

The necessary disclaimer is that my argument about taxpayer flight has focused on the working and middle classes. That said, here's the list that strikes Krell as nakedly random; the states are listed according to the percentage of population with income over $200,000 (highest percentage on top), and the number following the state's name is the Tax Foundation's ranking for tax burden (#1 being the heaviest burden and #50 being the lightest):

  1. Connecticut: #8
  2. New Jersey: #10
  3. Massachusetts: #28
  4. New York: #3
  5. Texas: #43
  6. Wyoming: #42
  7. Delaware: #47
  8. Rhode Island: #4
  9. Alaska: #50
  10. New Hampshire: #49

Personally, I'd be reluctant to make grand claims based on such rankings, because the factors that come into play are endlessly complex — especially when one is generalizing about the intersection of multiple criteria. But is there really nothing observable about these top 10 rich-folk states? Nothing that distinguishes those with high tax burdens from those with low tax burdens?

The high-tax-burden states are all coastal abutters of New York City. Massachusetts is right there, as well, and has the added benefit of a lower tax burden (or had that benefit). They're also pretty small, so the geographic variation isn't as pronounced as in, say, California. The five low-tax-burden states are literally scattered across the country.

If the project is to see whether there are observations to be gleaned from the combination of these two rankings, it would be eminently reasonable to hypothesize that rich people like to live near New York City and in states with low tax burdens. Obviously, a multitude of factors come into play, but it takes a nigh upon willful blindness to proclaim the complete irrelevance of taxation.


August 5, 2009


Well, If RIFT's Onboard...

Justin Katz

Did you know that the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers opposed proposals for binding arbitration? Neither did I. But hey, now that the union has dropped its opposition, we might as well move forward with the practice, right? That's the implication of Jennifer Jordan's online report:

A change of position by one of the state's teachers unions could pave the way for the state to adopt binding arbitration as a way to avoid teacher strikes, an approach used in Connecticut since 1979.

One must turn to the longer version that appears in the print edition, which is significantly harder to find online, to discover that there might be any downside to this attempt to "save communities from spending money on attorney fees while eliminating the threat of teacher strikes or work-to-rule situations," in Majority Leader Gordon Fox's words. But there it is, in paragraph 12 (of 23), appearing on page A6, after the NEARI's Bob Walsh has laid out the union position to Fox's second:

The Rhode Island Association of School Committees opposes binding arbitration, said executive director Tim Duffy.

Read down a bit farther, and you find that the Connecticut boards of education and finance, as well as municipal officials, all want binding arbitration to go away, or at least be reformulated, because it "costs communities tens of thousands of dollars." Moreover, according to Patrice McCarthy, deputy director and general counsel for the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education, it "impacts even those communities that never reach binding arbitration, because it forces communities to enter into agreements they don't want to, because they are so concerned about the cost."

If the concern is the damage done by strikes and work-to-rule, Massachusetts shows the way by treating such practices as the hostile and immoral acts that they are and fining the teachers. In Rhode Island, we get this curious bit of intelligence:

"We decided to shift our position because the House leadership asked us to give them a piece of legislation that would bring finality to the question of what happens when there is no contract in place," said Marcia Reback, RIFT executive director. "Given the question, the only mechanism that brings you finality is binding arbitration."

So Rhode Island's so-called representatives approached the union. A better characterization would probably be that the corruptocrats and unions are engaged in behind-the-scenes strategizing to lock in the unions' current deals and ensure that they can never go down. The winds of public opinion are shifting, and Fox & Co. up at the State House are desperate to sell out their constituents in order to protect their parasitic pals in the teachers' unions.


July 30, 2009


Nailing Off the Coffin but Quick

Justin Katz

If the mob of seven wins its lawsuit, it's lights out for Rhode Island:

Rhode Island's public employee labor unions are mobilizing to file a class-action lawsuit against the state to block pension changes the legislature adopted in June to save taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

The executive committee of Council 94, American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees, officially voted last week to file a lawsuit, according to President J. Michael Downey. And Council 94 has been joined by a coalition of other unions representing 26,000 public school teachers and state workers affected by new pension rules, which among other things, establish a minimum "target" retirement age of 62.

"All the public employees unions are in," said Marcia Reback, president of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers & Health Professionals. "We had a meeting of all the lawyers who represent the public employees ... Now we're in the process of selecting our lead attorney."

The coalition of at least seven labor unions expects to file suit by "the early fall," according to National Education Association executive director Robert A. Walsh.

This against pension changes that didn't come close to sufficient in the first place. What's the state-level equivalent of canceling sports and not buying any supplies or textbooks? Whatever it is, the headline after a union victory should read, "Leave Now."


July 24, 2009


Apparently, "Irrational" Is in the Eye of the Reporter

Justin Katz

Randal Edgar has a head-shaking opening to his ostensibly objective report on the outcome in the matter of the Cranston Teamsters' argument that 20% of healthcare actually means a set dollar amount:

It has long been accepted that the terms of a labor contract continue after the agreement expires but a Superior Court judge placed limits on that theory Wednesday, ruling that arbitration was not appropriate when the Cranston Teamsters union objected to higher health-insurance premiums imposed by the city.

Even though the Teamsters contract points to arbitration as a means of resolving disputes, and even though it states that contract terms remain in effect until there is a new agreement, state law allows no labor contract to have a term of "more than three years," said Judge Michael A. Silverstein.

The raw bias of that opening opens a window that must give the aware layman the feeling that labor, law, and public-sector union contracts exist in some bizarre world of invisible striped felines doing kabuki dances. With his ruling, it appears that Judge Silverstein skirted the question of whether the arbitrator's award showed "manifest disregard of a contractual provision" or a "completely irrational result." The award fails by both criteria: The contract (PDF) states that employees will pay 20% of their healthcare with no provision (that I've found) limiting adjustments. The worker's responsibility is 20%. Period.

From the perspective of reformers, I suppose Silverstein's ruling is a positive development, in that expired contracts would appear to be more vulnerable to adjustment by towns and school districts. On the other hand, by lobbing the ball back to the Labor Relations Board, he may have cleared the path for an unelected body to set the policy, removing culpability from lawmakers for a desired mandate that drew considerable heat from concerned citizens.


July 22, 2009


The Travesty of the School System

Justin Katz

The union's response to the Woonsocket school committee's approved cuts — which, as Monique suggests, it hopes the judiciary will obviate — was predictable and probably wouldn't have merited mention except for the closing words of Woonsocket Teachers Guild President Richard Dipardo:

"They've cut all sports but track, all extra-curricular activities," Dipardo said. "It's just survival."

Yeah. Survival for the kids, and the minor discomfort of a pay freeze for the grown-ups, some six dozen of whom (I'm told) are approaching retirement with free healthcare grandfathered from a 1994 contract change, and after several years of 7-10% raises.

And let's not leave retired Superintendent Maureen Macera out of the mix. Here's Valley Breeze publisher Tom Ward, writing in January 2008:

A few years ago, Macera was Woonsocket's assistant superintendent, earning on average $103,000 per year for her final three years of service in that post. Three years ago, she was promoted to superintendent. Upon her promotion, she called for the elimination of the assistant superintendent's post, asking the School Committee to fold those duties into her own and asking for a much larger compensation. The School Committee agreed, and in the past three years, Macera earned $152,900 in year 1, $162,900 in year 2, and now earns $172,900 this year.

In Rhode Island, a pensioner like Macera, with more than 35 years service, receives 80 percent of their highest three years' pay. ...

Had Macera retired as assistant superintendent three years ago with a top three-year average pay of $103,000, she would have a pension of $82,400 per year.

Instead, she took the promotion and worked for a new three-year average wage of about $163,000. Her annual pension now? $130,320. For those of you without a nearby calculator, that's $2,506 per week. Oh yeah, she gets a 3 percent raise (about $75 per week) every year, too.

That deal puts Macera on the list of public employee retirees taking home six figures as a lifetime "thank you for service." A few months after Ward wrote the above, Macera retired, and the school committee hired Robert Gerardi at $150,000, with up to ten weeks of paid time off per year.

Reaching a state of mere survival, in this context, isn't typically a quirk of circumstances; it's the consequence of years of incompetence and greed. Vicious, drooling, self-fondling greed.

Turn your attention, if you can stand it, to an April 2008 article titled, "Woonsocket schools show surplus":

Macera and other urban educators are pinning their hopes to a proposed bill called the Fair Share Education Funding Formula, which Macera says would distribute state aid more equitably. The bill proposes redistributing state funds to towns and cities bases on the wealth of the community, student enrollment and the the number of special education students, English language learners and children from poor families. The bill is sponsored by Representatives Edith H. Ajello, D-Providence, and John A. Savage, R-East Providence, and Senators Rhoda E. Perry D-Providence, and Hanna M. Gallo, D-Cranston. "The formula has been used across the country. It does not increase funding but redistributes it based on these factors, making it fairer," Macera said.

Under the new system, Woonsocket would stand to get an additional $13,164,914 to be phased in over three years. Pawtucket would receive an additional $10,772,350, Providence would receive $49,674,333 and Cranston would get $14,604,658.

The Woonsocket district is already spending half of that amount, in deficit, can there be any doubt that the extra would be filched, as well?


July 21, 2009


NEA-RI Future Illusions with Averages

Justin Katz

Mr. Crowley has been on the attack, lately, so it's pleasant to see him turning toward attempts to actually make a case on behalf of those for whom he advocates. Yesterday, he presented some National Education Association numbers (I know, I know) thus:

This first chart shows that over the last decade, teachers [across the nation] have earned annual increases 2.85%. Sounds fairly modest, right? ...

Now look at this [other] chart. It looks at teaching salaries over a 20 year period, from 1989 to 2009. If you look at the actually dollar amount, the range starts in 1989 at $29,564 and ends in 2009 at $53,910. But, when you look at the same time period and use constant dollars (that is, taking inflation into account), the dollar value in 2009 would be $204 less than what is was in 1989.

Crowley doesn't link to his source, but several previous iterations of the NEA report are available here, and the first thing to note is that the first chart isn't the data for "teachers," but for "instructional staff", which includes, as written in the 2007 report (PDF):

... classroom teachers, principals, supervisors, librarians, guidance and psychological personnel, and related instructional workers.

I point this out for clarity only, inasmuch as the annual increase is pretty much the same if limited to teachers. Both pretty much track with inflation.

It's the second paragraph of the quotation from Crowley that ought to be surprising to anybody who's followed the issue of teacher employment and contracts, because contracts typically increase the pay allocated for each salary step by inflation or better each year, plus teachers move up the steps as they go. It would therefore be astonishing to learn that they are barely keeping up with the consumer price index (CPI). The matter is more striking, today, as Crowley has focused in on Rhode Island:

... looking at the last ten years, Rhode Island teachers saw smaller salary increases than their peers around the country. As the chart shows, the national average gain for the last ten years was a 32.9% total increase in salary. For Rhode Island, the total increase in salary was 29%, placing us 33rd in the nation. ...

How does this translate into constant dollars [adjusted for inflation]? Well, nationally, the decade from 1997 through 2008 saw teachers lose 0.6% in salary. Rhode Island teachers, in constant dollars realized a loss of 3.5%. That's going backwards.

If that just sounds wrong, well, it's because it is, and here's why:

One helpful byproduct of the union's salary step system is that the trends for individual teachers are reasonably predictable. Increasing the number of classroom teachers by 26% over eight years pulls the "average salary" downward, even though everybody involved is making more money. That's how Rhode Island managed to be number 9 in the nation in average teacher salary in both the 97/98 and 05/06 school years even though it was number 25 for its percentage change over that decade: Our number of teachers increased at twice the national rate, even though our enrollment increased at the national rate.

For illustration purposes, I put together the following chart. Because I had them handy, I began with the latest Woonsocket salary step amounts, guessed at the ratios at each step, and assumed 5% annual retirement and a 2.8% increase in steps each year; these assumptions result in comparable change numbers to those that the NEA reports. Lowering the retirement assumption would increase the effect (because a higher percentage of teachers would remain at step 10). The 2.8% increase in steps is probably low; picking two years for which data is available for all districts but Warwick, from 2004 to 2005, the overall average step in RI went up 3.3%. However, the goal was to model the NEA's results, and this puts the steps pretty much at inflation. For simplicity's sake, I disregarded other considerations like longevity, activity pay, and higher-degree adjustments.

With the very same step increases, if the state had only replaced retiring teachers, the increase in the "average salary" would have changed from 11.2% to 20.8%. If districts had hired even more teachers, the average salary would have increased less. In other words, this "average" has little relevance to the financial well-being of individual teachers, and it's bizarre to claim that they "realized a loss." The steps at least paced with inflation, and a teacher who hit step 10 in Year 8 would be receiving twice the pay she or he did in year 1.

And here's the kicker: None of this touches on benefits.


July 20, 2009


A Crime Against Society

Justin Katz

Before we let his subject drift into the vague pastures of public memory, let's join Mark Patinkin in shaking our heads at the tale of the neighbor-killer who retired in his twenties after six months of public service:

You no doubt saw that Nicholas Gianquitti, 41, now serving 40 years for murdering Cranston fire lieutenant James Pagano, will keep receiving his $3,841.50 monthly pension. The check will arrive at his home, for his family's use. The reason? His crime wasn't related to his police conduct.

That may seem astonishing, but to me it's more astonishing that he got such a lifelong pension in the first place.

Here is a man who began as a patrolman in July 1991, and only six months later, fractured his left kneecap when he fell chasing two suspects in a parking lot. For that, he got a lifelong pension at two-thirds his salary — tax-free because it is for disability.

It is not the only such pension, and it makes me wonder: What planet is the Retirement Board living on?

In a healthy society, this story would have representatives and bureaucrats glancing out the window all day out of fear that the masses might be coming to remove them from bodily office. Instead, we can only wonder who won the office-lounge dispute over whether Gianquitti was an inevitable outlier in an otherwise honorable system or he represents everything that's great about promoting the government as an employer.


July 17, 2009


Making Up Time in Cranston

Justin Katz

Tim White's got another video of employee malfeasance with taxpayer funded time:

The video shows the janitorial office at Cranston's Western Hills Middle School from the view of a hidden camera looking down at a time clock used by school custodians to punch in and out of their shifts. The first minute and twelve seconds of the tape are uneventful. Then, a voice off camera says, "I'm gonna bang these out."

A school department worker then steps into frame. He is identified by school officials as Neal Emmett, the custodial foreman of Western Hills Middle School. He takes a time card from the top of the clock. Emmett then removes the shell of the clock and manipulates the gears to advance the time from 8:35 to roughly 9:00. Walking off camera, he takes a time card from a rack and stamps it with the adjusted time.

The inference is that the custodial crew is leaving early and advancing the machine to capture more hours, and the "bang this out" phrase, the practiced movements of the foreman, and the presence of the camera itself all suggest that it was a regular act. The requested budget for 2008-2009 (PDF) included $278,169 for custodian salaries in Emmett's school, with another $2,500 to cover Saturday detentions. I don't see any indication of an overtime budget. Although, it appears that Emmett's scheduled pay rate for 2008 was $36,629 (PDF), but that he took home $43,021 (PDF).


July 16, 2009


Gutting the District in Woonsocket

Justin Katz

For those who need a bright light in the lazy days of a tardy summer, here are the cuts approved by the Woonsocket School Committee last night (PDF, including other documentation):

  • All sports except track & field: $155,903
  • Athletic supplies: $12,750
  • Athletic uniforms: $9,350
  • Choral, class advisors 8 through 12, RI Honor Society, band, drama senior high publication, VICA: $49,461
  • Saturday detention: $2,000
  • 40 teacher furlough days: $6,084,033
  • Total: $6,548,134

Pondering what students are going to do with no teachers for 40 of the school year's 180 days brings to light a general principle that seems to have been baked into the Rhode Island education paradigm: Everything must be cut, rather than reduced. Salaries never go down; staff are laid off. Extra activities are never included in teachers' already high salaries; they are eliminated. An across-the-board cut in the combined salaries/benefit total of about 13-14% for all teachers, staff, and administrators would eliminate the shortfall with no cuts to programs.

Sure, that's a bitter pill for employees to swallow, but it's hardly unique among workers in today's environment. It's also mitigated with some perspective about salary trends, especially (as ever) among teachers:

Over the three years of the most recent teachers' contract (PDF), the average pay scale step has increased 7.64%. In any given year, the average salary increase from one step to another is 6.5%. The result is that an actual teacher has seen nearly a 10% increase each year and a 21.5% increase in salary since the contract went into effect. (Higher education bonuses are not included.)

Of course, teachers at step 10 have had to make do with the 7.64% increase to their step and longevity (as well as whatever seniority-based perks are worked into the contract), but sometimes an organization has to do what it must do in order to maintain its purpose. And besides, those teachers hired before 1994 (about 70 of them, I'm told) have never paid a penny for their healthcare.

It remains a possibility — another principle baked into the public sector paradigm — that the objective, here, was to put forward cuts that the unions, government, and public wouldn't permit to happen rather than adjustments that might actually solve the problem. Eventually, everybody involved is going to have to cease petulant demands that money just be found... somewhere... and accept that the old way is not sustainable.


July 15, 2009


Arbitration Is a Union Game

Justin Katz

Anybody who still believes that public sector union arbitration isn't the unions' playroom should take a moment to glance toward Cranston. The contract between the city and the Teamsters (PDF) contains the following language:

The City agrees to offer a Preferred Provider Organization (PPO) plan for each member of the Union and his family. Each employee shall pay a percentage of the monthly working rate for the City for the plan chosen, deducted bi-weekly from the employee's paycheck. The co-share percentage will be 10% for Year 1 (FY 7/1/05 to 6/30/06), 15% in Year 2 (FY 7/1/06 to 6/30/07), and 20% in Year 3 (FY 7/1/07 to 6/30/08) of this agreement. The PPO plan will include the following: $10 co-pays for office visits, specialists, and urgent care visits and a $50 co-pay for emergency room visits each occurrence.

That contract expired at the end of June 2008, and as anybody should have expected (and the union probably did), the city continued to adjust healthcare co-shares in accord with rising prices. The union filed a grievance claiming that the dollar amount is what should carry through — which certainly conflicts with the reason that elected representatives have been negotiating for percentages — and the arbitrator who handled the grievance gave the win to the union. Despite the absence of any dollar-amount language in the contract. Despite the fact that the contract was no longer in effect.

And so, the city finds itself spending scarce funds on legal expenses to defend against union-fantasy-land justice. I say it's time to meet lunacy with resolve: If a union is going to delay contract resolution and tie the city up in court, anyway, when times are tight, fire its members and rehire.


July 13, 2009


A Change That's Only Radical in Public Education

Justin Katz

This almost sounds like the beginning of a professional work environment:

Under orders from the state education commissioner, the district this fall will begin filling vacancies in six schools based not on seniority, but on whether that teacher is a good match for the job — and the school.

"I've been a principal for 11 years," said Michael Lazzareschi, who heads the new Nathan Bishop Middle School, "and I've never had the ability to pick my own candidates. There's nothing more exciting than seeing the lines of teachers waiting to be interviewed."

Although the Providence Teachers Union is threatening to sue, claiming the state education commissioner doesn't have the authority to overrule a union contract, Schools Supt. Tom Brady says the rank-and-file have shown real enthusiasm for the new system.

"Five hundred and twenty four teachers applied for 75 positions," Brady said. "That far exceeded our expectations."

It's the wild, wild West in school administration:

To avoid any hint of favoritism, the School Department, working with the union, developed an interview process that relies on questions from a common bank of questions that use concrete teaching scenarios and short model lessons.

The interview is designed to measure specific skills: Does the teacher know his subject? Can she demonstrate knowledge of recent research in his discipline? Is he able to demonstrate his knowledge within an actual model lesson?

The other important piece of the new hiring system is mutual consent. Teacher and principal must agree that the school is a good match. There will be no "on-the-spot" hiring.

The whole notion behind "criterion-based" hiring is that it empowers principals to put the right teacher in the right classroom. It also allows the superintendent to hold principals accountable for improving student achievement in their own buildings because they finally have the authority to hire their own staff.

Obviously, union functionaries aren't happy with the idea that elected representatives and the administrators whom they hire will actually be able to run their schools. What they mostly fear, I suspect, is that the public is no longer going to pretend the validity of union spin regarding the benefits of allowing schools to be run by organizations with political motivations and thuggish tactics. Daylight has cracked under the union rock; all that remains is to suggest that taxpayers — voters — take a look at what's been revealed.


July 11, 2009


Good and Bad Addendum

Justin Katz

One of that union guy's talking points on the recent episode of Newsmakers that I addressed the other day didn't spark an immediate rebuttal from Bill Felkner or from me.

If you listen to the language that Bill uses — "lucrative contracts" — I think the reality is that that money that goes into a public sector contract does in fact go right into the economy. Firefighters, teachers, public servants — they live in and around the communities they serve. They're not taking their money and dumping it in the stock market. They're going to the Dunkin' Donuts at the corner; they're going to the local mom-and-pop restaurant. So that money's going into the local economy.

It's true that public sector workers are no different from private sector workers as residents — as economic units in the state's economy. It's a dramatic distortion, though, to lift that up as a response to Bill's one-to-one statement about money taken out of the economy and shifted to labor.

Trace the pot of money that goes to public-sector labor: There's some cost for the government to collect it. Some of it enables policies of inefficiency, such as requiring multiple traffic controllers to stare into space at construction sites in order to meet a genitalia quota. Some of it is siphoned off to pay people like Pat Crowley and the entire organizational structure that supports him — which I suspect includes a flow to the national organizations and which I know includes a flow to politicians and political activism. When it comes to the individual worker, some of it is exported (trips, out of state shopping, etc.). Some of it is saved. And yes, a percentage goes into the active local economy. Only that very last percentage — and I'd love to have the time to do the research and figure out a rough per-dollar amount — has the potential to advance anything new. The pay that goes to government bureaucrats, union executives, and so on supports an activity that is already established; we're not talking innovations that might result in economic growth.

By contrast, the dollar that the government takes out of the economy to feed this machine comes out of what might be seen as an "excess" end, in that the first column from which taxpayers are likely to draw funds in order to pay their tax bills will be the least necessary to survival. I long ago decided that I couldn't justify a daily stop at the Dunkin' Donuts for a $1.50 coffee when a can of Chock Full o' Nuts supplies the same caffeine fix for pennies. A weekly dinner at the mom-and-pop restaurant might be the first thing to go when the property tax bill jumps up by double-digit percentages.

In order to grant the public sector unionist sufficient funds to add a dinner out to the weekly schedule or a flat-screen TV to the living room wall, multiple families have to give theirs up.

Extrapolate that example to the "extra" spending of the wealthier residents from whom a greater percentage of the money is taken. Tax money for labor doesn't come from basic house-upkeep money. It's not diversified, global, long-term investment money. It's not pick-up-an-extra-shift-at-work money. Rather it's money that would be risked on local high-growth investment opportunities, or that would simply be given away with no expectation of return. Now apply this imaginative exercise to corporations.

This isn't an argument that we ought to give the rich as much as we possibly can. I'm merely pointing to a dynamic that we ought to take into consideration as we assess potential economic policies, and the right answer is likely to vary from era to era. Suffice to say, though, that an economic downturn that has sent the state into a landslide to bankruptcy is not the time to be pulling money out of a portion of the economy that can tolerate risk and loss and from which expenditures may be lightly made in order to maintain and increase payments to a portion that is notoriously inefficient at recycling dollars.


July 9, 2009


Warwick Payrolls

Marc Comtois

Over the weekend I was at a neighborhood July 4th get-together. The group was a mixed one. If I had to guess, most were either a-political or run-of-the-mill Rhode Island Democrats. The topic turned to the recent closing of a local Warwick elementary school and how property taxes just got a big bump (believe me, they did). There was anger over the tax hikes and the school closure. One parent questioned why a school would close when money could have been saved elsewhere, mentioning the fact that the teachers make a lot of money and that you could find it all out at the "Ocean State Policy" website.

The parent then listed off some of the salaries of teachers from the local elementary school. There were a few surprised faces amongst those who heard the numbers, to which the parent then said, "Yeah, I know...I thought they made like $45-$50,000 or something, not that much!"

In an attempt to shed some more light on the situation, I decided to take a ride on the Transparency Train to analyze the actual school payroll numbers for Warwick. It's more time consuming but also more illustrative of the actual situation than the teacher contract.

I looked at the 2007-08 salaries of full-time teachers in a variety of categories. The below table, based on the 2007-2008 Payroll, summarizes my findings. It shows the number of teachers in each category, the total amount of money dedicated to their salaries and then average salary, average low and high salaries (the average high salary at the Jr. High and High School level reflects the pay received by department heads), and the average median salaries.

If you compare these numbers to the salary schedules in the teacher contract (page 109 in this PDF), you'll find that that, for the most part, the median Elementary and High School teacher salary in Warwick is the equivalent of a Step 10 (or more) with some longevity and probably some advanced education bonuses thrown in. Overall, elementary teacher salaries are the highest, followed by High School and then Junior High.

Given that most people think teachers make about as much as the average Rhode Islander, around $50,000 - $54,000 a year (in 2007), it's understandable their surprise when learning about these numbers. While it is true that new teachers enter the work force at the average income level, that doesn't last for long. It is apparent that the majority of teachers are compensated at a level at the top or above the traditionally negotiated step scheme. While the teacher salaries are arguably commensurate with other professionals of similar background and training, the benefits they earn--in addition to the shorter work-year--are something those in the private sector don't enjoy. In addition to their salaries, teachers also receive $10.5-$12,000 in pension contributions from the district in addition to $15,000 in medical/dental benefits.

But these numbers also help explain some other things, too. In general, teachers at the Junior High level are paid less than their Elementary or High School colleagues. This is unsurprising given the additional challenges faced when teaching this age group. In short, once they get they're time in, a lot of teachers go to Elementary or High School, where the kids are generally more receptive or, in the case of High School, you know what you're dealing with. In Jr. High, every day is a mystery with a cohort that is feeling their oats. Unfortunately, that they are so challenging is the very reason to keep the best, most experienced teachers at the Jr. High level. If only they had incentive.

It can also be inferred that, because Warwick has closed a few elementary schools in the past two years, the job openings are in the secondary education area (Jr. High and High School). This means that the elementary schools are "top heavy", with the result that the median income is higher at the elementary level. It would take some additional analysis of other school districts that haven't experienced so many school closings to determine if this is indeed a factor.

As I was looking at the teacher payroll, I thought a comparison with the payroll of the other big ticket items--Fire and Police--would help add some context. The data available was for 2008-09-- a year later than the teacher info I used-- so the data isn't contemporaneous. (The actual low, high and median salaries for each position are given, not an average as with most of the teacher data).

2008-09W-F-P-Pay.JPG

I don't have much analysis to offer for these last examples. They are what they are. Additionally, a quick survey of the municipal payroll reveals a lot of salaries that fall within the "average Rhode Islander" pay range or below, with a few high-salary, supervisor positions, as well. (For further comparison, this site purports to supply salaries for a range of private sector jobs in Warwick). I'll conclude with this: taxpayers should be aware of these numbers so that they can determine whether they think these are legitimate wages to pay for the jobs being done or not.


July 8, 2009


The Good and the Bad on Newsmakers

Justin Katz

It shows how far behind I am on catching up that I've just managed to watch the episode of Newsmakers featuring OSPRI's Bill Felkner and Pat Crowley of the NEA, RIFuture, and various other special interest groups.

Bill did admirably, but the viewer can observe something that I've found to typical of such head-to-heads. Crowley got in all of his (no doubt) scripted talking points, from "astroturf" to "tax cuts for the rich," while Felkner tried to give examples and put particular facts up for discussion. It's difficult to understand why the three other participants in the discussion let Pat get through the whole spiel, but the following quotation illustrates the disinterest in clarity and extemporaneous discussion:

What's wrong with working people making a good salary and having a decent benefits package? I mean, that's really what this comes down to. Instead there's arguments from taxpayer groups and from the right saying that just because a working person makes a living wage that that's a bad thing. No. That's a good thing. It's the model that we need to actually need to encourage more in this state. And I think the fact that this is being positioned as working people versus taxpayers — I think that what that actually shows is that there's a political agenda in the state that actually is trying to disempower working people, not so that the wealth is spread throughout the state, but so that the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very few. And I think what this last weekend [of union strikes during the mayoral conference in Providence] highlights is that working people in the state of Rhode Island — especially organized workers — are tired of being used as scapegoats for a political agenda.

The strategic objective: equate public-sector unionists with "working people." If the reality is that give-aways to organized labor are not sustainable and inevitably harm those who are most susceptible to harm — private-sector workers — do a quick hop-skip to distract from that fact through allusion to some vague "political agenda" pursued by rich masterminds. The distraction was certainly not hindered by host Tim White's reference to Bill as "from the conservative think tank Ocean State Policy Research Institute", while Pat was simply "from RIFuture.org and the NEA." (Earlier, White called RIFuture "left-leaning.")

Crowley effected this sort of maneuver throughout the show. To White's question about the economic damage should the NEA sue the state over pension reforms, Crowley couldn't even muster a "look, we appreciate that litigation puts an additional strain on taxpayers, but..." Instead, he walked away with this, correcting Tim on what his question should have been:

Well, think that the real question is why do the public sector workers and the teachers of Rhode Island have to keep on taking the hit? I mean, like I said, there was another reform in 2006. Prior to that there was a major reform in 1997. Prior to that, there was one in 1992. All of those reforms were taking benefits away. So the idea that all of these things are just heaped upon teachers and public sector workers simply isn't true. And every time there's a reform, there's a promise. "This is the last time guys" "Really, this is the last time." "No, this time's really it." So how many times do the public sector workers and the teachers of the state have to open up their pocketbook so that the state can balance the budget, especially when the state has year after year cut taxes for rich people. Cut taxes for corporations. The reason we're in a budget problem in this state isn't simply because we pay our teachers well; it's because, over the last decade, we've cut taxes, cut taxes, and cut taxes, and created this economic black hole for ourselves.

Thus does Crowley brush away decades of unbelievable hand-outs that have made public-sector workers, especially teachers, Rhode Island's elite class on the grounds that, every now and then, the gorging must be mildly restrained. Inasmuch as most viewers don't have the history Rhode Island's pension system at their fingertips, Pat's references might as well be plucked from a hat, but they do lend an air of legitimacy to his complaint. Describing the actual changes would likely expose his game. In 1992, the state introduced the requirement that pension recipients endure the long slog of 10 years of actual work for the state in order to be eligible; I didn't find any change in 1997, but in 1994, the General Assembly introduced a requirement of at least 20-hours-per-week of work. And in 2005, introduction of minimum ages (a ripe old 59) and other changes, as to cost of living adjustments (COLAs), were already known to be insufficient and only applied to those not already vested with 10 years of service.

As for the supposed promise of no further cuts, perhaps we're getting a whisper of behind-the-scenes talk, because such declarations are certainly not prominently made in the public. Whatever the case, it is irresponsible of legislators to make them.

And none of that touches upon the deeper debate about the effects of tax cuts on revenue. (Tax revenue from "the rich" has actually gone up, over the last decade, both in real terms and as a percentage of total taxes collected.)

Bill began to turn the tables at around minute 14:30, with his introduction of some of the structural strategies whereby left-wing groups shuffle money and redirect influence. He also made a strong point, against the combined efforts of Crowley and Ian Donnis to challenge the transparency of OSPRI on the grounds that it doesn't disclose small-dollar donors, responding that people give freely to such groups in a way that is not true of public-sector unions.

He could have further noted that the public has the same amount of information about, say, Ocean State Action as about OSPRI. That point was brought to the fore by the minor spat over what organizations are housed in NEA-RI's headquarters at 99 Bald Hill Rd. Crowley disputed that Marriage Equality RI is located there, although as of last August, the group's tax exemption was registered at that address. More significant is the reference to WorkingRI; although Bill may have misspoken about its relationship with the address, a little research shows how little difference it makes.

The group's Web site isn't very informative when it comes to its operations or management structure. (Its address is a P.O. box in Warwick.) But a 2008 Projo article about the links between labor organizations in RI names Frank Montanaro as the chairman of its board. Montanaro is also president of the RI AFL-CIO, as well as chairman of the Institute for Labor Studies & Research, which is indeed headquartered at 99 Bald Hill. NEA-RI President Lawrence Purtill is listed as the Institute's secretary treasurer, a post that NEA-RI Executive Director Bob Walsh fills (according to the Projo) for WorkingRI.

WorkingRI is a prominent player on RIFuture, by the way, and the AFL-CIO has a very large ad in the hardly-prominent position at the bottom of the blog.

Bill's point, in short, is irrefutable, which is why it's disappointing to watch an episode of Newsmakers hover in the zone of talking-point assertions. But ensuring such outcomes is, I suppose, part of Patrick Crowley's job — which may explain why his union pays him $5 per year for political activity, according to Felkner.


July 7, 2009


Toward What End They Rush

Justin Katz

Ed Achorn takes the opportunity of the eternal contract bill — which he calls "remarkably reckless and profoundly anti-democratic piece of special-interest legislation" — to offer a helpful rule of thumb on the General Assembly's standard operating procedures:

This is an idea that, at the very least, merits serious discussion, rather than the rush treatment it got in the Senate. When something is whipped through the legislature at lightning speed, it is a good bet that it harms the public and serves special interests. When something is discussed to death, and still not passed, it is a good sign the special interests oppose it and the public supports it. To wit: The General Assembly has refused, yet again, to create fair elections in Rhode Island, as in most other states, by eliminating the corrupting master lever. In doing so, it cavalierly ignored the formal wishes of the state’s top election officials and the government of 23 Rhode Island communities. And Rhode Island has still not joined 48 of the 49 states that make indoor prostitution illegal. (In Nevada, prostitution is legal in some counties but strictly regulated.)

There is no remedy but to change the players, and the last election gave reason to fear that such an act may be practically impossible.


July 2, 2009


Caruolo Not a Foregone Conclusion

Justin Katz

As a threatening cudgel to wave during negotiations and town meetings — allowing school committees to declare that they'll just take what they "need" and unions contriving to force them to do so — the Caruolo Act is still an insidious force in Rhode Island politics. But with the move being denied in West Warwick, it would appear that many of us, including school committees and unions, expected it to be a bit more of a rubber stamp:

Judge Steven P. Nugent, in a ruling from the bench, dismissed the School Committee's Caruolo suit against the town, saying that school officials didn't even try to balance their fiscal 2009 budget after voters at the Financial Town Meeting limited their spending to $49.2 million — roughly $4 million less than they had requested.

Nugent said the committee had failed to heed the state law requiring that it give the town and the state auditor general a corrective action plan within five days of realizing that it would have a substantial shortfall.

Although this may be good news in the long run, in the short term for West Warwick, it will require cuts in programs and services. Plan B, in other words, will not be to tighten belts on payroll, but to limit benefits to the town and its children. And it's not as if belt tightening would be egregious. According to the district's budget plan released in March 2008 (PDF via Transparency Train), making up the $3.3 million that the district sought through Caruolo would require merely a 6.7% cut in the combined salary/benefit totals for next year's projected budget. Salary/benefits, by the way, were projected to go up 5.4%. The amount of actual cuts to current salary and benefit amounts would be approximately 1.4%.

Cry me a river.

You'll recall that the 2009-2010 school year is the so-called "fourth year" that the school committee tried to opt out of in the teachers' contract — which it was contractually permitted to do. After a few months of damaging work-to-rule by the teachers, the committee relented. The result (PDF) is that teachers' salaries are contracted as follows, with the categories after step 10 (10 years of service) incorporating longevity payments:

Step 2008-2009 2009-2010 % increase in step % increase in pay
1 $40,802 $41,822 2.5 NA
2 $44,273 $45,379 2.5 11.2
3 $47,743 $48,937 2.5 10.5
4 $51,212 $52,492 2.5 9.9
5 $54,683 $56,050 2.5 9.4
6 $58,153 $59,607 2.5 9.0
7 $61,624 $63,165 2.5 8.6
8 $65,093 $66,720 2.5 8.3
9 $68,564 $70,278 2.5 8.0
10 $72,034 $73,835 2.5 7.7
11 to 14 $72,926 $74,750 2.5 3.8
15 to 19 $73,819 $75,665 2.5 3.8
20 to 24 $74,711 $76,579 2.5 3.7
25 to 29 $75,603 $77,494 2.5 3.7
30+ $76,495 $78,409 2.5 3.7

And that's not all; extra payments for other activities are all going up, as well. Summer school will pay $42 per hour, rather than $40.50 per hour (3.7%). Substitutes will get about 4.5% more (to around $110 per day, depending on the length of the assignment). Teachers who cover other teachers' classes will see a 3.7% increase in the resulting payment, to $42. Tutors will see the same. Extracurricular pay is going up approximately 2.5%, with the student council adviser, for example, getting $2,510 rather than $2,450. The bonus payments for graduate credits and degrees are all going up — an average of 2.6% (to $4,200 for a Master's in the teacher's field).

All with a 7% share of healthcare premiums.

Little wonder the teachers were willing to damage their students' educations back in 2007! Little wonder, as well, that Rhode Island's schools are in their sorry state.


July 1, 2009


An Indication of the Perils of Consolidation

Justin Katz

The General Assembly has created a "labor management board" that will come up with six or more healthcare plan options from which local districts may choose during contract negotiations with teachers. Here's how the board will be constructed:

The board that will be appointed to design and approve the benefit packages will consist of: two members named by the Rhode Island Association of School Committees; two members named by the Rhode Island School Superintendents' Association; two members named by the Rhode Island Association of School Business Managers; two individuals named by the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals who may be active or retired teachers or officials from the union; two members named by the National Education Association who may be active or retired teachers or union officials; one member named by RI Council 94 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and one member named by the Laborers International Union of North America.

Of the twelve slots, six belong to unions. Two belong to an organization servicing elected school committees, two belong to an organization servicing the superintendents whom school committees appoint, and two belong to an organization servicing the business managers whom superintendents and school committees hire. Before suggesting an even split between labor and management, consider that ten of the twelve members will be representing parties who will receive the benefits that are being designed. And even then, the two other members are appointed by a group joined by a class whom voters elect; that's quite a degree of separation.

One would hope that school committees will still be able to negotiate copays, coshares, and all the rest, but I'll be surprised to see the board give them any options comparable to my high-cost, high-deductible, unsubsidized healthcare savings account deal.


June 28, 2009


Taxing Health Care

Marc Comtois

One idea that has been floated as part of comprehensive health care reform is to tax health care benefits as income. I recall Senator McCain's plan contained such a provision for example. Well, it looks like the Senate is considering going with it, too. Except for union workers.

The exception, which could make the proposal more politically palatable to Democrats from heavily unionized states such as Michigan, is adding controversy to an already contentious debate. It would shield the 12.4 percent of American workers who belong to unions from being taxed while exposing some other middle-income workers to the levy.

“I can’t think of any other aspect of the individual income tax that treats benefits of different people differently because of who they work for,” said Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, a Washington research group that often criticizes Democrats’ economic proposals. Edwards said the carve-out “smacks of political favoritism.”

Sheesh. There's no way to see this as other than fundamentally unfair. But some unions think it's fine:
Gerald Shea, an AFL-CIO official lobbying for health-care reform, said grandfathering benefits negotiated in a collective bargaining agreement is a “common thing when there is a big change in federal law.”

“Once a collective bargaining agreement is set, employer’s budgets are set, workers expectations are set. It doesn’t make sense to go back in the middle of the contract and change it,” he said.

Union groups and workers said Congress shouldn’t target contractually negotiated benefits.

Anna Burger, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union, said in an interview that workers have often traded salary increases for better benefits in agreements.

Taxes “shouldn’t be taken from the backs of workers who have bargained away wages and other things for their benefits over the years,” Burger said.

We're quite familiar with that mindset, aren't we? However, there are some unions who do oppose the idea:
Other unions say they’re opposed to a tax on some employer- provided benefits, regardless of whether collective bargaining agreements are exempt.

“Either way, we are against a tax on health-care benefits in whatever form it takes,” said Jacob Hay, spokesman for the Laborers’ International Union of North America. The union represents 500,000 workers, largely in the construction industry.

Interesting.



Private School as Money Saver

Justin Katz

Think about this, from amidst the continuing saga of the West Warwick school budget:

After one resident learned that it costs about $15,000 to educate each child in West Warwick, she suggested that the town simply send its students to private Catholic schools. [Town Council Member Angelo] Padula quickly agreed, saying, "If we sent 200 children to a private school, Prout is $9,500. LaSalle is $9,800. We would save $6,000 per child."

For those who've learned under new math techniques (or do not have a calculator handy), $6,000 times 200 children is $1.2 million. As a bonus, with those millions of dollars in savings, Rhode Island private school students on average score 200 points higher on the SATs than their public-school peers.

(Yeah, I'm aware of the arguments about demographics. Just sayin'...)


June 24, 2009


House Passes Pension Reform

Marc Comtois

It wasn't what the Governor asked for, but the House passed an amended pension reform article as part of the budget.

Despite threats of lawsuits by teachers unions, the House of Representatives has approved a slate of pension cuts aimed at shaving a total of $55 million off the soaring taxpayer cost of providing pensions to more than 26,000 public school teachers and state employees, including new judges.

The final vote for the package was 50-to-24.

For reasons that remain largely unexplained, House Finance Committee Chairman Steven Costantino introduced, and won support, for a last-minute amendment exempting District Court judges from the new curbs the budget seeks to place on the pensions available to judges hired after July 1. When asked the reason, Costantino said: "They are in a different statute.''

(snip)

In one vote after another, the House rebuffed attempts to stretch the retirement age to 65, or avert any of the pension cutbacks by re-amortizing the state's pension debt, to avoid having to make any cuts now by stretching out the payments.

House leaders objected strenuously to both, with House Majority Leader Gordon Fox delivering an impassioned speech in which he said: "This is when it's going to be step-up time... Now is the time for you to be profiles in courage, not to placate who is going to be supporting me with a campaign check in the next election, not worried about you may offend somebody.''

"So welcome to the club ladies and gentleman. Welcome to the club because these are your times and you are either going to rise to the occasion and make the tough decisions or you are not,'' Fox said. "Send the message that we are not going to put off to our children and our grandchildren the decisions that we need to make now because I would hate to think that some poor state representative 15 years from now now is going to have to deal with the crap we left them.''

I still think that age 65 makes a helluva lot more sense, given current actuarial tables and all, but it is a step in the right direction.


June 23, 2009


A Press Release to Emulate

Justin Katz

East Providence School Committee Chairman Anthony Carcieri has issued a press release on which other elected representatives throughout the state should take notes:

On being informed that NEA has voted "no confidence" in the East Providence School Committee, its Chair, Anthony Carcieri, said this.

"So what’s new? No union is going to give a big vote of confidence when they're told they have to contribute to their health insurance. It's unfortunate, but it's the way of the world. That all happened six months ago. We've moved past it. We're bringing technology to our students for the first time in the Fall. Our Vocational School is launching innovative new programs that will catapult our students forward. We're pushing forward a revolutionary initiative to raise the quality of special education in East Providence to World Class standards. These are just some of the things we’ve accomplished in the last six months, as we are bringing the school system back from the brink of bankruptcy.

What has NEA done in the last six months?

They put on red shirts and disrupt School Committee meetings. They say they want to bargain, but they never schedule a meeting. They try to stop innovation. They demand that we raise taxes and go deeper in debt.

The East Providence Schools will be a magnet for students from other communities within the next few years. We will be a magnet for creative energetic teachers who put kids first. We don't need teachers who want to spend their time parading around like the Red Army. We need teachers who will help us to prepare our kids to deal with an increasingly competitive world.

We're told that NEA has threatened to tell their members to leave our school system. Any teacher who doesn't want to be a part of what's going on here should do what NEA says. We're building to be the best. We're putting the students first. Any teacher who doesn't want to be a part of that should follow NEA's direction.

Remember, we pay our teachers better than 90% of the school teachers in America. The teachers' union just can’t get over the fact that we had to retrench a little bit in January so we could pay their salaries in June. This is the time to focus on delivering the best education for our students without breaking the backs of our taxpayers. It's time to get over it. We have a lot of work left to do to raise the performance of our schools. We have to do a better job for the kids. That's our focus, and it’s the focus of most of our teachers."


June 18, 2009


BREAKING: Crowley Says Union Lawsuits Frivolous

Justin Katz

Well, there you have it — further evidence of the unions' strategy for getting their way. In a comment to Marc's post on legislation creating perpetual union contracts, National Education Association of Rhode Island Assistant Executive Director Pat Crowley comments:

Right wingers in favor of frivolous lawsuits.....gotta love it.

As in: If this legislation doesn't pass, we, the unions, will deliberately drain public coffers with frivolous lawsuits designed to twist your arms until you cry, "Alinsky!"

Of course, this is a threat that has surely rung out in every town in the state; here's our example in Tiverton.


June 17, 2009


Perpetual Contracts

Marc Comtois

RI Sen. Charles Levesque (D-Bristol/Portsmouth) and Rep. Peter Palumbo (D-Cranston) have introduced legislation that would keep expired teachers’ contracts in place until they are replaced by new contracts. The Senate passed the measure and it is now waiting in the House (see the proposal here) for consideration. Why?

Levesque said the intent is to help clarify the issue so a community’s resources, financial and otherwise, aren’t wasted.

“I believe that the proposal codifies the current understanding of the law,” he said. “I do think it is wise to do, so that the community will move on to resolving the issue, and not [spend] hundreds of thousands of dollars on finding out that a court will rule that existing contracts do continue. Even if they are successful in destroying that principle, what would the School Committee have gained?”

Simple question: so why would any teacher union--or anyone--ever see the need to renegotiate? The yearly COLA-like increases (2-3%/year) would be locked in. The currently generous benefits would be locked in. Heck, who wouldn't want that deal? As explained by the Rhode Island Statewide Coalition
“This obviously removes any incentive for unions to negotiate, and comes close to transferring the largest element of town budgets from town councils to the unions....Unions could run forever with their current contracts without town governments having any ability to modify the terms, other than by declaring bankruptcy.

“This law would set a precedent for other government unions and thereby lock town and state budgets into permanent cost-of-living increases, minimal health-care co-pays, and the other lopsided union benefits that could no longer be negotiated because the existing contracts would remain in force forever, regardless of their nominal end dates.”

I can't blame the unions for trying to lock in in perpetuity. Heck, that's their purpose: to get the best deal for their membership. And it's supposed to be the job of our politicians to take into account the best interests of ALL of their constituents. But we know how that works around here.


June 14, 2009


Surreality in Johnston Contract

Justin Katz

Rhode Island's circumstances won't change until enough voters see the scam in such news as this:

The agreement, ratified by the committee on Tuesday night, gives all teachers a 2-percent raise for the 2010-2011 school year, said the schools superintendent, Margaret A. Iacovelli.

The most experienced teachers (at the 10th step) will receive a 1.75 percent raise during the upcoming 2009-2010 school year while teachers at all lower steps will see no increase in their wages.

There is simply no way it wouldn't be major news if the lower-step teachers forewent their step increases. In the previous contract (PDF via Transparency Train), step increases ranged from 5.24% to 8.38%, with an average of 6.81%. Only in Rhode Island labor lingo is a 5–8% increase in pay considered a flat-lined concession during hard economic times.

And only a citizenry fatally inured to having their elected representatives give away their tax dollars to organized labor would fail to laugh at this negotiating accomplishment:

Teachers' contributions to their health-care costs will increase by $114,000 in the second year of the contract and by $142,500 in the final year, she said. The teachers’ contributions to their health insurance will gradually increase from $780 per year now to $1,280 in the final year of the contract between the town and the Johnston Federation of Teachers.

So, in the third year of the contract, teachers will get raises (on top of step increases and other adjustments, such as higher-ed degree bonuses) ranging from $757.70 to $1,369.88, and their share of healthcare payments will increase by $500. For comparison with your own healthcare deal, their co-shares will be rising from $15 to $24.62 per week. That certainly doesn't break the 10%-of-premium milestone now — let alone two years from now.

This, Projo reporter Mark Reynolds tell us, is the result when a union "has come to recognize the severity of [a] town's finances." Judge from that what they've been doing to us during somewhat less lean years.


June 13, 2009


Passing the Eternal Contract

Justin Katz

The email is already rapidly permeating the Rhode Island wing of cyberspace announcing Senate passage of S0713 (PDF), which adds the following language to teacher-related labor law:

In the event that a successor collective bargaining agreement has not been agreed to by the parties, then the existing contract shall continue in effect until such time as an agreement has been reached between the parties.

As today's RISC-Y Business newsletter suggests, this legislation "removes any incentive for unions to negotiate, and comes close to transferring the largest element of town budgets from town councils to the unions." If school committees ever get it in their heads to begin scaling back pay and benefits, unions could simply stall in perpetuity.

RISC also offers the interesting note that this bill was originally scheduled for debate on the day that the legislators ran away from the Gaspee Tea Party. According to the Senate journal for the next session (PDF), when we voters weren't literally at the gates, the votes went as follows:

YEAS- 32: The Honorable President Paiva Weed and Senators Algiere, Bates, Blais, Ciccone, Connors, Cote, Crowley, DaPonte, Devall, DiPalma, Doyle, Felag, Gallo, Goodwin, Jabour, Lenihan, Levesque, Lynch, Maselli, McBurney, McCaffrey, Metts, Miller, O'Neill, Perry, Raptakis, Ruggerio, Sheehan, Sosnowski, Tassoni, Walaska.

NAYS- 2: Senators Maher, Pinga

ABSTAINED- 1: Senator Picard

The three names in bold are Republicans who voted for this desperate attempt to dig a deeper grave in which to bury Rhode Island alive, and if it becomes law, not a single one of them should ever receive the support of Republican voters again.

House bill 5142 (PDF) would have the same effect, although it would create binding arbitration on all issues (right now it is not binding on financial matters), with the arbitration panel resolving "each individual disputed issue by accepting the last best offer thereon of either of the parties." So, for instance, if a school committee agrees to certain requests of the union as part of negotiations toward higher healthcare co-shares, but the union won't budge on the benefit number, the arbitration panel could pick the union's "last best offer" without anything previously set aside being taken up again. The new contract would, as a matter of law, be retroactive to the previous contract's expiration, and it's worth noting that, although the bill makes financial arbitration binding, it does not remove language forbidding appeal.

H5142 is currently being "held for further study" in the House Labor Committee. I'm not very familiar with the rules for the speed at which it could happen, but 5142 could be resurrected at any time.


June 11, 2009


Re: Nothing Egregious About This Picket Line

Justin Katz

Without coming down on either side of the particular issue on the table (which, whatever else its effects, has helped to highlight the multiple dumbnesses of Rhode Island politics), I have to express an objection to something that Andrew wrote earlier today:

... Vice-President of the United States of America is not a union job. Vice-President Biden's decision not to attend the conference is a purely political one and it is ludicrous to assert that people should self-curtail their rights of free expression and assembly, because the VP of the US needs to be protected from having to make political decisions.

The consideration that's missing from this analysis is that the Providence firefighters should and do have a more direct and more substantial interest in the well-being of Providence and of Rhode Island. It costs Biden next to nothing — and lesser federal functionaries even closer to nothing — to skip the convention. He's in office; he's just started in office. Indeed, bowing out arguably helps him to burnish union bona fides and illustrate independence from political leaders who happen to share the Democrat brand.

He's a politician, and he'll behave politically. Saying that the firefighters' union should not consider the consequences of its actions because they are filtered through the proxy of a politician's decisions is like saying that a dog owner shouldn't seek to protect his pet from having to resist biting guests. In the context of a dinner party, teaching the dog is not the focus; protecting one's associates is. In the context of rallies and national conventions hosted in Rhode Island, the Vice President's development and stagecraft shouldn't be the focus of those whose actions might repercuss in the state; the local community should be.

One could argue that the union's stunt will not have substantial consequences. It would also be reasonable to argue that things played out in a way that the union couldn't have foreseen, and its own political considerations required it to persist. But the general principle that a person or group's responsibility does not extend to anticipating the likely actions of others is not a notion that it is wise to promote.


June 10, 2009


What the Unions are For

Justin Katz

The possibility of payback in such forms as the following will be the continuing story:

That news comes courtesy of federal disclosure forms that unions file each year with the Department of Labor. The Bush Administration toughened the enforcement of those disclosure rules, but under pressure from unions the Obama Labor shop is slashing funding for such enforcement. Without such disclosure, workers wouldn't be able to see how their union chiefs are managing their mandatory dues money.

But there's a more fundamental, and more interesting, angle (emphasis added):

An SEIU spokeswoman says the union works on a four-year cycle, in which it goes "all out for the presidential election" and then rebuilds its finances. She adds the union has paid back more than $10 million of the $25 million it borrowed last year. But it's nonetheless true that the SEIU's liabilities have continued to climb each year from 2003 to 2008.

In that regard, there doesn't appear to be much difference between a labor union and a charitable organization that undertakes a remunerative enterprise (selling something or offering services) to raise money for the cause that represents its reason for being. The worker representation by which the unions raise their money is a means of financing political activism. Which side of the organizations represents their core purpose is probably not as easy a question to answer as it ought to be.



RI Unionization and First Preferences

Justin Katz

Amidst a parade of economists and business advisers who see the prominence of unionized labor in Rhode Island to be a hindrance to economic growth in the state, the labor point of view is interesting:

George H. Nee is the secretary-treasurer of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO and a member of the state Economic Policy Council, which advises the governor on economic issues. He says the state's unions prop up the Ocean State economy, making sure workers, after covering basic needs, have enough money left to afford a dinner out or a shopping trip to the Providence Place mall.

"It's a different perspective on the economy. If workers have disposable income, that benefits the whole business community," Nee said. "We don't benefit as a country or a state with a race to the bottom."

A pamphlet promoting unions in Rhode Island says the states with the highest levels of unionization have higher hourly wages, lower rates of poverty and fewer residents without medical insurance.

In contrast:

In 2008, the Chamber started a campaign — the Workforce Freedom Initiative — to slow the growth of unions. It says states with the highest levels of unionization have lower levels of economic growth and higher levels of unemployment than areas where unions are weak.

At issue, here, is a basic question of cultural preference that relates to national — and international — debates about the shape that our society should take. The dominant view in Europe, also ascendant in the campaign and victory of President Barack Obama, is that our focus should be on individuals' well-being: by union and by force of law "making sure workers, after covering basic needs, have enough money left to afford a dinner out or a shopping trip to the Providence Place mall." The source of that money is a secondary consideration, which is why public-sector unions are so harmful.

The alternate perspective, heretofore characteristic of the United States of America, is that an environment of economic freedom will foster a system of creative destruction that will, yes, permit some to fall into economic hardship, but that over time will improve the economy and advance technology such that everybody will benefit. The definition of hardship will shift from scrounging to eat to scrounging to pay for a television to scrounging to afford monthly Internet bills. (Suffering persists, of course, but it comes to be seen as extreme hardship.)

I'd suggest that strength of the first point of view is largely attributable to the success of the second. That is, unions haven't really had to explain from where the money would come, because the economic system was sufficiently healthy that nobody's minded much the bleeding. As the give-a-man-a-fish paradigm comes to dominate — drawing the productive toward itself with a gravity of comparative circumstances — the economy will atrophy, and the trajectory of hardship will head back the other way.


June 8, 2009


Shifting Laws, Corrupt Continuity

Justin Katz

By now you should have read yesterday's front-page advertisement for the Gaspee Tea Party rally in the Providence Journal. I'm referring to the article on big-money state pensions that Monique mentioned last night.

Most of the article is a series of revelations that make one wish for something symbolic (but not harmful) to tip over or sink, but this insidious qualifier ought not slip by without note:

No one is allowed any longer to buy credit for more time than they actually served in the military. Since 1994, there has been a minimum 20-hour-a-week work requirement for pension credit. That same year, lawmakers repealed the pension provision that recognized the part-time, six–month-a-year legislative clerks and doorkeepers as full-time state employees for pension purposes.

As egregious pension-related schemes have come to light, policies have been changed, but neither the players nor the politics have been rectified significantly. Legislators and judges still offer mutual support for budgets and jobs and so on. Unions still get away with manipulating contracts to drain the public coffers. Who knows what tricks haven't been exposed in the pension system and in other areas of state government.

The only way to prevent such stories from being regular features of the state's major media outlets is to turn up the spotlight and change the people in office.

Toward that end, I hope to see you Wednesday.


June 5, 2009


Charters as Examples in Multiple Ways

Justin Katz

Readers' first reaction to this story may be "let my charters go":

Stymied by contractual rules that control the hiring and placement of teachers, three unionized charter schools are exploring whether to seek independence from the districts that govern them.

Times2 Academy and the Textron Chamber of Commerce Academy, both in Providence, and the New England Laborers Academy/Cranston Public Schools Construction Career Academy have expressed frustration with collective-bargaining language that permits teachers with more seniority to displace — or "bump" — those with less.

After all, some of the justifying evidence is pretty egregious:

Several years ago, 25 of the 35 teachers at Times2 Academy received layoff notices, including the entire elementary school staff. That same year, one-third of the faculty members at Textron received pink slips. Bumping wreaks havoc with small, innovative schools that strive to create learning environments where teachers collaborate on instruction and faculty members get to know their students. ...

"We are concerned about anything that would stifle innovation," Davis said. "At Times2, 72 percent of teachers received a pink slip this spring. When more than two-thirds of our teachers are being told, 'Take a hike,' that is massively disruptive. Times2 has the highest high school graduation rate in the state. We can't afford to put those students at risk."

With a little more consideration, however, one's inclination should be less to let the charters increase their independence (although that should happen, as well) than to address the problem for all schools. Status as a non-charter school does not make it any less disruptive to see large shifts in personnel.

Simply put, the one-two gut punch of bumping and seniority-based assignments and layoffs have no place in a profession like teaching, given the importance of talent — and specificity in talent — as well as consistency and community for the students. When a specific position is set to be eliminated, for whatever reason, that should be that. When faced with the necessity of broader layoffs, districts should be able to confer with principals and other school leaders to weigh the many class, program, school, and district–based factors that bear on each position.

The charters' charge of innovation most definitely highlights the problems in public education, but once identified, we should eliminate those problems for all schools.


June 4, 2009


What Management Rights?

Marc Comtois

Whether it's with Police departments in Cranston and East Providence or charter schools in Providence and Cranston, union contracts just always seem to contain provisions that restrict basic management rights. In the case of the Police, why on earth should the Mayor and/or City Council not be able to hire whomever they want to be Chief? Well, because both Cranston and East Providence have contracts restricting new hires to from within their own ranks. As for the charter schools, the price for getting charter schools in Rhode Island at all was, apparently, that they be unionized and young teachers be subjected to the same "bump" process that can short-circuit any hopes of school-team building.

Cranston's Mayor Fung seems to have conceded the point (the City Council is still looking into its options) and the E.P. City Council is fighting the union. As for the charter schools, Education Commissioner McWalters previously directed the Providence schools to replace vacancies based solely on teacher qualifications, not seniority, and the belief is that his directive can be extended to include the Charter Schools. Or they'll seek emancipation from the school systems to which they are currently linked.



Yes, Let's Compare North Carolina and Rhode Island Public Sector Pensions

Justin Katz

It must be difficult to continually strive to find concrete facts to bolster the clearly erroneous position that Rhode Island needn't make dramatic changes to its public-sector union deals. In response to an op-ed touting North Carolina's 106% funding of its public pension system — versus Rhode Island's 53% — Pat Crowley presents the following argument:

... it doesn’t take too long to figure out that maybe it isn’t the benefits that are dragging down the state pension system. After all, a quick examination of the North Carolina plan shows that it may not be the benefits that drag down a plan, but political meddling. For example, public employees in Rhode Island make the highest contributions of any public employees in the country. Teachers contribute 9.5% of their pay to the pension plan. State workers contribute 8.75%. What do they contribute in North Carolina? 6%. That’s right, they contribute less.

So they must get less, right? Nope. Take a worker who earns $50,000 when they retire. In Rhode Island, under schedule A (the old system), a worker could retire at any age after 28 years of service and collect a monthly pension benefit of $2541 per month. But, under schedule B (the new system) that worker must work at least until age 59 and have 29 years of service to accrue a monthly benefit of $2,208. In North Carolina? Any age, 30 years, the person gets $2,275. Not quite as good as schedule A, but remember, in they are contributing nearly 4% less of their salary. And it is still better than Schedule B.

North Carolina pensioners also get a cola, tied to the CPI, just like Rhode Island. The handbook wasn’t exactly clear about when the cola takes affect… in other words, it isn’t clear if they have the Rhode Island delay factor. Nor does it seem like they have a cola cap as in Rhode Island.

Until Mr. Crowley nudged me in this direction, I'd found the "political meddling" talking point to be mostly persuasive, requiring an answer of, "yeah, but the now-what is the thing." Having scratched the surface of the NC-RI comparison, however, I'm not so sure that's the appropriate response. Let's start with the easy points:

  • Cost of living: Crowley relies entirely on North Carolina's pension handbook (PDF), which is why he finds the description of the COLA process vague; the Rhode Island handbook (PDF) lays out the formula. The vagueness results from the fact that North Carolina does not appear to have automatic cost of living adjustments: each one is a function of legislative statute, taking into account various factors, especially the state's financial condition. In 2008, NC gave pensioners another 2.2%; in 2006, it was 3%; in 2003, 1.28%; in 1991, nothing at all.
  • First-year calculations: Take note of Crowley's sleight-of-hand when he compares the two states' calculations. Assuming a final average salary of $50,000 — which North Carolinans would have to average over four consecutive years, while Rhode Islanders are judged by three — Pat plugs the numbers into the formulas to show those in NC receiving more despite their lower contributions. The problem is that he calculates the Rhode Island numbers using fewer years of service (their respective minimum ages), which clearly skews the numbers. In RI, a state worker who works the 30 years at which those in NC can receive their full pensions will actually receive $2,302, on schedule B, and $2,750, on schedule A. In other words, after working 30 years, the NC pensioner begins with $27,300 per year, while the RI pensioner begins with $27,624 or $33,000.

Moving beyond the assumed average salary, however, brings us to the doozy. As a preliminary note, I'll point out that North Carolina requires employees to work 30 hours per week to be eligible for a pension, while Rhode Island requires only 20, so I've excluded part-time workers in what follows. Using the U.S. Census of Government Employment Build-a-Table Tool, I dug my way to the following data related to full-time state and local employees (dollar amounts are annual):

North Carolina Rhode Island % Difference
Total employees 488,723 49,378
Full-time pay $20,079,838,692 $2,720,994,372
...Average $41,086 $55,105 34%
Elementary & secondary instruction employees 147,738 16,258
Elementary & secondary instruction pay $6,106,397,004 $1,009,706,664
...Average $41,333 $62,105 50%
All non-instruction employees 340,985 33,120
All non-instruction pay $13,973,441,688 $1,711,287,708
...Average $40,980 $51,669 26%

It's true that Rhode Island teachers, who contribute the greatest percentage of their pay toward retirement among RI public employees, put 3.5% more toward their pensions than do their peers in North Carolina, but on average, they're paid 50% better! Furthermore, if we calculate pensions from these averages, the thirty-year North Carolina teacher gets $1,881 per month, while the average RI teacher gets $2,859 under schedule B and $3,416 under schedule A. Annually, those three numbers work out to $22,568, $34,313, and $40,989. So, while it may be the case that the two states' formulas don't make the difference between funded and not-so-much (although Rhode Island's does grant a little higher percentage of salary, and then there are those automatic COLAs), the major difference derives from the fact that public employees are paid so much more, up here.

And lest somebody argues that our more-expensive region makes the difference, Bureau of Economic Analysis data paints that as a relatively minor consideration. (Note: This table includes part-time employees.)

North Carolina Rhode Island % Difference
Wage and salary employment 4,423,523 513,562
Wage and salary dispersements $170,554,670,000 $21,048,764,000
...Average $38,556 $40,986 6%
State and local government employees 629,279 62,157
State and local government pay $21,755,270,160 $2,869,287,108
...Average $34,572 $46,162 34%
Non-state & local government employees* 3,794,244 471,405
Non-state & local government pay* $148,799,399,840 $18,179,476,892
...Average* $39,217 $40,273 3%
* These numbers mix the data sets, so they should be considered estimates for illustration purposes only.

In summary, yes, Mr. Crowley, this is a union and union benefit issue, in which North Carolina public-sector employees earn 12% less than the average non-state employee, while their Rhode Island peers earn 15% more. (And that's not even getting into benefits, such as healthcare.) I'm certainly eager for considered discussion of the data, but it appears to me that the great pension debate that never seems quite to happen returns rather quickly to the battle over remuneration.


June 1, 2009


The Unions' Legislative Connivances; or, Why We Are Where We Are

Justin Katz

A good letter from L. Chappell of Saunderstown:

With the state and local budgets running deficits, the teachers' unions wish to add insult to injury with a bill that would force municipalities to keep the expired contract in force while they negotiate a new one. This bill is clearly a reaction to the events in East Providence.

The bill sponsors, Senators Rhoda E. Perry, Charles J. Levesque, Michael J. McCaffrey, Joshua Miller and Susan Sosnowski, have shown their true colors toward the taxpayers of East Providence in particular and the state in general with this bill. Actions like this are why your property-tax bills continue to climb. Ask yourselves if you have legislation like this protecting your job.

With a law like this on the books, unions would have even less reason to negotiate toward good-faith compromise.


May 26, 2009


The Real Discussion Happens in the Dark

Justin Katz

A pre-meeting executive session has occupied the Tiverton School Committee for the past hour and fifteen minutes. About twenty minutes ago, Chairman Jan Bergandy and Vice Chairwoman Sally Black stepped into the auditorium to announce that a discussion of legal issues related to the budget would delay them for another fifteen.

Although my reader-funded high-speed Internet makes my entire office essentially mobile, I do wonder whether there ought to be some sort of start-time clause in public meeting laws.

I'll admit that it was kinda neat to sit in an empty auditorium for forty-five minutes. (The teachers who are no in the room with me were hanging out in the lobby area.) Pleasant memories of practicing piano in a mostly dark auditorium during study hall seventeen years ago.

And here comes the committee...

8:30 p.m.

The budget discussion has begun with the pivotal nature of state and federal aid. Supt. Bill Rearick suggested that everything is speculative until those numbers are in. (Of course, he was a bit less circumspect when telling the Sakonnet Times that children are going to be hurt.

8:37 p.m.

About eight of the 24 or so teachers in the room left when the agenda moved on from the budget to the district's strategic plan. Just sayin'.

8:54 p.m.

And that's it. Short meeting... once the waiting was over. Of all of these meetings that I've attended, this was by far the most promotional of the students' activities. That's a good thing, and prudent, too, given the realities of budget formation. For one thing, it shows an increased appreciation for the importance of bringing the community into the various processes.

The next step should be to find ways to increase the percentage of per-student spending that goes toward such activities.


May 23, 2009


Telling Reasons to Object to Tax Cuts

Justin Katz

I've got my reservations about Governor Carcieri's tax proposals on the grounds that they don't go far enough, especially in extending their effects to middle and working class residents. But some of the objections from the other side should inadvertently direct Rhode Islanders' attention to the underlying problems of the state:

Karen Malcolm, executive director of Ocean State Action, a coalition of labor unions and advocacy groups, said previous state tax cuts have not worked. "The policies we've been following have not brought the promised jobs," she said.

Instead of phasing out the corporate income tax, for example, Rhode Island should instead seek changes to local property taxes, which represent the single greatest tax burden for business, she said.

Of course, local property taxes are so high in part because the unions — especially the teachers' unions — have been more successful at pumping up their members' remuneration packages from that stream. Witness:

Malcolm goes on:

And to improve Rhode Island’s overall business climate, the state should focus on other areas, such as fixing crumbling roads and bridges, she said.

Of course, infrastructure repairs are more expensive than they would be absent union rule and the related regulations. (It's quite a thing to drive by a roadwork site and witness the two flag-bearing women standing next to each other, flags down, chatting while the mandatory police officer chats on his cell phone, back to the scene.) Moreover, the fact that the state typically allocates 0.0% of its General Revenue to transportation suggests that Malcolm is seeking to raise additional taxes to direct toward labor.

Then there's the other side of the problem:

Rick Harris, executive director of the Rhode Island chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, said Carcieri's proposals would drain away tax revenue at a time when it is most needed for education, health care and other programs. "If you're taking more money out of the system, how are we going to meet this need?" he said.

Directing the wealth of productive, working Rhode Islanders to those who are otherwise — even if the intention is to make them more productive — is part of what created our current hole. If we're to have any hope of turning things around, we must reverse our focus and increase activities that create revenue, rather than expend it.


May 22, 2009


Building a Better Career

Justin Katz

I can most definitely relate to Michael Crawford's observations:

When Matthew Crawford finished his doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, he took a job at a Washington think tank. "I was always tired," he writes, "and honestly could not see the rationale for my being paid at all." He quit after five months and started doing motorcycle repair in a decaying factory in Richmond, Va. This journey from philosopher manqué to philosopher-mechanic is the arc of his new book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. It's appropriate that it arrives in May, the month when college seniors commence real life. Skip Dr. Seuss, or a tie from Vineyard Vines, and give them a copy for graduation.

The graduates won't even skim Shop Class, of course. But maybe, five years from now, when they can't understand why their high-paying jobs at Micron Consulting seem pointless and enervating, Crawford's writing will show them a way forward. It's not an insult to say that Shop Class is the best self-help book that I've ever read. Almost all works in the genre skip the "self" part and jump straight to the "help." Crawford rightly asks whether today's cubicle dweller even has a respectable self. Many of us work in jobs with no discernible products or measurable results. We manage brands and implement initiatives, all the while basing our self-esteem on the opinions of others.

Compare that with the motorcycle mechanic. Instead of the vague threat of a performance review, the mechanic faces the tactile problem of a bike that won't start. He tests various theories and deploys actual tools. The sign of success is a roaring engine. In Shop Class, Crawford talks about fixing bikes and the analytical lessons he draws from his gearhead days. It's kind of like Heidegger and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In one virtuoso episode, an oil seal on a 1983 Honda Magna V45 becomes a lesson in how curiosity can be dangerous when it becomes fixated. We become self-absorbed, even self-indulgent. The ideal, when working on a bike, is to keep the customer in mind, to realize that messing with the bike (satisfying our curiosity) ultimately needs to be curtailed by consideration of the wider world—i.e., the customer, who doesn't want to overpay. As Crawford points out, much "knowledge work" lacks this element of practical wisdom, of opening out into the experience of others. Just go read a few dissertations.

While doing the work of a mechanic provides intellectual challenges and the intrinsic satisfactions of completing problems from start to finish, Crawford knows that working in the trades is seen as déclassé and too limiting for a college graduate. And then he goes on to show how stupid that viewpoint is.

Of course, from my point of view, I see how lessons learned in a trade can be reapplied in an office. Reviewer Michael Agger's language doesn't suggest this as an option, but the "enervating" careers that he mentions can be made to have discernible products and measurable results. They may necessarily have to be traced in the longer term — building a house rather than installing a kitchen — but anywhere there is an objective, there is an opportunity to measure progress. Furthermore, it may require a little bit more work on the part of managers, but even employees who are applying their time on some small, discrete component of a larger project can be enabled to see the usefulness of their tasks.

Which is not to disagree with the suggestion that young adults learn a trade. There is a risk, however, of romanticizing blue collars too enthusiastically. We have our cogs, and we certainly have our tedium. But even those, properly approached, offer opportunity for progress in our broader personal occupation of building a healthy frame of mind.


May 21, 2009


No Union Is an Island

Justin Katz

From a piece on the Caruolo Act comes this familiar anecdote:

When West Warwick learned this winter that it would lose much of its revenue sharing funds from the state, [West Warwick Town Manager James] Thomas said the town laid off more than a dozen workers and secured union wage concessions. "Some of them will not have had a raise for 30 months. The same comment cannot be said for school teachers in West Warwick. It is out of control, there is no accountability and they believe they are islands onto themselves," he said.

Union members get raises in good times and bad. They'll explicitly strive to hurt their students academically to manipulate parents as voters and tear apart the community that they profess to serve in order to avoid a mere 3% cut in their remuneration. It's shameful, and the worst part is that the union organizations have structured the system such that even well-intentioned residents and school committee members actually believe that it functions as it does according to some irrevocable universal mandate.

We all want the best education possible for our students, but union schools are simply not providing it. And we all (should) agree that talented teachers ought to be well compensated, but really, the current system, handling teachers homogeneously, as if they are operating a factory, amounts to a middle class entitlement system. Enough is enough.


May 18, 2009


Municipal Increases Are Mainly Pay and Benefits

Justin Katz

This story on the likely decreases in state aid to municipalities appears to break apart two categories of spending that are very closely related (emphasis added):

Indeed, the numbers suggest that municipalities have largely avoided the budget cuts that swept across state government in recent years, according to a report to be released this week by the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council.

Since 2004, "the increase in local government expenditures has outpaced the growth in the state general fund budget, [the consumer price index], and personal income in almost every year," the report says. "The majority of this expenditure growth has been to support education spending, which accounts for the majority of local spending; however, spending on employee benefits is the second-fastest increasing component of municipal budgets."

In point of fact, most of the increase in education spending has gone toward employee pay and benefits. Treating education as its own all-inclusive category blurs the story. And that story relates to a point made later in the article:

The governor has introduced legislation to eliminate most of the mandates. But the Democrat-controlled Assembly has been reluctant to support the Republican governor's initiatives, most of which are opposed by organized labor.

Labor has the RI system structured so well in its favor, that there isn't much by way of reform that won't disrupt its schemes to some degree. Yet, they must be disrupted, and both union members and elected representatives must soften their opposition.


May 13, 2009


Different Statements (and Threats) from the Unionist

Justin Katz

As I noted during liveblogging last night, Tiverton Guidance Counselor Lynn Nicholas had the following to say at the school committee meeting in November, at which the committee voted to hold off on approving a retroactive teachers' contract until state numbers came in (stream, download):

Before I ask Doug a question, I just need to make it clear that, if the award is not agreed upon tonight, there will be a lot of harm done. Some of it will be financial; a lot of it will not be, and I'm not going to go into detail.

In reviewing the audio from her speech tonight (stream, download), I was planning to note how her perspective is quite different when taxpayers, not union teachers, are the ones removing money from the budget. But on the scene, I hadn't caught the implications of the sentences with which she closed her speech. Addressing the school committee (emphasis added):

You need to be serious about what you plan on cutting. I am the last person on this Earth that would want to hurt a child, but you need to make a statement. I don't know how you're going to do it. I don't know what you're going to do. But you need to make a statement to get people to the town meeting.

Keep in mind that this was before the conversation turned to ways to "get out the vote." That being the case, Ms. Nicholas would appear to be suggesting that the school committee make targeted cuts, risking harm to students, that would anger parents enough to get them to the next FTM. True to union form, the kids — whose well-being, the disclaimer goes, is a top priority for everybody — are to be leveraged as pawns to drive the parents toward actions beneficial to the union.

This coincides with a — for now — rumor that I'd heard today that a certain school committee member is planning to recommend cuts in programming intentionally in order to fire up parents. Me, I'd suggest that the school committee consider the possibility that such maneuvers could very well motivate parents to take quite different actions than the committee intends... especially now that a local organization exists to explain precisely where the district's money has been going.


May 12, 2009


A New Dawn for Tiverton Education... or Is It Dusk?

Justin Katz

A larger-than-usual crowd is in t Tiverton High School library for the first school committee after the financial town meeting cut the district's budget by $627,247. A healthy TCC showing; the rest, I assume, are teachers and sympathizers.

School Committee Chairman: "Our only priority in dealing with this cut is to protect our students, and to make sure that our students are impacted as little as possible... everything else is secondary."

7:17 p.m.

They're going to speak vaguely for public consumption and reserve specific strategies for executive session because, as Bergandy put it: "We have to explore possible legal consequences."

Carroll Hermann started by thanking those who showed up at the FTM and voted against the cut. "With $600,000, everyone will get hurt. No one will walk away whole."

7:21 p.m.

Sally Black is taking a general tack, currently suggesting that, at a certain point, "tinkering" with the "delicate balance" has to stop.

She's emphasizing the "fair funding formula" from the state, pointing to a clause in proposed legislation reading "regardless of annual availability of state revenues."

Mild dig at Budget Committee members who didn't vote with the budget they proposed.

7:27 p.m.

Bergandy suggested that, when the state is done cutting, the shortfall may reach a million dollars.

TCC member Joe Souza is speaking, saying that the cut wasn't to "hurt the kids." Scoffs from the teachers in the room: "Yes it was."

7:29 p.m.

"We need to stand up in this town and make some noise... together." Too much in-fighting.

"It's not the Tiverton taxpayers against this school committee."

Guidance Counselor Lynn Nicholas — who is heavily involved in the union — thinks that lawsuits against the town "need seriously to be considered."

Now she wants to know what advocacy the school committee will pursue to get parents to the town meeting.

7:35 p.m.

One teacher wants to form an organization to battle TCC. My impression was that the union and the town Democrats were organized for such purposes.

How absurd that a small group fighting back can make these people feel that the process was somehow unfairly tilted.

7:37 p.m.

Bill Rearick just read the new charter amendment that prevents town funds from advocating for causes.

Sally Black described an undue concern about what it allowed her to do.

7:41 p.m.

A reader just emailed to remind me of Lynn Nicholas's comment during contract disputes: if the committee does not pass the contract, there will be "a lot of harm done — some financial, some not."

The audio is here. Full quote:

Before I ask Doug a question, I just need to make it clear that, if the award is not agreed upon tonight, there will be a lot of harm done. Some of it will be financial; a lot of it will not be, and I'm not going to go into detail.

When you make a statement like that when you're looking for money for yourself, you don't have a whole lot of credibility to villainize taxpayers as hurting children.

7:51 p.m.

And business moves on to sex offender notification and heating oil bids.

7:54 p.m.

At last night's town council, apparently at the beginning (why I missed it), Council Vice President Joanne Arruda made a point during the consent agenda segment of expressing opposition to a petition to end the Caruolo act and another to allow town councils power over teacher contracts.

7:58 p.m.

It just occurred to me that one of the speakers during the financial town meeting segment of this meeting pointed out that services to students have been declining for years. She was making the point that parents will leave town if the new cut exacerbates the problem; I'd note that TCC is less than a year old.

The NEA-RI has been around for quite a while, though...

8:02 p.m.

And out into the night...


May 10, 2009


Where Tiverton Goes from Here

Justin Katz

Saturday morning, a majority of electors at the Tiverton financial town meeting (FTM) for 2009 voted to cut the Budget Committee's recommended school department budget by $627,247 — explicitly subtracting $174,054 from the local contribution and $453,193 from the expected general state aid. Owing to a Budget Committee resolution passed earlier in the meeting, any "federal, state, or local government aid" in excess of that amount would be "returned to the Town's General Fund as a surplus."

If not for a time limit before the meeting would automatically have recessed until the following week — thus risking a repeat of last year's performance — the municipal budget could have experienced a similar cut.

As one might expect, rumors (aka threats) of litigation are already circulating, and Rhode Islanders have been conditioned to see such actions as unavoidable consequences of cold process. As with children decrying the restrictions imposed by peer pressure, the excuse will go out from officials and union members alike that laws, mandates, and contracts leave them no choice. Adults should understand that there are always choices, the question being who refuses to make the right ones.

In evaluating the path forward, Tiverton should recall to mind two antecedents without which Saturday's result would likely have been quite different: the suspicious outcome of last year's FTM and the imprudent raise and retroactive giveaway to the teachers' union in January. Both galvanized those of us who see a need for an overhaul of priorities, and both compounded the difficulty of dealing with current financial strain.

For all the shades of gray, there are really only two paths forward. Our representatives can take the taxpayers' cue and push back on those whom they've previously perceived as tying their hands — the unions and the state. Or our representatives can continue fighting reformers and attempting to move as much of their habitual agenda as possible.

If they choose the former approach, they'll force the unions and state lawmakers to accept the mantle of intransigence against financial reality and taxpayers' demands. They'll also find eager support amidst a growing wave of active citizens with their eye on transforming Rhode Island into the national leader that it ought to be.

If they choose the latter approach — if they cling to the remnants of a withering status quo, if they continue to pile on the antecedents to escalation — they might just push an increasingly organized opposition to the next level of involvement: namely, campaigns for office.


May 9, 2009


The Unions' Guy

Justin Katz

In effect, the Obama administration insists that some of the federal money given to the states is meant to go directly to unionized public sector workers in California:

The Obama administration is threatening to rescind billions of dollars in federal stimulus money if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers do not restore wage cuts to unionized home healthcare workers approved in February as part of the budget.

Schwarzenegger's office was advised this week by federal health officials that the wage reduction, which will save California $74 million, violates provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Failure to revoke the scheduled wage cut before it takes effect July 1 could cost California $6.8 billion in stimulus money, according to state officials.

The state lowered the maximum hourly wage of members of the Service Employees International Union from $12.10 to $10.10, and the SEIU picked up the Obamaphone.


May 5, 2009


Town as Big Business

Justin Katz

One could understand, perhaps, the city/town being its own biggest employer in a rural area or suburb with little by way of industry. But Warwick? Bob Cushman writes:

According to Warwick’s 2007 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, the City of Warwick was the No. 1 employer in Warwick, with 2,900 employees. Number two was Kent Hospital, with 2,050 employees. Number three was Metropolitan Life/Property Insurance, with 1,450 employees. Number four was United Parcel Service, with 1,000 employees. Number five was Leviton Manufacturing, with 840 employees.

In 1998, the population of Warwick was 85,427 citizens. By 2007, the population had increased slightly, to 87,365 citizens. In 1998, the number of full-time municipal employees was 875. By 2008, the number of municipal employees had increased more than 6 percent, to 929 employees.

In 1997, the number of students in Warwick’s schools was 12,124. By 2008, the number had decreased to 11,150 students. In 2012, the projected student population is expected to further decrease, to 10,442, or a 14 percent decline from 1997 levels. In 1997, the number of teachers employed was 1,056. By 2003, the teaching staff had increased more than 7 percent, to 1,133.

Since then the teaching staff has been reduced to 1,088 teachers, still an increase of 3 percent over 1997 levels.

Little wonder public-sector unions do so well, as a political constituency, when the biggest employer in town receives its revenue through force of tax.


May 4, 2009


Government as Pension Program

Justin Katz

Here's an eye-popper: Cranston spends more than a fifth of its total budget on pensions (not including teachers). Nine municipalities spend over 10%.

While Rhode Island's political leaders wrestle with state pension reform, there's another big pension headache out there — the soaring cost of municipal pensions.

A new study by the business-backed Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council reports that the amount of money that communities spend on pension costs has increased nearly 50 percent in the past five years, from $101 million in 2004 to $149 million in the current fiscal year ending June 30.

But the raw amount, the exclusion of teachers, and the addition of state employees is not all:

The study found that locally administered pension plans were able to fund only an average of 45 percent of their obligations as of June 30, 2006, with an unfunded liability of $1.6 billion. That encompasses quite a wide range, from a Coventry police pension plan that is only 7.9-percent funded, to the Jamestown police pension plan, which is over-funded, at 123.9 percent.

In other words, as much as they're spending, many cities and towns ought to be devoting more resources to pensions.

That's if you look at it as a funding matter. If you look at it as a practical and moral matter, they ought to be devoting less to pensions. It's time to bring public workers back to the real world.


May 3, 2009


Paloozas All Around

Justin Katz

I'll admit some jealousy.

Over the course of a year, Matt Allen built a brand new radio gig into the number 1 show in its slot. His previous experience had been limited to production and some periodic shows here and there on the schedule. For his show's one-year anniversary, his company threw him a big "Mattapalooza" party, replete with a cake, an office-produced video, and a parade of people offering much-deserved plaudits.

During an overlapping time period, with plenty of help from other carpenters, architects, engineers, and various subcontractors, I built this addition and renovated two-thirds of the existing house (two-thirds being equivalent to two-and-a-half to three times the size of my working class ranch):

My previous experience had been limited to small jobs and a couple of suburban basement finishes. As the project — and a hellacious year — neared completion, my reward was a series of insults from the boss and a substantial cut in my pay. (The insults, I suspect, were meant to cover the fact that, just a few months earlier, he'd promised quite the opposite change to my remuneration.)

These disparate outcomes were not the result of government regulations. Unionization did not play a role. To some extent, the cultures of the industries did; with the prominence of names and personality, the information and entertainment industry is more sensitive to the competition for proven quantities. Construction is more of a dirt-field bulldog game, with a culture of teeth-gritted tolerance for struggle (which somehow seems always to benefit the honchos financially).

But what it comes down to, it seems to me, is that some employers view talent as something to be nurtured and guarded, justifying periodic costs on an individual basis as investments in a long-term competitive advantage. Other employers view talent as something to be exploited for every immediate penny that it can generate, even if the wringing process drains the last ounces of drive from its vessel.

This comparison came to mind mainly as a starting point for ruminations about ways to make the system better... or worse. Public policy ought to encourage entrepreneurship, to be sure, but not everybody, indeed a likely minority, will have the interest or specialized knack to set out on their own. For those who wish mainly to apply their non-business skills in the workplace — which is to say, those who prefer to leave organizational processes to others — advantage is to be gained to the extent that they are (one) not tied to their current employers and (two) able to go elsewhere.

Regarding the first, it is understandable to lament the loss of those storied lifetime relationships between worker and organization. However, it isn't immediately obvious that employees benefited more from, say, promised pensions, than did employers who, by those promises, had less fear of attrition. The manacles of workplace-based healthcare are a stark example of the detriment: Why should somebody's boss hold in his hands the health of his crew's families?

Regarding the second, incentives for companies to grow ever bigger should be viewed with suspicion. Technology has done much to decrease the advantage of size — for example, by bringing the development and production of marketing materials increasingly within the capability range of neophytes. On the other hand, the new implied government insurance that companies gain by becoming "too big to fail" is certain to have repercussions that are not agreeable to workers. Especially in an environment in which businesses are developing global pools of potential workers, the fewer potential employers, the less leverage the workers will have. How much worse, too, would it be to give ultimate responsibility for the economy to a governing regime of so-called public servants?

The gathering consensus appears to be that we're heading for a time of willing dependency — a European-style socialist democracy that seeks to make guarantees to citizens of a certain standard of well-being. I maintain hope that Americans are not a people who will find the taste of such a life to be to their liking, but ultimately, Americans will have the system that they desire.

Whatever our decision, we should pause to reflect on the subtle, yet profound, significance of relations. Assistance given for family or for charity is a pleasure for the giver. Recognition of an employee, freely offered, is an opportunity. Better to be the recipient of these than to be the obligation of government functionaries or, more directly to the point, the ostensible beneficiary of mandates on one's employer. A person who is a mandated obligation is a burden to be minimized.

Reality is not such that we can each and every one of us expect paloozas in our own names, but our individual freedom and independence correlates with the value that we can place on our time. What we need, for our own fulfillment, is for those who would claim more of that time to realize that talent is more precious than money, even if their market values are the same.


May 2, 2009


Public-Sector Rules May Be Strict, but Respectful

Justin Katz

It is wholly reasonable — even obvious — for the city of Woonsocket to implement these rules for its firefighters:

The order bans work that that would involve using department time or resources, including the uniform, for personal gain; doing work that would normally be expected to be done for the city while the firefighter was on duty; any acts that would have to be reviewed or approved by the Fire Department or other city employee; and lastly, work that "involves such time demands as would render performance of his or her duties as a firefighter less efficient and effective."

These four requirements follow basic ethical and professional norms from which public sector employees and officials seem too often to be excused in Rhode Island. Where Woonsocket goes too far, however, is in presuming not to treat firefighters as adults and professionals:

The city has issued a general order to its firefighters that says starting May 11, if they want to work a second job, they will need the permission of the chief or the public safety director.

Policies should be in place to take corrective and punitive action when rules are broken, but giving an employer a preemptive veto power over activities outside of the workplace is a clear violation of rights and due respect.


April 30, 2009


New GM: UAW To Bargain With Themselves

Marc Comtois

The Wall Street Journal editorializes:

President Obama insisted at his press conference last night that he doesn't want to nationalize the auto industry (or the banks, or the mortgage market, or . . .). But if that's true, why has he proposed a restructuring plan for General Motors that leaves the government with a majority stake in the car maker?
Yeah, and what a deal for private investors!
According the Treasury-GM debt-for-equity swap announced Monday, GM has $27.2 billion in unsecured bonds owned by the public. These are owned by mutual funds, pension funds, hedge funds and retail investors who bought them directly through their brokers. Under Monday's offer, they would exchange their $27.2 billion in bonds for 10% of the stock of the restructured GM. This could amount to less than five cents on the dollar.

The Treasury, which is owed $16.2 billion, would receive 50% of the stock and $8.1 billion in debt -- as much as 87 cents on the dollar. The union's retiree health-care benefit trust would receive half of the $20 billion it is owed in stock, giving it 40% ownership of GM, plus another $10 billion in cash over time. That's worth about 76 cents on the dollar, according to some estimates.

In a genuine Chapter 11 bankruptcy, these three groups of creditors would all be similarly situated -- because all three are, for the most part, unsecured creditors of GM. And yet according to the formula presented Monday, those with the largest claim -- the bondholders -- get the smallest piece of the restructured company by a huge margin.

While the WSJ seems to not like the idea that "At the next labor contract bargaining session, the union would sit on both sides of the table," Mickey Kaus points out:
Let the UAW, as new owner of GM, pay the price for the overgrown work rules of its locals. Let the UAW demand above-market raises from itself. Let the UAW try to raise money from new lenders after the previous round of lenders has been royally screwed (thanks, in part, to the UAW). And then let the UAW try to sell the cars that result.

The most efficient way to balance competing interests, as Michael Kinsley noted years ago, isn't an adverserial system where various singleminded interests duke it out--either in court or on picket lines--but in the head of a decisionmaker who will feel the relevant consequences. As long as the government steps out of the financing picture, the UAW will feel the consequences of its own excesses. Just don't bail them out again!

Wish I could be sure about that last bit...but as for the rest, it would certainly change the worker/management relationship.


April 29, 2009


William Felkner: Card-Checking Arlen Specter

Engaged Citizen

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter has become a Democrat. Many view this as only a change of label, but it could have a significant impact nonetheless.

As you may all be painfully aware, card-check legislation is pending in Washington. If passed, it would eliminate the secret ballot for workers and give unions the ability to knock on potential members' doors and say whatever it takes to get a signature on a small card, which will still be a binding legal document that would force collective bargaining on an employer.

Elimination of the secret ballot also eliminates the assurance that the worker has ample opportunity to hear both sides of the argument.

This legislation has been struggling to be passed. Inside the beltway rumors have it that the swing vote, Senator Specter, hasn’t received enough "support" from the unions yet but was keeping the door open to persuasion.

My birdies that fly south-right for the winter tell me that the Republican National Committee has threatened Specter that if he supported card-check it would throw its support behind his likely primary opponent, Pat Toomey. Well, it looks like we can call him the general election opponent now.

Regardless of where this shakes out, it still bodes ill for workers' rights to secret ballots. The Democrats, who are clearly taking direction from the unions on this issue, are only one or two votes away from the 60 needed to close out the Republicans (depending on how the
Franken/Coleman race goes). Because card-check is such bad legislation, any compromise will be a step in the wrong direction.

Bill Felkner is the president of the Ocean State Policy Research Institute, sponsor of the LRB Watch website and the Transparency Train public information portal.


April 24, 2009


Crowley's Strategy: Repeat the Lie

Justin Katz

I remain reluctant to relinquish the innocence that leads to my being surprised that such people as Pat Crowley exist outside of Charles Dickens novels and the bureaucracies of totalitarian madhouse societies.

Last April, I informed readers of the Providence Journal opinion pages that, "according to tax returns filed in 2005 and 2006 (based on income from 2004 and 2005), Rhode Island lost, on a net basis, 8,296 taxpayers, with an aggregate adjusted gross income totaling $485 million, over those two years (IRS migration data)." The statement derived from some research that I'd posted here in February, and on which I later expanded here and here.

One recent evening, somebody working with the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce emailed me to inquire after my source, which I provided, and subsequently forwarded to me an "E-Brief" conveying the data (PDF). RI Representative David Segal (D., Providence, East Providence) got wind of the release and posted about it on RI Future.

Then Crowley got in the game, teasing a post in which he would get to the bottom of the Chamber's claim. Wrote Pat: "Needless to say, this has made the policy wonk in me very excited. Why? A number is verifiable. Or at least it should be." In the comments, Tom Sgouros chipped in to correctly identify the data source (IRS migration) and to concede, at least, that "there's no doubt that it's troubling information."

When Pat finally put the post up, it was incorrect in its core accusation:

In order to make their claim, the Chamber needs to make a leap of faith – that the migrants were only in one direction and that they were all taxpayers. This is pure speculation: for example, with higher education being one of our major industries, a graduating class is going to have a lot of comings and going; and the Chamber only accounts for the goings.

And went on to cite trends in the number of IRS tax filers in Rhode Island. Unable to keep my fingers out of the fishbowl any longer, I explained that "tax years 2005 and 2006 saw migration TO Rhode Island of 43,774, with an aggregate AGI of $2,037,577,000, but migration FROM Rhode Island of 52,070, with an aggregate AGI of $2,522,327,000." (I also explained why the filer data wasn't directly applicable.) It was a quick I-should-already-be-in-bed comment, and I pretty much copied and pasted from the Excel file that I built from the IRS data last year. If only for rhetorical reasons, I should have been more explicit that the data is based on counties, not states, so both the inflow and outflow numbers include people who moved within Rhode Island, because Tom Sgouros correctly specified:

For 05-06, the IRS data I have says that 17,395 2006 returns were from people who moved from here to elsewhere, and that 12,968 people moved from elsewhere to here.

I should note, here, that the Chamber of Commerce's language is insufficiently specific that the data accounts for two years of migration. Adding the second year to Tom's number, we get the following for net losses of taxpayers and AGIs over the two years:

Justin's taxpayers Tom's taxpayers
Inflow 43,774 26,128
Outflow 52,070 34,424
Net outflow 8,296 8,296

Unless you're employed by the National Education Association of Rhode Island, you'll likely notice that the two totals are exactly the same, because the in-state migrants cancel themselves out. The same is true for AGI.

But rather than admit the obvious and attempt, as Sgouros did, to move the debate onto ground that is actually, well, debatable, Crowley dug in, saying that I've been "caught in a lie" and "exposed" and updating the post to accuse the Projo of fraud for a related editorial. Exposed I've been: of a desire to review numbers with those who dispute my conclusions and to clarify where we're looking at different things.

Given his slight change of status when he became the owner of RI Future, I'd been attempting some level of interblog comity, but it's so clear that Pat is of the do anything/say anything school of propaganda that it's difficult not to suggest that anybody who aligns themselves with him thereby damages their own credibility.


April 19, 2009


Revenue-Driven Quota, or Union Stranglehold Workaround?

Justin Katz

A busy week moved this Hopkinton tidbit to the bottom of the pile, but the multiple angles make it of broader interest:

If you drive through Hopkinton, keep this in mind: The officers you see are each required to write 20 traffic tickets per month, "more or less," under a new Police Department policy.

Excuses, like being busy doing something else, or having taken vacation days, "are not acceptable," Lt. Daniel C. Baruti said in a March 3 internal e-mail that spells out the policy.

Drivers who think they have been ticketed unfairly often suspect that they were cited because of a police quota rather than their driving. The police almost universally deny that quotas exist.

The e-mail says, in bold, italic type, "Do not forward this e-mail."

Baruti tried to put a business-as-usual face on the controversy, with the emphasis on "business" by presenting law enforcement in terms of money-making:

Baruti and the other local officials said that the policy is a management tool intended to make the police more productive. Although it has drawn some criticism, Baruti said, the policy is legal and that they have no intention of abandoning it. ...

The e-mail said that officers who don't meet the quota — an average of one ticket for every shift worked — will have to fill out daily activity sheets to account for what they have done during their shifts. Baruti acknowledged that officers would rather not have to do that.

Baruti's e-mail said that the department's "production level" has fallen and that the town manager and some members of the Town Council "are very dissatisfied with our numbers." He said he thinks a decline in the department's ticket production reflects a lack of motivation.

Baruti wrote that he plans to send the officers' statistics to the Town Council, so members can "see for themselves who is producing and who is not." DiLibero said the council hasn't acted on the issue, which he considers an administrative matter.

Police Chief John Scuncio, by contrast, fires the union flare:

Scuncio, on the other hand, said the policy is aimed at a single officer who does practically no work. One example of his lack of effort, the chief said, is that month after month, the officer writes no tickets at all. The chief said the officer's inactivity "really creates problems" because new officers "see this guy doing nothing." He didn't identify the officer, saying he didn't want to single the officer out. ...

He said he's reluctant to try to discipline the officer because of the difficulty under the legal and contractual protections provided to Rhode Island police.

Maybe I'm getting tired of games in my ornery middle age, or maybe my incredulity results from daily experience with the demands and strains that exist in the private sector, but I'm inclined to offer solutions to both justifications for this policy, no matter which is the actual one: Make all officers fill out daily activity sheets, regardless of their "productivity," and stop negotiating contracts that make it difficult to discipline egregiously "unproductive" employees.

Seems like every time the public discovers an objectionable policy or practice in the government sphere, it's excused with reference to the deeper problems that it's supposedly attempting to solve. Well, let's do away with the deeper problems, even if it annoys big contributors, people in the family-and-friends camp, and special interests.


April 11, 2009


The End of Education in Providence

Justin Katz

What kind of a school system would let this sort of thing happen? It's sure to be the end of quality public education as we know it (emphasis added):

Starting this fall, teacher vacancies in four Providence schools — Hope High School, Veazie Street Elementary School, Lauro Elementary School and Perry Middle School — will be filled based on whether the applicants have the skills needed to serve students in those particular schools. The principals of the district's two new schools — Nathan Bishop Middle School and the Providence Career and Technical Academy — will have the authority to hire their own teachers. The entire school district will move to this new plan at the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year.

For anybody who missed my sarcasm, I'll restate: What kind of school system would allow itself to decay so greatly that such a basic organizational practice seems like a radical innovation? Unbelievable.


April 9, 2009


An Explanation for the Union

Justin Katz

The reaction of RI Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals lobbyist James Parisi to news that Governor Carcieri's 2010 budget includes a provision liberating charter schools from some personnel requirements suggests that the teachers' unions are frightened that charters might become even more successful:

"It's wrong, it's unfair, it's unconscionable, it's absolutely unnecessary and it wasn't the deal that was struck when the original charter law was put into place," James Parisi, a lobbyist for the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, told the House Finance Committee in a hearing Tuesday.

Who knew the schtick of lawyer Jackie Chiles from Seinfeld worked for lobbyists, as well?

A more interesting quotation from Mr. Parisi comes at the end of Cynthia Needham's article:

"What I don't understand," Parisi said, "is how the governor could propose expanding charter schools when the public school districts are hurting as much as they are hurting."

The puzzle's not difficult to solve. The governor recognizes the need to apply education money effectively, where it would do the most good. In the public schools, it would be soaked up by the teachers as a matter of course, without substantial connection to change or improvement. When an organization is fundamentally broken and displays little will to repair the core problem, society will find a way around it.


March 30, 2009


The Pressure to Give and Give

Justin Katz

There's something very Rhode Island about a financial town meeting that admits non-resident outside guests and then adds half a million dollars to the school budget:

The non-resident ban the Lincoln Town Council approved 4-1 last week stems in part from controversy over last May's rollicking Town Meeting that increased this year's school budget by $517,248. In the aftermath, the meeting moderator questioned whether non-residents had voted for the increase and intimidated voters from opposing it. But the Budget Board reluctantly certified the budget on legal advice.

Councilman Keith Macksoud, who said he brought the proposal to the council after talking with the Budget Board and moderator, said in an interview that some people indicated they felt intimidated to vote when teachers turned out at the meeting to support adding to the budget.

The ordinance says meeting attendees can vote by majority to allow the media, non-resident town officials/department heads, the town solicitor and "others" to attend.

I can see time's being an issue if every vote must be balloted, but it would seem feasible to have secret votes on substantive matters such as the school budget.


March 24, 2009


The End of the Labor Line

Justin Katz

One can't help but see France as an example of the future several steps down a path toward which Rhode Island (and to some degree the United States) seems sometimes to threaten to take. This sentence captures the total absurdity of the mindset:

More than 1 million people marched in France yesterday to demand that the government do more to overcome the economic crisis, but planned strikes failed to fulfill a key goal - to paralyze the country.

Paralyzing the country to spur an overcoming of an economic crisis. Yeah, that'll work. I've an affection for the concept of revolution, but in practice, it often seems to be a manipulated excuse for citizens to enjoy a period of havoc.



Bumping in Education Is Obviously Wrong

Justin Katz

Amanda Pereira, a sophomore at Classical High School, and her fellow students in Young Voices confirm that students also see what many of us believe to be obvious, that allowing teachers to be bumped from their jobs based on seniority alone is wrong:

[Bumping] has a terrible effect on students. In 2008, we conducted groundbreaking research on students' everyday experience in Providence schools. We surveyed more than 1,600 high-school students and conducted focus groups with more than 200. Many students talked in the focus groups about losing their best teachers to bumping. This comment is just one example: "I had this social-studies teacher who really cared. He was a great teacher and I could really relate to him. Then he got pushed out one day, and I got this teacher who just sat at her desk and didn't teach us anything."

It's really hard to lose a great teacher, especially since there aren't a lot of teachers we can connect with. In our research, students said only 30 percent of their teachers motivate them.

Bumping is just an egregious example of the "union approach," which is clearly a detriment to our schools and a harm to our children.


March 23, 2009


Taking from AFSCME to Pay the Teamsters

Justin Katz

AFSCME Council 94 President J. Michael Downey has an op-ed on yesterday's opinion pages in which he makes a couple of flawed analogies in trying to convey his point (emphasis added):

State workers pay a lot of money for their pensions. We put 8.75 percent of each paycheck into the pension fund — higher than any other state employee in the country pays for this kind of plan. This contribution rate covers 85 percent of the pensions' normal costs. Slashing the pension plan that we have been paying into for decades is And if Governor Carcieri gets his way, he will be no better than Bernie Madoff or anyone else who succeeded in swindling working families out of their hard-earned money. ...

It takes 10 years of service to become vested in the state employees' pension system. After a worker pays into the system for a decade, his or her benefits are supposed to be guaranteed. But the governor's proposal would change the rules for all state employees and teachers who retire after April 1. Changing our pensions so drastically after many years of contributory service is similar to a bank's trying to tell you that you don't own your home after you have made faithful payments for 30 years. To suddenly change the pension system for people who contributed to the system and played by the rules is just plain wrong.

In the first instance, changing the pensions is more like a bank's changing the interest rates over time, which we all tolerate every day. In the second instance, vestment isn't full ownership. It's more akin to allowing a homeowner to borrow more money based on 10 years of equity; the bank still owns the house for 20 more years. And at any rate, the town could raise taxes, or some other expense could go up changing the totality of the arrangement that the buyer initially expected.

We can put that all aside, though. Let's accept Downey's premise that the government is responsible for promised retirement benefits. That doesn't mean that it has to find the money by raising taxes. It could also reduce other employee benefits to compensate. It could, for example, take a dollar-for-dollar reduction in healthcare, perks, salaries, and so on, in order to honor its deal with vested retirees. Downey calls pension reductions "stealing from workers." I can imagine what he'd say to the proposition of taking from them in order to give back to them.


March 22, 2009


RISC Winter Meeting: Treasurer Frank Caprio on Debt and Pensions

Justin Katz

Third on the schedule at the Rhode Island Statewide Coalition's Winter Meeting was RI General Treasurer Frank Caprio (stream entire speech):

  • RISC Chairman Harry Staley's introduction: stream, download
  • Caprio's opening remarks (and shout-outs): stream, download
  • Mock description of U.S. and RI governments as investment opportunities: stream, download
  • Why are these entities able to find investors to cover debt? Private enterprise: stream, download
  • Expressing intentions to "move things in the right direction (i.e., lowering taxes, increasing transparency, and furthering "strong financial management": stream, download
  • Reviewing the pension system's history in RI — "Is there any mystery as to why we as taxpayers are slated to pay a billion dollars of taxpayer money into the pension system in just seven short years?": stream, download
  • The solution — "being addressed right now by the state legislator": stream, download
  • "The problem is that we have twenty years" to go" to fully fund pensions" while pursuing changes in health and logevity increases: stream, download
  • Closing remarks, insisting that we not saddle future generations with our problems:: stream, download

March 21, 2009


Tying Workers to Their Employers

Justin Katz

The other day, a coworker and I had a discussion — while we worked, of course — about the many ways the law seems intended to lash us to our employers, in turn providing them with a measure of protection from competition. If they go out on their own, carpenters in Rhode Island must register with the state, which requires an application and fee as well as proof of liability coverage. Also on the form is a requirement of proof of continuing education, although that requirement is currently waived pending somebody's figuring out what carpenters could possibly need to know that they don't learn on the job.

Then there's the tax side. The self employed must pay income tax and self-employment tax, for which (as I understand) they are required to make quarterly estimated payments, all of which begins to make the hiring of an accountant an advisable option.

Then there's hiring employees. With a single hire, the new business must adjust for thousands of dollars in insurance and various payments, which leads many small players in the construction industry to hire employees as subcontractors.

And then there's health insurance, with which Congress looks likely to cinch employees a bit tighter:

Three powerful House committee chairmen have agreed to work together on legislation to overhaul the health care system, starting with the view that most employers should help finance coverage and that the government should offer a public health insurance plan as an alternative to private insurance. ...

Many issues, including the question of how to pay for it, are unresolved. But the House chairmen said they had informally agreed to plow ahead on the assumptions that individuals would be required to carry insurance and that most employers would be required to help pay for it.

Of course, that required "healthcare assistance" will come right out of employees pay, yet it will create that much less incentive for employees to take educated risks to break out on their own, and providing it will create one more barrier to growth for the striving entrepreneur. All of which will increase employers' power over their employees, while increasing the financial benefit to most employees not at all.

Furthermore, as regulations seek to provide workers protection, they create incentive for employers to behave in ways that would leverage loopholes. With Rhode Island's unemployment insurance system, employers have reason to motivate employees to quit (or to trick them into doing so, as I have seen done).

Eventually, we can hope, Americans will figure out — and elect representatives who appreciate — that freedom and opportunity are the best protections against abuse, poverty, and healthcarelessness.


March 19, 2009


Scatting and Be-Bopping All Over the Paper

Justin Katz

There isn't much advantage to pointing these things out, at the local level. Those who get it will see, and those who choose not to see won't get it. But I do wonder what the keepers of the Providence Journal's credibility think of reporter Alisha Pina's assessment that the following comment had sufficient content to include it in her article prior to today's Labor Board hearing:

Patrick Crowley, an assistant executive director of NEARI, said, "Having had the displeasure of reading this so-called report, it only serves to confirm Mayor Larisa and Mr. Felkner have no idea what they are talking about. Given their bumbling and lack of popular support this isn't surprising at all."

As they (might) say in the circus: You can't blame the clown. The quotation is a twofer for Crowley; he gets to mock and belittle his opposition and further the ailing state newspaper's decomposition into a rag. Crowley's entire raison d'etre in the RI scene is to serve as a distraction from the real players and schemes of the union industry in the state. A pity ostensible journalists haven't the instinct to see through that, perhaps even to the extent of seeking the story behind the jester's curtain.

Somebody on Fountain St. must understand ... right?



William Felkner: Is the State Labor Relations Board biased? You betcha!

Engaged Citizen

The dispute between the East Providence School Committee and the East Providence Teachers' Union has focused attention of the Rhode Island State Labor Relations Board (SLRB), a largely obscure administrative body that referees disputes between management and labor. What little public information is available regarding the Board and its operations has caused taxpayers to be concerned that the process may be biased in favor of labor. And these are not new concerns.

In 2004, Governor Carcieri called for several SLRB members to resign after they ruled that child care workers providing services to children on welfare should be considered state employees. The far reaching effect of this decision could have opened the door for as many as 1300 state contract workers to become union members. That decision was eventually overturned by the Superior Court. At that time, it was noted that eight of the last nine SLRB decisions taken to the Supreme Court had been overturned.

Now, in 2009, we see another unsettling action from the SLRB that once again raises questions of bias.

In September, the East Providence School Committee filed a charge against the Teachers' Union consisting of three pages of detailed allegations of obstacles created by the union during the negotiation process. Two months later, the union filed a two sentence complaint against the school committee regarding more or less the same circumstances, the central allegation of which was that "no substantive discussions had occurred."

Despite the extensively documented submission of the School Committee regarding the Union's behavior, the SLRB administratively dismissed this complaint. Yet the SLRB sustained the charges of the Union as deserving of a hearing, despite the fact that they do not detail any conduct by the School Committee that constitutes a "refusal to bargain."

As if that didn't raise obvious questions of bias, a month later, when the union filed on additional grounds, the Board broke all records of dispatch in forwarding the matter. In the three years prior to the East Providence case, it took an average of 148 days for a filed charge to be reviewed and an average of 319 days to get a hearing before the board. The Union's charge from East Providence was approved in 36 days and will have a hearing in only 73. According to our research, the process has never moved this fast.

How the SLRB administrative decisions are made and why this case has been processed so much more quickly than any other will remain a mystery as discussions are held behind closed doors. It is easy to see why the public would be suspicious of the process given the apparent different treatment of labor and management interests in this case.

Cynicism about the responsiveness of government in Rhode Island is nothing new, but the Ocean State Policy Research Institute is committed to informed public discourse. Accordingly, we have earnestly undertaken to learn more about how the SLRB functions, who they are and how they make their decisions. We have examined the SLRB's last three years of decisions for evidence of their prejudices, whatever they might be. The unmistakable conclusion one reaches is that the SLRB lacks transparency and they lean toward labor.

From 2006 to the present, the SLRB has heard 19 cases, seven of which we have determined to contain substantive rulings that impact management-labor interactions. Every one of those major cases was ruled in favor of labor. The total scorecard for the SLRB, including cases with minimal impact, is 15 wins for Labor and four wins for management.

While the board's decisions are generally logically reasoned, that is different from saying that they are correctly decided. These kinds of decisions interpreting statutes, rules and regulations depend on analogy to previous results. The weight the Board places on these various precedents operates like a finger on the scale, and there can be no doubt it is tipping towards labor.

But don't take our word for it. We have created the Labor Relations Board Watch website (www.lrbwatch.org) to house our research along with public information we obtain to provide transparency. It is time that everyone takes a close look at the SLRB and engages in reasoned debate to create pressure for reform. It would be naive at best to think that the board's documented history of opaque behavior and perceptually biased decision making would change without intervention. We hope this website empowers citizens with the necessary information to let the Board members know that they are watching — a dynamic that is new to the SLRB. Gone will be the days that the Board pulls the economic strings of the public purse in virtual secrecy.

Bill Felkner is the president of the Ocean State Policy Research Institute, sponsor of the LRB Watch website and the Transparency Train public information portal.



In a Snap Judgment, the Crowd Might Matter

Justin Katz

So the Ocean State Policy Research Institute has learned that the State Labor Relations Board is a very quick-thinking group (emphasis added):

By law, such proceedings must be open unless a recorded vote is taken to close the meeting and an explicit exemption under 42-46-5(a) is cited. Any votes taken in closed session must be reported. But SLRB minutes consistently failed to report "the vote of each member on the question of holding a meeting closed to the public and the reason for holding a closed meeting" as required by 42-46-4, and conspicuously fail to report the votes of members taken in these close sessions. The only remotely applicable exception to the Open Meeting Act that would allow a closed session is that for "any investigative proceedings regarding allegations of misconduct, either civil or criminal". But these board "investigations" averaged a minute and a half for the 44 cases reviewed in the last year and lately are down to about 30 seconds. For instance, last year's Nov. 18th executive session at which the East Providence School Committee's charges against the Teachers' Union were summarily dismissed lasted only five minutes and eight separate cases were decided, that's an average of 37.5 seconds each.

That finding certainly has implications for a meeting today, regarding which the East Providence Taxpayers Association said the following in a press release:

Representatives from over a half-dozen Rhode Island good government groups will keep a watchful eye on the decision of the Rhode Island State Labor Relations Board in its first hearing on the controversial East Providence teachers' union case at the Labor Board's offices, at 1511 Pontiac Avenue, Building #73 in Cranston on Thursday morning, March 19th from 9 AM – 12 noon.

EPTA spokesman Bill Murphy said, "Good government groups around the state are alarmed by the bias against taxpayers and the School Committee the State Labor Board has displayed in its handling of this case. Representatives from these organizations will be on hand to keep a watchful eye on the Board's behavior in this important matter. It is obvious to all of us that the Labor Board should never have filed this complaint and should not be hearing this case. The Labor Board does not have the authority to order school committees how to spend their money. It certainly doesn't have the power to order them to break the laws against deficit spending. The Board simply does not have jurisdiction in this case. At a minimum, the SLRB should wait until the Superior Court issues a decision about whether the case even belongs before the Labor Board."

Anybody who's planning to attend should be sure to be on time. Given the board's habitual pace, the hearing could be over faster than a taxpayer can say "point of order."


March 18, 2009


Life Experience Answers Loughlin's Question

Justin Katz

A moment's review of one's own life will likely provide plenty of basis for answering Rep. John Loughlin's rhetorical question, by which he argues for preserving the pension scheme for vested employees:

How can we say to a valued teacher or employee that has contributed to a plan for ten, twenty, or nearly thirty years in accordance with the terms the state agreed to, that they now must work a decade longer and receive a reduced retirement?

When I was laid off from my job editing high-tech market research, I was fully vested in my portion of the company's Employee Stock Ownership Program. Thus, I kept the plan's current value, and I had the option of holding it or cashing it in, but it would have been ridiculous of me to expect the company to continue making its contributions. Perhaps you've known people who invested time and money in education and resources for careers that simply weren't as lucrative when the hopeful students were ready for them; such people are owed neither jobs nor refunds.

The simple fact that an interest group — such as Rhode Island's powerful unions — extract a promise from particular politicians cannot be taken as a guarantee that the government will permit general calamity in order to preserve benefits that no longer represent reasonable expectations. If they don't like the new terms of their employment, they have the same option that the rest of us have: Look elsewhere.

If Rep. Loughlin wishes to do right by the state's employees, he'd be better off trying to persuade them that making necessary adjustments now is the fair and just path toward honoring commitments as closely as possible while mitigating the suffering that Rhode Island's policies have imposed on its people.



Media Fogging the Card Check Debate

Marc Comtois

Mickey Kaus has been on top of "card check" from the get go. His latest takes on some of the media spin regarding the issue:

The labor side's ability to get reporters to use their version of card-check's controversial secret ballot provisions continues to amaze. Here's WaPo's Alec MacGillis:
The bill, first introduced in 2003, gives workers the choice of whether they want to organize by getting a majority of workers to sign pro-union cards, instead of having to hold secret-ballot elections.
That's one finely-spun sentence there. Who are the "workers" who will have this "choice"? They are the union organizers mounting a unionization campaign. Do any other "workers" who sign or don't sign the cards have a "choice" of methods? a) The cards aren't to choose the method. They are to choose the union. If 50% of the workers sign the cards the union will have won, period. An election at that point is prohibited; b) The only way an individual worker could use this system to "choose" a secret ballot election is by somehow signing a card if it will help union organizers meet the 30% threshhold required for an election but refusing to sign it if it will give the union organizers the 50% that will kill the election. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer recently outlined this complicated card-signing strategy with a straight face on the House floor. But of course no individual worker will know if his signed card will provide the 31% plurality or the 51% majority. Only the organizers know this. You could sign the card intending to provoke an election and discover that you actually prevented an election. There's no way for ordinary workers to reliably game the system in order to "choose" a secret ballot. c) The whole underlying dispute is over whether the act of signing cards is an accurate expression of worker choices, or whether it subjects individuals to subtle and unsubtle community pressure to vote against their real preference. By assuming that the cards represent the true "choice" of workers, Hoyer and others assume what is at issue.
Kaus also points to this recent Rasmussen poll:
National Survey of 1,000 Adults
Conducted March 13-14, 2009

By Rasmussen Reports

1* Do most working Americans want to belong to a Labor Union?

23% Yes
44% No
33% Not sure

2* [Answered Only By Those who are Non-Union Members] Would you like to belong to a labor union where you work?

9% Yes
81% No
9% Not sure

NOTE: Margin of Sampling Error, +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence


March 17, 2009


A Match Made on Bald Hill Road

Justin Katz

The unions have made an honest blog of RI Future:

Working Rhode Island, a coalition of most of Rhode Island's labor unions, and RIFuture.Org, the State's premier political blog, announced a first of its kind partnership designed to increase the visibility of the labor movement in the online world. Through the partnership Working Rhode Island will use the RIFuture.Org blog to give an up close, first person account of the activities of organized labor throughout Rhode Island including the rallies, organizing efforts, contract campaigns, and legislative testimony affecting working people that often get overlooked by the mainstream media.

Yes. If one thing has been lacking at RI Future (especially since its ownership change), it's been the union point of view. If only the Poverty Institute could get in on the arrangement and the Projo's Political Scene could use RI Future as a source.


March 16, 2009


Correction on Tiverton Contract

Justin Katz

In attempting to get a handle on the recently approved AFSCME labor contract in Tiverton on a Saturday morning, I made a data entry error that resulted in a too-dramatically opposing result from the town administrator. He inadvertently jumbled the starting points for his increase/decrease calculations, leading to a stated savings of $117,065, and I inadvertently typed $60 into my calculator rather than $60,000 for overtime savings, leading me to declare a cost increase of $114,647.

The actual result was apparent in my second look at the contract, for which I brought the administrators numbers into an Excel spreadsheet. Unfortunately, time constraints led me not to make the connection. The upshot is that, with more-or-less even savings of $5,233, the town traded some staff restructuring related to minimum manning for the salary and healthcare-cost increases.

I regret the error and will make corrections and notes where appropriate. In the broader debate, however, my view doesn't change. The town should be looking for substantial savings, given the current environment, and this contract is ultimately more expensive than the prior one.


March 13, 2009


Curious Developments in Pension Politics

Justin Katz

For whatever it's worth, the "study commission" looking at pensions for the Rhode Island House approved a plan to increase the minimum retirement age to 65, and although it didn't vote to eliminate cost of living adjustments (COLAs), it did suggest tying them to inflation data.

The curious result came during the vote to apply changes to current employees who are vested, but not yet eligible to retire (emphasis added):

The union leaders, predictably, were in the minority on each vote taken last night, arguing throughout that no one who has put in the minimum 10 years of service that entitles them to a pension — also known as vesting — should be touched by any mid-career changes in the retirement package they have for years been led to expect. On many of the votes, they were joined by Rep. John Loughlin, a Tiverton Republican who has signaled some interest in running for Rhode Island Democrat Patrick Kennedy’s 1st District Congressional seat.

What to make of a panel on which Rep. Timothy Williamson (D-West Warwick) and Rep. Timothy Williamson (D-West Warwick) vote for a stronger line than Mr. Loughlin?


March 11, 2009


Stasis Locked In

Justin Katz

I'm hearing that the Tiverton Town Council ratified the contract with the AFSCME municipal workers. That's one out of four contracts in the town becoming available for negotiation this year that is now off the table. One out of four contracts that will now represent a "locked in," unchangeable portion of the budget over the next three years, no matter what the economy does and no matter what happens in the lives of Tiverton residents.

One talking point that council members are using in justifying their votes to constituents is that the contract incorporated a couple of policy changes, notably minimum manning, that made increases in other areas a reasonable exchange. But first of all, the minimum manning of town workers hardly represents the burden that the same policy creates with the fire and police workforces. And second of all, these "principles" may be written out of contracts just as easily as they're written in. This contract, of itself, is more expensive than the status quo. Whether non-dollar policies that kept the money flowing to the union members will hold their strength next time around — probably in an improved economy — we'll have to wait and see.

If the other three contracts receive similar treatment, we may be in for an even more painful economic depression.


March 9, 2009


Taking Back Buy Backs

Justin Katz

WPRI's Tim White has been looking into the practice of teacher healthcare buybacks in Rhode Island (with the television segment airing tonight at eleven):

After combing teacher contracts for all 36 school districts, Target 12 crunched the numbers. Here are some of the most generous buy-back offers we found.

-Newport teachers can get up to a $5,800 check to opt-out of coverage.

-West Warwick teachers can get $5,500 per family plan.

-Smithfield teachers can get a $4,500 check every year.

There's a perverse sense to the typical argument on behalf of buybacks:

"I think providing a modest cash incentive is a reasonable opportunity and unions give to the employees by providing these waiver payments," said James Parisi of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers.

Parisi believes that buy-backs are a good deal for towns.

The perversity comes in when one considers that the reason "incentive" comes into play is that the public gives its employees benefits so far out of proportion from what's available elsewhere that they are unlikely to find incentive in the fact that a spouse's healthcare is better.

(A secondary argument is that households containing two members in the same public-sector workplace could cost the employer more by each taking the healthcare, but that possibility ought to be obviated out of hand in policy, if not in law.)



Pension Problem Based on More than Slight Undersight

Justin Katz

The talking point of local unionists and ostriches is that our pension system is in trouble because a few years of low contributions in the '90s threw everything off, and all we have to do is to maintain funding for just a couple of decades, and the whole thing will work itself out right. That diagnosis is wrong, according to a panel convened by the General Assembly:

Even if the stock market rebounds next year, the cost to Rhode Island taxpayers of providing some of the most generous public employee pensions in the region will shoot from $370.9 million this year to a projected $836.3 million by the year 2017. ...

... [Chief of Staff for the General Treasurer Mark] Dingley said the state is paying today for past mistakes, including decades of unfunded benefit increases, inaccurate actuarial assumptions, and earnings that have failed, over the last decade, to meet the 8.25 percent assumed rate of return on investments.

Despite union arguments to the contrary, he produced a letter from the actuaries that said the deferral of state contributions in the early 1990s has played a relatively small part. Had there been no deferral, it said, the state's required contribution this year would be 20.53 percent of payroll, instead of 21.13 percent.

Just another bomb waiting to go off in Rhode Island, with a fuse that nobody's willing to stamp out.


March 7, 2009


An Increase as "Savings" in Tiverton Contract

Justin Katz

It so happened that, the week my letter about Tiverton officials' relationship with the public unions appeared in the Sakonnet Times, the town council posted a "tentative agreement" with AFSCME Council 94, slated for ratification at Monday's town council meeting. The coincidence led one commenter on the Sakonnet Times site to aver hypocrisy, on my part, for treating the teachers' union as unique. (The magnitude of cost is apparently not a factor in judging a conservative's "hypocrisy.")

That commenter is not the only person who's asked my opinion, so as I would have done anyway, I spent some time looking through the various documents related to the agreement. Of particular interest is the PDF showing $117,065 in savings over the life of the contract: Unless I'm misreading — and I couldn't make the provided numbers translate into the stated decrease* — the town derives that dollar amount by assuming increases in salaries and other costs and counting some mitigating changes as "savings."

Based only on this "contract negotiations summary" document, however, the estimated cost to the town of this contract represents an increase of $114,647 (3.4%) decrease of only $5,233** compared with a scenario in which the contract total would be held steady at the '07/'08 level over the same period. Since that year was the most expensive of its contract, the total cost surely increased.

This is why the town — like the state — is in its current predicament: It begins with what sounds like a fair-sounding pay increase (2.5%), rather than starting from the perspective of the taxpayer. What makes town officials think that the town will have more to spend on these services in a few years than it had at the tail end of an era of plenty during a housing boom?

At a time when newspapers are reporting the fastest rate of job loss since the 1970s, and when economists have begun pushing back their predictions of recovery by six-month intervals, agreements should be made on a one-year basis and strive for an overall balancing of cost increases and expenditure savings. Towns factor in the increases and decreases in the cost of utilities and healthcare, but they never apply the same calculations to labor. I'm sorry to say it, but the cost thereof is way down, based on the ready supply of new employees, and if union workers insist on a three-year term that protects their jobs for that duration, they ought to make the town a better offer. Otherwise, the town should consider, in a sense, going out to bid.


* I've emailed the town administrator asking for the formula that arrives at these numbers.
** My initial number resulted from a data entry error as explained here.


March 6, 2009


Displacing the Tiverton Elite

Justin Katz

I've got a letter in the current Sakonnet Times, responding to some discouraging observations at recent town meetings:

To the editor:

The self-presumed ruling class of Tiverton — in and out of office — has no governing ideas but to raise taxes in good times and bad while comfortably accepting that most of the town's budget is locked in by law or by contract. So, they've turned their ire toward the members of Tiverton Citizens for Change who have stepped forward to change the trajectory of municipal government.

First the accusation against TCC was, "They're not from here, and they haven't done anything!" Then it was, "They're not from here, and they make mistakes when filing campaign finance forms!" The new one is, "They're not from here, and they need practice conducting public meetings with a hostile audience!"

Well, golly. The meetings that the familiar voices reference are those of the current Budget Committee, on which local reformers have a controlling hand, and the heat radiated most strongly (thus far) when the group interviewed the School Committee. It's almost as if the town aristocracy is trying to distract from school officials' admission of difficulty facing down the obscenely aggressive National Education Association labor union.

An anonymous commenter on my web site, AnchorRising.com, mocked Budget Committee (and TCC) member Thomas Parker, a successful naval officer, and suggested that we should "take a good look at who we have running some of our meetings and think about providing effective leadership to the town in this time of crisis." Yes, let's.

At its most recent, notably quiet, meeting, the School Committee did not have members of the Town Council gabbing disruptively in the back of a small meeting room or former School Committee Vice Chairman Mike Burk bellowing attacks as he paced the room, both of which set the tone of the prior Budget Committee meeting. However cordial their gatherings, school committee members and representatives bemoan the strength of the teachers' union and (unbelievably) their own sense that they have weak hands for negotiation. (How about having employment on offer during the worst downturn since the Great Depression?) And when the town administrator and council president recently asked for financial help to maintain services in the current budget, committee members were awfully quiet, considering that the request came mere weeks after they had given away hundreds of thousands of dollars to the intimidating unionists.

On the Town Council side, meeting attendees walk away with the sense that even contracts that are up for negotiation are "locked in." Council President Don Bollin recently declared an inability to "trim a budget based on what [he] would like to see happen in negotiations," and that "it's easier to have the money put back should the results we want happen." As the School Committee recently acknowledged, however, the unions typically demand more than is budgeted, rather than allow any earmarked dollars to flow back to the town. Indeed, a central rationalization of the school department for awarding not only raises but retroactive pay was that the "money was in the budget."

So, if your overarching preference is for peaceful government meetings in which all of the meat is chewed during executive sessions and in which officials practice comity most enthusiastically while conspiring, along with the unions, to manipulate procedural rules to ram double-digit tax increases through financial town meetings, then side with the familiar faces. Me, I'll take fresh leadership that conducts entertaining meetings but checks unions to lower taxes and maintain services at the same time.


March 5, 2009


Scoring the State Labor Relations Board

Justin Katz

The Ocean State Policy Research Institute has kicked off LRB Watch to track the wins with the State Labor Relations Board. Despite claims from certain quarters that the board is "management" heavy, OSPRI finds that labor has one 15 of 19 decisions since 2006. When it comes to matters that OSPRI classifies as "major" — based mostly on "the establishment or reinforcement of precedents of potential wide application" — labor is seven for seven.

Not that the actual record will matter to those aforementioned quarters.


February 27, 2009


Administering Results for Negotiations

Justin Katz

It would go too far to speculate that this sort of thing is widespread:

Statewide testing procedures were violated at Whiteknact Elementary School last October when at least 14 third graders were given extra time, the state Department of Education has concluded.

And now school officials are looking into whether another violation occurred when the standardized tests for students in grades 3 through 5 were administered at Whiteknact. ...

Barbosa also said her daughter, also a Whiteknact student, told her that the person who administered the standardized tests in her classroom prompted the students with answers. Barbosa did not disclose what grade her daughter is in Tuesday night and she could not be reached Wednesday morning.

Students' success on these tests has a direct bearing on contract negotiations, and especially given other tactics of unionized workforces, it's reasonable to suggest that perhaps some third party should direct and supervise the test taking.


February 25, 2009


Contract Steps: A Tutorial

Marc Comtois

When we here about 3% raises in union contracts, what does that mean? Seems obvious: people will make 3% more next year over this. But with union contracts, that's not the case. In most union contracts with which I'm familiar, each position has a defined table of step increases based on years served. When we here about 3% raises, for example, that 3% is being applied to the STEPS not to the people.

For municipal and teacher contracts (Police and Fire contracts can be different--going "up a step" doesn't occur yearly, for instance), that usually means pre-defined increases for the first ten steps (or years). After that, people are "frozen" at step 10 and continue to receive the annual step 10 escalation (which is basically the publicized % raise we always here about).

To a non-union member of the public, this can be confusing, which isn't helped by the way such pay increases are routinely reported.

Here's an example: This chart is for a generic municipal position (fyi: the numbers aren't real, just an example) based on the tentative agreement in Warwick, with the typical salary/step structure laid out for 2009->2012 based on current salary in 2009, 0% "raise" in 2010 and 2.25% raises in 2011 and 2012.

genericstepsex.JPG

An actual, flesh-and-blood first year employee makes $30,000 in 2009, $32,500 in 2010, $35,788 in 2011 and $39,206 in 2012. Even if there were no "raises" in 2011 and 2012, that worker would still see raises ($35,000 in 2011 and $37,500 in 2012) as they progressed year-to-year. So, you see, the structure of the steps has a "hidden" raise built in.

Here's a real-world example. This is the step structure of an old teacher contract from a Rhode Island community.

realstepex.JPG

As you can see, for the most part, the raises for each STEP were uniform ("Step Incr."). This is what gets reported as the % raise. So, you might hear that the teachers received, on average, a 3.6% raise from Year 1 to Year 2 and a 3.4% raise from Year 2 to Year 3.

But the actual teachers received raises much higher than that ("Real Incr."). Here's the same chart, but with the actual year-to-year career path of a sample "rookie" teacher highlighted.

teacherrookie-example.JPG

So, moving from Year 1 to Year 2 doesn't result in the publicized 3.6% raise, but a 12.6% raise, thanks to the built-in Step increases. And so on.

Finally, those outside of the "stepladder" (people with over 10 year service, usually) are "frozen" at Step 10 and receive the % increase that is always publicized (in essence, these are the only employees to which the public number applies). Eventually, they also usually receive a longevity bonus every year, based on how many years they've served. As an example, from the same real world contract:

longevityex.JPG

(Thanks to commenters "MikeinRI" and "Patrick" for helping me to clarify my thinking with this!)

ADDENDUM: Bill Felkner from OSPRI passes this along:

When we posted the teacher contracts we did a short analysis of each one, tallying up the step and “raise” – what we found is that the districts average about 10.5% per year. If you go to our fiscal database (http://www.oceanstatepolicy.org/transparency.php) and browse to each district, you will find a category for Contract Evaluation. Click on that and you will see the total step+raise for each one.
Thanks!


February 24, 2009


Science Education Breaks Through the Negotiation Firewall

Justin Katz

It appears that the most recent of the their multiple weeks off during the school year mellowed Johnston science teachers with regard to the new program that had recently been announced as foiled:

During their winter break, local science teachers changed their minds and decided to participate in a project to improve science education across Rhode Island, a school official said yesterday morning.

As of 10 a.m. yesterday, 14 science teachers and 9 special-education teachers had signed up for the program, gratifying the same officials who recently accused the teachers' union of trying to sabotage Johnston's leadership role in the statewide effort.

"I don't know what changed but I’m very pleased," Assistant Supt. Kathryn Crowley said. "I think they're going to benefit greatly from participating in this program. I thank them all."

Ms. Crowley should thank enraged Rhode Islanders, as well.


February 23, 2009


Lombardi Beats the Path

Justin Katz

In dealing with his town's unions in series, North Providence Mayor Charles Lombardi is imparting a lesson:

Mayor Charles A. Lombardi dismissed 20 town workers last night after their unions failed to meet a 7 p.m. deadline for accepting deep cuts in wages and benefits.

In all, 10 municipal workers and 10 public works employees lost their jobs. Lombardi also plans to lay off 30 firefighters following a Superior Court hearing tomorrow.

If the firefighters don't get the message, then perhaps unions in other Rhode Island cities and towns will. The money tree has wilted; there will be no more temporary fixes that worsen our predicament; you can divvy what remains or take your brethren's unemployment, and the municipalities' lost services on your shoulders.

Personally, I think it would be more helpful in the long run for the unions to continue to fight and to reveal their nature. But beginning to change their nature would work, as well.


February 21, 2009


Avedisian Locks in... Savings?

Justin Katz

Out of Warwick comes a "tentative agreement" with the municipal unions in which Mayor Scott Avedisian purports to have secured $10 million in savings between March 2009 and June 2012. The dollar amount is measured against the current contracts, expiring at the end of June, and an assumption that a subsequent contract covering the next three years would otherwise have been substantially the same.

The specifics of the "concessions," however, give the impression that the objective is to lock in some very modest changes to help the unions weather the escalating economic storm. Furthering the impression that the taxpayers of Warwick may not be getting the best of deals, here, is the fact that the city council has called for a special meeting on Tuesday night to ratify the contracts, which (according to my sources) will require "unanimous consent" among the councilors, because the required procedure will have been circumvented.

According to a cover letter to the above-linked packet by Personnel Director Oscar Shelton:

... the bulk of the savings comes from increasing health insurance copayments, temporary wage reductions, deferring holiday pay and clothing allowances and from the FOP and Municipal Unions' willingness to reduce their ranks through attrition. The police union is amenable to allowing the City to reduce their force from 180 employees to 163 without filing for arbitration or any other types of litigation. The Municipal Union's workforce will be reduced by at least 12 employees and the Management/Non-union employee Group will be reduced by at least 16 employees (28 total).

The salient points are as follows:

  • The health insurance savings come from an increase in the weekly pay-check reduction from $11 for all employees to a whopping $14 for an individual plan and $28 for a family plan, which is minimal to say the least, by current standards.
  • The wage reductions vary in significance from one contract to the next:
    • The police will see a 3.25% salary reduction for the remainder of this year (which began, last July, with a 3.75% increase). Unfortunately, my documentation is missing the page that lays out the raise schedule for '09 to '12.
    • The firefighters will see a 5% salary reduction for the remainder of this year (which again began, last July, with an approximate 3.75% increase, although I didn't check the increase for each position). Come July, they'll get that money back as their raise for the first year of the new contract, and then they'll receive a 1.5% increase every six months until June 2012 (equivalent to 2.25% annual increases).
    • Municipal employees will see a 3% decrease for the remainder of this contract year (which began with a roughly 3% raise, although again, I didn't calculate every grade). As with the fire department, a return of that money will be their raise for the '09-'10 year, followed by 1.5% increases every six months.
  • In all cases, the deferred holiday pay and clothing allowances are redeemable as paid days off (with clothing allowances converted thereto) — timed, at least, so as not to trigger overtime costs — or as cash payments upon retirement.
  • The ability to secure attrition of workforce comes at the cost of no-layoff clauses in the police and fire contracts. (The police contract specifies the current contract period, but as I said, I'm missing an important page.) Moreover, none of the attrition or staff reduction language that Shelton cites is actually in writing within the document that I have.

The most insidious part of the agreement, however, is that it is absolutely contingent upon the city's revenue shortfall. As the police section of the agreement puts it:

In following, the parties hereby agree that should the City become able to partialy or wholly fund the above-referenced Budget Shortfalls for the (current) Fiscal Year ending June 30, 2009 and/or the Fiscal Year ending June 30, 2010 through the receipt or generation of additional revenue through:

(a) its receipt of any reinstatement of or new source of State of Rhode Island State Aid/revenue sharing,

(b) its receipt of any applicable funding from the Federal Government, or

(c) its reduction of applicable costs and expenses from the implementation of any legislatively and unilaterally reduced wages and benefits levels affecting those wages and benefits levels set forth in the parties' current 206-2009 CBA or the successor 2009-1012 CBA (i.e. such as those changes proposed in Article 33, Article 45, etc. of the Governor's proposed Supplemental Budget);

the parties will re-open negotiations concerning the 2009-2012 CBA in order to reinstate levels of benefits reduced in said CBA (i.e. the Holiday Pay and/or Clothing Allowance deferred in the 2009-2012 CBA) in amounts that are commensurate with the level of additional revenue received or generated.

In other words, should budgetary matters turn around in a way helpful to the city, the unions will be first in line for renewal of their money flow. Part C goes so far as to require renegotiation should, for example, the governor and General Assembly implement a statewide minimum healthcare copay; Warwick's savings from that measure would be cycled back to the unions. If only Rhode Island's cities and towns could draft their contracts contingent upon the continuation of short-term market booms and annual windfalls!

As I suggested above, the agreement has an air of union protection in a disastrous and unpredictable time, and the people of Warwick should insist that their elected representatives protect them instead.



A Warning-Response Disconnect in North Providence (for One)

Justin Katz

North Providence Mayor Charles Lombardi has issued twenty layoff notices to public works and municipal employees that will go into effect unless their unions accept a five percent cut in salary and a fifteen percent health insurance contribution. The mayor's had mixed results, thus far, with the police union coming up with $200,000 and the firefighters' union going to court. It's the argument of the latter — put forward elsewhere, recently — that strikes a discordant tone:

On Thursday night, the entire membership of the firefighters' union voted against the cuts, according to the union's president, John Silva.

The firefighters, who number about 100, voted for a package of concessions that would save the town about $85,000 between now and June 30, and about $390,000 over the next 15 months, Silva said.

But Lombardi said the town needs about $240,000 in concessions from the firefighters in the current budget year, which ends June 30.

The firefighters union secured a restraining order that would provide some level of layoff protection until Judge Mark A. Pfeiffer takes up the issue Tuesday morning.

Silva said the order would prevent the layoffs. Lombardi said the restraining order allows him to lay off as many as 22 firefighters.

Following the lead of Woonsocket firefighters, the union is arguing that the threatened layoffs would jeopardize their safety and that of the public.

"It's a third of our force," Silva said.

We should heed the advice of professional firefighters when it comes to the necessary provisions for our safety, of course, but there's something that justifiably restrains public judgment. If firefighter and civilian safety is so terribly threatened by layoffs, then how can it not be worth a small cut in pay and reasonable healthcare contributions to prevent them?

Unionists would say that public safety workers would be in a disadvantageous negotiating position if underfunding were always leveraged against their conscience, and that's a valid argument to be worked out through the give and take of politics and negotiations. But in the current circumstances, the disadvantage is too dramatically skewed the other way; the North Providence union can refuse the concession and turn to the court to stop detrimental cuts in staffing and services.



When Negotiating Season and Flat-Tire Season Coincide

Justin Katz

In a comment to my post about Tiverton school officials' ambiguous admission of intimidation by the National Education Association, Cranstoner Donald Botts relates the following anecdote:

My take on their comments was that the union was attempting to use intimidation tactics against them, but they either were not intimidated or didn't want to admit they were intimidated.

I spoke at a school committee meeting in Cranston recently. Magically, roofing nails appeared at the end of my driveway. I was not performing any home improvement projects at the time.

Interesting.

Each of my family's vehicles has had a flat tire, recently. With my work van, it was a roofing nail; with my wife's car (which I use when not working), it was two punctures, sans implement.

Of course, being a carpenter, I'm very slow to look elsewhere to explain such things. Moreover, amidst the daily inconveniences that arise from working full-time in a construction trade, having three children, owning a fifty-year-old home, living in Rhode Island, being politically active, and writing for this here blog, flat tires are things to be taken in stride. Heck, it's been so long since I was above grade, what's another shovelful out of the hole I'm digging?

It strikes me as a particularly foolish mechanism of intimidation, though, if there's another explanation for flat tires than the terrible condition of our state's roads: If they appear to be coincidental, the action will have no effect on behavior. On the other side of the spectrum, strongly suspecting a human agent behind a mere inconvenience will surely tend to increase one's resolve.

ADDENDUM:

Mr. Botts sends along a picture of the nails — of assorted sizes — collected from the driveway, sidewalk, and grass in front of his home, as if tossed from a car:


February 20, 2009


The Town Governments Need the Taxpayers' Help

Justin Katz

The bottom line for Tiverton — indeed, for all of Rhode Island — came into stark relief at last night's Budget Committee meeting. The town's infrastructure is crumbling. Taxes have been skyrocketing. The schools are laying off teachers and talking about cutting into services. And town officials are insisting that there is simply no way in which they can avoid raising taxes in the double digits — during the worst economic downturn in three-quarters of a century.

As a prelude, the Department of Public Works Director Stephen Berlucchi detailed how much ground his staff must cover and how dramatic is the disrepair of the town's infrastructure. By all accounts, the DPW employees work very hard, but the fact remains that, with overtime, longevity, and sick-time buy-backs, their average income allotted in the currently proposed budget is $47,877.60. That doesn't count benefits or pensions. Mr. Berlucchi noted that their work time is all too precious, but they get two weeks of vacation to start, which climbs to three weeks after five years, and (possibly) four weeks after ten years. Factoring in their twelve sick days per year, that's potentially more than a full man-year in paid time off.

The matter of real interest, though, came from the school department's turn at the microphones. The conversation was quite revealing when the elephant in the room stepped from the shadows: stream, download.

Superintendent William Rearick: It's one thing to have discussions and say what the objectives may or may not be, but until you've done it and faced the full fury of an organization that has over 2.1 million members nationally, has unlimited resources, and will go after elected officials on the school committee and family members and say or do whatever --- it's not an easy process. And I'm saying it from experience, and I'm speaking for my former chairman, and my vice chairman, and my current members that went through that horrible process. It's not easy.

And when we were going through it, quite frankly, there weren't a whole heck of a lot of people standing shoulder to shoulder with us when we were taking on the battle, when we were the tip of the spear. And I think people need to know that. It's one thing to to pontificate about this that or the other thing. It's another thing to actually do it, to sit there and then have to withstand the assault that you will come under during negotiations.

The teachers unions, whether you like them or not, they're very powerful, well organized, and the way it's structured now, in my opinion, until we get a statewide contract, local school committees will always be under that gun.

It's just simply not that simple. I just ask people to take that in mind, having lived through it, having seen people's families negatively affected by it to the point where they're still affected by it --- needs to be taken under consideration. In simple terms: easier said than done, and folks need to consider that when the rubber hits the road.

Budget Committee Member Thomas Parker: So you're actually intimidated by contractual negotiations?

Rearick: Sir, I went eighteen months toe-to-toe with the toughest teachers union in this country. I'm not intimidated by them or anyone.

Parker: Well you just implied that you were.

Rearick: I'm telling you that they went after school committee members personally.

Former School Committee President Denise DeMedeiros: I was not intimidated.

Parker: What kind of organization is this you're dealing with that intimidates you and threatens your family?

DeMedeiros: That's what I asked every day the last year, and we were not intimidated. We did the very best we could. And my family...

Parker: Mr. Rearick just said that they were intimidating.

DeMedeiros: Of course they're intimidating. Wouldn't they intimidate you if they went after your job and your children? Wouldn't that be intimidating to you?

Parker: I've been in combat, lady...

[Crowd noise.]

Demedeiros: I'm very glad you just did that, because you just did that in front of the camera, and people in this town know who I am and know what I have done and what I went through the last year.

Parker: My point is this: You're dealing with an organization which has intimidated you, which has threatened your families.

DeMedeiros: Yes.

Parker: And you admit it here, and as a result... what kind of an organization are you dealing with? That's the only question I'm asking.

DeMedeiros: That's what we asked every day for the last year. It's called a labor union. NEA, actually.

Rearick: And we weren't intimidated, because we didn't concede the field.

Parker: So you're saying the NEA are the ones who intimidated you?

Rearick: They're the labor union that we had to deal with. They didn't intimidate us.

The bottom line is that those who populate municipal governments are placed before an orchestrated assault. It's little wonder that labor costs are scraping the services from the budget. And it's easy to empathize with the frustration that elected officials — essentially volunteers — have expressed as the local citizen group, Tiverton Citizens for Change, has stepped into the mix to push back against the union tide. In their view, they've stood up for their town and done as well as they believed possible in the face of extremely powerful interest groups that aren't afraid to throw stones and sling mud.

The boards and committees aren't empowered to fight against such dominating strength. In addition to behaving beyond officials' moral boundaries, the unions act and organize beyond their scope, controlling the fundamentals of the debate. Each town union's victorious negotiation gives every other town's union leverage to compare salaries. The dynamic infects even discussions about student performance. When Budget Committee Member Cynthia Nebergall raised the issue of unacceptable test scores, the superintendent's argument entailed comparisons across the state and across the nation (stream, download. But none of those comparisons rise above the core problem.

We who see must organize at the state level and remove some of shackles that bind our towns and cities, but even more importantly, taxpayers must begin to stand as a group and let the unions know that their game is over by cutting budgets and thereby forcing deep concessions. The school committee stands on its record of resisting last year's onslaught, but the reality is that the union simply wouldn't come down to a number that the district could concede. The teachers took the town's appropriation, tacked some more demands on top of it, and then began their campaign of intimidation.

It has to stop.


February 19, 2009


Another (Potentially) Huge Development

Justin Katz

Here comes another historic, philosophical battle, this time in Providence:

Education Commissioner Peter McWalters has ordered the city schools to begin filling teacher vacancies based on qualifications rather than seniority, an order that could fly in the face of the teachers' contract.

McWalters, in a no-nonsense letter yesterday to Supt. Tom Brady, said the district hasn't been moving fast enough to improve student achievement and that it was time to intervene in a much more aggressive fashion.

Dare we hope that we're seeing the beginning of a revolution of sanity? (And dare we hope that it'll arrive before we reach the utter bottom?)



Letting the Public Watch the Table

Justin Katz

The conversation between Andrew and Matt, on last night's Matt Allen show, had to do with open public-sector negotiations. Stream by clicking here, or download it.


February 18, 2009


Open Negotiations and the Common Good

Carroll Andrew Morse

Contrary to the Rhode Island Labor Relations Board's implication that contract negotiations opened to the public constitute "mere surface bargaining", there are other states that mandate some form of open negotiations -- sometimes all the way through the process. The Washington-state based Evergreen Freedom Foundation has compiled a list of different state laws regarding openness as of about a year and-a-half ago. The laws on the books fall into three basic categories…

  1. Straightforward requirements that contract negotiations be open to the public (for example Florida, Kansas, Minnesota, Tennessee)
  2. Requirements that records or recordings be kept, and made available to the public (for example, Idaho)
  3. Requirements that proposals offered at different stages of negotiation from both sides be made available to the public (for example, Alaska, Iowa, Ohio)
A major source of dissonance between municipal councils, unions and the public can be traced to union resistance to negotiating in the open. Here's what I mean by that: it is often implicit in union positioning during collective bargaining that contract provisions can be...
  • Appropriate vehicles for regulatory action (for example, regarding minimum staffing), and
  • Full-blown appropriations decisions (for example, as is being debated in East Providence, where the underlying question is whether union contracts need to be brought into compliance with the government’s budgeting process, or the results of the budgeting process need to be brought into compliance with union contracts.)
But there are non-trivial problems with assigning full force of law to contracts, the primary being the difficulty in reconciling the principles of democratic self-governance with the idea of organizations not directly accountable to the public (and this refers to any kind of organization, not just unions) having a way to override the established budget process -- the process that some would claim is the fundamental basis of self-government. (Personally, I'm not quite so stark in my view of government, but I do agree that going outside of the budget process should not be easy, if it is allowed at all).

Even without settling this concern, however, union leaders and members who are serious about contracts being agreements that serve the broader public good and not just narrow organizational interests need to be willing to embrace the same level openness in contract creation that is required when making other public decisions and laws intended to advance the common good.


February 17, 2009


Labor Relations in the Dark

Justin Katz

According to a press release from the Ocean State Policy Research Institute (printed in full in the extended entry), without public discussion, the Rhode Island Labor Relations Board has declined to consider the East Providence School Committee's complaint against the union:

"The State Labor Relations Board reported it has dismissed unfair labor practice charges filed by the East Providence School Committee against the teacher's union alleging failure to bargain in good faith (ULP-5933)," said William Felkner, president of OSPRI, "but we learned this after hearing the news that they did issue a complaint based on the same circumstances filed as charges by the union against the school committee (ULP-5946)."

As background, complaints by the Board reflect that the charges have jurisdictional substance and may give rise to a finding of unfair labor practice. They are not meant to reflect on the merits of the case but lead to a formal hearing to weigh those merits.

The extensive submission of the School Committee details compromises offered by management and intransigence by the Union in attempting to set conditions for negotiation in over 3 pages of documentation for the basis of the charges. These are only allegations that have not (and apparently will not) have a hearing, but it is remarkable that the Board should have thought such serious charges if true, did not amount to a refusal to bargain.

Yet, the board did find evidentiary circumstance that may constitute bad faith on the part of the school committee based on a complaint consisting of 2 sentences that quote the school committee as saying that "no substantive discussion had occurred []." This is not to say that a charge cannot be brief and to the point, but the mere fact that no discussion has occurred offers no evidence whatsoever as to what party is responsible for the breakdown in negotiations and who is really refusing to come to the table. Both sides essentially alleged that the other wouldn't come to the table, yet one set of charges was sustained and the other dismissed.

"How the SLRB made this decision is puzzling and will remain so because the decisions are made behind closed doors," said Felkner. "Why these decisions are made outside of public view is one more mystery."

In the executive-session-discussed view of the Labor Relations Board, all of the discord in East Providence is apparently the fault of either unfair practices on the school committee side or, well, the fickleness of nature, I suppose. The other party to negotiations may play by no-holds-barred rules.

OSPRI is kind to suggest only the "appearance" of bias.

Continue reading "Labor Relations in the Dark"

February 16, 2009


A Thought on Minimum Manning

Justin Katz

I know and trust Lieutenant Michael Morse of the Providence Fire Department, and he certainly makes some persuasive points on minimum manning:

From my seat I witness Providence's manpower used beyond the breaking point daily. Day after day, we are forced to tap resources from surrounding communities to answer 911 calls. Crews from Cranston, East Providence, Johnston, Pawtucket and anywhere else Providence can find fill the void when we need emergency responders. The people in those communities are under-protected while their first responders are busy bailing out their neighbors in the capital. It is a recipe for disaster. ...

One thing that is imperative in the fire/EMS service is consistency. From our end, we need to know where our resources lie, how long before they arrive, and how many will show up when called. While I am doing CPR with my partner, I'm also formulating a plan based on my expectations. I know Engine Company 11 has been dispatched from the Reservoir Avenue Fire Station and will arrive within a few minutes with three firefighters on board. I'll need two trained people to continue CPR, one to drive the rescue, my partner to monitor the heart, administer oxygen and start IVs. That leaves me to administer medications, defibrillate, document and contact medical control. Nobody is idle during an emergency. Often we have nobody left to drive the fire engine. We do the best we can and make due with what we have.

What if the mayor closed Engine 11 for the night rather than pay overtime? What if two firefighters showed up five minutes later than planned? What chance, if any, the patient had for survival would be tossed aside because of irresponsible budgeting? Is this the best our society can do?

The basic distrust is that the people setting manning levels stand to gain financially from overtime. (Whether that is really a factor is a debate into which we needn't slip.) The basic challenge is that schedules will always hover somewhere between full-time equivalent positions.

To square this circle, although I hate to create any additional departments at the state level, what if Rhode Island were to establish (or adjust rules and regulations in whatever way necessary to enable municipalities to establish) a statewide or regional fire authority that would take care of some of the organizational and back-office work entailed in sharing full-time firefighers/rescuers from town to town? The fire authority could bring an outside perspective to disputes about the number of team members necessary at any given time, and more importantly, it could organize a mixed volunteer and professional force that would split time with different departments.

I'm not suggesting a union-hall type setting to which such employees would show up to grab their daily assignments. Rather, their schedules would typically be nearly as regular as firefighters' currently are.

That way, each town or city could remain fully staffed without requiring a significant number of work hours to be paid at time-and-a-half. There would also be a new route toward securing full-time jobs or volunteering. (Details about pay, benefits, and pensions would have to be worked out of course.)

Just a thought.


February 14, 2009


Pulling People from the Union Machine

Justin Katz

The extremity of Mike Cappelli's comment about unions offers a starting point from which more tempered opinions can be considered:

Do these pigs ever acknowledge that the taxpayers are people, too? Do they ever acknowledge that their "clients" are children, too?

Dealing with these pigs is like dealing with Hamas, Justin. You just can't do it. You continue to delude yourself into thinking someway, somehow, there is a silver bullet out there to fix this problem, and you just need to find that one way to deal with these pigs.

I don't waste my time on such useless pursuits.

Mike pulls back from the direct comparison to terrorists, comparing instead the act of dealing with the group in question, but there's still an underlying difference that destroys the conclusion: Union members are not an isolated culture isolated from their fellow citizens. They are our neighbors, and the side that forgets the humanity of its opposition will ultimately fail.

Look, probably more than half of the emphasis in unions' propaganda is directed at their members, for whom questioning union tactics may lead to questioning union value. Local taxpayer groups can't be acknowledge as consisting of residents who are seeing their tax bills drive up their monthly mortgage payments, even as their employers scale back salaries; they aren't aging retirees watching their income flake away; they're "astroturf" groups, mouthing a bought-and-sold line of rhetoric funded by powerful interests from whom union members must seek protection. (In Tiverton Citizens for Change, we've taken to calling ourselves "crabgrass.") The numbers showing the disparity between union members and the people who pay their bills must be seen as spun, not factual illustrations of inequity. And so on.

The reasons that union members are susceptible to the chatter of their labor organizations are readily empathizable. Nobody ever feels as if they are compensated at their full value. Nobody fails to notice that they face sometimes uncomfortable restrictions on their spending. And yet, union members sense that they've got it good compared with their private-sector counterparts, and it's surely reasonable to fear that somebody will wash that advantage away, perhaps even with some justice.

Mike is correct to say that there is no silver bullet; no argument will prove powerful enough to shatter the illusions forged in self-interest and well-financed intellectual trickery. But inasmuch as union members can see through their glass boxes, they may be drawn out of them, into their full communities. Giving them violent images against which to react will only add layers to the walls.


February 12, 2009


Union Cause and Effect

Justin Katz

I just heard a report on 630 WPRO in which the public sector unions in New Bedford explicitly rejected a pay cut in full knowledge that the city would have no other option than layoffs. Said one firefighter (approximately):

We're going to have to work harder, and response times are going to be slower. People are just going to have to expect that.

In other words, the unions' vote didn't preference just layoffs over paycuts, but degraded emergency service over paycuts.


February 10, 2009


Reducing the Schools

Justin Katz

With other contributors covering the state of the state and the hoopla in East Providence, I'm at the Tiverton School Committee meeting, to which I arrived in the midst of Superintendent Bill Rearick's description of the various cuts to come for the next budget — you know, the one that increased by about $150,000 when the committee approved the latest teachers' contract.

7:15 p.m.

Personnel reductions to come:

  • 0.5 middle school special ed
  • One elementary special ed
  • One speech pathologist
  • One kindergarten teacher
  • One grade one teacher
  • Four grade seven teachers reduced by 20% each
  • Three part-time elementary teacher assistants
  • 6.5 elemntary special ed teacher assistants

As I understand, these are on top of some nine positions already slated for nixing.

7:22 p.m.

The committee just voted to approve the new proposed budget, with only Danielle Coulter opposed. Supt. Rearick reminded everybody that further cuts — that is, below a 2.7% spending increase year-over-year — are going to begin cutting into programs.

Of course, The teachers got their raise, including retroactive pay for more than a year of negotiations. That much is off the table...

7:27 p.m.

The committee is discussing the 24 tentative pink slips that the superintendent will give out in case they have to be let go. Most or all of these teachers won't lose their jobs, but Rearick made an interesting comment:

"Many of these are the best and brightest."

Presumably, he's referring to bumping and the discusson he said he had with the union leaders over whose jobs to threaten. Letting the good one's go; that's the way to succeed!

7:36 p.m.

Extended discussion of the appropriate detail to be included in meeting minutes. Danielle Coulter suggests that key points of discussion ought to be included. Carol Herrmann thinks that's the press's job. Rearick said the schools' lawyer suggested the short form.

7:41 p.m.

Looking at the new budget proposal, the breakdown of increases/decreases is noteworthy:

  • Salaries: 0.54%
  • Benefits: 2.18%
  • Purchased services: 19.87%
  • Supplies/materials: -5.12%
  • Other costs: -3.15%
  • Capital (operations): 1.19%
  • Capital: 0%

Those salary and benefit numbers, by the way, take into account the 14 or so layoffs — and they're still increases.

7:47 p.m.

The committee is discussing the financial ramifications should the financial town meeting be moved to July. Financial Director Doug Fiore explained that any resolution to postpone the vote would require a component that ensures the continuation of cash flow until the budget is resolved.

Interesting.

7:58 p.m.

After the meeting Town Council Member Joanne Arruda approached me rather agitated that I'd suggested that town council meetings tend to start early, and she requested that I tell my "people" that my assertion was "not a good thing."

So, people, let it be noted — and I've appended a footnote to the relevant post — that my casual commentary did not accurately reflect the thorough devotion to punctuality of the Tiverton town council. I should have taken a moment to elaborate on my thought, rather than publish an inaccurate short-hand quip.



Not the Sideshow

Justin Katz

This is being treated as a secondary matter, but in the long range it might be the more significant thread coming loose in East Providence:

The state Labor Relations Board has decided to hold a formal hearing on a complaint by the city teachers union that the School Committee violated Rhode Island labor law by insisting on public negotiations as a prior condition for collective bargaining.

The charge was filed in early December by the East Providence Education Association. Yesterday, the board confirmed that it has issued its own complaint, which says that the school board's insistence on public talks resulted in "mere surface bargaining," a violation of the duty to bargain in good faith.

The board's complaint is not a finding but its own statement of the issue, which will go to a formal hearing Aug. 25.

I'm not sure where the distinction lies between the board's having an official "complaint" and having come to a "finding," but the idea that the only fair negotiations are those that happen outside of the view of the people who ultimately pay for the results is another bit of insanity to add to Rhode Island's madness. If this complaint is found to have merit, the lesson will be that "fairness" is a measurement of the unions' leverage, rather than a two-sided balance.



Semantic Games with Children

Justin Katz

How much of life is phrasing? When it comes to the political battle with unions, the spats are like Abbot and Costello skits, which (for the young'ns) often hinged on a semantic misunderstanding. One must read to paragraph six to reach the punchline under the headline "Teachers deny killing science initiative" (emphasis added):

The union has never taken a formal position on the matter, according to the news release that Kandzierski sent out late yesterday afternoon.

"To blame this on the teachers is nothing more than a political cheap shot and a weak attempt to cover up their own inadequacies in communicating this program to teachers," she said in the statement.

Nobody had suggested that union members sat down and took a formal vote concerning whether science teachers ought to participate in an externally funded program to improve science proficiency in the town. But school officials did notify the relevant teachers and sent them requisite information. So, in effect, the union is pointing its finger at the individual teachers for declining to participate, and of course, the union would defend with its claws any attempt to impart consequences for that decision. (Not to mention "unofficial" suggestions that the union might have made.)

Whatever the case, the situation provides a clear example of the insidious effect that unions have on a professional environment, especially one involving the nexus of children's education and taxpayer funding.


February 9, 2009


A Cause of This Effect

Justin Katz

Things don't look good in West Warwick:

There are no solutions to their immediate fiscal problem. In fact, their current deficit is projected to balloon into a $10-million deficit in the years ahead if nothing is done.

So school officials have worked "seven days a week" to come up with a three-year plan that would gradually wipe out the growing deficit.

It requires a supplemental tax hike in the current year to raise an additional $2-million. In future years, a hodge-podge of reductions, from health-insurance savings to staff cuts and eliminating sports, would gradually wipe out the deficit. It would only work with substantial union givebacks, they say.

Conspicuously absent from the story is a recollection of the work-to-rule action back in late 2007. The school committee, if you'll recall, had followed the appropriate procedure to opt out of the last year of the contract, which would have left it up for negotiation after this school year. Witnessing the damage that the teachers were doing, however, the committee backed down and extended the contract through next year:

The next day [after the school committee's vote not to extend the contract], the union announced it would take a "work to contract" stance that discouraged teachers from performing any duties not explicitly required by the contract. Union members began sporting pins that proclaimed "We Keep Our Promises," and let their actions speak for themselves.

As the school year got under way, the resignations rolled in, affecting classrooms at all grade levels. Field trips and teacher participation in the school-improvement and teacher-support teams halted districtwide. At the elementary level, there were no yearbook advisers, book fairs, learning walks or teacher involvement in fundraising. Teachers shunned a Saturday-school program. The National Junior Honor Society adviser at Deering Middle School resigned as well.

Advisers for the French, Italian and Spanish clubs at West Warwick High School resigned, as did the summer school director, Academic Decathlon adviser and the credit-retrieval program coordinator. The band and choral calendars were scant. Community members and school administrators stepped in to fill vacancies, chaperoning school dances and volunteering to lead summer school programs.

And now the union has the upper hand as the town struggles and tears itself apart trying to balance its budget. The well-paid grownups got theirs, and now the question is how much they'll deign to help the givers.


February 7, 2009


Community Beyond Outreach?

Justin Katz

An East Providence school committee member in attendance at the Ed Achorn talk gave me a copy of a flier that's going to homes across the town:

Inside are a few union talking points presented in a "true or false" format, my favorite of which is the following (emphasis in original):

It's the teachers' fault that the district is running a deficit.

FALSE. The district has been mismanaged for years, with annual budget deficits for the last 10 years in a row. The City Council and School Committee have made decisions that have worsened the situation rather than resolved it.

What makes this noteworthy is that the single greatest example of mismanagement has been in giving away too much to the union. In some of their more stumbling rhetoric of recent months, even union officials have tacitly acknowledged this point.

But there's reason for optimism: The back of the pamphlet provides contact information for all of the school committee and town council members, and at least according to the one who gave me the flier, every single response that it has generated was supportive of the school committee, not the union.

One must wonder whether the teachers' union in East Providence, and perhaps elsewhere, has squandered its support among the community at large.


February 5, 2009


Massaging the Numbers on Teacher Compensation

Justin Katz

Yesterday, I pointed to a report showing that Rhode Island teachers lead the nation in pay compared with neighbors in similar fields within the state. With a methodology that selects specific occupations that require a comparable amount of education to teaching, the study's authors found that RI teachers exceed their peers by 12%. Not surprisingly, the NEA's Pat Crowley prefers a different study, from the Economic Policy Institute, which is funded in part by labor unions:

... in order to be a teacher, a person needs, as a base level, a bachelors degree. So if we are to do a fair comparison, we should compare teacher pay to other college educated professionals. According to the Economic Policy Institute, teachers in Rhode Island earn 90.9% of their educated peers. This includes the so called "summers off" idea. Even though a bachelor's degree will get you hired, in order to keep working or to advance, a teacher needs to earn a Master's degree (not by law, mind you, yet, but by the nature of the job). In Rhode Island teachers with a Master's degree fair somewhat better, earning 96.3% of what their peers earn. Said another way, teachers in Rhode Island face a 5-10% wage penalty for working in the profession.

Right off the bat, it should be observed that the class of "college educated" residents includes a very broad range, with significant outliers on the high end. A college-educated entrepreneur who builds a business and nets himself billions of dollars will draw the pool well north of the more standard career path. Moreover, a teacher who reaches such heights through some innovation would have to cease to be a teacher to pursue it.

Secondly, wherever one places the parity line, the report (PDF) still places Rhode Island at an extreme: with the third highest teacher-to-private-sector ratio. Even if public school teachers have a raw deal, Rhode Island doesn't have the economic health to be unique in combating the inequity.

At bottom, though, Crowley's statement fundamentally misleading, if not flatly incorrect. The EPI's measure adjusts for "the so called 'summers off' idea" by comparing weekly earnings. At least for some portion of teachers, however, the paychecks are spaced out across the year, not limited to the weeks of actual work. In Tiverton, the contract calls for biweekly paychecks year round, with the option for teachers to take a lump sum for the summer pay. And beyond it all, even the EPI acknowledges the importance of total compensation:

Improvements in the non-wage benefits of K-12 teachers partially offsets these wage differences, such that the weekly compensation disadvantage facing teachers [nationwide] in 2006 is about 12%, about 3 percentage points less than the 15% weekly wage disadvantage.

Unfortunately, the EPI (and therefore Crowley) does not offer a state-level comparison of compensation. Perhaps the results were not helpful to the cause.


February 4, 2009


The Union Death Grip

Justin Katz

What we're seeing across Rhode Island, from Tiverton to East Providence, to West Warwick, and now to Johnston is the essential nature of the teachers' unions:

Resistance from the teachers' union has forced the Johnston school system to abandon its leading role in a $12.5-million project to dramatically upgrade science and math education across Rhode Island, school officials said yesterday.

The town's top educators withdrew from the effort after learning that the district's science teachers would not participate in the program, which Governor Carcieri last September heralded as essential for the development of a work force in an increasingly challenging global economy. ...

In Johnston, only 16 percent of its 11th-graders were proficient in science.

"We could have gotten things that we normally could not afford, especially in this economy that we're in," Schools Supt. Margaret Iacovelli said yesterday when asked about the district's withdrawal from the program. "I'm really disappointed."

School committees and superintendents have been unwilling, in the past, to tie the unions' hardball tactics to significant detriments to students, so year by year, they have incrementally introduced those detriments a little at a time. Now the money has run out, the minimally controversial excisions have all been made, and the unions' teeth are coming out.

ADDENDUM:

The governor has released the following statement:

The decision by the Johnston School Department to leave the five year science and mathematics pilot project to upgrade science and math education in the state was met by surprise and great disappointment by Governor Carcieri today.

"This was a tremendous opportunity for Johnston to forge a new path in math and science education in Rhode Island," said Governor Carcieri. "It represented a chance for the Johnston School District to use new tools and resources for their teachers and students to improve students' proficiency in the critical areas of science and math. This decision by the Johnston teacher's union to pull the plug on their own members is spiteful, and in the end only hurts the students."

The decision by Johnston School Department will not derail or delay the project. The Rhode Island Department of Education has already identified a list of schools to participate in year two of the five year pilot program and will choose to accelerate one of those schools to now participate in year one. RIDE is expected to make a decision within the next week.

"We have received overwhelming response from school districts eager to participate. However, it is disappointing that Johnston has stepped away from the project, and it is a shame that the students will be deprived of the chance to participate," concluded Carcieri.



'50s Policies in the Modern Economy

Justin Katz

As I recall, it was during America's discovery of FoxNews, just after 9/11, that I saw Robert Reich on Hannity and Colmes, and Hannity made a comment to the effect that Reich's ability to talent for promoting detrimental economic policies was frightening. That memory came to mind while reading Reich's recent essay promoting the "Employee Free Choice Act" as a form of economic stimulus:

WHY IS THIS recession so deep, and what can be done to reverse it?

Hint: Go back about 50 years, when America’s middle class was expanding and the economy was soaring. Paychecks were big enough to let us buy all the goods and services we produced. It was a virtuous circle. Good pay meant more purchases, and more purchases meant more jobs.

At the center of this virtuous circle were unions. In 1955, more than a third of working Americans belonged to one. Unions gave them the bargaining leverage they needed to get the paychecks that kept the economy going. So many Americans were unionized that wage agreements spilled over to non-unionized workplaces as well. Employers knew they had to match union wages to compete for workers and to recruit the best ones.

Cast your mind back, dear reader, to the time of fuzzy bunnies and economic prosperity — all the way before technology booms and Reagan, back to a time that relatively few of you remember with an adult's clarity. What was responsible for that technicolor past of prosperity? Unions! Ignore that those were days of pre-globalization innocence; ask not what happens when labor becomes more expensive in the United States in an environment already characterized by companies' looking for less-expensive nations in which to operate.



The Story of Rhode Island Education in Two Rankings

Justin Katz

Taking a soft tack in defining "fairness" when it comes to teacher compensation, Julia Steiny references a series of reports put out by Education Week:

The researchers averaged the earnings of all 16 occupations and used that number to draw a "parity line" across the center of the chart. Against that line they graphed each states' average teacher compensation — salary and benefits — to indicate, on an admittedly gross average, how well teachers were paid as compared with their private sector counterparts. ...

Seven states pay above the parity line. Rhode Island is at the extreme end of the chart, paying 112 percent of parity, or 12 cents per dollar more than the private sector average.

So Rhode Island teachers are doing relatively well, while lots of private-sector people are losing their jobs, or having hours and benefits cut back. It's only natural that teachers would freak when their salaries and benefits are threatened. A loss of income, however minor or manageable, feels neither good nor fair.

But private sector people who have lost their jobs must now somehow get health care, since we are the only industrialized country that still ties health care to jobs. And they must also pay the taxes, quite high in Rhode Island, that maintain their luckier, unionized, protected brethren. This feels royally unfair. As such, the resentment growing in Rhode Island’s private sector is now mushrooming.

Unfortunately, the report does not say whether the parity line takes into account benefits and work schedules (hours in the workday, days in the workyear), although judging from the language (e.g., "pay-parity"), I suspect not. Whatever the case, the Rhode Island report (PDF) shows on page 11 that our state is #1 in the country for paying teachers above this definition of parity.

There's another component to the story, though. The previous page of the report informs the reader that Rhode Island ranks 47th in "efforts to improve teaching," which includes accountability for quality, incentives and allocation, and building and supporting capacity. In other words, Rhode Island already overpays teachers compared with the society in which they live (and the community that funds their compensation), but if we were to adjust for the quality demands that we place upon them they'd be off the chart.


February 2, 2009


Repair the System to Repair the Budget

Justin Katz

It's curious — at a time when lefties and unions are more than happy to accept far reaching justifications for weaving their wish lists into an ostensible stimulus package at the federal level — to hear them arguing for a close delineation of "budget repair" in the state:

Union leaders are accusing the Carcieri administration of executing a targeted assault on labor unions and of trying to "destroy the labor movement in Rhode Island" by seeking to limit the scope of collective bargaining in this state.

Such fragile things are these unions, apparently, that the imposition of limits could be fatal to them. Of course, they're merely throwing any argument that they think might stick at the governor's proposal:

But union leaders say there's another key flaw in the proposed prohibition [against teacher strikes and work-to-rule]: It doesn't belong in the state budget-repair bill because it won't save local school districts any money, they say.

Sure it will: By removing a cudgel that the unions use to threaten, and to harm, the communities from which they wish to extract more money, the change would empower school committees to negotiate more responsible contract terms. RI unions have constructed a series of pretty little traps around all of their talking points to create the illusion that the only restrictions and cuts that are legally, morally, or safely feasible are those that they propose, but the icy sheen of recession reveals just how shallow their arguments really are.



Change Can't Be Done

Justin Katz

On Friday evening, Portsmouth Fire Chief Jeff Lynch sent an email to a baker's dozen (or so) of state legislators explaining why not a single one of the governor's budgetary suggestions related to public-sector labor ought to be accepted. The entire letter is printed in the extended entry, below.

It would be folly to state that the chief doesn't make some worthwhile points, but no group whose cash flow is apt to be restricted as Rhode Island adjusts to financial reality will come unarmed with arguments. There's a reason they've collectively pushed our state to the precipice in the first place.

I won't attempt a point-by-point response to Lynch's statement, here, but a few of his comments related to benefits point to a skewed perspective that legislators ought to take into account as they gut the governor's supplemental budget and pass one of their own making:

I know, the rest of the world already co-pay some or all of their insurance. However, when I started I qualified for food stamps. We take the low pay because we have these benefits.

I can't speak to the wheres and whens of Chief Lynch's first days as a firefighter, but career paths that begin within 100% of the poverty line are not uncommon. Be that as it may, a look at Portsmouth's '07/'08 payroll (PDF, from The Money Trail) reveals that no full-time firefighters currently face that prospect. Their compensation packages (PDF, from The Transparency Train) emphasize the point. The town's budget for that year (PDF, from The Transparency Train) puts the healthcare costs for the department at $452,881. Lynch subsequently notes "a friend" in the defense-industry private sector who supposedly has a better deal, but individual acquaintances and long-ago pay complaints are hardly relevant to questions of parity.

Similarly with pensions:

It remains unclear whether the COLA proposed by the Governor applies to vested employees. Regardless, our contributions were based on actuarial studies that accounted for our present COLA's. Additionally, having to wait 5 years for a COLA will essentially put the average public servant at poverty level. Assuming the cost of living increases 3% per year, which is compounding, a person retiring form a job that pays $50,000 with a 50% pension will start with a $25,000 per year pension. After 5 years that pension will be worth less than $21,250 in today's dollars. This coupled with a healthcare co-payment of $3,800 makes the value of the pension worth around $17,450.

Put aside that public employees who retire after twenty years of service are not likely to begin their forty-year retirements without finding other jobs that put them not only above the poverty level, but well above the median household income for the state. Lynch's hypothetical simply doesn't apply to the men under his command.

According to their latest contract (PDF), a 1st class firefighter (who reaches retirement without becoming an officer) earns $47,587.10, and longevity is included in pension calculations, which brings the retirement-age average to $51,552.69. Retiring after 20 years, his pension payment would be $30,931.61, and after 27 years, it would be $38,148.99. With no cost-of-living adjustment, the retiree would face the undaunting necessity of saving or investing that annual cushion until actually reaching a suitable retirement age.

Again, we in the private sector are generally not in a position to snicker at that benefit. Still, the chief goes on:

Second to the love for the job, the reason we all take these jobs are for the benefits because they don't pay nearly as well as private sector jobs for the risks we take. We make a deal when we sign up and plan our lives in accordance with that deal. To change it, and change it this drastically, is unfair to say the least. I can tell you as much as I love my job, and as much as it is going to kill me to leave it, I have advised my son that he should seriously consider another career.

Strictly speaking, union employees remake their arrangement with every contract. If Mr. Lynch is referring to a more abstract "deal" of contract-by-contract increases and perpetual insulation from the economic realities that the rest of us face, then I'd ask why it is that he believes his reality ought to be more "fair" than his neighbors' — neighbors who have at an accelerating rate been advising their children not just to consider alternative careers, but to flee the state in which they've grown up altogether.

The bottom line is that nobody's deal will survive the collapse of the state, and that is exactly what the future holds if dramatic changes are not made to Rhode Island's method of operation.

Continue reading "Change Can't Be Done"

January 30, 2009


A Get What You Can Society

Justin Katz

It's difficult not to rub one's eyes and look again:

Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year.

That was the sixth-largest haul on record, according to a report released Wednesday by the New York State comptroller.

That's the culture, though: Whether left, right, or center, take what you can. For their part, lefties and unionists can hardly complain on principle, but only on scale. News from Tiverton:

Two senior officers in Tiverton's police department have announced their imminent retirements. They are Deputy Chief Nicholas A. Maltais, 42, and Detective Sergeant Charles R. Mulcahy, 44.

Deputy Chief Nicholas A. Maltais will retire effective March 30, 2009. Although known for some time to have been considering retirement — he’s been with the department for 21 years — the timing of his departure now is in part related to pension reduction proposals outlined by Governor Donald Carcieri that would take effect April 1. That cutoff date is causing public employee retirements statewide. ...

Deputy Maltais earns $67,322 annually. When he retires he will have 145 days of unused sick leave that the town will buy out in a lump sum for an estimated $38,000.

Sergeant Mulcahy, who could not be reached for comment, earns a salary estimated at $56,000, according to town budget documents. His unused sick leave, and the amount of any town buyout, are unknown.

Both men will draw pensions from the police pension fund that equal 52 percent of the average of their three highest years with the department. Deputy Maltais is entitled to approximately $35,000 annually.

If Maltais lives to be 80, his total payments will be $2,420,581, or $115,266 for each year that he worked. Forty-five percent of that number, $1,090,581, is due to cost-of-living increases. In the 38th year of his pension, the payment will be $104,482.90. (That strikes even me as a very high number, so please correct me if I've erred in my calculations.)

Says Maltais:

"I feel comfortable in my decision to retire at this time. I'm looking into other opportunities. I really value family and look forward to spending time with my two sons. This is time you never get back."

Many a private-sector father knows the feeling, although most of us have no option but to watch the time slip away from behind our desks, our steering wheels, or our machine controls.



Disappointing Unionism

Justin Katz

Michael Morse is a good guy. A very good guy. He's reasonable, compassionate, and intelligent, but also emblematic of the cult of unionism. That such a man would not spare one word of sympathy for those appalled by the teachers' union tactics at the infamous East Providence school committee meeting or one word to disassociate his own union, or at least his own belief about unions, from the astonishing behavior illustrates how corrosive unionism can be to a community, how divisive the line around those who proclaim "solidarity." Union uber alles.

To Michael, Travis Rowley's recounting of the school committee meeting marks him as an "arrogant" purveyor of "vitriol." Yet, he offers no expression of regret that the National Education Association's Patrick Crowley has been increasingly successful at making his the face of Rhode Island unions. Michael speaks of the "potential allies" whom Travis has alienated, but if he means to indicate people under the union umbrella who might be uncomfortable with some actions of their peers, he does not give reason for confidence that he'd be willing to break ranks himself.

And so it has been. It was largely Lt. Michael Morse of the Providence Fire Department who finally convinced me of unions' insidious nature. Although I've considered him a friend, and although he reached out in camaraderie to the contributors of Anchor Rising, the union disagreement proved too much. He's scrubbed us from his blog, and apparently, we weren't able sufficiently to persuade him that our opposition to public sector unions is based on honest assessment that he'd step forward in public to display a union rift so that the broader community could begin to heal.


January 25, 2009


Up Being Down as a Political Philosophy

Justin Katz

The way in which individuals construct an understanding of their societies is what makes it fatal to paint them all with the bold colors of their affiliations: People will be particularly amenable to certain explanations for events around them — whether they've been pushed toward prescribed priorities via social clichés, have an economic interest in a particular construction, or some combination — and will act accordingly. Their culpability is not diminished by that fact, but it does have implications for any strategy intended to change their minds (or at least persuade them to loosen their grip on something precious that they're strangling).

I bring this up in an exercise to deepen my empathy for those whose behavior I so deplore and whose practices I find so detrimental to the state. Imagine yourself, for instance, in the place of somebody who's a few steps closer to the left of political center and/or whose very livelihood is dramatically reliant upon the strength of organized public-sector unions. From such a position, Pat Crowley's response to a description of the forces involved in East Providence by Travis Rowley might just succeed in its certain end of pushing you a little farther away from cold reality (emphasis added):

But, like I said before, there is a certain class of folks in Rhode island that are upset that their standing as overlords is being challenged. They're not upset about class warfare, they're upset that the under classes are starting to fight back in the war they have been waging against workers and poor people for generations. Rowley's pieces, now published more frequently in The Journal, expose the glass jaw of the right wing. The joining in common cause of disgraced Education Partnership refugees, so-called Taxpayer groups with out of state memberships (watch this video), and anti-immigrant bullies in common cause against teachers and unions is called Astroturfing. The reason why they are doing it: Rowley's first line: "UNIONS, the engine of the Rhode Island left..."

In this bizarre world, a young go-getting member of the state's almost non-existent opposition party is the emblem of a class of "overlords," struggling to maintain the oppression of a category of citizens whose average household income is actually well above the average for the state. Crowley even provides a link to a conspiratorial definition for "astroturfing":

The use of paid shills to create the impression of a popular movement, through means like letters to newspapers from soi-disant 'concerned citizens', paid opinion pieces, and the formation of grass-roots lobbying groups that are actually funded by a PR group (AstroTurf is fake grass; hence the term).

In your empathetic mode, doesn't it all begin to make sense? Put aside your first-hand knowledge that the local reform groups are really just citizens who've had enough and imagine that this small group of vocal people who wish to make changes to your enviable employment package are actually a front group for powerful interests attempting to keep the lid on society's populist potential. Only you, the middle-class union worker, remain as a shining emblem of The Possible for your fellow workers. (And besides, who wants to work into their 60s?)

Under those circumstances, you too might find yourself telling a financially struggling carpenter why you and your even-better-paid spouse (with the family business and a rental property) absolutely deserve an increase in remuneration even as the state's economy collapses. You might even be inclined to listen to the flashy union executive as he explains to you that screaming and intimidating elected municipal officials is all just part of the negotiation game — absolutely essential to the prevention of backsliding into indentured servitude.

If the so-called "taxpayers" aren't villains, then the whole worldview into which you've molded your career deserves some scrutiny. And if Crowley's audience begins to question whether there's actually a chance — a hint worth considering — that they've somehow become the bad guys in the story, his own lucrative position as an operative for an immensely powerful union organization (that actually does fund astroturfers) comes under threat.


January 22, 2009


East Providence Teachers' Union Denied

Justin Katz

The East Providence School Committee just won the day in court — at least to the extent that the judge denied the union's request for an injunction against the imposition of the School Committee's remuneration change.

Decision: PDF
School Committee Press Release: PDF


January 21, 2009


Sitting Down with the Treasurer

Justin Katz

RI General Treasurer Frank Caprio invited Anchor Rising for a sit-down chat in his office last night, centering on pension issues, but touching on various other matters.

In general, I think the four of us in attendance were reasonably impressed with the treasurer's explanations for economic policies and his knowledge of political history in Rhode Island. In specific, some of the more detailed material is going to take time for us to digest prior to comment, but a few clips might be of interest to readers right off the digital recorder:

  • On complete financial transparency in his office, to be unrolled in a few weeks: stream, download
  • In opposition to the use of state-owned vehicles: stream, download
  • I got a chuckle out of the notion of fear among those in his office promoted beyond the union's bounds to become (scary music) at-will employees: stream, download
  • Caprio's got a merit-based promotion system in place with his workers' union, and he thinks the practice is transferrable across government: stream, download
  • Apparently, Rhode Island "only" pays 7% of its revenue toward debt service. I wasn't wholly satisfied with the Caprio's description of the comparative appearance of that statistic against a typical business and wonder whether it's fair to compare the government to a mortgage-paying household: stream, download
  • On the possibility of municipal bankruptcy (or entry into "a process"): stream, download
  • On his pension-plan thinking. Apparently, much of the cost of switching to 401k would come from accounting rules, but with the possible loophole of diminishing, rather than "closing" the defined benefit program: stream, download
  • The reason that Rhode Island actually ranks pretty well when it comes to retiree healthcare costs: stream, download
  • On abortion and same-sex marriage, neither of which would be his center of focus for any campaigns or offices: stream, download
  • Running for governor?: stream, download
  • Wherein I continue to strive for an answer on the social issues: stream, download
  • On eVerify and immigration: stream, download
  • On branding the state otherwise than with corruption and mob films: stream, download
  • With regard to a port project and other initiatives, the treasurer agrees with me that a broadly attractive economic environment (tax cuts included) ought to be the focus of policies: stream, download
  • An interesting response to my question about his thoughts on Republicans running as Democrats ("Why not the reverse?") and a discussion of the RIGOP: stream, download

January 19, 2009


What's Going Up in Education

Justin Katz

As Marc and I have been illustrating, there are a number of ways to cut the data on education expenditures. That, indeed, is what makes it possible for unionists to declare this or that slice decisive, even if reality disagrees.

In the comments to Marc's post, for example, NEA Assistant Executive Director Pat Crowley seizes on Marc's observation that "the piece [of the education expenditure pie] that went to the teachers stayed relatively the same" from 2004 to 2007. In Crowley's estimation, that fact is proof that "collective bargaining costs are not what is driving the costs in education." Pat's really going for the bold, here, because "instructional teachers" spending is not the only subcategory directly dependent upon collective bargaining. He's also ignoring the fact that total education spending has gone up an average of 6% every year this decade (both per student and overall).

If the question is what subcategory of spending is driving up the cost of education in Rhode Island — or inversely, which subcategory has been soaking up our increasing investment therein — then the most direct insight will come from a graph depicting the per-student spending on each:

In the extended entry, I've provided similar graphs for various school districts that I found to be of interest for one reason or another. (I'd be happy to run more districts if readers have specific requests.) There are, of course, town-to-town variations that might be of interest to those familiar with the local particulars,* but the basic story is the same: Between roughly 2003 and 2005, funding switched from paraprofessionals (classroom aides and such) to therapists and other special- needs–related employees,** and funding for teachers has never ceased its climb. That, again, is excluding other subcategories that could justifiably be tacked on to the cost of teachers and — even more — teachers' unions.


* I find it interesting, for example, that Tiverton has seen such an unusual increase in pass-throughs, which include out-of-district services for special needs students as well as the limited resources redirected to private schools (such as some transportation costs and books). One reason could be that families that were priced out of better-performing districts like Portsmouth and Barrington opted for private school; another could be an increasing inclination to flee the public schools for any of the multiple private options available in the area. The protracted union "negotiations" can't have helped in that regard. It's also notable that Providence has such relatively low per-student spending on teachers. Whether that indicates a comparative lack of city funding or of state funding, I don't know.
** This shift from paraprofessionals to therapists probably explains why Crowley picked 2004 as the year for comparison with 2007: At the state level, 2004 marked the peak for paraprofessionals, which are counted in the "instruction" category that Crowley incorrectly uses as a stand-in for "teachers." His game is propaganda, not analysis.



Continue reading "What's Going Up in Education"

January 16, 2009


The Best Laid Plans

Justin Katz

They'll call it jealousy, the unionists, but I think a caller in to Jim Hummel on the Dan Yorke show yesterday put it more accurately: "Why do the union members think they're better than us?"

I really do wonder if they know what the average (thinking) private-sector worker hears when they say such things:

But those who spoke yesterday decried the "unfairness" of charging state employees and teachers among the highest pension contribution rates in the nation — 8.75 percent and 9.5 percent, respectively — and then withholding a benefit for which they paid. Talking about "property rights" and "life decisions" made in anticipation of annual pension increases, Vincent Santaniello, a lawyer and deputy executive director of the National Education Association of Rhode Island, laid the groundwork for a potential legal challenge.

Plainly put, the circumstances of life change. Nobody gets to take a job in their twenties and then kick back in comfort that their entire financial future is set. Even without cost of living adjustments (and especially with a higher minimum retirement age), considering their pay, their benefits, and their free time, there is no reason that teachers and other public employees shouldn't be able to position themselves extremely well for retirement.

Rhode Island Federation of Teachers & Health Professionals President Marcia Reback speaks of "a permanent subclass of senior citizens who will be in poverty with no hedge against inflation." Yeah, right. Tell that to those of us who work our fingers to the bone yet are always one bill behind because our own taxes and the toxic environment that redirects opportunity away from our state prevent us from advancing in absolute terms, let alone against inflation.



Accommodation Upon Cashing Out

Justin Katz

I might be missing something, but this seems to be becoming a bigger deal than necessary:

But after hearing mayors, school administrators and union leaders warn of potential chaos 10 weeks before the end of the school year, Gallogly said she consulted with the state's actuarial consultant yesterday and was told the state could move the deadline for employees to retire to any point prior to the June 30 end of the fiscal year, and still book this year’s $95-million state and local share of the savings from this long-term reduction in the state's unfunded liability.

If the savings are in retirement payments, couldn't the state just stipulate that retirees finish out the year?



The Union Executive's Projection

Justin Katz

This is classic Crowley:

Repeat the lie. Repeat the lie. Repeat the lie. No matter how wrong, no matter how damaging. Repeat the lie. This must be posted in the Projo editorial room somewhere:

The lie.

Crowley's first step to this particular platform was finding a bit of data that looks, in the light of a flickering 20-watt bulb, as if it might support the contrarian notion that taxpayers are actually moving in to Rhode Island. He then ignored arguments that his finding was, at best, incomplete. And before you know it, he's accusing of outright lies those who dare to restate the common (and accurate) knowledge that taxpayers (and people, too) are leaving the state.

You've heard the old home remedy that faking a mental illness means you don't really have it? Well, Pat's version is to point the finger at his opposition to distract from his own offensives.

Just the other day, when asked what "the teachers" would say to a particular argument, I referred to a year-old letter from Mr. Crowley claiming that "the cost of teaching has risen slower than overall inflation." His conclusion was that "it isn't teachers and their exorbitant salaries driving the costs" of local education. I pointed out at the time that, when one teased out the component of "instructional expenditures" that actually goes to teachers, it increased well over inflation, and at the expense of such other items as technology and instructional materials. There's something perverse about leveraging the decline in spending on an item from which teachers' ever-growing remuneration has been draining funds to suggest that contracts haven't been shifting in their favor.

Well, here he goes again:

According to the Rhode Island Department of Education, we are spending less and less of our education budgets on teachers and instruction over the last several years. For example, in 2004, 56.7% of statewide spending on education went to classroom instruction. In 2007, that number fell to only 51.7% of statewide spending, a drop of 5%. ...

What does that mean? Well, it means that spending on classroom teachers, their salaries and benefits, are not the things that are driving the cost of education. It also means that the items contained in collective bargaining are not the cost drivers. In fact, spending on teachers is not even keeping up with inflation. In 2004, total statewide spending on education was $1,795,090,933. By 2007, the number had risen 14% to $2,088,669,861. But instructional spending rose from $1,018,276,109 to $1,079,576,386, a rise of only 6%.

In actuality, from 2004 (PDF) to 2007 (PDF), the statewide per-student spending on "instructional teachers" (as opposed to the broader "instruction") actually rose $880, from $5,490 to $6,370, or 16%. Both the size of the expenditure and its increase are greater than any other item — or category — on the list of education expenditures.

So, as Crowley complains that spending on instruction hasn't risen in keeping with the rest of education spending, he ignores the fact that teachers claim an increasing percentage of that pie:

A broader investigation of expenditure data would make for a worthwhile discussion, if anybody wishes actually to engage in it.


January 15, 2009


Hummel and the Union Trio

Justin Katz

Jim Hummel, filling in for Dan Yorke, has had three unionists on the program since 3:00, and as I've pulled up flooring and cleaned my jobsite, I've been itching to make three points:

1. Regarding the teachers'/union's behavior at the latest School Committee meeting, NEA lawyer John Liedecker pointed out that the police had said, on the radio, that at no point did the evening approach a riot. Is that the standard, now? Appropriate behavior on one side of the line and rioting on the other?

2. Local East Providence union President Valerie Lawson stated that all they want is for the School Committee to return to the negotiating table and try to get the two sides' numbers a little closer. As we've also experienced in Tiverton, this ignores the reality of what the School Committees have begun to do — namely, to tell the teachers exactly how much there is available and to move from there. In other words, there is no hidden pile of gold. Either the teachers are refusing to believe reality, or they are, in effect, demanding that the districts cut broad swaths of other spending, even though teacher pay and benefits have been draining other areas of expenditure for years.

3. I want to give a quick tip of the hat to the blogging revolution. The union trio had been claiming that the heckling was all about School Committee Chairman Anthony Carcieri's microphone misuse. When Jim Hummel played my clip of the teachers' shouting down taxpayer Tom Riley, Ms. Lawson could only stumble through a response until Mr. Liedecker jumped in and smoothly changed the subject.

Beware entrenched powers and special interests: Bloggers are out there!



The Locus of Disruption

Justin Katz

Andrew's call in to the Matt Allen show, last night, turned into a longer form interview about the East Providence School Committee meeting. Stream by clicking here, or download it.

To the conversation about Anthony Carcieri's microphone volume (or lack thereof), I'd add my impression that Carcieri fully anticipated a disruptive atmosphere and was focused on moving through the agenda, without expectation that the audience would be following along — or would be able to do so, given audience noise. Consequently, he didn't bother much ensuring audibility beyond the dais.

That said, from my limited experience in Tiverton, the tone that the union set in East Providence was pretty standard for negotiation-season school committee meetings. The "can't hear you" heckles are a mainstay — anything to rattle the small-time public officials.

Indeed, if you listen to the second snip of audio from the meeting, somebody shouted that very phrase — amid a drown-out wave of boos — almost before Carcieri'd said a single word.


January 14, 2009


Union Life Cycle and Expectations

Justin Katz

Jim Hummel made the point, while filling in for Dan Yorke today, that teacher union contracts are the product of years — decades — of cumulative negotiations. Compromise on X for reason A, one year, and expect to make it up a few years down the road. Consequently, a rollback (his point goes), as appears likely in East Providence, throws some sort of delicate balance off kilter for the teachers.

The problem with this approach is that unions have no employment life cycle. They latch on to the district and remain there, in theory, as long as the schools exist. An individual employee in the private sector will see his or her remuneration go up and down, shifting from this to that, generally increasing over a career (most significantly because of promotions, rather than raises), and then retire — probably having shifted companies in the interim. Eventually, the increased cost of that employee's equity with the company goes away.

The way the unions work their contract is to shoot for pay increases; if they can't get that, they go for benefit increases; if they can't get that, they go for perks; if they can't get that, they seek to shift work environment and employment terms. But unions don't retire, and they don't shift to another district to chase opportunity.

That is to say that the district never gets relief from those cumulative negotiations. As they mount, there's only so much that the town can pay for education, and there are only so many work and management rules that it can afford to compromise before the cost is seen in the quality of students' education. As they struggle to maintain the rule that teachers' employment packages never diminish, they begin to cut facilities and program spending.

Hummel also mentioned that every teacher whom he has asked about the union's behavior at the East Providence School Committee meeting last night has seen nothing wrong with it. I'd suggest that the reason for this egregious blind spot is that the union organization has invested many years of effort persuading teachers that "this is the way these things are done." They think that all negotiation proceedings occur this way and that, otherwise, "the school committee will walk all over us." (These aren't direct quotes from anybody in particular, by the way.)

I guess the long and short of it is that teachers ought to be professionals, and public sector professionals oughtn't be unionized.



East Providence Schools: The Fiscal Problems They Face

Marc Comtois

Anchor Rising has received the following:

The East Providence School Committee is providing 2 examples of the financial avalanche facing our entire community.

Attached is legal action by the Northern RI Collaborative seeking past due payment of $563,214.30 for tuition payments for our special-needs students.

It is irrational that the teachers' union chooses to ignore the financial crisis facing its own community. This is apparent given their behavior at our school committee meeting tonight.

Here is a copy of the bill from the NRIC (PDF). Additionally, here is a bill from the RI Interscholastic League with charges totaling $6,496 (PDF).



Not Here... Yet

Justin Katz

Via Jay Nordlinger comes what we can only hope is not a vision of Rhode Island's future:

French teachers hurled shoes and other objects at police Monday to protest President Nicolas Sarkozy's high school reforms, prompting police to respond with tear gas.

France's leading teachers' unions demonstrated in the western city of Saint-Lo at a cultural center before Sarkozy gave a New Year's address to education officials. Protesters and police exchanged blows, and one store window was smashed. No arrests or injuries were immediately reported.

Major unions refused to attend the president's speech because they oppose the government's education reforms.

Sarkozy's government wants to modernize the education system to make French students better prepared for the job market. But the government is also seeking to cut costs and bureaucracy across several sectors. The education reform includes changes to high school curricula but also job cuts among administrators and teachers' aides.

Where teachers behave thus, teenagers racking up hundred-million-dollars in riot damages cannot be far behind. Nordlinger opens up his Impromptus column (which is structured like a blog) with an appropriate musing:

It seems to me that the Left has won: utterly and decisively. What I mean is, the Saturday Night Live, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher mentality has prevailed. They decide what a person's image is, and those images stick. They are the ones who say that Cheney's a monster, W.'s stupid, and Palin's a bimbo. And the country, apparently, follows. ...

What are the shaping institutions of American life? The news media. Entertainment television. The movies. Popular music. The schools, K through grad school. In whose hands are those institutions? In what areas do conservatives predominate? Country music, NASCAR, some churches? (Talk radio too, I suppose — no wonder so many on the left want to shut it down.)

As to Jay's question about areas in which conservatives "predominate," I'd offer the small — but important — addition of comprehending reality.



The Sound of the Beginning of the End

Justin Katz

The following are some audio clips from the East Providence School Committee meeting. Keep in mind, while listening, that the sound isn't entirely representative. For one thing, I was sitting near the taxpayer group, so they might be overrepresented in the general sound level (although still greatly outnumbered).

  • School Committee Chairman Anthony Carcieri makes his appearance to booing: stream, download
  • The union sets the tone right from Mr. Carcieri's very first words (and, yes, that's me shouting "grow up" — keep in mind that I'd already been subjected to a half-hour of union slogan chanting and screams): stream, download
  • The teachers cheer that some of them have actually done (gasp!) extracurricular work: stream, download
  • The teachers cheer that they can blame poor performance on "facilities" (nevermind that keeping up with teacher contracts has been bleeding other segments of school budgets for years): stream, download
  • A moment of heckling, including the call of "Scared?": stream, download
  • Just a snippet of the tone that continued, with a gradual escalation, throughout the meeting: stream, download
  • The teachers find the phrase "anti-bullying" humorous: stream, download
  • The teachers find the quip "outdoor voice" humorous: stream, download
  • Anthony Carcieri attempts to lay down the ground rules for public comment, and local union leader Valerie Lawson speechifies: stream, download
  • East Providence teacher Mary Texeira offers a reasonable statement — although she probably goes off the union message a bit when she states that she wouldn't mind a five-year pay freeze if the school committee would lay out the reasons that it's necessary: stream, download
  • Taxpayer Tom Riley takes the mike and faces down the hecklers — inspiring the single most silent moment of the night when he suggests that younger teachers will lose their jobs if the union doesn't let the district spread the costs across their pay packages — but the devolution of the meeting leads the school committee (almost inaudibly) to adjourn: stream, download

January 13, 2009


What We're Up Against

Justin Katz

So parking has already spilled over to the supermarket parking lot across the street, and it was clear from conversation that the women standing at the crosswalk with me were teachers from another district. As we crossed, the policeman directing traffic told them to "be loud — my wife is a teacher." (There's a six-figure household.)

Barely had I sat down when the unionist who had complained to me in the men's room of driving down from Boston for a recent Tiverton School Committee meeting accosted me, suggesting that I "get a real job — you loser." I tried to be friendly, but he didn't seem interested. Subsequently, he walked around pointing me out to the other side.

Fun, fun.

ADDENDUM:

At least there are some good guys here, some wearing t-shirts that read: "Teachers and Union Reps BIG Difference."

ADDENDUM (7:36 p.m.):

The teachers are screaming like kids at a rock concert for the benefit of a television camera. This should be required viewing for all citizens of the state.

ADDENDUM 7:39 p.m.:

It's sort of that old comic book cliché of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, isn't it? There simply is no money, and yet, one out of six Rhode Islanders is being prodded by union organizations to get out and demonstrate against necessary adjustments.

Do they not understand what is happening, or do they not care? (Or does their union organization strive to keep them misinformed and maleable?)

ADDENDUM 7:44 p.m.:

I saw Pat Crowley strolling up the aisle along which I'm sitting, and I prepared myself to shake his hand, should we make eye contact. A friendly quip came to mind for the moment after skin contact: "See, reality didn't explode." Instead, he kept his shaking hand in his pocket and handed me a business card with the following quotation from a Boston Globe letter:

Why are we the pigs? The public employees I know are social workers who care for abused and neglected children. Or they work with mentally ill and mentally retarded adults and adolescents. They find homes for the homeless. They keep the roads repaired and clean. They open and close the bridges. They run the 911 emergency system. They teach our children. They keep the city and state hospital systems working. They run state prisons. Public employees are police officers and firefighters. Public employees help keep you healthy and safe.

But nobody disputes any of this. We who wish reform have a variety of roles that benefit society. Were I in a poetic mood, I'd list some of the more sympathetic among private sector jobs, but you can certainly come up with them yourself. Rhode Island simply cannot afford to keep leading with its heart, because those people who do all those wonderful things — along with coaxing the system to pad their wallets — are pulling the entire state into the quicksand.

ADDENDUM 7:56 p.m.:

True to the usual maturity of these audiences, the teachers booed as the school committee walked toward the stage — one of them a young lady who's probably a student.

ADDENDUM 8:02 p.m.:

Vicious "boos" as Anthony Carcieri walks in room. Unbelievable. And intended to intimidate.

ADDENDUM 8:05 p.m.:

Boos and heckling as soon as Committee Chairman Carcieri tried to speak. I cannot believe adults think it's appropriate to behave like this.

ADDENDUM 8:08 p.m.:

Even the Pledge of Allegiance became a bit of protest theater in their hands.

ADDENDUM 8:16p.m.:

Despite quips and harangues from the audience, the school committee is just moving forward with the agenda.

Pay attention, teachers: this is what courage looks like.

ADDENDUM 8:19p.m.:

As a few teachers continue to shout out, and the rejoinders from the crowd for them to "shut up" increase, I do wonder whether any of the teachers are embarassed that they are asked to join these mobs. Or did those teachers decline to come out tonight?

ADDENDUM 8:23p.m.:

Mr. Carcieri has skipped an item or two on the agenda, requiring others at the table to correct him. There have been a couple of snickers from the crowd, but one really must appreciate the anxiety that his position engenders, just now — even those who disagree, I would think.

ADDENDUM 8:31 p.m.:

During a review of a district-wide analysis, an administrator mentioned a couple of instances in which teachers are volunteering time and working after hours. The teachers cheered, as well they should.

They're also cheering as she describes that some deficiencies aren't the teachers, but the supplies and tools that the district provides. As I'll be pointing out in a graph in the near future, a significant reason for that development is that more and more of RI districts' money has been going to pay teachers' salaries and benefits.

ADDENDUM 8:36p.m.:

Some heckles to "speak up" and "use the microphone." A woman called out, "Scared?" If she were closer to me, I might have called out in return: "Wouldn't you be."

Perhaps the most astonishing thing, coming from teachers, is the utter lack of empathy that they exhibit. I imagine they do better with the students, but it's disconcerting to realize that they believe school committee members to be The Enemy, and therefore undeserving of some basic respect.

ADDENDUM 8:40 p.m.:

A mention of an anti-bullying program brought what I'd describe as cackles from the audience. It's like a movie set in Medieval times.

Now their screaming "out door voice." Really.

ADDENDUM 8:43 p.m.:

It's a good thing that we've gotten to the public comment section. I don't think the audience could stand to sit still much longer.

ADDENDUM 8:46 p.m.:

Local union head Valerie Lawson wants them to accept the arbitration. "Let the teachers get back to teaching the students."

You mean they're not?

ADDENDUM 8:49 p.m.:

Comments from the crowd around me suggest that the teachers intend to run the clock.

One just gave a reasonable speech and said that she "has no problem not getting a raise for the next five years" if the school would admit the problems.

The next speaker got up and introduced himself as a taxpayer. He was jeered.

ADDENDUM 8:53 p.m.:

The union is declaring "point of order" that the speaker is bringing up issues that aren't on the agenda. Heckle. Heckle. Jeer. Jeer.

But this isn't an agenda item. It's just a statement from an interested member of the public.

The school committee declared that the meeting is getting out of hand and called it a night.

ADDENDUM 8:58 p.m.:

Very loud boos as the school committee prepares to leave.

Any teachers who read this, I implore you: Take a moment to consider why it is reasonable for these town officials to be nervous. Think of the environment that you create at these meetings — not just this one, but every big and small town in the state. Is this who you want to be?


January 12, 2009


Thousands of Sharon Wests

Justin Katz

Many Rhode Islanders surely share the sentiments that Sharon West expresses from East Providence:

Recently, a consultant hired by the committee reported that the average teacher makes $69,000 a year and receives benefits costing $26,000 annually.

Yes, $95,000, and many make even more. The consultant stated that this amounts to an hourly wage of $93. Please bear in mind that currently the School Department is $4 million in the red and sinking deeper every day.

As average homeowners, as well as renters, struggle to pay utility bills, car payments, the mortgage or the rent, buy groceries and pay medical bills, these 180-day-a-year workers want still more. Teachers, look around! These folks are valiantly struggling day by day to provide basic necessities for their families.

We, the working stiffs who pay for everything, need some relief, not further plundering.

The question is whether there are enough of us to force change. Can we (or hard experience) shake enough of our neighbors out of their apathy to counterbalance the well entrenched interests that bind the state? Let's hope the isolated reform movements that have emerged (notably in the East Bay, for some reason) are the tip of the spear, not the rear guard of an exodus.


January 7, 2009


The Governor's Proposed Changes to Rhode Island's Labor Law

Carroll Andrew Morse

These are some of the state labor law changes being proposed by Governor Carcieri as part of his budget reform package...

Article 25:

…makes explicit a school committee's authority to lay off teachers in the event of budget deficiencies without a particular hearing for the teacher being laid off.
Article 26:
…requires towns, cities and school committees to post proposed collective bargaining agreements on the appropriate town or city website 30 days prior to contract ratification.
Article 27:
…explicitly prohibit[s] "work to rule" labor actions by certified public school teachers. It also imposes…the loss of two days pay for each day of a strike and provides that a labor organization that promotes strikes shall lose its representational status and its ability to collect dues from its members for a period of three years.
Article 28:
…enhances the Department of Education's authority, in school districts under progressive support and intervention, to assign teachers to positions where they are most needed without collective bargaining contractual provisions.
Article 29:
…secure[s] school committee's management control over issues that are not appropriate for collective bargaining.
Article 43:
…[removes] any issue(s) relating to minimum manning from the scope of issues which can be negotiated or arbitrated under the policemen's and firefighter's arbitration laws.
Article 44:
25% cost sharing requirement for municipal employee health insurance.



Tasting the New Environment

Justin Katz

I just heard on WPRO that the judge won't decide whether to stop the East Providence School Committee's unilateral employment change until the 23rd. It looks like union members will start to feel the pinch of not giving concessions.

That's a huge change for the better from an environment in which they expect to get back pay no matter how long they hold out.



West Warwick Next in Line

Justin Katz

The school committee in West Warwick appears mainly to be doing the bare minimum to support a Caruolo suit for more money from the town, but it may be headed down the road behind East Providence soon:

The performance audit, commissioned by the town as a part of the Caruolo lawsuit proceedings from the last fiscal year, found that most substantial savings — $14.67 million — in the School Department budget would require concessions from the teachers union or waivers from state and federal mandates.

"These are recommendations for the future and going forward," said consultant Salvatore Augeri. "They could cut some supplies for a couple thousand, but we're not talking millions right now."

But $3.5 million is what the School Department says it needs to finish the remainder of this budget year. Last month, the committee sent the town a letter requesting an additional $3.5 million in operating funds and school officials have authorized their lawyer to file a lawsuit seeking the additional money once all other avenues are exhausted.

Is "the future and going forward" anything like "infinity and beyond"? It seems to me that the school committee has to stop toying around. It isn't enough to publish a list possibilities like "eliminating 16 teachers by requiring the maximum number of students allowed in each class by contract, and cutting 23 other positions that are not required by the state." The committee ought to be bringing that to the teachers' union and explaining that it will happen in the absence of deep concessions.


January 5, 2009


Re: Tim Williamson

Justin Katz

I missed part of the conversation, but according to Dan's subsequent paraphrase, Williamson also mentioned draft legislation that would enable local school committees to modify contracts on the grounds that there is simply no money and that would centralize contract negotiation within the state government (the Department of Education, I believe).

Does that strike anybody else as odd? The legislation would simultaneously move contract negotiation to a higher level of government and enable a lower level of government to renege? Either that's incorrect, or something suspicious is going on.


January 4, 2009


Retiring England and New England, Alike

Justin Katz

The editorial board of the Providence Journal notes a familiar problem in the old country:

Last month, Britain's biggest business group, CBI, released a report contending that the total liability for public pensions in the country had reached at least a staggering 900 million pounds — about $1.4 trillion. Some 5 million unionized public employees in Britain may retire at 60, at two-thirds of their highest salary, while 21 million private-sector employees face much less plush retirements, and the prospect of working (if they are lucky) until 70 to make ends meet.

Of course, there are myths and statistical imbalances to be overcome if the untenable situation is to be remedied:

The public employees contend that they get plush pensions in exchange for earning less than their private-sector counterparts. But a study by the Office for National Statistics found that isn't true; public employees received higher pay than those in the private-sector at all but the highest levels.

Under the Labor Party, the number of public employees in Britain exploded by more than 23 percent between 1998 and 2006, while private-sector employment — which covers most of the cost of government — inched up only 3.3 percent.

Creeping socialism begins to look like a concerted plan, doesn't it?


January 3, 2009


Wherego the Impressions Goes Public Opinion

Justin Katz

Union members and supporters in Rhode Island should contemplate hard where their self-imposed imperatives are placing them in the battle of messages. On their side is a dogged assertion that official processes don't weaken their hand even during financial emergencies:

[Union lawyer John] Leidecker also said state law says districts should adhere to the old contract until a new one is executed, and there aren't exceptions for a fiscal crisis. In addition, he said the committee members' decisions yesterday "further indicates their disdain for the process," particularly the arbitration process, which produced a "fair settlement."

It's understandable that the union would take that line; they've managed, over the years, to hone The Process in their favor, after all. However, regular folk tend to turn against tilted processes when they collide against reality and reason:

Mayor Joseph Larisa said: "East Providence is flat broke. The big labor contract that finally expired was as outrageous as it is unaffordable. Now that the damage has been done, the options left are a crazy 15 to 20 percent property-tax increase against our hard-hit taxpayers, bankruptcy or finally setting reasonable and fair compensation for all school employees. There is no fourth option.

January 2, 2009


East Providence Charges into the New School Year

Justin Katz

So states East Providence School Committee Chair Anthony Carcieri in a press release just out (and available in full in the extended entry):

"This school system has cut everything to the bone except the teachers' contract. Everything," Carcieri said. "They stopped capital improvements years ago. Basic maintenance of the school buildings has all but stopped. We've been ordered to replace about 70 doors for safety reasons, and there's no money to pay for it. We have no extras in our educational program. We've had expert after expert look at this. There is no place left to cut except our biggest account — teachers' pay. I hope they'll understand that this is nothing we want to do. We have no choice."

In a letter to the NEA's Jeanette Woolley (PDF), School Committee Lawyer Daniel Kinder notifies the teachers' union of several changes that the committee "must, and will, implement... effective Monday, January 5, 2009 at 12:01 a.m." Included is no pay increase, a 20% contribution to healthcare premiums for all active teachers and all retirees on or after November 1, 2008, and other healthcare-related provisions. Chief among those is not only the complete elimination of the buy-back provision (previously over $5,000 for declining coverage), but the addition of the following language:

No employee or retiree shall be eligible for either family or individual health coverage or family or individual dental coverage if the employee or retiree has available to him/her alternate coverage from another source, whether from another employer, a spouse's employer, a governmental entity, or otherwise. Thus, for example, without limitation, if an employee's spouse is employed by an employer who maintains a group health insurance plan that includes family or spousal coverage, the employee is not eligible for coverage under the East Providence Schools group plan. Similarly, without limitation, Medicare eligibility or a teacher's employment by an employer who maintains a group health insurance plan would also render the teacher ineligible for coverage pursuant to the East Providence School Department plan. Each employee and retiree claiming eligibility for health insurance coverage pursuant to the School Department's plan shal be required each year to provide the School Department with an affidavit in form satisfactory to the School Department, averring under oath and penalties of perjury, that the teacher does not have available to him/her health insurance and/or dental insurance from any source other than the School Department.

In short, any teacher who can get coverage elsewhere must do so. Note the absence of any weasel language like "comparable."

The teachers in East Providence and throughout Rhode Island must come to realize that their union has served them extremely poorly by:

  1. Failing to accurately assess the financial realities of the state and towns, and/or
  2. Promising the possibility of endless advances via hardball negotiations.

The state's been pushed off a cliff, and it is time for unionists and other riders of Rhode Island's apocalpyse to reorient themselves toward reviving our drowning society.

Continue reading "East Providence Charges into the New School Year"

January 1, 2009


Pork for the Union

Justin Katz

Michelle Malkin's looked through some of the expenditures of the UAW, which via auto-industry bailouts, is now under the care of the federal government:

In February 2000, the union poured $14.7 million into Pro Air, a Detroit start-up airline that, well, didn't get off the ground. Plagued by safety problems, the feds shuttered the company less than a year later. The union didn't fare much better in its venture with a liberal radio network. In 1996, union heavies got the bright idea to invest $5 million in United Broadcasting Network, a left-wing precursor to Air America that the UAW hoped to use to spread its corporate-bashing propaganda. They shelled out for a $2 million, state-of-the-art studio in Detroit and incurred years of losses of a reported $75,000 a month before closing the network down in 2003.

And while the UAW and carmakers cry poor, they've operated massive joint funds for years that have paid for lavish items such as multi-million-dollar NASCAR racer sponsorships and Las Vegas junkets. The dire economic downturn hasn't changed the behavior of profligate union bigs at the front office or the shop floor. Local Detroit TV station WDIV recently caught local UAW bosses Ron Seroka and Jim Modzelewski — both of whom make six-figure salaries — on tape squandering thousands of hours of overtime on such important labor security matters as on-the-clock beer runs and bowling tournaments.

And that's not even getting into the union-owned golf courses and other golf-related expenses.



Benefiting the Community

Justin Katz

Harvey Waxman, of Wickford, makes a good point:

When private-sector unions make concessions their sacrifices will go to companies whose executives often make millions in salaries and to shareholders whose dividends can benefit from those concessions.

When a public-sector union makes concessions the beneficiaries are not high priced executives but the people, the homeowners, the citizens of Rhode Island. That is an important difference.

One could quibble with the fact that Harvey doesn't treat shareholders as "people, homeowners, and citizens," which clearly they are (and not all rich, either), but the sentiment came to mind when I read of financial problems in Woonsocket:

Leaders of the police and fire unions said Menard has told them that, unless they make contract concessions in areas including health benefits, the city may have to lay off about 30 of the 99 police union members and 45 of 132 firefighters union members to balance the city's $116-million budget.

Union leaders in both departments said cuts of that magnitude would be devastating.

"It's a tragedy waiting to happen," Steven R. Reilly, president of the Woonsocket Firefighters Association — Local 732 of the International Association of Fire Fighters — said after addressing the council Monday night.

"I've got people here wondering if they have a job," said Sgt. John Scully, president of Local 404, International Brotherhood of Police Officers.

It sounds to me as if Mayor Menard was telling the union leaders that they have it within their power to avoid that tragedy in waiting. Unions act collectively when they're trying to negotiate for evermore; they should also act collectively when it comes to preserving each other's jobs.


December 31, 2008


Retiring Objections

Justin Katz

Commenting to my post on returning retirees in RI's public higher ed system, Steve appears to have inside information:

Justin, I'd like to clarify something, if I may. No one has "eased back into their old positions." The staff that retired and were brought back have returned on a part-time basis. No one is working 40 hours weeks. They are working fewer hours and being paid at an hourly rate. They are not on salary.

(Incidentally, of the 44 retirees who have returned on a part-time basis, 21 are staff and 23 are adjunct faculty being paid $3,000-$4,000 on a per course basis.)

For example, the director of institutional research at RI College returned after retiring and is now working part-time as a consultant. Institutional research was a one-professional department at RIC. (That is the case with many departments; our ranks are painfully thin.)

Without the director's return, part-time, RIC would have no institutional research capacity at all. It made more sense to bring her back on a part-time basis than it did to hire a full-time IR professional and pay salary, benefits, contribution to retirement plan, etc. That would have cost upwards of $80k at a minimum.

Know, too, that what the institutions are trying to achieve here is being able to cope with $30 million in budget cuts over the last calendar year and still provide the necessary services for students who are paying tuition to attend their institutions.

Since the retirement program is private, and nobody returns full-time, and the system stands to realize substantial saving, it appears that I reacted too quickly characterizing this story as in line with, say, a judge who manages, via retirement, to take home more public money for less work and responsibility.

Thanks to those who persuaded me of my error calmly.


December 30, 2008


Retirees Back Again

Justin Katz

Rhode Isand commissioner of higher education Jack Warner has an op-ed in today's Providence Journal "Explaining college retirees' return." This is the only new, mitigating factor:

The Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education, through its predecessor, the Board of Regents, was given the authority to establish its own retirement plan in 1967 (Rhode Island General Law 16-17.1).

Higher-education employees who participate solely in this plan are not members of the state retirement system.

Under the provisions of this plan (known as a 403(b) plan), the public institutions of higher education can legally bring back any member of the system at any time without any restrictions.

There are restrictions on members of the state retirement system, also known as ERS. While there are some ERS employees who work in higher education, the large majority of higher-education employees have 403(b) plans. The 403(b) plans are defined-contribution plans, which makes them very different from the defined-benefit state pension plan. A 403(b) is more like the private-sector 401(k) plan in that employees contribute a minimum of 5 percent of their salary and the state makes a contribution of 9 percent as an employee benefit (much the same way a private-sector employer contributes to an employee's 401(k) plan).

So, in essence, a higher-education employee who retires on a 403(b) plan is largely receiving a payout of his or her own money invested over the years of employment, not a continuous payment from the state under a state pension.

Well, his own money plus that 9% public contribution. In any case, the practice of rehiring employees immediately after they've retired still leaves a sour, contemptuous of the regular working stiff, taste in the mouth.


December 28, 2008


Living for the Public Worker

Justin Katz

Chris Powell's description of the public sector in Connecticut sounds very familiar:

With its law requiring binding arbitration of public employee union contracts, state government has established an elaborate mechanism of disconnecting the compensation of public employees from democracy, the public's ability to pay, and even any discussion in politics. Since that compensation totals about half of all state and municipal government spending combined, reconnecting it to those things is the great challenge facing state government.

If, because of the recession and the sharp curtailment of the public's income, government has to economize, and if public-employee compensation constitutes about half of government spending, then exempting that compensation from the economizing forces all the economizing onto the remaining half of the budget, and public services are devastated so that public employees may avoid sacrifice. This is what has been happening at the municipal level, with services being liquidated to finance ever-increasing compensation for town employees. It's not that towns have cut spending. It is that their tax bases have not grown enough to sustain services and to increase town employee compensation. So services formerly considered basic, like school sports and extracurricular activities, have been eliminated so that raises can still be paid.

One need only look to the results of arbitration in East Providence to see the mechanism in action. Even with the numbers laid before him, and an understanding that economic reality is likely to worsen before improving, the arbitrator still presented his proposal to advance teachers' remunerative goals as a compromise.

Luckily such "arbitration" is not binding, in Rhode Island, but our deeper and longer-term stagnation more than make up the necessary difference toward draining our public coffers of funds for much beyond employing people.


December 24, 2008


Union Reverse Tautology and Arbetrayal

Justin Katz

The rhetorical dance of the East Providence teachers' union is so flowing, it's easy to miss the essential argument:

"The School Committee's solution to their self-inflicted fiscal problem is to blame it on the teachers' contract and to shift the entire burden of paying off that deficit to the teachers," union representative Jeannette Woolley countered in her opening statements. She also said the district had opportunities to implement health-care cost sharing before with past contracts but the school board members at the time "dropped the ball."

In addition, Woolley showed the teachers conceded scheduled raises three years ago when the district needed help, and the committee and school administration didn't raise the issue of health-care cost sharing then, either.

"So the bottom line from our perspective is that this school district is not in its current condition as a result of what the School Committee likes to term an overly rich contract," she said. "The facts suggest that the School Committee simply hasn't taken care of business over the years in this school district."

Got it? The School Committee didn't negotiate tighter contracts over the years, leading to the currently unaffordable one, so that contract can hardly be said to be "overly rich." The lessons for children are manifold: That overweight child could have forced himself away from the potato chips and the video game console at any time, so it can hardly be said that he ought to change his behavior now that he's obese!

The worst part is that the tie-breaking "neutral" arbitrator apparently bought the argument, at least sufficiently that his panel issued a decision that the school committee clearly can't accept — thus illustrating what a scam the arbitration process is in Rhode Island:

Mr. Ryan continues:

"The Union urges that comparability (to other district contracts), not ability to pay, should be the panel's paramount consideration. The School Committee insists that it has no choice but to pay its FY08 debts and adhere to its budget for FY09. School department deficits are unlawful under R.I.G.L. §§ 16-2-9(d), (e), & (f); 16-2-21 (b) & (c); 16-2-21.4; 16-2-11 (c); and 16-2-1. These interlocking enactments prohibit school departments from incurring or maintaining a deficit or engaging in deficit spending." ...

Mr. Kinder commenting on his dissenting vote said: "The award is useless because the School Committee is prohibited by law from accepting it. The award is useless because the School Committee cannot meet the award's costs in the first year of its 3-year term, let alone in the second or third years. Those are facts. Those facts were placed before the panel. The panel's award ignores these facts and provides modest changes that, if adopted last year, might have served to avert this year's financial crisis. But, last year, when the Teachers' Union was asked to accept similar, modest changes in order to avert a $3.2 million deficit, the Union refused. In consequence, the School Department will end this year with a deficit of well over $8 million, if nothing is done."

Will's got the entire School Committee press release up on Ocean State Republican.


December 23, 2008


RE: Warwick Schools Cancellation

Marc Comtois

Following up, the ProJo has their report on the situation today:

School officials said that few members of the union that represents custodial, maintenance and secretarial employees — the Warwick Independent School Employees (WISE) –– responded to calls to come to work late Sunday afternoon even though union workers had showed up for snow duty on Friday and Saturday.

The School Department and the WISE union have been stalemated over a contract for more than two years, but union leaders last night said that there was no concerted attempt to avoid working on Sunday.

Mayor Scott Avedisian, who was in contact with both sides yesterday morning, said he did not care which was in the wrong and that it is “absolutely unacceptable” that Warwick schools were not ready to open along with almost all other public school districts yesterday.

To prevent a repeat occurrence, Avedisian said that after talking to School Committee Chairman Christopher Friel in the morning, he issued an executive order forming a special committee to deal with efficient snow removal at the schools. He said that he and Friel agreed that if school employees are not available to clear the drives, parking lots and walkways, the city will do the work and bill the School Department.


December 18, 2008


Wagner v. Taylor

Carroll Andrew Morse

Michael Barone of U.S News and World Report has an interesting capsule history of how labor/management relations through the 20th Century have brought the U.S. auto industry to where it is today…

Mickey Kaus, pretty much alone among the commentators I've been reading, indicts "Wagner Act unionism" for the decline and fall of the U.S. auto industry. The problem, he argues, is not just the high level of benefits that the United Auto Workers has secured for its members but the work rules—some 5,000 pages of them—it has imposed on the automakers. As Kaus points out, unionism as established by the Wagner Act is inherently adversarial. The union once certified as bargaining agent has a duty not only to negotiate wages and fringe benefits but also to negotiate work rules and to represent workers in constant disputes about work procedures.

The plight of the Detroit Three auto companies raises the question of why people ever thought this was a good idea. The answer, I think, is that unionism was seen as the necessary antidote to Taylorism. That's not a familiar term today, but it was when the Wagner Act was passed in 1935. Frederick Winslow Taylor was a Philadelphia businessman who pioneered time and motion studies. As Robert Kanigal sets out in The One Best Way, his biography of Taylor, he believed that there was "one best way" to do every job. Industrial workers, he believed, should be required to do their job in this one best way, over and over again. He believed workers should be treated like dumb animals and should be allowed no initiative whatever, lest they perform with less than perfect efficiency.

It is interesting to note that "Taylorism" was a part of the general trend occurring in the first half of the twentieth century, where the old classically liberal ideas were considered passé and the idea that the common folk needed strong management by an elite, in every area of their lives that mattered held a strong foothold.

We should be trying to move past Taylorist attitudes, the collateral damage they've caused in the past, and a possible revival of them in the near future, in as many places as possible.



Outsmarting the Taxpayers

Justin Katz

I'm sure there are arguments that it's financially efficient. That it preserves human capital. That it's better than alternatives. But when all th talking is done, this is just outrageous:

They left the state college system in droves in recent months to avoid paying more for their health insurance or losing it entirely, and they left with thousands of dollars in retirement incentives and severance payments for things like unused sick time.

But now, 44 retirees from Rhode Island College, the Community College of Rhode Island and the University of Rhode Island are back on the state payroll — in many cases, back in their old jobs as professors, administrators, school nurses, accountants and computer technicians while collecting state-subsidized pensions.

State law permits class instructors to remain on an explicitly limited basis, but the others are leveraging this bit of specious reasoning:

When asked, however, how that law justified the rehiring of top-level administrators, back-office financial staff and computer techs — including one CCRI retiree with a $44,412 state pension — spokesman Steven J. Maurano offered up a new and previously unheard of argument in the halls of state government, after consulting with Ron Cavallaro, general counsel to the Board of Governors for Higher Education.

Maurano said Cavallaro believes the law limiting which retirees can be rehired — and how much they can earn without giving up their retirement benefits — applies only to those enrolled in the state retirement system, not the vast majority of newly retired state college and university faculty and administrators enrolled in the privately operated TIAA-CREF, to which the state contributes 9 percent of pay annually for each enrollee.

Under that reading, Maurano said, the administrators of the state college system can bring back whomever they want, for however long they want, at whatever level of pay they deem appropriate without any loss of retirement benefits.

Most Rhode Islanders, one shouldn't have to explain, don't ever get the option to retire with a large incentive check and in time to preserve unsustainable healthcare benefits on a public-sector-level pension and keep the very same job on a lighter basis to make up (or exceed) the difference in income. This asserted loophole should be closed immediately and all cases retroactively challenged in court.

At the very least, very tight time constraints ought to be placed on the retiree-temps so that the organizations for which they work can absorb as much institutional knowledge as possible. Then the public-sector kings should be let out to pasture so that Rhode Islanders suffering from the nation's worst unemployment rate (and without pensions) can claim any positions that absolutely must be filled.



The Impact of the "Employee Free Choice Act" on Minorities

Marc Comtois

Jennifer Rubin reports that "Al Sharpton announced that he would be opposing the EFCA and mobilizing the African American community against it." Additionally, some of Sharpton's concerns--and that of other African-Americans--were explained in a discussion on Sharpton's radio show with African-American small-business owner Sylvester Smith and Charlie King of the National Action Network (the civil rights group headed by Sharpton). As King explains:

So let’s say using my hypothetical...that the workforce gets unionized by getting, let’s say, 21 people to sign a card saying that they want a union. Then you could have, after 90 days--if you can’t have an agreement between the union and the employer--it [goes] into what’s called binding arbitration and an arbitrator, a federal arbitrator, would come in and basically decide what that contract is going to be for two years. So, essentially what you could have is a person, a working man or woman, in a business who will have a contract put upon them without them ever agreeing to have a union or voting on it or having a say in what that contract will be once unionized.
Sylvester observed:
[W]e think that the heart of this issue is not about protecting workers, the heart of this issue is about the decline of union membership that’s been going on in this country for the past thirty years. The unions at this point are in a death spiral and much of it’s tied to the exportation of production jobs from this country to other countries and the unions.…
As Rubin adds, "Whatever one’s opinion of Sharpton, his opposition to EFCA signals an important division within the Democratic Party."


December 17, 2008


Predirecting Anger

Justin Katz

My response to Richard Joslin made it into this week's print edition of the Sakonnet Times (as did TCC President David Nelson's), and I'm sure it'll spark an angry response or two from unionists.

Who knows but that ringleader Crowley will pen a guest letter from across the state. Given the extent of his so-called research and other writings at RI Future, his day job apparently leaves him with copious amounts of time for extracurricular activities. That assumes, of course, that the teachers aren't paying his salary for his blogging.

Whether that's the case or not, I'd suggest that teachers are misdirecting their anger if I'm the recipient. I'm merely arguing in what I believe to be the best interests of my town and its students (agree or disagree). On the other hand, the central justification for teachers' union dues' going to the state NEA would seem to be for state-level advocacy and planning.

Tiverton teachers should take especial note of the latter, because for all of their "research" and statewide contacts, the union officials appear to have failed to foresee and/or advise members of the likelihood of a state budgetary collapse. Inasmuch as it contributed to the local's dogged pursuit of a better deal, that failure cost the union members thousands of dollars, with no end to the state's and town's fiscal crises in sight.


December 14, 2008


"A Fussy and Difficult Student"

Justin Katz

There's a familiar face on the front page of the Providence Journal today:

From the beginning, the relationship between William Felkner and the Rhode Island College School of Social Work has sounded like the screech of chalk on a blackboard. ...

Felkner has filed a lawsuit against Rhode Island College that revives arguments from conservatives who have assailed the NASW code of ethics, the profession of social work and the structure of academic programs in schools of social work across the country.

The article reminds readers of a quotation from one social work professor in Felkner's past who succinctly illustrated the attitude that can fester when a group is ideologically cloistered, standing as timely evidence of the need for intellectual diversity and of the opportunity for citizen media, such as blogs, to have an effect by shedding light even in small dark pits:

[Felkner's] complaint about the film prompted an e-mail from his professor, former adjunct faculty member James Ryczek. "Social work is a value-based profession that clearly articulates a socio-political ideology about how the world works and how the world should be," Ryczek wrote.

While Ryczek said he wanted to promote an open debate in class, he acknowledged his own liberal leanings.

"I revel in my biases," Ryczek wrote. "So I think anyone who consistently holds antithetical views to those that are espoused by the profession might ask themselves whether social work is the profession for them."

One problem that arises from this particular mentality is that it creates a system whereby public funds are used toward the education of people subsequently tasked with pressuring the public for further funding by a caste of secular sacerdotalists who dictate the methods and means for which acolytes must advocate. Along those lines, note this paragraph, as well:

The School of Social Work and its advocacy arm, the Poverty Institute, favored an "education first" approach to welfare, arguing that training helps recipients land higher-paying jobs in the long run.

A peculiar and tricky business this balancing of "arms," as one can begin to see (for example) in one California union's stewardship of a charitable appendage:

A nonprofit organization founded by California's largest union local reported spending nothing on its charitable purpose -- to develop housing for low-income workers -- during at least two of the four years it has been operating, federal records show. ...

The primary mission of the charity -- the Long Term Care Housing Corp. -- is to provide affordable homes for the local's members, most of whom earn about $9 an hour caring for the elderly and infirm. But SEIU officials declined to discuss the charity, saying it is a separate legal entity from the union, even though its board is dominated by officials from the local. The charity is located at the local's headquarters.

In some respects, it's surprising that Bill was able to infiltrate our local cell of poverty advocates as deeply as he did.


December 12, 2008


Fortunes Untold

Justin Katz

Police officers deserve to be well paid, but this is astonishing:

Nearly one in 10 Massachusetts State Police officers made more than the governor last year, with 225 officers topping the $140,535 annual salary of the state's chief executive.

Four of the 2,338 state troopers were paid more than $200,000, and 123 others were paid more than $150,000, the salary of the governor's Cabinet secretaries, according to payroll information obtained by the Globe under the state public records law.

A sizable chunk of that amount, it bears noting, was earned standing around construction sites, and the totals do not include sums paid by the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority and the Massachusetts Port Authority.


December 10, 2008


How Employer and Employee Achieve Fairness

Justin Katz

Last week, I sent the following unpublished letter to the Sakonnet Times:

School Committee Vice Chairman Sally Black gave an impassioned speech at the board's meeting last Tuesday explaining why she voted unsuccessfully to approve the latest iteration of the teachers' contract, despite likely cuts in state aid. As sincere as her reasoning may have been, it's indicative of the mindset that has laid Rhode Island so low.

Mrs. Black cycled through a bit of education policy history to conclude that the state and federal governments have not followed through with promised funding for decades, even as they've demanded more and more from local schools. From her perspective, the school committee did the work that they were supposed to do, and moreover, she was very pleased with her children's experience in the school system and believes the teachers deserve as much compensation as the town can give them. Her conclusion is that the contract is "fair and just" and therefore ought to be ratified regardless (apparently) of the town's ability to pay for it.

Tiverton and all of Rhode Island simply can no longer afford to arrive at salary, benefit, and service numbers in that fashion. In every area of government functionality --- from the development of laws to the expenditure of petty cash --- officials must build policy structures to reach goals, instead of declaring the goals and then searching for some miracle bridge to reach them.

Good teachers deserve good pay, and the approach of the school committee member and the Department of Education official alike ought to be to determine the ways in which the system can be improved to bring resources and remuneration to those who deserve it while enhancing results. Insisting on the worth of all teachers as a group and then scrambling for revenue and workable reforms will ensure neither fair pay nor just results for our children.

My point, in sum, is that public officials — although many have no experience operating businesses — have a responsibility to behave as employers. When it comes to setting salaries and benefits, the employer's duty is to maximize productivity while minimizing cost; the employee's role is to maximize the remunerative and atmospheric equation toward his or her individual goals. Both sides, of course, ought to operate within moral boundaries that prevent either from taking advantage of the other.

Yes, it is possible for employees to take advantage of their employers. Observe the public sector unions in Rhode Island for an example.

The tendency of both the population and its officials to approach public employees from an incorrect perspective — even as unions push with all their might for the employees interests — became apparent in a conversation I had with an anonymous commenter on the Sakonnet Times Web site:

The new Tiverton teacher contract, which has not yet been ratified by the town, is actually for alot less than most other towns in RI and Mass. ...

I am not in a union, yet I will be damned if I am going to accept less pay at my job than the local average compensation. And you are right, there should be a pay differential, Tiverton should pay a bit more than Providence, not less, because we want better teachers, not glorified babysitters like Providence and woonsocket. Good teachers flock to better salaries, as does any job.

My end point there was to point out that teaching is, even as it stands, a LOW PAYING career. You can make more, alot more, as almost anything else with a college degree. Yes, they choose to be teachers, does that mean they should choose to be near the poverty line as well? A family of 4 with $45,000 per year income qualifies for state assistance, yet people complain because teachers want SLIGHTLY more than that? With a 4 year degree? Give me a break. ...

... you should wake up tomorrow and go to work and decide for yourself whether you are being paid fair market value for your job or not. Personally, I compare my salary and benefits against others in similar jobs to see if I am being paid fairly. I am. But many are not. RI teachers are paid a fair wage at what the contract state here in Tiverton. Other teachers in teh state make more, but not a whole lot more.

Put aside that the commenter compares teachers with families, often having two incomes to reach that amount. (Also put aside that it's ridiculous for the state to give assistance to families with median income.) Two indications that his view is from the employee side, are:

  1. That he does not factor work environment into comparative salaries. Tiverton may want to lure the best teachers from Providence, but it can expect to discount the rate that it pays, to some degree, based on the fact that it's a more comfortable place to work. On the flip side, Providence must pay more to attract good teachers, because fewer teachers want to work in the city.
  2. These considerations play out in a marketplace, which determines "fair" salaries more effectively than citizens poking around the Internet are able. The final indication that Tiverton is paying below market rate for its teachers shouldn't be that a union in another town (or all other towns) has negotiated an even more outlandish deal; it should be that the town is having difficulty finding qualified teachers. That is not the case. Nor is it the case, as far as I know, that teachers are preparing to abandon the town for higher pay in nearby districts.

Just like the housing market, the job market fluctuates. I can do all the research I want to determine the average pay for my job in my area, but I must adjust my findings by my individual talents and flaws, and by other aspects of my employment that aren't easily translatable into numbers. I must also realize that average salary information is next to useless if there are no jobs available that will pay more, no matter my expectations. So, over the past couple of years, my current employer has offered me advancement opportunities that probably wouldn't have been available elsewhere, even were another company to offer more money. And now, the job market has shifted such that it would be foolish to jump ship in search of opportunities that aren't available.

There is plenty of room to negotiate teachers salaries downward — most fairly by holding them steady. Moreover, there would be many more ways in which to work mutual benefit into employment relationships if there weren't a union mentality that forces the teachers to behave as if they're all identical cogs.


December 4, 2008


Individuals in a Package Deal

Justin Katz

In the midst of a very edifying conversation in the comments section of my "Powers and Victims" post, Tiverton teacher Ed Davis offers the following significant perspective:

You're right, no one is forcing us to work here. Unfortunately, I saw this philosophy take hold in the school system my son attended. Many of the good young teachers, in the critical areas of math and science, left for better paying jobs. This is beginning to happen in Tiverton.

Doesn't that just highlight the spectacularly inappropriate setting that unions create within the public school system? In order to keep well qualified and fresh teachers covering central subjects, the school must hand out raises across the board. The cost of giving a young science whiz a 5% raise (beyond steps) can turn out to be hundreds of thousands of dollars.

That is plainly insane, and plainly indicative of the detriment that unions present to our children.


December 1, 2008


Vulgarity No More at Council 94

Marc Comtois

Apparently there was a "vulgarity" problem at Council 94 and J. Michael Downey ain't gonna take it anymore (h/t).

In an internal memo obtained by The Journal, Council 94 President J. Michael Downey tells staff that he will be "fully involved in the decision-making process" of union leadership following the departure of former executive director Dennis Grilli.

"As president of this council, it is my obligation to ensure that the members' hard earned dues dollars are put to the very best use on their behalf," Downey wrote in the Nov. 20 memo. "In this regard, it is my observation that some staff need significant improvement. Let me be clear. I expect that all of you (sic) to give full measure to the job you have been assigned."

He continued: "In addition, this council will not tolerate any form of disrespect or use of vulgar language and gestures -- either toward the members or to your fellow staff."

....There wasn't a specific incident that prompted the warning, he said, but rather a culture inside the union's Charles Street headquarters in which staff members regularly swear at each other or other union members. He also cited regular use of vulgar hand gestures.

"We don't want that here," Downey said. "If they don't work on the things I outlined, we will have a problem.... We're not talking about layoffs; we're talking about progressive discipline."

Wonder if the NEA has a similar policy?


November 29, 2008


It's Always a Matter of "Fairness"

Justin Katz

The title of this post refers to the words of Paul Saccoccia, a national rep for the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, who believes that disabled policemen and firefighters in the state pension system should receive pension contributions from their towns when the state doesn't give them the full amount that they want:

Lawyers for the city [of Cranston] and the firefighters' union say the request stems from the fact that the employees' disabilities — which officials would not disclose — have been verified by doctors but were not recognized by the state Retirement Board because they developed over time rather than stemming from one event or injury.

Yet, state law says that a police officer or firefighter who retires because of on-the-job injuries shall receive not less than two-thirds of their pay at the time of retirement — the amount the employees sought through the state system.

The situation has left all three employees on the city payroll, at 100-percent pay.

And union leaders say the only way to get them off the city payroll is to have the City Council adopt two ordinances that would allow the city to make up the difference between the disability pensions the state will grant and the work-related disability pensions the employees want.

Thus is Rhode Island pulled by the heartstrings (purse strings, for some) toward policies that give privileged classes multiple opportunities for benefits. And thus do the unions abuse the communities that their members serve: Somehow (note the passive voice) the three employees have been "left" on the city payroll and cannot be "gotten off" unless the law were to be changed to give them what they want.

Translating into active voice, that means that the employees refuse to officially retire, and the unions have structured contracts such that the city can neither force them out nor fill the positions that they are not currently performing. I'd suggest that, if it isn't a matter of critical public safety for those positions to be filled — that is, if it isn't utterly unconscionable for the union to use their vacancy as a bargaining chip — then they really don't need to be filled, anyway.

(And that's not an excuse to puff up the overtime salaries of other employees.)


November 26, 2008


Not the Way to Arrive at a Salary

Justin Katz

By far the most interesting audio from last night's Tiverton School Committee meeting, in my opinion, was Vice Chairwoman Sally Black's reasoning for voting to approve the teachers' contract (stream, download) because the thought processes are indicative of the flawed way in which Rhode Islanders have conducted their public business.

Mrs. Black cycled through a bit of education policy history to conclude that the state and federal governments have not followed through with promised funding for decades, even as they've demanded more and more from local schools. From her perspective, the school committee did the work that they were supposed to do, and moreover, she was very pleased with her children's experience in the school system and believes the teachers deserve as much compensation as the town can give them. Therefore, the contract is "fair and just" and ought to pass.

The problem with this approach is that it disconnects financial decisions from financial realities. We cannot come up with a notion of fairness and justice based on abstractions or on emotions and then make that the primary consideration. The primary consideration has to be the money that's actually coming in.

Especially from the perspective of elected representatives — unless they were elected of the unions, by the unions, and for the unions — the first question has to be what is good and what is sustainable for the town. Double-digit tax increases are not sustainable. The next question has to be what is good for the students, and as I've pointed out, based on Department of Education data, Tiverton already pays more per pupil for teachers than the state average, and its student-teacher ratio is only slightly lower than the state's overall. In other words, based on the money that the district actually has, it is already more generous to the teachers than the norm for Rhode Island, which is more generous than the norm for the nation.

Rhode Island has, for far too long, begun with the pay and benefits that "should be deserved" and only as an afterthought wondered where the money would come from and what the effects would be of taking it. Our teachers, specifically, are paid above the national average, even as our median household income is below the national average. We have to readjust, and we have to do so quickly.

ADDENDUM:

For interest and public record, here's the audio of Guidance Councilor Lynn Nicholas's threat of "harm": stream, download:

Before I ask Doug a question, I just need to make it clear that, if the award is not agreed upon tonight, there will be a lot of harm done. Some of it will be financial; a lot of it will not be, and I'm not going to go into detail.

November 25, 2008


Another Night at the High School

Justin Katz

Well, here we are, at what's sure to be a tense school committee meeting — as the teachers demand their retroactive pay and a handful of us concerned citizens try to explain that it would be insane to dig our financial hole deeper, with the state facing such a daunting task.

You know it's got to be an event, because Mr. Crowley made the trip all the way from Lincoln. Luckily, a few AR readers made a point of introducing themselves to me before the meeting to lessen the minority feeling, and we've also got some moral support from the Portsmouth Concerned Citizens.

Which is not to say that there's anything resembling parity in numbers. But when a special interest is used to facing absolutely no opposition, perhaps a ragtag band of reformers can mount an adequate defense.

ADDENDUM 7:23 p.m.:

Interesting anecdote: During a start-of-meeting executive session, I left the auditorium to use the men's room, and as I stepped to the sink to wash my hands, a man came in complaining about the traffic from Boston: "But you get the call that you've got to come down; what are you going to do?"

I joked about the traffic, and he further stated, "I just hope they don't say anything bad about the teachers in front of me, because I just drove down from Boston and I'm not in the mood."

He appears to be intending to sit near the audience-use microphone.

Ah, union tactics.

ADDENDUM 7:27p.m.

While I look around the room during the wait, I'm reminded of the difficulty of this whole process. Here is a roomful of people most of whom are dedicated to educating children and only want a fair salary in keeping with what they were told to expect when they entered the field. And yet, their combined efforts, in town and across the state, are a significant part of the chain that's dragging us under.

Little wonder they've been able to do it, though: as contentious a man as I am, I very much dislike having to look at the faces around me and see opponents. The average citizen is certain to accede to their demands.

ADDENDUM 7:35 p.m.:

Committee Chairman Jan Bergandy just announced that the executive session was going to be longer than expected. Odd, if they're deciding how to vote, that they have public discussion at all.

ADDENDUM 8:04 p.m.:

Interesting note: they just voted to approve the minutes from the last meeting — usually an uninteresting formality — but it was actually necessary for one of the new members to amend the minutes to include comments from Tom Parker, whom you'll recall made a citizen's plea not to approve the NEA contract for financial reasons.

Wonder how that became omitted.

ADDENDUM 8:07 p.m.:

The feeling of reluctance, from those on the stage, to progress through to the meat of the agenda (contract negotiations) is palpable. Can't say I blame them. I'm stressed, and here I am hiding out of view.

ADDENDUM 8:13 p.m.

Interesting to watch Pat Crowley reading Anchor Rising real time:

ADDENDUM 8:18 p.m.:

Chairman Jan Bergandy is expressing grave doubts about the contract, given likely cuts from the state, so he's posing the question: What are the consequences of not approving the contract?

ADDENDUM 8:22 p.m.:

Predictably, new committeewoman Carol Herrman moved to pass the contract (Sally Black seconded): She argued that if the numbers don't work out... hey, we'll reopen the contracts. Of course, she didn't mention that the leverage would be completely different.

She also argued that all contracts should be reopened, but the teachers' is by far the biggest, and if the teachers take a hit down the road, there will be more leverage to renegotiate the others.

ADDENDUM 8:26 p.m.:

Of course, the teachers cheered loudly when Carol made her motion. Subsequently, new member Danielle Coulter spoke in favor of holding off on the contract until the state makes more information available.

In support of Mrs. Coulter a few of us in the audience applauded, and Chairman Bergandy chided us for being inconsiderate to the teachers' feelings.

Sorry. It clearly was not easy for Danielle to say what she did. She's going to get heat for it. And I for one am going to make sure that she's not sitting up there without support.

ADDENDUM 8:31 p.m.:

Vice chair Sally Black just made an impassioned speech that the state isn't living up to its end of the bargain, so she votes to pass the contract because it's "fair and just."

We can no longer operate that way. We have to start with the financial reality and negotiate from there. The money doesn't appear on the grounds of justice or fairness.

ADDENDUM 8:51 p.m.

Strangely, the teachers are arguing that the committee has long known that cuts were coming. Me, I'm inclined to agree — which has made it a dubious proposition to allow things to get to this point — but I don't see how that's an argument for irresponsible financing, now.

ADDENDUM 8:57 p.m.:

Despite a stated two to three minute time limit per person, one teacher has been going on for about ten minutes now saying that political changes in the past few weeks have accounted for the change in the committee's opinion.

I disagree to an extent, but beyond that: so what? That's how we decide how things should work in a democracy! Politics is what makes it in officials' interests to represent the interests of their constituencies.

ADDENDUM 9:14 p.m.:

Guidance Councillor and active unionist Lynn Nicholas just took the microphone to say that, if the committee does not pass the contract, there will be "a lot of harm done — some financial, some not," and she made a point of leaving it there, continuing with: "Have you even begun to think about the lawyer fees."

Yes, they're all about preserving the quality of our schools.

ADDENDUM 9:19 p.m.:

I'm surprised it took this long for a teacher to suggest that Obama might swoop in and save us all.

ADDENDUM 9:26 p.m.:

Mr. Bergandy is making the very good point that, if the committee approves this contract and large cuts do come, programs will be cut, which means that teachers will be laid off.

ADDENDUM 9:30 p.m.:

Now we're having classroom logic lessons from the teachers: "If you admit that this is a fair contract and then there are cuts and you decrease the contract, wouldn't that make it an unfair contract?"

This mindset is maddening.

ADDENDUM 9:32 p.m.:

Union President Amy Mullen just threatened that the deal on the table will not be available in the future.

ADDENDUM 9:35 p.m.:

The contract failed, and the teachers stormed out...

Except for one — an English teacher — who although clearly upset took a moment to introduce himself and give me hope that we can, through it all, resolve differences.

Thank you, sir, for that.

ADDENDUM 9:48 p.m.:

There's a feeling of afterward to the continuing meeting. The committee is deciding whether to hire a technology person. Carol Herrmann moved that they hold off on this contract; Danielle Coulter concurred.

The difference is that they're currently paying a per diem person to fill a necessary role.

ADDENDUM 9:58 p.m.:

The new technology guy was not hired, with discussion postponed until after the union issue is resolved.

ADDENDUM 10:04 p.m.:

A potentially telling statement: the committee is discussing the process of bidding for a new attorney, and Superintendent Rearick just recused himself on the grounds that he's been working with the current attorney for a very long time.


November 24, 2008


Open Letter Against Ratification

Justin Katz

Dear Tiverton School Committee members:

It so happened that, the Friday before you'll decide whether to approve the arbitrated teacher contract, my boss called me on the construction site to tell me that, after I take my five paid days of annual vacation this week, he and I will have to sit down and agree to cut my salary. Having trimmed all indulgences from my family's budget, I'm already barely making enough to get by, but as you know, times are hard. Indeed, the governor has already warned you that the state will likely be cutting your budget, too.

I understand that everybody in Tiverton just wants to move beyond the current contract negotiations --- buy a respite and feel, for a short time, that we're all working together toward the same goals, maybe kick off the new school committee with a lowering of the tension that simmers with each meeting. But that feeling would be an illusion, and shorter-lived than you'd like to believe. Times are only going to get harder, and any compromises made now, when the contract is not yet signed, will be unreachable for modification when Tiverton joins other RI towns in considering asking its unions for contractual concessions.

Forgive the passive voice, but I was informed this week that I'm broadly disliked in certain circles in town, circles with which some of you run. That, I cannot help; I am who I am, and I believe what I believe. As our town's elected education representatives, however, you ought to be concerned about my belief that the teachers' negotiating tactics and their ever-increasing slice of the budgetary pie made it a matter of parental responsibility to pull my children from our public schools. My wife and I cannot afford private school, but our assessment is that we would be shirking our duties as parents not to sacrifice for it.

Our house --- the only home that our children can remember --- should not be among those sacrifices. But if the cost thereof should increase in keeping with recent yearly trends, its loss is a very real possibility, and we are most definitely not alone.

In these times, Tiverton teachers --- who are already well paid in comparison with the norms under which average Rhode Islanders live --- ought to be giving back, not demanding thousands of dollars in retroactive pay. If they receive raises, instead, the possibility of keeping tax increases within bounds will disappear, and I'd remind you that you do not represent them, but us.

At every meeting you are all presented the faces, the voices, and the requests of public school teachers. They may not demand so much attention, but my family has faces and voices, too. Ms. Black and Ms. Herrmann see those faces and (despite my admonishments) hear those voices every Sunday morning, and I hereby request that you represent us and refuse to write large checks to working-to-rule teachers during times of fiscal uncertainty. I request that you consider my children before you decide that teachers whom their tax-paying father does not trust with their education deserve to be rewarded even as every private-sector Tiverton worker suffers pay cuts, unemployment, or (if they're lucky) insecurity.

If you would hesitate before telling my children that they should live in their grandparents' basement so that union teachers can continue to earn well above the median household income for the state, do not ratify this contract. The stakes are that high.

With sincerity and hope,

Justin Katz


November 23, 2008


Clearly Not "For the Children"

Justin Katz

Tiverton Citizens for Change is moving forward from its electoral successes:

The School Committee should reject a tentative two-year teachers' contract at its meeting Tuesday in light of possible unanticipated cuts in state aid to local schools during the current fiscal year, according to the anti-tax group Tiverton Citizens for Change.

The committee and the union representing about 190 teachers were at an impasse for about 14 months before reaching a tentative settlement in nonbinding arbitration Nov. 5, a day after the general election, which turned out the longtime committee chairwoman and put two new members on the five-person panel. ...

In calling for the committee to oppose the pact, Tiverton Citizens for Change cited Governor Carcieri’s recent announcement of a projected deficit of $233.6 million in revenue before the end of the fiscal year. ...

"Some will suggest this additional funding request is for the children. It is not. It is for the teachers," said TCC president Dave Nelson in a statement.

Schools Supt. William F. Rearick has recommended passage of the agreement, which he estimated would give each teacher an annual net raise ranging from about $1,100 to $2,500.

I've suggested to the governor that he (or a representative) should attend Tuesday night's school committee meeting as a statement of, essentially, "This is the sort of thing I'm talking about." He won't likely be there, but I'd encourage anybody else with an interest in stopping Rhode Island's hole-digging to make an appearance.


November 19, 2008


Surprise! You're Union.

Justin Katz

Thomas Wigand, a labor lawyer and well-known personage on the Rhode Island right, describes for the Providence Business News just what the Employee Free Choice Act would mean:

This new legislation is called the "Employee Free Choice Act." Some have opined that the name is "Orwellian," for EFCA quashes "free choice" by effectively eliminating secret ballot elections in union-organizing drives. It accomplishes this by mandating "card check" certification of unions. Under a "card check" regime, union organizers need only collect signatures from a simple majority of the targeted work force, upon which the union is "certified" and the entire work force is unionized.

This "card check" process leaves employees at the mercy of union organizers who, working singly and in groups, track down employees at work and in their homes. Experience shows they often subject employees to misrepresentations, which escalate to peer pressure and then to intimidation, until the employee finally relents and signs a union "authorization card." So under EFCA the union ("candidate") can solicit and collect the signatures ("votes") by pretty much whatever means it deems necessary, and then declare itself the victor — exactly the type of "election" regime one would associate with a totalitarian state. ...

The coming administration elevates the enactment of EFCA from "possibility" to "likelihood," though uncertainty as to enactment remains. What is certain is that employers wishing to preserve their union-free advantage should not wait for enactment before responding to this threat. Employee signatures are valid for one year — so even now organizers could be quietly collecting inventories of signatures, readying themselves to pounce on unsuspecting companies immediately after enactment, announcing that their workplace is "now union."

If the EFCA were to pass (which it shouldn't), it seems only fair to add an amendment that would allow employers and anti-union activists to accumulate signatures for a petition that bans unions, or at least requires them to campaign and seek votes.


November 14, 2008


A Little Perpective for the School Committee

Justin Katz

So here's what's going on in other towns while the Tiverton teachers demand retroactive pay for time spent working to rule:

As state leaders wrestle with a second-straight year of mid-term budget cuts, mayors and managers across Rhode Island are looking at everything from later bill payment schedules to union concessions to offset expected losses in state aid.

In Cumberland, Warwick, South Kingstown and other communities, major purchases are on hold, unfilled positions are staying vacant, and other options, including layoffs, are being considered given the likelihood of cuts this fiscal year.

Some local leaders think those moves won't be enough.

I'd suggest that the Tiverton school committee should get those union concessions while it's still called "negotiation" and the default is that the unionists don't have access to the money that's supposedly sitting around waiting to be claimed.


November 12, 2008


Either Way, the Children Suffer (but One Way Is the Way Out)

Justin Katz

There's creeping desperation in West Warwick:

The Town Council and School Committee agreed to open the lines of communication as part of a settlement of the Caruolo lawsuit the schools filed against the town in April, which seeks a $1.1-million addition to its $49.4-million budget. ...

... the first step, Thomas said, is addressing the schools budget. This year, the School Department is projecting a $4-million deficit. The projections increase in coming years until they reach $12 million in fiscal 2012.

School Committee member James A. Williamson said the schools may have to get creative with ways to save — or raise money. It may propose charging teachers a parking fee, increasing the distance students have to walk to school to cut down on busing, or cutting sports programs. If that doesn't work, Williamson said, he'll propose the schools refuse to comply with some state or federal mandates that don't directly affect student learning. "It sounds drastic, but if we're to a point where if all else fails, and if there's something we can do that won't have a tremendous impact on students, we have to consider trying it out," Williamson said. "It may be time to get bold, and try some things we've never tried before."

If the schools begin cutting programs or making children walk longer distances in the cold, it adversely affects the students. If the schools begin to squeeze the overly remunerated union teachers, it adversely affects the students by way of unconscionable labor actions such as work to rule. At least the latter might lead to changes that can actually salvage a decent education for future classes; the former merely accepts a few more inches into the quicksand.

The single greatest mandate that towns must begin to fight is unions' legalized monopoly of public education.


November 9, 2008


What Rhode Islanders Don't Seem to Get

Justin Katz

East Providence School Committee member Anthony Carcieri makes an interesting observation to the Providence Journal:

Along with the skirmishes over ground rules, the negotiators also have disclosed their ultimate goal. The committee wants $3 million in annual concessions from the teachers, Carcieri says, adding that they aren't bluffing or backing down. "The NEA has experienced hard-ballers who go around from city and town stepping on the retired librarians and school moms who join the School Committee to help and have little experience with contract negotiations," Carcieri said. "They’re shaking down municipalities and taking them for more than they are worth."

The National Education Association Rhode Island representative for the town, Jeannette Woolley objects the accusation, but selects her words carefully to deny that the NEARI "dictate[s] the East Providence teachers' actions." That may or may not be true, but it wasn't what Carcieri was saying.

The problem is actually much bigger than unions' bringing in major leaguers to whack around townies: The unions devote massive resources to shaping state law in the their favor — from the fact of the union monopoly on public education to the possibility for school committees to sue their towns. Oh, the unionists will point to this or that agenda item that has yet to find its way into law as evidence that state legislators are not in their pockets, but the fact that they haven't gotten everything they wanted all at once is only mildly mitigatory.

Underlying the battle, of course, is the very thing that Rhode Islanders just don't seem to understand: The system is constructed such that our representatives have to stand for our interests only as the third or fourth consideration, and such that there's an elaborate set of policy and political mirrors at which to point to diffuse responsibility. The number one priority for us who see the funhouse for what it is must be to start breaking some glass.


November 8, 2008


Credit Where Credit's Not Due

Justin Katz

Well this would clearly not be acceptable:

In the first year of the contract, retroactive to the last school year, [Tiverton] teachers with at least 10 years' experience would receive pay increases of 2.75 percent. The same group would get another 2.5 percent in the current year, but hikes in health insurance costs also would kick in.

A teacher with at least 10 years experience, who made a base salary of $64,205 in the 2006-2007 school year, excluding stipends for advanced course work and degrees, would get a retroactive check of more than $1,700 for the last academic year.

In the current school year, that same teacher would receive another raise of about $1,650, before taxes, according to calculations made from the history of the salary scale.

It would be downright immoral to reward teachers for their year of "work to rule" — a year that saw a painful tax increase — by paying them extra for that time. For the town and state ever to make progress, the notion that public sector union employees will pay no price for dragging out negotiations has got to end.


October 31, 2008


Contract Games

Justin Katz

Some last-minute pre-election teacher contract controversy has arisen for Tiverton voters' edification:

Superintendent William Rearick and School Committee Chairwoman Denise deMedeiros thought they were close to approving a contract for the teachers this week, saying this is the closest they have been in more than 16 months of negotiating, but teachers union President Amy Mullen said there is no deal because the terms of the agreement keep changing.

Mullen said she thought they had a deal Oct. 15 when she met with Rearick and Fiore, but Rearick said the union's figures did not mesh with the amount of money that is available for the teachers and some tweaking was needed.

"We've gone backwards," Mullen said Wednesday. "We thought we had an agreement. We shook on it. I thought for sure they'd vote to approve it (Tuesday night at the School Committee meeting)."

Rearick gave the union a last best offer Wednesday morning after meeting with the School Committee.

"We're pretty far apart," Mullen said.

DeMedeiros was surprised to hear that Wednesday.

"We're very, very close in salary. We're almost right on," said deMedeiros, who hopes to avoid costly arbitration that is scheduled to begin again this Wednesday. "When we first filed for arbitration, we were miles apart. We are now extremely close. There is no need for any of this anymore. If they want to go to arbitration, that's fine, but I don't understand it."

So the union is blaming the school committee, and the school committee is blaming the union. That's all unremarkable, and since the taxpayers who'll be footing the bill don't have access to the terms of the negotiations, there's no way to tell who's closer to the truth.

The cast of candidates for school committee gives some reason to think it's the union that's playing games. Of the five committee members, three seats are up for grabs, and two incumbents are running. Three non-incumbents are in the race — two who would be more amenable to union demands and one who would be more inclined to hold the budgetary line, Danielle Coulter. In other words, the union has reason to believe that the next school committee will be more apt to vote in its favor.

Union President Amy Mullen is on the right track on one count, though:

"We have no confidence in his educational leadership of this system," Mullen said of [Superintendent Bill] Rearick. "He is dragging us down. He has no vision for this system. He's shown no leadership."

Watching from the outside, it has seemed that Rearick is more inclined to compromise with the union than the school committee is. If he wanted to show visionary leadership, he'd walk into negotiations, toss on the table a contract that the school committee has already approved, and tell the union that it's a take it or leave deal. (And, no, I didn't forget an "it" in that sentence.)


October 30, 2008


Common Ground: I Don't Want David Cicilline Making Decisions About My Healthcare Either

Carroll Andrew Morse

To the members of the six Providence municipal unions who, in the words of Philip Marcelo of the Projo, “[oppose] the city’s decision to change its health care benefits manager”, let me one more time pitch the most obvious solution to your dilemma…

  1. Your health insurance should be separated from any direct employer involvement; David Cicilline should have zero say who any individual has as their health insurer.
  2. The money now going to pay for a city-negotiated healthcare plan would then be distributed to the individual employees, in the form of increased salary. It’s your money anyway.
  3. Employees could then pool their money together and have their union negotiate directly with the insurer or insurers of their choice, to get the deal they want.
A slightly more detailed explanation of how this would work is available here.


October 28, 2008


Unionists Like the Shadows

Justin Katz

The shadow that unions cast over our education system never ceases to sting:

[East Providence's] current contract with its teachers expires on Friday, and talks are at a deadlock. The sides can't agree on ground rules and the sticking point is the School Committee's demand that the bargaining be done in public.

"The union representatives say open negotiations will cause 'grandstanding' and 'political maneuvering,'" City Councilman Robert Cusack said last week.

Well, yeah. That's the point. Open negotiations would enable the public to offset the grandstanding and political maneuvering at which the unions are so proficient. In other words, not only do the unions involve teachers in the bullying of local communities, but they put them in the position of preferring that the other side not be able to fight back — or even to know what's going on.


October 26, 2008


In a Word, Professionalism

Justin Katz

Julia Steiny recently heard a speaker whose conclusions point to the same problem in education, but from a different aspect:

University of Chicago Prof. Charles Payne spoke recently on the subject of his book So Much Reform, So Little Change. ...

"Because you have institutions in which the adults fail to cooperate. Grown-up people unable to work together bedevils the system from bottom to top."

Yes! Payne is so on to something.

He says, "All decisions are politicized. Failure is valorized. Sit in a teachers lounge and listen to them compete with one another about how much their kids are failing." When districts actually get good leadership, they chew him up, they buy her out. Payne cites Rudy Crew's excellent record in Miami and his ignominious departure as only the most recent example.

That's a proximate cause, but Steiny extrapolates the factor that creates the detrimental setting:

... the central relationship at the heart of public-school districts, big and small, is the structurally adversarial relationship between labor and management. Historically, labor-management stances often erupt into war-like conditions with strikes and the ugly work-to-the-rule labor actions hurtful to children. When school or district grown-ups battle among themselves about who's entitled to limited, tax-generated resources, students don't matter.

Unions create a power group whose interests are ultimately distinct from those of school children. They create an environment in which a teacher seeking to advance has incentive to invest in the union structure, rather than proving her or his own value in the objective of the school (i.e., education).


October 20, 2008


A Question on Public Contracts

Justin Katz

I understand that arbitration is a wildcard that Rhode Island officials might not wish to risk, but something about the latest deal — as with previous deals — worked out with public sector union leadership brings into relief the practices that have gotten our state into its current difficulties:

Council 94's new agreement — like the original proposal — would provide no pay increases in the first year, but include raises of 2.5 percent, 3 percent and 3 percent in the subsequent years.

We certainly shouldn't take the attitude that public employees should never get raises, but on what grounds does our floundering government promise to pay almost 9% more for its workforce in four years?


October 19, 2008


The State of the System

Justin Katz

Just in case anybody missed this nugget from our state's leading education unionist:

Robert A. Walsh Jr., executive director of the National Education Association Rhode Island, said repealing the tax levy law would also alleviate the problem.

Said Walsh, "We simply can't continue to produce a competitive public education system in our current state."

Put aside Walsh's dubious usage of the word "continue." "Repealing the tax levy law" is a one-step-removed synonym for "raise property taxes by more than 5% every year across the state." Those who believe that the unions will behave as a partner in education reform should be well aware that the core component of their solution is, yes, to make Rhode Island's tax burden even greater.

Furthermore, the only way in which Walsh's statement of possibility "in our current state" can be taken as true is if he excludes the possibility of real, substantial, change to the way in which education is administered and financed. One recent call for such change came from Bishop Hendricken High School Vice Principal John Jackson:

At first glance, it seemed like a feel-good story about a young girl from a war-torn country (Liberia) who was living a dream here in the United States. She was in a school (St. Raphael Academy) where she felt free to speak out, where teachers push students to do their best, and where she has aspirations of attending college. Her prior experience in the public schools of Providence was poor, to say the least — being teased and mocked, and even beaten up a few times.

Wouldn't everyone who is concerned with every qualifying student being given an opportunity for a great education be inspired and energized by a tax-credit program that allows businesses to donate money to help in this cause?

Apparently not, because once again, along comes the union perspective, and again the focus is not on education, but on protecting their own, and funneling money into a failing public school system. That the education of this young girl has improved dramatically is inconsequential to some, evidently.

As paradoxical as it may sound to the blue-state mind, all viable solutions for repairing Rhode Island's ailing educational system require that the money going to the public schools be decreased, whether it goes instead to private educators or to private citizens to improve their lives and our economy (or some combination of the two).


October 16, 2008


USA Today: No Card-Check

Marc Comtois

To follow up on Don's post, from the editors of America's middle-of-the-road (to be generous) national newspaper, USA Today, an essay against "card-check" legislation:

A win for Obama and big gains for Senate Democrats could remove the remaining obstacles to the euphemistically named "Employee Free Choice Act."

Cajoled choice is more like it. The proposed change would give unions and pro-union employees more incentive to use peer pressure, or worse, to persuade reluctant workers to sign their cards. And without elections, workers who weren't contacted by union organizers would have no say in the final outcome.

Labor leaders, such as AFL-CIO President John Sweeney in the space below, argue that the proposed law wouldn't prohibit private balloting. This is accurate but misleading. Union organizers would have no reason to seek an election if they had union cards signed by more than 50% of workers. And if they had less than a majority, they'd be unlikely to call for a vote they'd probably lose.

The legislation has other questionable provisions as well. For example, once a union is formed, if labor and management can't agree on a contract, a federal arbitration board would be called on to go beyond the normal role of facilitating talks and actually dictate terms.

Labor has seen its role decline since the 1950s, when about a third of all private sector employees belonged to unions, compared with about 7.5% today. So it's understandably eager to find ways to expand membership, particularly at a time when workers are feeling economically vulnerable. But undermining democratic principles is not the answer.


October 14, 2008


Obama vs. McGovern on eliminating secret union elections

Donald B. Hawthorne

Power Line discusses Obama's support for the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation which would effectively eliminate private votes for union elections.

Not even George McGovern agrees with Obama on this one.

If elected, maybe Obama could send union members who resist coercive pressures off to a re-education camp run by Bill Ayers!

Hey, if our federal tax dollars can underwrite voter fraud, why should our options be restricted here? Now, that would be change you can believe in. LOL.


October 10, 2008


Not a Trick Question, but Close

Justin Katz

Asks Matt Jerzyk in a comment to a previous post:

Is it too much to ask for that American workers who work full time be paid a living wage with affordable and accessible health insurance?

Well... yes. The reality is that we can't just wish and make it so. Like it or not, every job has an economic value to society, and overvaluing it is like undervaluing gravity: You leap, but you fall.

It goes without saying that each of us will disagree with particular results of the complicated interplay that determines the worth of a particular task. Head Start employees ought to be well compensated, I'd say, but the way to work toward that end is to advocate for more money (not discounting private donations) and to institute a system that creates the necessary wealth. Trying to manipulate things in the other direction — starting with the salaries — is sure to do harm.

Rhode Island is just about as clear of a test case as one is apt to find. The state has developed a dire mandate to attract productive people and to encourage economic activity. We need to streamline government and increase the money and the opportunity that private citizens and businesses have in play. A failure to do so will mean less and less money available for Head Start (for one), whether the employees are unionized or not. If they're unionized they and the organization will just have less flexibility to deal with financial reality.


October 9, 2008


A Sincere Question from the Other Side

Justin Katz

Putting aside my biases, I truly do wonder: Do folks who are voting to unionize — as have five Providence-region Head Start faculties — ever ask themselves from where the money will come, or do they just decide that they need an organization protecting their interests, without giving much consideration to the hows and wherefores?


October 4, 2008


Another Direction for Wealth Redistribution

Justin Katz

This has to stick in the craw of anybody who's struggling to make monthly housing payments and considers continued employment to be a month-to-month thing (emphasis added):

Carcieri immediately put legislative leaders on notice of the likely need to borrow from the state-run disability-insurance fund earlier in the state's budget year than anyone could recall. In one such letter to Senate Minority Leader Dennis Algiere, the governor noted that he can only do so when: "All cash in the General Fund, including the payroll clearing account has been or is about to be, exhausted." ...

Approximately 420,000 private-sector employees in Rhode Island, and some municipal employees, pay 1.3 percent of their gross wages — up to a maximum wage base of $54,400 — into the TDI trust fund.

When it comes to government-run insurance, everything is ultimately part of the general fund, and it's clear, when push comes to shove, where the government's priorities lie.

... the state is lurching from pay period to pay period in an atmosphere of increasing uncertainty about the state's ability to raise the revenue that the governor and legislative budget-writers anticipated when they cobbled together this year's budget.

It's time to cut expenditures and shrink the size of Rhode Island's government. Any other solution will only exacerbate the problem.


September 29, 2008


The Unspoken Roadblock

Justin Katz

Something still isn't making sense, for me, from a Friday article on RIPEC's study of RI education:

RIPEC has released a report entitled Education in Rhode Island 2008 that is chock-a-block with data, and it reinforces RIPEC's standing message that lagging student performance does not reflect the size of the investment.

And yet (emphasis added):

RIPEC has a three-part prescription for the problem: Reconcile the curriculum with exam goals and make sure the exams conform to national standards; ensure accountability by combing through the expenditures of local school districts in a search of efficiencies and enforcing sanctions for failing to meet expectations; and implement a predictable formula for state financing of local schools.

It's true that urban schools are a drag on Rhode Island's test results, so bringing them up would bring up the state, but it's not true that all of Rhode Island's other schools are performing adequately. At bottom there's a six letter (plural) problem that must be addressed in our education system, and RIPEC skirts it.


September 20, 2008


With Their Own Money, They Will Rob Them

Justin Katz

None can doubt that this is part of the "value add" of the union structure, but it still strikes the ear as sinister:

The organization opposing efforts to eliminate the state's income tax has received two-thirds of its funding from large teachers unions based in Washington D.C.

The Boston Herald reports in Wednesday's editions that The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers contributed a combined $1 million to the Coalition for Our Communities.

State finance records show that the group raised $1.5 million from unions and $100 from an individual donor.

How about that Orwellian name: The Coalition for Our Communities? Yeah, a coalition of unions to bleed our communities!


September 19, 2008


Residents Should Stop Paying That Much for This

Justin Katz

In a town that has witnessed nearly a 12% increase in property taxes in the past year, this sort of thing should get the union-busting, pink-slip-preparing blood boiling:

[Johnston teachers] were a no-show on Monday at Winsor Hill School's open house, an event where they typically meet parents and fill them in on their instructional plans, officials said yesterday.

School Committees should begin taking these unconscionable actions as justification for rewriting contracts to fit budgets and handing them to union leaders with hand-written "take it or leave" notes attached. Believe you me that plenty a private-sector employee is aware of the number of job inquiries floating around the executive office. The arrogance of the unions' tactics when taxpayers are already being pinched and when Rhode Islanders increasingly feel lucky to be working at all is simply appalling.


September 2, 2008


I'm Not Comforted by This "Progress"

Justin Katz

So the teachers head back to class today, in Tiverton, and although their contract is still under negotiation, there appears to be some movement. One of the reasons, however, is probably not a positive:

... both sides agreed to keep the details of negotiations private, in a departure from the practice of publicly airing differences on salaries and health insurance, the sticking points of the labor impasse.

So much for open government. Instead, they'll come up with some numbers and let the taxpayers know when it's a fait accompli. But that's not all:

Most recently, the union has told school officials it cannot meet until December — after the November election, which could affect the composition of the School Committee.

So the union has gone without a contract for a full year, with only an extension of the older contract in the previous year, bringing it up to this election, in which at least one very union-friendly resident is on the ballot. Now the union organization will try to elect negotiation opponents who are more amenable to their view and then "resolve" differences of opinion when it comes to the contract.

If only everybody could elect new bosses for negotiation purposes, too!


September 1, 2008


Samuel Gompers Wisdom for Labor Day or Any Day

Carroll Andrew Morse

Nothing says Labor Day quite like a good Samuel Gompers quote

Time is the most valuable thing on earth: time to think, time to act, time to extend our fraternal relations, time to become better men, time to become better women, time to become better and more independent citizens.
In terms of understanding the subtle shifts of history, however, this more practical quote from Gompers is still my favorite
The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.


August 29, 2008


Seeing Union Negotiations in the Broader Picture

Justin Katz

Granted, I don't have his business experience, but sometimes news reports give the impression that Governor Carcieri doesn't have a feel for the push-and-shove momentum with which one must grapple when bringing painful, but necessary, change:

"We're going to do our best efforts to negotiate and discuss this in good faith and get a resolution," the governor's chief legal counsel, Kernan F. King, said outside the courthouse. "And the chief justice is going to be watching carefully over this process. [He] has encouraged both sides to get together and to get a deal for the benefit of the people of Rhode Island."

But Carcieri released a statement later in the day suggesting that he would not bend in offering labor unions a deal other than what Council 94 members and a handful of smaller unions rejected last month. ...

That deal "represents the very best financial offer the state can afford in this economic climate," Carcieri said. "While I am hopeful this expedited process will result in a ratified agreement, I continue to have an obligation to balance the budget. The longer we are without an agreement with Council 94 and the other unions, the only options I have to recoup the cost savings are more severe and impactful to employees than the co-share changes. Time is running out. I cannot delay much longer."

Inasmuch as the new contract sets forth a decrease in their members' largess, the unions have only to gain via continued "talking" and "negotiations," and the members are still existing with their currently ample deals. Indeed, Council 94's lead attorney, Gerard Cobleigh, admits, "We're where we want to be." As long as the governor's threats remain just that, the union has no reason to settle and considers itself to hold an ace:

"You have to understand though that the state workforce is down to a level now that there aren't enough people to do half the jobs that are out there," Cobleigh said. "So layoffs aren't really practical."

The governor's response should be to highlight his belief (I hope it's his belief) that there are too many jobs to be done in Rhode Island government, anyway. Go ahead, governor, bring this to a head, because all of this quibbling over $10 million looks foolish when anybody who's paying attention knows that to be a mere fraction of the midyear shortfall scheduled for announcement in a few months. (My money's still on $150 million.)

For all we can know, the governor has incorporated that pending change of circumstances in his current strategy for handling the unions. (E.g., "I was trying to be fair with the employees, but as the newly released numbers show, what we were trying to do was still not enough.") The union, by contrast, surely sees the successful completion of another election cycle as a milestone giving it running room to flex its muscles and push for tax increases.

What the system needs — what the union members apparently require — is a straightforward illustration of action and consequence, so that when the new numbers come to light and further reductions are necessary, government employees will have already seen that a failure to compromise sufficiently will result in some of them losing their jobs and everybody else having to work in a more harried environment with inadequate help.


August 28, 2008


The Union's Value-Add

Justin Katz

Congratulations to the National Education Association's Pat Crowley for managing to push his story about Governor Carcieri's Florida condos onto (astonishingly) the front page of the Providence Journal, which used it as a contextual gotcha against the backdrop of the union healthcare story. (Gee, I didn't realize that the governor is rich!)

Normally, I wouldn't have considered this feat worth mentioning, except for a "meanwhile" education story relegated to the Rhode Island section:

College-bound Rhode Island students performed about as well this year as last in the SAT, AP and PSAT tests, it was announced Tuesday by the College Board.

Seniors scored 495 in critical reading on the SAT test, down 1 point from last year; 498 in mathematics, unchanged; and 493 in writing, up 1 point. About 66 percent of seniors took the exam. The scale for scoring ranges from 200 to 800.

Rhode Island students fell below the national average, which is 502 in critical reading, 515 in mathematics, and 494 in writing, the College Board said.

Rhode Island did not fare well when compared with nearby states. Figures from the Associated Press showed that Connecticut’s students scored an average of 507 in math, 506 in writing, and 503 in critical reading. Students in New Hampshire averaged 523 in math and 502 in critical reading. The score for writing was not available.

In Vermont, students scored 519 in critical reading, 523 in math and 507 in writing. The figures for Massachusetts were 525 in math, 514 in critical reading, and 513 in writing.

Scores for Rhode Island seniors who attend public schools were 483 in critical reading, unchanged from last year; 487 in mathematics, down 2 points; and 479 in writing, up 1 point. About 59 percent of the public school seniors in the state took the exam, the 13th-highest participation rate among the states. Figures for private schools were not available.

The College Board said that after two years of declining scores for public school students, the 2008 national scores — 497 in reading, 510 in mathematics, and 488 in writing — stood unchanged. Rhode Island scores, which declined only 1 point in the aggregate, have mirrored that national trend.

In summary, Rhode Island is below the national average in every subject, and our students are even further behind students in the two states by which we are surrounded. Plumbing the data for the public-school/overall distinction for our neighbors, the tale is even more bleak for RI families that can't secure freedom from RI's government/union schools:

So, not only do Rhode Islanders in general perform more poorly on the SATs, but there's a much greater discrepancy between public and private school students, here. Yes, congratulations are certainly due to Patrick Crowley and the NEARI!

ADDENDUM:

I was actually holding off on a trail of analysis that I'd begun because there are more subtle points to be made, and I wanted pondering time, but since Brassband points out in the comments that the above chart shows public school and overall SAT scores (i.e., public school students are included in both), here's a chart comparing public with private schools:

Apart from the fact that there are relatively few non-religious private schools in Rhode Island, one reason I held off — and the reason I break out religious schools separately even though they are also included in the "all private" column — is that they seem more likely to be a refuge for the average family fleeing the public school system. Note that RI religious schools do better than religious schools in either of the other states.

ADDENDUM II:

In the comments, Thomas Schmeling calls the two visuals above "gee whiz graphs" because I zoomed in on a score range. Frankly, that sort of point, when made in isolation, strikes me as rhetorical sleight of hand. Examining the axes to discern what's being shown is a critical step in reading any graph, but deciding whether it is deceptive requires consideration; it isn't a given. Schmeling illustrates the validity of my rejoinder by failing to make any argument about whether the tighter distinctions are merited, just implying that they are not.

So here's the second graph starting from zero:

Except to the degree that it is more difficult to read accurately, that doesn't cool my response any, because (probably in common with most Anchor Rising readers) I learned from self-interested experience how to read and compare SAT scores. We all look to the labels, approximate a 200-point difference, and know that to be large (although those of us who took the two-subject version might have a skew). Indeed, Schmeling points out the percentage difference of the public and private categories, but the SATs aren't graded by percentage; they're graded by point, and comparisons of results in practical situations often come down to 50 points per test. People pay for test-specific training to achieve less advantage than that.

Schmeling's second point — that controlling for socioeconomic status makes the difference go away — is even more apt to elide the very point under discussion. Firstly, that private schools are able to educate students at a lower cost per student (and a much lower cost per teacher, to my experience) suggests to me that even an equivalent score brings into question the government/union model.

Secondly, consider the method of calculating "socioeconomic status" used in one study that Schmeling cites:

She determined students’ socioeconomic status (SES) by looking at six factors students were surveyed on in the NAEP assessment: eligibility for free or reduced lunch, eligibility for Title 1 funding, reading material in the student’s home, computer access at home, Internet access at home, and the extent to which a student’s studies are discussed at home.

Four of those six measures relate to parental motivation, not to household wealth. My family, for example, sacrifices hugely in order to claim items three, four, and five (and now to afford private school). And although I haven't seen any studies to this effect, it seems reasonable to me to suggest that the presence of such children has an effect on their peers' performance. If, as I implied above, motivated working- and middle-class families like mine are going that extra sacrificial mile to escape an unsatisfactory public school system, then those children who are left behind have fewer models for better academic behavior among their classmates.


August 23, 2008


Accentuating the Extremity

Justin Katz

Bob Kerr sounds a familiar argument, although I find it no more persuasive in print than in pixels:

I know as well as any keen observer that labor unions cause hair loss, teen pregnancy, sexual dysfunction, adolescent obesity and poor gas mileage.

I have heard repeatedly from the dashboard sages how unions are plotting to make a mess of darn near everything, with the possible exception of the union hall and the detailing on the expensive imports all union bosses drive.

It's no more persuasive when the writer provides his name, but at least the reader knows from whom it's coming.


August 22, 2008


Nix the Union

Justin Katz

According to the Sakonnet Times, the Tiverton teachers' union is softening its demands in the face of fiscal reality. I note, also, that according to an RI Dept. of Elementary and Secondary Education table published in the Providence Journal, not a single Tiverton school had sufficient performance or progress to merit commendation after the last school year. (As of this writing, the relevant Web page for the Dept. of Education is not available.)

That educational failure couldn't have anything to do with the teachers' collectively working to rule, could it?

What a travesty. Fire them all, I say, and rehire any who are willing to work as professionals rather than as merit-averse unionists. In the meantime, give me at least some of my tax dollars back so I won't have to continue working myself into an early grave to afford private school.


August 21, 2008


Blinders-on Economics

Justin Katz

Richard Forbes, of Warwick, offers an argument we've heard before:

I continually see negative commentaries about unions. Many people express resentment that union members (especially state worker and teacher unions) have excessive perks that the general population cannot obtain.

Their anger is directed toward the wrong place. In the past, unionization raised the bar for all of us. It was union organization that set the standard of an expectation of health insurance, paid time off, sick days, vacation days, limited work hours, etc. Unions created a standard of living that didn't exist before Franklin D. Roosevelt. ...

We should all be demanding that our standards be maintained, as the unions are trying to do, rather than blaming the last bastion of the American Dream.

What we never seem to hear is an admission from such idealists is that there are economic forces, rooted in human nature, for which we must account. Blinders on, they insist that market realities are arbitrary and ultimately manipulable.

Mr. Forbes should stop to consider that private-sector unions are fading because the bar has been raised beyond companies' ability to clear it and remain in business. He should also question whether the economic policies that he prefers are partly responsible for the government debt that he laments.

When one denies reality, the results are often the opposite of those intended — except, in the short term, when it comes to a limited group that is bolstered to keep the dream alive despite all wisdom.


August 11, 2008


A Question of Possibility

Justin Katz

Reading some of the comments to my post on the Lincoln teacher union contract agreement, it strikes me that many of my anti-union compatriots give due appreciation to the reality of change.

The bottom line, as far as I can see, is that the union acknowledged the reality of limited funds and, rather than tumble into the public-relations nightmare that has attached itself to, for example, the Tiverton NEA gang, chose to shuffle the dollars around pretty much within its existing slice of the pie. That's a step in the right direction.

Sure, the members probably wanted to put as much money as possible into "raises" (in reality, step adjustments) so that those percentages would continue to grow into the future. No doubt, they likely hope to undo or shift some of the "concessions" when the economic environment improves. But continuing to ratchet up the squeeze is the duty of private citizens.

Don't insist on all or nothing, because even well-meaning beneficiaries of a corrupted system will burrow back into the comfort of unjust manipulation if their little steps forward yield nothing but heightened rebuke. The goal must be to translate our gains, as limited as they may at first be, into the language of systematic reform that remains even when dollars aren't so scarce (which is a distinct possibility sometime before mid-century).


August 10, 2008


No Mystery to Contract Resolution

Justin Katz

Ah, the magic of the Lincoln compromise:

Despite these tensions, Lincoln is an example of what a community can accomplish, even when money is scarce, says [Larry] Purtill, president of NEARI.

"What Lincoln shows is that both sides were willing, in a tough financial environment, to find a way to make sure that they reach an agreement so there is no work stoppage and programs continue and that teachers got what both sides thought was fair," Purtill said. "Districts have to get creative, because both sides are realizing there is just not a lot of movement to be had on the money."

If the article's representation is accurate, there's really no mystery to Lincoln's accomplishment. Everybody understood that funds were limited, and holding steadfast to unrealistic increases in remuneration would only have bled funds from other necessary areas of the district's budget, so negotiations centered around how best to shuffle around the dollars already allocated for the teachers. They dropped sabbaticals, picked up more healthcare costs, decreased healthcare "buybacks," and tinkered with work hours to comply with state law while not incurring large costs. In return, they get raises.

I'd love to indulge in equivalence, but somehow the "both sides" construction doesn't strike me as accurate when it comes to what Lincoln has done and what every other Rhode Island town must do.


August 1, 2008


A Memorandum of Chain Jerking

Justin Katz

So the contract proposal that some public sector unions recently voted to reject was apparently not a real offer. According to the NEA's Bob Walsh, it wasn't the result of "negotiations," but of a "process by which a memorandum of settlement was reached." (Note the passive voice.) Presumably, Bob would have been just fine with the governor's having responded to broad approval of the contract by withdrawing its terms and declaring that it had just been, you know, a sort of poll of members' disposition.

So the negotiation process now has another layer. Union leaders "discuss" a settlement with the governor and vote to send it to their members as if it were an official contract to be ratified. Depending how that goes, they then enter into official "negotiations" with the governor to push for more. How many times contracts can be "discussed" without being "negotiated" is an open question.

From this perspective, the following bit of Walsh's explanation of why "union officials agreed to discussion, as opposed to negotiations," is of especial interest, strategically:

With contracts already in place through June 30, 2008, formal negotiations could have left the door open to a process where the state tried to reopen other issues in the existing agreement. This was not an idle concern, as informal discussions the prior year led a member of the administration to try (ultimately unsuccessfully) exactly that tactic regarding health care plan design.

In other words, "discussions" apparently allow the unions the flexibility to come up with contracts that the members can accept, while not opening up the previous contract for changes. This might be useful if, say, labor leaders wish to stall through the fiscal year without having to face the possibility of changes that might create immediate assistance to the fiscally ailing state. Sorry, Bob: the unions have had it every which way for far too long.

Me, I say that the unions blinked, and the governor should consider the thousands of Rhode Islanders who would be beyond relieved to see a flood of ads in the pitifully thin Sunday jobs section of the paper.



What Would You Private-Sector Workers Do?

Justin Katz

Jessica Knapp's astonishing comment deserves a bit more attention:

As pointed out in the Providence Journal on Saturday, the talks between the governor's people and union reps were not official negotiations. To claim that they were is a blatant lie. Instead of taking the proper, legal channels, King Don has issued another "executive order." Utterly useless.

I'll never understand people who put all their faith in one profit-rabid CEO like Don and not in the hardworking folks of RI. 4,000 people just like you voted against this contract, in the best interest of their families and their state.What would you do if your employer demanded that you pay more of your health care premium? What will you do when men like Don win, and union members lose, and your employer demands the same of you? How much more do these people have to give up, and how much time do you have before the same is asked of you?

What's astonishing is that Ms. Knapp is apparently unaware that public-sector unions are hardly the leading edge in having to compromise with their employment packages, but she is apparently unaware that her opposition on the issue points it out repeatedly. On top of that, the ignorance of the disparity between public-sector union employment and private-sector employment is galling. What would I do were an employer to limit the amount of my raise and require increased contributions to healthcare coverage? Many in the private sector would rephrase the question as "what have I done when."

Moreover, the casting script of the unionists exemplifies their detrimental reliance on a divisive storyline. The few times that I've heard similar tales, whether with small construction contractors or large IT-related corporations, management was sincerely seeking to balance the health of the organization with the well-being of employees.


July 15, 2008


An Opportunity for Empathy

Justin Katz

There's a lesson in empathy available in this:

And several thousand other state workers are caught in the middle of a war between leaders of the largest employees union, Council 94, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees that has put that union's executive director — and lead negotiator — Dennis Grilli on the defensive about his own raise and the $10,044 "waiver payment" he got for taking his wife's state-provided health insurance, instead of a union package.

Stunned that after 30 years in the union trenches he has become one of the targets of the angry debate, Grilli this week said he would give up the 3 percent raise awarded him by his union's leadership board last spring that boosted his salary to $102,900 a year.

A five digit windfall for not taking a benefit. So whose turn is it to make the argument that employees who save their employers money by not taking benefits ought to reap some of the rewards?

Perhaps one can hope that reality is beginning to sink in, for Rhode Island's public-sector unions. The days of squandering the state's economic health may by necessity (and by necessity only) be coming to an end. It's interesting to note, by the by, that one apparent hold-out is an affiliate under Bob Walsh's shadow.


July 7, 2008


Now That's an Entitlementality

Justin Katz

In the midst of a story about Rhode Island government's hard financial times, one finds the following nugget:

... local officials say they need more.

They want state legislators to change the pension rules for municipal employees, requiring them to work longer before they can retire.

They are also pushing for the repeal of a state law that allows third-party arbitrators to impose sometimes costly police and fire contracts on municipalities after union talks break down.

Those proposals face opposition from the state's powerful labor lobby.

Tony Capezza, Rhode Island state director of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, said the binding arbitration law is only fair, since police officers and firefighters do not have the right to strike.

"If you don't have binding arbitration, you would have to have the right to strike," he said. "Lincoln freed the slaves years ago."

Yeah. Working at will an environment in which employers have the final say in running their organizations and employees with jobs critical to public safety can't put those jobs on hold, en masse, as a negotiating tactic is just like being owned as chattel.


June 18, 2008


Spinning the Union

Justin Katz

Paul Bovenzi's response to an excellent op-ed by Bill Wilson raises an interesting question. On the one hand:

Also, there are jobs (teaching and otherwise) that are not Union. People have a choice. They can work for a private school if they are completely opposed to being in a Union. Maybe the reason they don't is because Union workers are treated more fairly and compensated better than non-union employees. As I have said before on this blog, the Union members I know are all happy and grateful to be part of a Union.

And yet, union membership is on the decline. Of course, as we know, that decline is mainly in the private sector, so one must wonder why an arena more subject to market forces is more likely to lose members.

Perhaps those "happy and grateful" union employees in the private sector are finding that the perks aren't worth driving their employers out of business, or forcing their jobs overseas. The public sector may have thought itself immune to this dynamic, but at least here in Rhode Island, I've a feeling that they're soon to learn otherwise.


June 16, 2008


Burning Out the House

Justin Katz

As one who flirts often with the edge of burnout, I hear the hum of truth in this:

Burnout has been long associated with being overworked and underpaid, but psychologists Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter found that these were not the crucial factors. The single biggest difference between employees who suffered burnout and those who did not was the whether they thought that they were being treated unfairly or fairly. ...

Their research on fairness dovetails with work by other researchers showing that humans care a great deal about how they are being treated relative to others. In many ways, fairness seems to matter more than absolute measures of how well they are faring -- people seem willing to endure tough times if they have the sense the burden is being shared equally, but they quickly become resentful if they feel they are being singled out for poor treatment.

Without doubt, the lesson applies in the civic arena, as well.


June 14, 2008


Letting the Unions Win the Lottery

Justin Katz

I have to admit that NEA head Bob Walsh's proposal to give the public sector pension system "equity" from the state lottery instead of this year's cash contribution confused me. Most prominently, I don't see how a government that habitually spends hundreds of millions of dollars over its revenue can be presumed to need a one-year fix, even if the economy were to right itself within the three to four years that Walsh predicts. Second most prominently, Bob doesn't explain why the pensioners would want an asset yielding cash returns this year at a fraction of the cash that they were expecting.

Anchor Rising readers have the advantage that one of Walsh's numbers should look familiar: The 8.25% that he puts forward as his "conservative expected return" is precisely the figure that inspired so much discussion 'round here. The key to his whole scheme, in other words, is to determine the percentage of the lottery that would be given to the pension system in lieu of this year's $243 million payment by calculating backwards from the "expected" return that the pension system requires in order to be solvent.

If the state were to put $243 million into the account, that money would have to generate a $20 million return (in a slow economy) for the pension scheme to work, so Walsh is requesting $20 million from next year's lottery revenue and calling that 8.25% of the pensions "equity." One could pick just about any number, suggesting, for example, that the projected $365 million in total lottery revenue really represents only a 3% of a total value (we're assuming) of $12 billion, making the pension's $243 million just 2% equity, with a projected return of $4 million, instead of $20 million.

But we could run this formula all evening. The salient question is, accepting Walsh's proposal, what happens next year. The state could resume cash payments, or it could give the pension system another chunk of lottery equity. Me, I'd wager that Walsh would, at that time, recalculate the value of the lottery such that his union members still receive their 8.25% return (plus, of course, the percentage already covered by this year's revenue). The one certainty is that the revenue coming into the state would diminish each year this method is used.

Another certainty is that those who control the pension system would be able to divest themselves of this lottery equity, should things turn around such that other investments would yield better returns. Again, I'd wager that the unions would turn to the state to buy back the equity at more than its value.

It's a clever ploy, buried beneath the confusion of Walsh's "sound financial principles," and treating it all as if it were found money. The money is not "hidden" in the system, though. It's our money, and it's under the control of our representatives, both of which make it as a shiny thing to Walsh's searching eye.


June 10, 2008


New Tone, Hidden Strategies

Justin Katz

An interesting passage from Steve Peoples's second part to the Projo's series on local unions:

LABOR UNIONS and their allies walk a fine line when it comes to influencing elections. State and federal campaign finance laws have strict limits on what is, and isn't, permissible.

That may be why Ocean State Action is actually made up of three distinct organizations — the Ocean State Action Fund, Ocean State Action and the Progressive Leadership Fund — although their boards have common members and the organizations have the same staff. ...

Federal law does not limit labor's ability to communicate with its own members.

Labor has detailed lists of the names, addresses and contact information for the estimated 75,000 union members in Rhode Island. Union canvassers can visit the households as many times as they want, send unlimited mailing or make unlimited phone calls.

It isn't my purpose, here, to spark a discussion of any of the laws involved in making this dizzying accountant's dream legal. Rather, I'm curious how folks believe this comprehensive lobbying strategy fits in with some related positions in the economic platform put forward by Mr. Barack "New Tone, Stop the Special Interests" Obama, such as fighting to ensure the "freedom to unionize" and working "to ban the permanent replacement of striking workers, so workers can stand up for themselves without worrying about losing their livelihoods." There's also some overlap in his vision of "comprehensive energy independence and climate change plan" and, say, the Green Jobs Alliance.

There's an ecologically sound bridge that Mr. Obama would like to sell (via tax dollars) to those who actually believe that he is a creature of compromise heretofore unseen in Washington.


June 9, 2008


Thomas C. Wigand: Bob Walsh's Risky Scheme

Engaged Citizen

According to the Providence Journal, Bob Walsh of NEARI has been prowling the halls of the General Assembly peddling a "plan" to solve this year's budget deficit. His protégé Pat Crowley has posted a version of it on the left-leaning RI Future blog. Though his proposal is coated in sugary language, should the General Assembly swallow it, it will indeed be a bitter pill for Rhode Island ... perhaps even economically fatal.

We all remember the "tobacco money." What Walsh proposes resembles that, in that he wants to divest the State of a future revenue stream in return for some quick cash, but his version is far worse, and will cause irreparable damage to Rhode Island.

The tobacco money is essentially "found money," indeed a windfall, and is going to be paid out for decades to come. But Rhode Island isn't going to get a penny. Why? Because the General Assembly went to Wall Street and sold Rhode Island's future income stream at a discount in return for some quick cash. Essentially this was a humungous, public sector "payday loan." So the tobacco money — "the profit" — is now all going to Wall Street investors. As we also know, within a few short years the General Assembly peed away that cash infusion. As shortsighted and irresponsible as that transaction was, it at least infused some new cash into Rhode Island's coffers. Walsh's scheme doesn't even do that — quite the opposite.

Euphemistically using the term "contribute equity" as a proxy for "transferring ownership," Walsh portrays his game as, in essence, placing a fallow state asset into productive use. In reality, what he is proposing is the piecemeal transfer of ownership of the Lottery to the state's pension system (and so, by extension, to the unions). He claims that this will only be a temporary measure, "contributing" only small percentages of "equity" (i.e., ownership) to the state pension system for a few years. If you believe that, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you (and I'm not talking the Pell Bridge). Exhibit 1: the tobacco money. Once the precedent is set, this "camel's nose" will continue sliding under our fiscal tent until the pension system (and thus the unions) own a major portion of the Lottery, if not all of it.

While these "equity contributions" are being presented as a temporary measure to get us through the "budget crisis" until the economy recovers, the transfer is permanent — the pension system (and thus the unions) will be getting those Lottery revenues forever. The tobacco money now being paid to the Wall Street investors has an eventual end date, while under Walsh's scheme to direct revenues to the pension/unions continues in perpetuity — a clever gambit on Mr. Walsh's part, eh?

Each percentage of "equity contributed" to the pension system means that an equal percentage of Lottery revenue will now go into the pension system, meaning that taxpayers will have to make up the shortfall in the general budget. Given that Lottery revenues constitute something like a third of total State revenues, this could eventually mean a 30% tax hike foisted upon the taxpayers of Rhode Island - merely to maintain the status quo in the state pension system. In other words, Walsh's scheme is a backdoor way of enacting a huge tax increase to force taxpayers to fund a bailout the State pension system.

Mr. Walsh is executive director of NEARI, and his job is to forcefully represent the narrow special interests of that organization (and, to the detriment of taxpayers and public-school students, he seems to perform his duties quite ably). So in promoting this scheme, "he's just doing his job." But ultimately it is unreasonable, indeed unconscionable, for public-sector employees to demand that taxpayers incur massive additional taxes just to maintain the status quo of the pension system, the benefits of which exceed by orders of magnitude the retirement benefits available to taxpayers (the vast majority of whom will get no pension whatsoever).

One would assume that Governor Carcieri will likewise "do his job," representing all of the people Rhode Island, and refuse to be party to such a scheme. It is likewise time for the General Assembly to begin "doing its job," representing the best interests of all the citizens of Rhode Island, not just placating narrow special interests.

We are at a watershed time in Rhode Island. In recent decades the General Assembly has become addicted to a tax-and-spend and pander lifestyle, a habit maintained in recent years through "fixes" such as the tobacco money. The consequences become ever clearer: a state economy whose performance lags both its neighbors and national averages, to the detriment of each and every citizen ... a downward spiral that will continue unless major structural changes occur to state government and the pay and benefit packages of all public sector employees.

The General Assembly has a decision to make. Either it can start "rehab" and set Rhode Island on a path for fiscal and economic rehabilitation ... or it can accept the new even more destructive "high" being pushed by dealer Bob Walsh.

Will the cessation of tobacco money signal the start of rehab, or will it prove that the tobacco money was just a "gateway drug" for even more destructive fiscal behavior on the part of the General Assembly? We shall soon see. The economic fate of Rhode Island hangs in the balance.


June 8, 2008


Thank You, Erin Blackman!

Justin Katz

Much of the criticism (and all of the hatemail) related to my op-ed regarding Lt. Michael Morse and unionization in RI has only served to exacerbate my reservations. Namely, when I say "unionization," they hear "firefighters." When I say, "I've concluded that public-sector unionization is among the villains in Rhode Island," they hear, "you get paid too much."

The bottom line is that, every time I've made a complaint about public-sector unions, even if my target is, say, the National Education Association, the firefighters step forward as poster children for the union cause. Consider the picture associated with Charles Bakst's latest column. Or better yet, consider the comment section to this post in which Michael links to my op-ed:

The worry I have is, don't they feel all you out there that provide this valuable service are deserving of every penny you earn? It angers me when people begin to look at the rescuers and search for ways to help the community money pot by asking the rescuers to sacrifice for the common good, because sacrifice they do already (you do).

The problem is that, as long as there's a unified union front, it's impossible to assess firefighters distinctly from the rest. As long as public safety officers stand shoulder to shoulder with social workers under the union banner, they force reformists to battle them in order to battle the unions.

And into this wrangle, in which the sides have worn veritable trenches beneath their feet as they've stood their immovable ground, comes Erin Blackman, who is currently working on a documentary about the Providence Fire Department, writing to the above-linked post on Michael's blog:

... unions would not be an issue if the friggin' cities and the state would quit paying ridiculous salaries to file clerks, data entry clerks and janitors and start paying firefighters, cops and correctional officers for keeping us safe every day.

You'll note that one rarely hears the office-chair jockeys in the public sector stepping forward to defend the necessity of union practices. Indeed, it seems increasingly that, as public school teachers tumble through the boundaries of reasonable action that they've been pushing for years, the emergency workers are slipping toward the spotlight to be the Face of the Union.

Yeah, it gets our hackles up when union business begins to overlap with the business of protecting citizens. But it would serve both the public and the emergency workers for such actions to be seen as distinguishable from the rest of the rotten mess in this state.



The Enemy's Org Chart

Justin Katz

Today's Providence Journal article on organized labor in the state is must-reading. This passage is particularly telling:

But organized labor also has a strong voice in discussions about over health-care cuts for the poor, reduced benefits for foster children, environmental causes like such as recycling, and even gay marriage.

Rhode Island unions have formed unique partnerships with a host of seemingly unrelated environmental and social advocacy groups. Through this, relatively weak organizations gain a stronger voice in state affairs. And In exchange, labor unions strengthen political alliances, expand their bank of volunteers that help elect pro-labor candidates, and improve their image.

Anybody find it curious that all of labor leaders' efforts to "improve their image" (their excuse to members for their unrelated activities, no doubt) have a leftward tilt?

ADDENDUM:

I think the heat is embellishing my need for a vacation (or maybe just a full night's sleep). I'd misread the table on which I commented earlier, so I've deleted the chart. There's still a more subtle point to make, but it'll have to wait on a bit of yard work.


June 3, 2008


Exhibit #473 for the Prosecution's Case That the NEA Has Less to Do with Education than Left-Wing Politics

Justin Katz

Yes, that's an organization composed mainly of teachers offering up unimaginative slogans that promote left-wing clichés:


June 2, 2008


Across the Union Divide

Justin Katz

My piece in today's Providence Journal dwells on the collision of my affection and admiration for Providence Firefighter/EMT Lt. Michael Morse and his book and my opposition to public-sector unions.


May 27, 2008


The Injury Lottery

Justin Katz

The Projo headline should have been "Murder case could threaten ex-officers' pensions," because it shouldn't take the manifest ability of killing another human being to correct this clear fleecing of the public:

Gianquitti has been collecting an accidental disability pension since 1993, retiring at 24 after six months as a patrolman for the Providence Police Department. His disability pension is two-thirds his salary, tax-free, plus health care benefits for him and his family. ...

While Gianquitti’s pension received cost-of-living adjustments, the city never checked on him to find out if he was, indeed, still disabled, Cunha said.

The hand-wringing over whether the pension requirement of "honorable service" applies to crimes committed after retirement is sickening: Anybody still living on the municipality's deal for police officers ought to be held to the same standard. And taking advantage of an early injury for a lifelong vacation ought to be considered dishonorable on its face.


May 25, 2008


Promises Bought and Futures Sold

Justin Katz

Julia Steiny is must-reading today:

After collecting my thoughts and temper, I wrote back. It seemed to me that teaching a child to read was the principal mission of any school and was, therefore, funded. Rhode Island has one of the highest per-pupil expenditures in the nation. If not to teach reading, what is it going to the schools for? The Regents were only trying to get children actual help, instead of letting them be subjected to Jurassic practices like being put in the dumb-kids' reading group or passed on for the next teacher to deal with. That help seemed well funded already, at least to me. ...

Too many people in Rhode Island are in the habit of thinking that the schools have the right to do whatever it is they're already doing, effective or not, and expect that anything better has to be paid for as an extra. When research and experience in other states identify an educational best practice — for example, tailoring strategies to each struggling reader — our state's taxpayers have to pay extra to implement it.

The problem is that reform-minded diktats from the state never touch on the core problem, which Steiny rightly identifies as unlimited collective bargaining rights, leading to such outcomes as this:

... the existing resources continue to shift away from kids to support benefits for adults. The Educational Intelligence Agency, a national watchdog, reports that Rhode Island's public school population has dropped 4.6 percent since 2000-'01, while compensation to teachers went up 37 percent. Nationally, the average state enrollment has increased 2.5 percent since 2000-'01 while compensation went up 24.5 percent.

Frankly, I have a negative emotional reaction to unfunded mandates: If the educational bureaucracy of the state — with which the unions have made it their business to exert influence — wishes to send down requirements, then it seems only fair that the money to support them oughtn't be derived from sources with which they are not connected (i.e., local and property taxes). But perhaps a case-by-case assessment is necessary. Really, how much funding is needed for the development of reading plans for individual students? That sounds like something that schools and teachers ought to do as a matter of course.

It may be that the very quality of unfunded mandates to which I have an adverse reaction speaks in their favor. They put pressure on an artificially constrained system, and the central and most costly constraint is the unionization of the teachers. In a system in which every new task or idea requires additional money, stuffing more of them into the bag will increase the awareness of those who ultimately have to carry it — taxpayers — and eventually enough of them will come to realize that our public servants have become our masters, foisting what ought to be their responsibilities onto our shoulders.

If we want to see this detrimental pressure removed from our educational system, we need take only one step: end the unionization of public school teachers. Taking that step, we could just watch how quickly the system would learn to right itself.


May 20, 2008


More Unionist than Professional

Justin Katz

West Warwick teacher Paul Bovenzi appears to have attended a few too many union prep and pump sessions:

Teachers drive education, and know what's best for children in their schools. Contrary to popular belief, administrators (or managers to use his misnomer) are no more educators than a hospital administrator is a doctor! Do you want a hospital administrator making medical decisions that affect your health?

Mr. Achorn wants to give these "managers" more power. I think they should get less. Administrators should do budgets, scheduling and handle disciplinary issues. Beyond that, we should let the educators take care of teaching children.

Mr. Achorn wants to give managers more evaluation power. I call for educators to push for a peer-evaluation system, much as the Rhode Island Bar Association evaluates its lawyers, Internal Affairs its police, or the American Medical Association doctors. Administrators have no business evaluating educators. The professionals in the field should evaluate and "police" themselves.

Besides, not to put too fine a point on it, but there is a dearth of any administrators out there, specifically good ones. Most administrators I have worked for can't handle the responsibilities that they have now and could never handle more, especially a more rigorous evaluation system. Who exactly are these managers who are going to turn things around in the public schools all by themselves? I am not saying there are not good people doing these jobs, but there are no super-administrators with all the answers. If they are out there, I haven't met them yet.

See, the problem with the union mentality is that the ostensible "professionals" lose credibility for their claims that they "know what's best for children in their schools" and "should evaluate and 'police' themselves." After some years of experience with strikes and "working to rule," the objective taxpayer and parent is apt to wonder how that's "best for the children," and to wonder what real consequences will be imposed in the course of self monitoring.

No, I don't want a hospital administrator making my medical decisions, but neither would I want doctors to be given too much rein to fashion the hospital with their own benefit centrally in mind. Indeed, were that to happen, I would go to all lengths to make sure that I received my medical services elsewhere.

And there's the rub. Doctors and lawyers have to perform. They may have routes toward accreditation and consequences administered through professional organizations, but they still have to convince clients that their services are worth employing. Moreover, through their control over "budgets, scheduling and... disciplinary issues," administrators exert influence over them, and over their organizations in whole.

As many of us have been saying for years: if teachers want to be respected as professionals, they have to begin playing that part, rather than the industrial unionist role that they've allowed to define them in Rhode Island.


May 16, 2008


Yes, You Bear Some Responsibility

Justin Katz

In the obviously titled "State workers protest any pension cuts," one protester said the following:

Others, including social worker Michael Fallon, said they felt state workers had been unfairly made the "scapegoats" for both the ballooning unfunded liability in the state pension fund and the "poor management" that landed Rhode Island in its current fiscal mess.

Being the member of a union does not mean one's hands are clean of the stains that the union's behavior leaves — quite the opposite — and union behavior has been a key component in our state's management. If members have voted for specific candidates under union advisement, if they have stood by while their lobbyists worked back-room deals, if they have said nothing as their dues bought ads on progressive Web sites and financed the campaigns of the legislators who have done such grave harm to our state, then they are not mere "scapegoats," but active parts of the problem.

The first step to fixing that problem will be for them to realize that one-issue voting (the issue being "my employment deal") is self-defeating because so calamitous in its result.


May 14, 2008


Changing the scope of what is subject to union contract bargaining for RI public employees

Donald B. Hawthorne

On the Tuesday evening Matt Allen WPRO show, Matt interviewed State Representative and House Minority Whip Nick Gorham about Gorham's bill H-7664, which would redefine the scope of issues subject to bargaining for RI public employees.

During the interview, Gorham noted that there are very different approaches across the 50 states as to what issues are subject to bargaining by public employees. At one end of the spectrum, some states do not permit any such bargaining for certain public employees. Unsurprisingly, RI is at the other end of spectrum, where current law says the following is subject to bargaining for all public employees: wages, benefits and all other terms and conditions of employment.

Gorham notes that current RI law disenfranchises management, such as school superintendents and principals, and creates the structural incentive which results in the state spending significant financial resources while getting only meager results on its investment. As I have written for years about the teachers' union contracts, RI overpays for under-performance and has created an entitlement mentality instead of a focus on performance.

Gorham's bill would limit the scope of what is subject to bargaining to only wages and benefits, applying such a scope definition to fire fighters, police officers, state police officers, correctional officers, certified teachers, municipal employees and 911 employees. The bill would place RI in the middle of how the 50 states approach public employee bargaining. And, by default, leave the remaining issues of how they get their respective jobs done to the people who actually do the work - instead of union officials.

Ed Achorn had this broad observation about the current conditions in RI and how this entitlement mentality has gotten the state into a very deep hole:

...Thanks in part to unsustainable benefits for public-employee unions, the state confronts a budget deficit of a half-billion dollars or more. And it cannot effectively tax its way out of the nightmare, since its radically high taxes (including property taxes) have already driven out jobs, businesses and many middle-class taxpayers, cutting revenues and leaving Rhode Island one of the few states in recession, while Massachusetts right next door adds jobs and boosts its tax revenues.

Rhode Island, with its beauty, superb location, intellectual infrastructure and potential for port activity, should be one of America’s booming places. Instead, its politicians have left its citizens living in fear that they will lose their jobs or be forced to pack up and leave.

The kind of thinking that brought about this economic debacle also prevails in public education. Thanks to state labor laws that tilt the playing field against taxpayers, and local officials who consistently give away the store in contract negotiations (either deliberately or because they lack the intensity and experience of their well-funded foes), the Ocean State pays one of America’s highest tabs per pupil for public schools, and gets generally mediocre results. And when even more money is invested in the schools, it seems to go into the pockets of special interests in the form of unsustainable benefits, rather than getting to students in the form of new books, science labs, sports, art, music and first-rate teaching.

It doesn’t have to be this way, Mr. Gorham argues...

Indeed, it does not.


May 13, 2008


Banking on a System Sure to Fail

Justin Katz

Andrew makes a central observation in the comments to his latest post on the pension deficit:

If politicians making bad fiscal decisions are the entire story of the pension funding crisis, that is a strong case against defined benefit plans, because there is no reason to believe that current and future pols are going to be any smarter than the ones who got us in to this mess.

For his part, NEA honcho Bob Walsh offers a worthy summary thereof:

... since you asked, here is a brief recap. While pensions systems started in the public sector to match the private sector models, they generally had a few major differences - public sector plans usually required employee contributions as well as employer contributions, and, while private sector plans eventually fell under ERISA regulations, such rules were lacking for public plans. Eventually, though, most public plans tried to follow private guidelines, but since governments were (correctly) considered on-going entities, getting to full funding was never a high priority and the typical 30-year amortization schedules were constantly being redrawn (there are still folks who argue they should be reamortized every year to keep management contribution levels down). RI last reset the counter 8 years ago, so we will be fully funded in 22 years IF we stick to the plan.

RI, of course, added to the problem in its own unique way - they were later to the game in requiring real actuarial studies to set the management contributions, and imagine their surprise when the funding levels were discovered to be so low. During the DiPrete years, the two early retirements saved the state money from the personnel budget by essentially giving away time in the pension system, which not only essentially transfered those costs to the pension system, it was the equivalent of borrowing the money at 8.25% (more, really, since the real returns have always been higher). DiPrete also gave us the banking crisis, which caused the state to decide not to make required contributions during that time. In the late 1990's, when funds all over the country were catching up due to stellar market returns, we decided to ignore the 5-year smoothing used to average out market returns and "mark to market" our portfolio, which lowered management contributions at the time and , all too predictably, caused them to increase years later.

Demographics have also played a part - while I disagreed with some of the Plan B changes, the concept of retirement at any age without any age-based actuarial reduction was not sustainable (as I testified at the time.) Of course, folks are living longer, etc., which also caused the need for those adjustments.

The missing piece is that — for professional and ideological reasons — he and his union-leader peers have backed the very politicians and policies that have brought Rhode Island to its current state. Giveaways, regulations, and micromanaged obfuscations of the free market — for the most part benefiting unions directly or indirectly — created the circumstances in which public-sector pensions are threatened as they are, and one suspects that those in the know, such as Mr. Walsh, have not raised the alarum because they've considered the pension benefits to be "guaranteed," if not legally, then morally. As Michael commented to a previous post in the series:

... the pension is part of a benefit package. The benefit package was offered to me when I accepted employment with the City of Providence. I didn't demand it or crunch the numbers or do an audit, I trusted the integrity of the people who hired me to have figured this thing out before offering the package. I've planned my future based on the numbers supplied to me and doing some investing and career building on my own. The only demanding I'm hearing is people who's future's are not tied to the pension systems demanding I sacrifice my future so they can save a few bucks on their tax bills.

Well, I'll agree that it was improper for politicians (and unions) to make unrealistic promises on which others would be expected to deliver, but Michael's undue dismissal of taxpayers' claims is telling. Sure, if everybody in Rhode Island threw me a dime (nevermind "a few bucks"), I could end my crushing debt, but I'd prefer policies that created an economy in which a hard-worker could thrive. I planned my educational investments based on indicators and advice, expecting those who'd constructed our social schema to have structured the market as promised. Life doesn't always work out as expected.

The thread running between Bob and Michael is the belief that the responsibility for fixing the pension system rests with those whose ostensible representatives enunciated the promises. And that points to a structure (deliberate, no doubt) in which those who bear the risks receive none of the rewards, while those who receive the rewards have no risks (in the sense of losing their pensions). From where, then, would those whose futures are actually in question — as Michael claims his is — derive incentive to keep an eye on the stewards of their retirements? To ensure that "too good" doesn't get swamped in "to be true"?

Tom W offers the important reminder that being entitled to vested benefits also means that benefits that aren't yet vested aren't an entitlement. It's the public sector workers' pension system that is at stake, and it seems to me that they ought to bear the brunt of the financial hit of having to return it to solvency. If the financial hit is too large, perhaps they'll decide to mitigate in small degree by canceling their union dues.


May 12, 2008


Ending Bumping

Justin Katz

Perhaps no practice is a better distillation of the blight that is teacher unionization than bumping. I'm with Julia Steiny in thinking that it ought to end, but the suggestions of the Business Education Partnership that she describes in her column, yesterday, are worth considering as half-way measures:

To professionalize education personnel practices, Blais and her colleagues put the focus squarely on evaluation. Rhode Island is one of only a handful of states that do not mandate that teachers be evaluated. In fact, most Rhode Island teachers are never evaluated in any meaningful or helpful way.

Blais says the key to an effective and fair evaluation system is to use several different measures, instead of just one principal's say-so. Evaluations should include objective, quantifiable information, such as student achievement, as well as administrator and peer observations. The resulting evaluations should place teachers at one of four levels: master, pre-master, basic and below basic.

With these categories in hand, teachers would no longer be interchangeable. Any teacher with two consecutive below-basic evaluations could be let go. (At last!) No basic teacher could bump a master, no matter how long he or she has been in the system. Only master teachers should be peer evaluators.

It is an abomination that, in a profession that begs for inspiration, we permit no measure of quality.


May 6, 2008


Doing a Job on the State

Justin Katz

James Cournoyer, of North Smithfield, gets to the heart of the matter (after noting that public employees are paid workers, not volunteers):

... a public employee who starts working at age 25 with a $30,000 salary and annual raises of 3.25 percent will contribute $74,425 to the pension system over 20 years, assuming a contribution of 9 percent of his annual salary. Then, at the tender age of 45, that employee can begin collecting a pension equal to 50 percent of his highest five years that will grow by the almighty "cost of living" adjustment every year for 30 years, assuming a life expectancy of 75. Thus, the employee who contributed a mere $74,425 to the system will receive payments totaling $1,230,000 if he receives annual 3 percent cost-of-living adjustments. This is unsustainable, unfair and unacceptable.

Plowing streets and answering 911 calls entitles Hanson to a paycheck. It does not entitle Hanson to early retirement on the backs of his neighbors.


May 3, 2008


Re: Re: Another Reason to Private School in Rhode Island

Justin Katz

Actually, what struck me about Rhody's comment was how this early sentence betrays the ridiculousness of his point:

If any of us were sent back to work under a court order, our attitude might not be that great, either.

Most of us, I venture to suggest, cannot envision circumstances in which a court would have to order us back to work. We take jobs understanding the general structure of the career ladder and expecting that raises will be related to: 1) our performance, and 2) our employers' fortunes. The idea of banding with coworkers for a work stoppage with the intention of procuring even larger raises despite the employer's well-known financial hardships and a lack of notable improvement (to say the least) probably strikes the majority of us as a species of lunacy.

The same assessment of general experience applies to Monique's suggestion that elected officials ought to negotiate task-by-task responsibilities into contracts. Who among us has that degree of clarity when it comes to occupational delineation? Most of us do the jobs for which we were hired — broadly defined — undertaking all that is necessary.

If the job description is to educate children according to standards set by the community and the state, and the state and community define being educated as being able to produce a final project, then it is the job of the teachers to ensure that each student is able to clear the bar. Period. "You didn't negotiate for fifteen minutes of advice as I walked to the car" would be a profoundly selfish and unprofessional insistence, and there is little distance between that and acting as "an adult adviser."



Another Reason to Private School in Rhode Island

Justin Katz

Here's another shining example of what public sector unions — specifically teachers' unions, specifically the NEA — have wrought:

The state Department of Education does not endorse the high school's plan for students to stand before their English classes to present their senior projects — a new graduation requirement here this year. ...

Most of the problems Tiverton High faces with its graduation plan can be traced to a long-running labor dispute involving teachers, who have been working under court order since last September. ...

Until now, a high school teacher has volunteered as a senior project coordinator, recruiting outside mentors to help students delve into their special interests and organizing and training judges for the culminating presentations.

But with the contract dispute permeating labor-management relations since last September, teachers have not volunteered to do much beyond their required duties. ...

Nor do the prescribed duties include teachers fulfilling another new state requirement that all high school students have an adult adviser: someone who knows them well and can help them over the rough spots that often occur in adolescence.

The General Assembly should end public sector unionization — specifically teacher unionization.


April 26, 2008


What a Crock

Justin Katz

Pat Crowley's complaints about a letter that Governor Carcieri apparently sent to Bob Walsh, Crowley's NEA boss, are transparently two-faced in so many ways that I won't enumerate them. Simply put, the idea that Walsh would respond otherwise than with the mind-numbing reply that Crowley publishes is laughable. It is, let's just say, improbable that the scene in the office was of Walsh demanding that Crowley come to his office, closing the door behind him, and lecturing him about the messes that he gets the organization in. More likely, the message from above was more akin to: "You must be doing something right." The governor's office surely understood as much.

The tragedy of the matter is that opportunity exists for a more profitable discourse. For a taste of the light so thoroughly extinguished, consider a comment to Crowley's post by Mike in RI:

It's precisely posts like this Pat that should cause concern. Why the hostility? I care very much about what you have to say publicly because I do believe you represent teachers. As a teacher I watch carefully the public statements and behavior of anyone who speaks on the topic of education. You Pat seem more than eager to stir the controversial pot, and therefore you are sure to garner more attention from teachers. I haven't seen any letters-to-the-editor from Marcia Reback picking a fight with the governor publicly, calling his wife a racist, or sharing her opinions about the Catholic church. She hasn't picketed local businesses, or flipped off those with whom she disagrees. If she had I would be sharing my thoughts with her personally. As an RIFT member it is my dues that pay her salary. You are NEA Pat, so I am not afforded that opportunity.

Feel free to review each and every one of my comments on this blog or any other. You will find that none of them were ever made during the time when school was in session. As a public employee, I feel it important to keep separate my opinions about politics and things not related to education out of respect for my students and parents. Therefore I will not use my name.

And just to clarify, are you suggesting that you wrote a letter to the ProJo with your Lincoln address and the editors changed it to Cranston? That seems odd.

Pat, you are passionate about your causes, and I have a great deal of respect for that. You must have been very good as a union organizer with the Teamsters. I mean that honestly. But teachers' unions are more professional in nature, and play a public role in communities across the state. We work with children and their families, and our approach must be very different from that of the Teamsters. I feel the political hostility you often exhibit publicly is a detriment to the cause of public education, which is my passion. Picking fights with the governor might make you feel good, but does little to help teachers and only angers more of the public that pays our salaries.

The only response to Mike came from RIFuturite Evan, dismissing him outright on the basis of past "conservative rants." The point is that, if Walsh had his own reservations about the hues with which Crowley paints his professional organization, he'd have at least mustered an empathetic response to what is clearly a sincere and thoughtful point on Mike's part.

And the reality is that, if Crowley weren't a high-ranker with the NEA, he'd be just another progressive crank, easily ignored and sparsely published. The damage that the educators' union is doing to education in Rhode Island is an affront to decency and an insult to intellectual endeavors.



Feinting Round One

Justin Katz

Surely, I've become too apt to be suspicious, but something in this labor rep's reaction to the supplemental budget — in conjunction with the legislators' "yelling and screaming" during debate of it — reminds me that this was merely the preface:

"It's devastating," said Dennis Grilli, head of the largest state employees union, Council 94. "All in all, I don't think we fared very well."

Labor's disappointment was met with praise from Governor Carcieri's office, which applauded the Democrat-dominated Assembly's decision to avoid raising taxes to help close the massive budget hole.

I can already hear the claim that labor's already taken "devastating" cuts, so now it's the taxpayers' (or the business community's) turn.


April 25, 2008


Why Should a Study Focus on the Underlying Problem?

Justin Katz

Here's the laugh line from Jill Rodrigues's Sakonnet Times story on the professional study that concluded — shockingly — that the Portsmouth school system needs more money:

Although much of that money is spent on salaries and benefits, the consultants did not weigh in on contract provisions and their impacts on the district.

Reading some of the details from Berkshire Advisors' report gives one the sense of a skewed mentality articulated: The school district needs to spend more on everything (except nurses), increasing programs for everybody from those with special needs to those with especially talents, but the money is just supposed to be found.

Frankly, the district would have made a modest advance in that regard by saving its consultation expenditures and asking any Rhode Island parent with some common sense what he or she believes the problem to be. More and more, the practical answer is: a lack of vouchers for private school.


April 24, 2008


Woe Is the Early Retiree

Justin Katz

Steve Peoples's story, which Marc mentioned earlier, of the likely mass retirement of public workers wishing to retain the current healthcare deal for retirees emanates cognitive dissonance. How are readers expected to react to this:

Sheila Ellis waited for nearly an hour inside the stuffy reception area of the state retirement office yesterday afternoon. And she would have waited longer, given what was at stake.

At just 45 years old, Ellis must decide whether to retire from the state job she has held since high school, or risk losing substantial health-care coverage for the rest of her life.

It's a decision she wanted to talk over with a retirement counselor.

"I'm young enough, it would be nice to work," said Ellis, who has worked with developmentally disabled adults for the last 28 years.

But really, her mind was already made up. State lawmakers this week pushed Ellis and probably thousands more state employees into retirement.

So Ms. Ellis will either spend the next forty years or so pursuing other interests, or she'll find another job and increase her pay and security. Are we supposed to feel an emotional twinge at that? I can't be alone in my reaction to the thoughts of another state employee:

Like Ellis, longtime state worker Deborah DiPietro doesn't have to think too hard to decide what to do. The 52-year-old taxpayer service specialist already crunched the numbers with a retirement counselor.

"I actually love my job. I love the people I work with. It's to the point where I got people saying, 'You can’t leave,"" said DiPietro, who has spent the last 34 years working for state government. "But when I do the numbers, I have to leave. That's not a good way to feel."

Well, apparently Ms. DiPietro doesn't love her job enough to keep doing it for remuneration that's a little more in keeping with the deals that the rest of us working stiffs get.


April 12, 2008


After Further Thought

Justin Katz

I've most likely been overstating the number of Tiverton teachers who stand to lose their jobs if the union remains implacable. Thirty-four notices of potential layoffs went out to meet a deadline; one position was eliminated in the school budget as passed; so I've been saying that intransigence might result in the actual layoffs of the other thirty-three.

The probability, however, is that the school committee sought to allow itself options should circumstances require positions to be eliminated. Their situation would have to be dire indeed for such a large portion of the workforce to be let go.

My point remains, though: union persistence will cost some members dearly, and a negotiating collective that is willing to push things that far would seek to soak up any new funds that become available.


April 4, 2008


Out of the Din

Justin Katz

Throughout my adult years, I'd never so much as considered sending my children to private school (parochial or otherwise) until very recently. Even my particular tincture of religious faith leads me strongly to feel that spending one's formative years among a cross-section of the local society — an opportunity that my own experience led me to take as an apt description of the public school environment — is a valuable component of education. Yet, yesterday our attempts to move our children outside of Tiverton's school district met with success.

After receiving my wife's call, in the morning, the rest of the day brought a noticeable increase in my stress level, involving anxiety about the now-certain new monthly bill. But what is one to do? The headline at the top of this week's Sakonnet Times is "Teachers reject two-year offer":

Tiverton teachers Monday afternoon "clearly expressed disapproval" of a two-year contract proposal put forward by the School Committee Friday, March 14, according to Amy Mullen, the union's president and Pocasset School teacher.

The school committee's contract offer was not proposed for ratification, and no vote was taken, said Ms. Mullen. Rather, it was discussed with "roughly 192 members present" at what union leadership characterized as an "emergency union meeting" at Green Valley Country Club in Portsmouth that began at 4 p.m. Monday and lasted nearly an hour and a half.

"The membership let us know it was not acceptable," Ms. Mullen said.

The complaint is that, when increasing healthcare costs are factored in, step 10 teachers will see minimal increases. Me, I can't keep my head from shaking: These teachers know the problems facing our state and our town. They know that money is extremely tight — so much so that their unreasonable demands will require the district to send out up to three dozen pink slips. Yet they persist.

And they persist in this (from an anonymous letter in the print edition's "Web Words" section):

Teachers, at this point why start anything to benefit the students. As parents of seniors, we know first hand you have disappointed the students all year. Some of the teachers were unprofessional, discussing the contract situation in the classroom, threatening to cancel events such as homecoming, dances and prom. You claim to be fulfilling your contract responsibilities, but as far as the students and parents are concerned, you failed! The seniors worked hard on their senior projects and, at this point, knowing they will not be graded by the teachers for their presentation portion of the project, their enthusiasm has diminished. This just adds to the list of disappointments such as mock trial, math team, class advisers, yearly art gallery shows, class trips, National Honor Society attendance, College Fair, limited letters of recommendation and limited after school help.Fortunately for the students, replacements were found and many of the above activities continued due to the principal and his office staff and concerned parents. Yet again you try to use the seniors as pawns! So you're not going to show up at graduation, who cares, it's too late. You lost the respect of most students and parents.

What responsible parent wouldn't reconsider the value of a public school education when faced with such an environment? I can't be alone in veritably itching for a concrete opportunity to fight for a school choice/voucher system.


April 2, 2008


A Raise over a Coworker

Justin Katz

The budget passed at the last Tiverton School Committee meeting — largely reflecting the latest teacher contract proposed — included the loss of only one teaching position from the payrolls. Prior to that, the district had sent out thirty-four non-renewal notices. Apparently, three-quarters of the teachers are willing to accept the risk (and probable sacrifice) of those three dozen peers:

In a straw poll, 144 teachers — three quarters of the union membership — indicated their disapproval of a two-year contract proposal from the School Committee that the union president says would eat up virtually all the raises with stiff hikes in out-of-pocket health-care costs in the second year.

Amy Mullen, the union president, said the committee's proposal in the second year would mean $3-a-week raises to teachers with at least 10 years' experience — slightly more than half the membership.

The remaining teachers, who are still working their way up the experience ladder, would come out at least $1,300 ahead in the second year, Mullen said.

Well, why would experienced teachers want to tough it out with stagnant $70,000-ish salaries until budget issues turn around? They've got seniority, after all.

Here, by the way, is a flashpoint that ought to be vehemently taken off the table immediately in response to the teachers' continued plying of the immoral work-to-rule strategy:

Last week, the School Committee passed on a union proposal for a one-year agreement that would have granted 3-percent cost-of-living increases, but conceded a jump of $522 in the employee share of a family health insurance plan, to $1,662 from $1,100.

The one year-agreement would have been retroactive to the expiration of the most recent agreement at the end of last August.

Nothing should be retroactive. You strike, you play games with children's educations, you get what you get during that period.

ADDENDUM:

I hate to complain about such things, but I really found Gina Macris's reportage to be confusing. Why does she allow Mullen to break out the step 10 teachers' potential raises on a weekly basis and then transition immediately to the annual increase of other teachers? Why, for that matter does she studiously avoid using the term "step," choosing instead the non-contractual phrase "experience ladder"?


March 17, 2008


Thomas Wigand: Camouflage Green

Engaged Citizen

As reported in the Providence Journal on March 13: "A coalition of labor unions, environmental advocates and antipoverty groups are collaborating to promote legislation that would help spark new renewable-energy industries in Rhode Island. The group, which calls itself the Green Jobs Alliance, says it has come together to promote a 'green economy' that improves the environment while at the same time creates middle-class jobs."

Neither the advance press release announcing the press conference regarding the rollout of this "Green Jobs Alliance," nor the subsequent Providence Journal story, made mention of the national and international roots and affiliations of this alliance. So it is fair to posit that there was a deliberate attempt to make it appear that this is some sort of homegrown, spontaneous effort within Rhode Island. But as we shall see, this seems unlikely — which in turn begs the question as to why the organizers sought to downplay those affiliations.

The Sierra Club, which was at the Providence news conference, has been engaged in a "partnership" with the United Steelworkers of America called the "Blue-Green Alliance" since 1996. This alliance, on March 13–14 hosted a conference called "Good Jobs, Green Jobs: A National Green Jobs Conference" in Pittsburgh. The speakers list includes representatives from various labor unions and the leadership of the AFL-CIO, which certainly was known to another attendee at the Providence news conference, George Nee of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO [who, with the local Sierra Club, co-authored a commentary piece calling for building wind farms in Rhode Island that appeared in the Providence Journal on February 20th].

The Blue-Green Alliance is sponsoring green jobs initiatives that appear identical to the Rhode Island "wind energy" effort in various of the "rust belt" states (arguably Rhode Island is one of the leading states in the expansion of the "rust belt" to encompass not just the upper Midwest, but the Northeast, as well). While an expansion of wind and solar powered energy generation is probably a good thing, it is fair to presume that the "green jobs" that they propose to create will actually be in the nature of taxpayer financed public works projects rather than incubating new private sector industries. After all, not every state can become a "leader" in a new "green" manufacturing sector, though it appears that this is how it is being marketed in each state.

Organized labor loves public works projects because they are de facto "corporate welfare" for unions. This is done through what are called "prevailing wage laws" and "project labor agreements." What these do is require public works projects (or private projects that get tax breaks) to pay union wages, the effect being that unionized contractors don't have to compete in a true competitive bidding process, so the playing field is shifted in favor of the unions … while the taxpayers are locked in to paying a higher-than-market price for the projects.

It is not a stretch to believe that the unspoken agenda here is to push new taxpayer financed public works projects, albeit labeling them as "good for the environment" and "fostering new industries with good paying jobs." After all, the Providence Place Mall and Route 95 projects are completed, so organized labor is no doubt on the hunt for new projects to fill the void.

Query whether Mr. Nee and the rest of organized labor would be willing, for the good of the environment, "to exempt such" green" projects from "prevailing wage" and "project labor agreements" so that they can be done at lesser cost, and so more of them can be completed. I think we all know the answer.

There is an international angle to this, as well. A group called the International Trade Union Confederation has involved itself with "global warming." This group declares on its Web site that "together with its affiliates, its regional organisations, the Global Union Federations, as well as with non-governmental organisations, the ITUC carries out ongoing campaign action for the universal respect of trade union rights, as guaranteed by the Conventions of the International Labour Organisation (ILO)." The ILO is an affiliate of the United Nations.

The Blue-Green Alliance and the ITUC are advocating for the use of trade agreements and treaties to advance a "green" agenda, including "protections" for "workers rights." To the ITUC and ILO, "workers rights" is a euphemism for the government's actively promoting union organizing and otherwise using its power to subsidize organized labor, such as eliminating workers rights to a secret ballot election by enacting statutory requirements allowing union organizers to collect "voluntary" signatures from workers (e.g., you can just imagine Teamster organizers collect "voluntary" signatures), and once a simple majority of employees have signed, imposing a union on the entire workforce. (Note that a simple majority of signatures would not be allowed to later decertify a union; rather, a secret ballot election would still be required for that.)

In fact, the 2007 ITUC "Annual Survey of Trade Union Rights" criticizes the United States for preserving an employer's rights to demand a federally supervised secret ballot election for employees contemplating unionization and to conduct meetings with employees (on paid time) to explain to workers the employer's position on unionization (otherwise known as First Amendment rights). The AFL-CIO's single biggest legislative goal is to have enacted an Orwellianly named statute called the "Employee Free Choice Act" that would strip workers of secret ballot election protections (at least when bringing unions in).

It is not a stretch to imagine that organized labor simultaneously seeks to bypass the legislative process and advance this special-interest agenda by burying it within trade agreements and treaties marketed to the public as "green." Ironically, the presence of such labor union special-interest terms might discourage emerging countries from entering into such trade agreements and treaties, thus actually inhibiting the "green" initiatives that are supposedly being advanced.

Certainly, advancing a "greener" economy is desirable. And there is nothing wrong with organized labor pushing its agenda, although it is a special interest. But neither is it wrong to recognize that there is much institutional self-interest going on here, and that organized labor's green initiatives are predominately "camouflage green" intended to mask its pursuit of its own self interests under the halo of environmentalism.


March 6, 2008


Unhoodwinkable

Justin Katz

In her post this afternoon, Monique didn't quote my favorite unionist quotations in that article about the governor's proposal to require presigning public hearings on public contracts (emphasis added):

"I'm halfway decent at reading tea leaves and I'm pretty clear that this budget article is about putting pressure on public officials not to give decent, in my view, pay raises and benefits to public sector workers," said James Parisi, a lobbyist for the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals. "It's built on a couple false assumptions — that the employer doesn't know what they're doing and they're getting hoodwinked by unions…. Public perception and the chatter out there aside, it's just not true and you need to know it's not true."

Allow me to be the first to confirm Mr. Parisi in his suspicion that the public probably doesn't agree with his view of "decent raises and benefits." In the eye of we many beholders (who are thus far beholden), his "decent" is our "decadent," "disproportionate," and sometimes "diabolical."

However, the majority of us don't, I believe, take our public representatives to be "getting hoodwinked" so much as having insufficient motivation to consider what our reaction might be were the contracts laid before us. When they do, they take the tack of the Tiverton School Committee and bring salient numbers before the public without a public hearing mandate.


February 27, 2008


Negotiating Child Abuse

Justin Katz

So what are the odds of this becoming law?

Amending state law to clearly prohibit strikes is the task force's first recommendation. If Carcieri supports the plan as expected, he would have to ask lawmakers to submit the bill to the General Assembly for a vote.

Officials at the state Department of Education researched tougher labor laws in Pennsylvania and New York when crafting the amendments, according to Deputy Education Commissioner David V. Abbott. One amendment would force teachers who strike to pay a penalty of two days' pay into a state school fund for every day on strike. When teachers strike now, they suffer no financial consequences.

The changes also would prohibit strikes and expand the definition to include "any strike or other concerted job action commonly referred to as 'work to rule' including, without limitation, any stoppage of work, slowdown or curtailment of one more customary teaching practices that are typically provided or performed by teachers in the absence of a strike." Superintendents and principals told the task force they consider "work-to-rule" actions more detrimental to students than strikes, as the action can drag on for years, as it did in Warwick. West Warwick, Tiverton and East Greenwich have also recently experienced periods of "work-to-rule," also called "contract compliance."

Teacher strikes and work-to-rule aren't "negotiation tactics"; they're extortionary child abuse. They take advantage of children's innocence and taxpayers' lack of choice concerning schooling.

Although he's obviously not banned or vocally denounced strikes and work-to-rule within his own organization, the NEA's Bob Walsh says (in the Projo's paraphrase) that he "prefers third-party binding arbitration." No doubt he does! Put the contracts in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, and everybody else can disclaim responsibility for the crushing increases in government spending.

Want an alternative to strikes and work-to-rule? How about teachers individually negotiate with their employers to reach agreements that reflect their actual value to the district, as well as the district's value to them?


February 19, 2008


The Most Basic Requirements

Justin Katz

In a letter to the editor of the Sakonnet Times (not online), Tiverton High School physics and chemistry teacher Richard Bernardo offers general encouragement to everybody involved in the contract disputes to "roll[] up [their] sleeves and [get] the job done." In light of news released since Mr. Bernardo penned his letter, this part sticks out:

The teachers are desperate; they are desperate because, in reality, they are in the fifth year of a three-year contract. Lying underneath the fact is the reality that they knew a long time ago that they had chosen a profession such that they would be underpaid and under-appreciated. However, the current development was not expected; this is their livelihood, their bread-and-butter, on the table; in spite of everything, they fear that they have failed at this most basic of life's requirements.

Having looked at the step levels of Tiverton teachers (which increases they've continued to receive, along with annual raises, except for this year... so far), I'd say Mr. Bernardo's being a bit melodramatic. Those teachers, however, who are affected by the news that I mentioned above, would be justified in feeling desperate:

Meanwhile on Tuesday, the School Committee agreed to send nonrenewal notices to 34 teachers for the next school year. State law requires teachers be notified before March 1 if there is a chance they might be laid off the following school year.

The notices will go to 15 teachers at the middle school, 12 at the high school, and 7 at elementary schools, Fiore said.

Squirm as the union might, the money is simply not there, and the union method requires an all-or-nothing approach that is leaving 34 teachers with nothing (at least when it comes to a contract for next year). Making matters worse, Tiverton's teachers won't be alone in the East Bay answering education want ads.

I'm truly sorry to hear about lost jobs, not the least because, as a parent, I'd prefer for the services that the district offers to be increasing. That might save me the time (at least) of looking into private schools. But as long as teachers continue to tie their fortunes to an organization that handles them as factory workers and must justify its existence — with emphasis on those with longevity — solutions for accommodating everybody will be illusory.


February 18, 2008


If Nothing Else, Sympathy

Justin Katz

One of the great boons of the Internet is the ability of a few keywords to lead random citizens to sympathetic conversations — replete with research, back-story, and action — already in progress. In my emailbox this weekend:

I am writing today after having stumbled upon your "Anchor Rising" website which described the 2005 East Greenwich School Contract.

I thought I was reading my own mind...let me explain. I am new to the Town of West Greenwich, 2 years. The teachers are in the middle of negotiating a new contract and have been working though they have not settled on a contract. What made me start researching these things was...

[Personal info removed.] My daughter's teacher suggested to me, not me asking her, that my daughter come to school at 8:00 a.m., prior to the school day starting and she would tutor her. I agreed and had taken my daughter in a total of maybe four times. My wife was contacted the other evening by the teacher saying how embarrassed she was at having to make this phone call. The teacher stated that she had been advised that she could no longer tutor my daughter without being paid. The teacher didn't even know how much she should charge. The teacher stated that she was told that she had to "work to rule." She also sent me some emails, of which I still have, with the same language as what you wrote about on your website. She stated that she had to side with the union and wished the parents would also support them.

She told how she works very hard outside of school, that we should support the union, that our children are not being hurt. I am appalled and disgusted that as our economy continues to be devastated almost daily, where we are losing jobs and benefits at an alarming rate, the union and the teachers are still of the opinion that they deserve MORE, not less and that we need to pay them to live the lifestyles they lead.

My wife informed the teacher that we are both self employed, have no work to rule, have no paid days off, summers off, paid healthcare etc... My wife and I pay $1,300.00 per month for healthcare. The teacher stated that she didn't even know what she pays as it is taken
out automatically from her check. My wife told her that if she didn't even notice what has been deducted, then it couldn't be very much!

This nonsense needs to stop. It's amazing how history seems to repeat itself. I could not believe what I was reading as I read your site. Thanks for at least showing me that I'm not completely losing my mind and that the NEA and teachers are out of control.

The teacher, of course, "has no choice but to go along." As seems to be the case in all unionized fields, members are apparently professionally obligated to participate in strong-arm tactics to ensure that their salaries and benefits are far beyond what's currently available in the private sector.


February 13, 2008


Sharing the Pain in Tiverton

Justin Katz

I don't support residency requirements for such public employees as teachers. It's nice to think that your children are being taught by your neighbors (as inaccurate as that characterization of fellow townspeople may be), but schools should find the best teachers they can, and teachers should be free to decide where to live.

That said, my disagreement with Tiverton School Committee member Leonard Wright about whether it's more fair to "set teachers back" based on benefits or to set taxpayers back based on taxes made me wonder how many of the town's teachers are in both groups. I offer these charts with no real conclusions attached; they're just interesting.



I'm curious what this data looks like for other towns. That information wouldn't happen to be centralized (or at least readily accessible) anywhere, would it?


February 5, 2008


Lying Down the Line

Justin Katz

Readers familiar with NEA Assistant Executive Director Patrick Crowley's body of work are to be forgiven if they took the opening line of the letter to the editor that he's been passing around to all the local papers — "repeat the lie, no matter how false it is" — as advice, not a complaint. Dan Yorke did a much better job dissecting Crowley's Newsmakers appearance than I did, but the take-away is the same — namely, that Crowley's professional objective is to get away with as much twisting, stretching, and convenient misspeaking of the truth as he can. Of especial interest with his latest offering, however, is how much help he has.

Crowley's letter (which is not available online) is nothing more than a distillation of a recent report (PDF) published by the Poverty Institute at the Rhode Island College School of Social Work (and hosted on a Web site, incidentally, that is registered using a RIC address). The Poverty Institute, in turn, gets some of its key data from the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), a Washington think tank funded by a long list of progressive foundations — in conjunction with the National Education Association.

I offer this information not to cast a cloud of innuendo about broad progressive conspiracies to fleece the Rhode Island taxpayers of their money, but because it is a critical consideration when observing how the Poverty Institute research document and Crowley's letter are constructed. Point by point (from the Poverty Institute):

  • "The number of very high income Rhode Islanders is growing." This is really the credibility hook (so to speak) for the entire study, because the data comes from the IRS. As I'll show in a moment, however, the progressives' use of it is (surprise, surprise) misleading.
  • "Incomes at the top are rising rapidly." This is the jealousy-evoking component, meant to help the reader toward the conclusion that wealthy taxpayers can afford to be taxed more. It's also the component that comes directly from ITEP, using (as far as I can tell) an untraceable methodology that allows an opposite conclusion than the data used for the first point.
  • "More affluent taxpayers move to Rhode Island from Massachusetts than move from Rhode Island to Massachusetts." The Poverty Institute turns back to the IRS to bolster its point, but using data that is not easily accessible and offering little by way of actual numbers.
  • "Charitable contributions by affluent residents have been stronger in Rhode Island than in neighboring states." The last claim is also meant to bolster the more significant openers, it is also from hard-to-access IRS data, and the data is also limited, inasmuch as the Poverty Institute provides only percentage differences from year to year, without any context as to what those percentages signify.

Here's how Crowley presents the first point:

The number of very high-income Rhode Islanders is growing. Using data (that is, real numbers) from the IRS, the Poverty Institute shows that between 1997 and 2004, the number of people with incomes over $200k rose 87 percent, more than Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Of itself, the claim is true enough. The IRS processed 5,064 more RI tax returns with over $200,000 in income in 2004 than 1997. But the related increases were 46,059 tax returns in Massachusetts and 26,433 in Connecticut.





Our neighbors are larger, though, so consider that households over $200,000 accounted for 2.16% of total returns in RI, 3.53% in Massachusetts, and 4.42% in Connecticut. Over the eight years in question, an additional 0.92% of Rhode Island households entered the highest income group. Massachusetts pulled up an additional 1.44%, and Connecticut 1.47%.




Incomes at the top are rising rapidly. In 2005, the highest earning 1 percent of Rhode Island households earned $965,908, an 11.9 percent increase from 1999.

Income for the elite rich rose faster than neighboring Connecticut and Massachusetts. Elites in Connecticut had their incomes rise by 5.3 percent and in Massachusetts they actually dropped by 4.2 percent between 1999 and 2005.

As I've said, this sources directly to ITEP, not the IRS, with no public data in a form that can be analyzed. The time span switches to 1999–2005, and the group under the microscope is now the top 1%, not those over $200,000. Not having access to the data, I can't guess the reasons for these differences.

It's interesting, however, that the Poverty Institute report shows that the top 1%'s average 2005 income of $965,908 represented a $113,705 leap from 2003 and was $115,908 higher than the 1999-2003 average. Whether the sudden spike was a fluke or a trend, I guess we'll see. Although, I doubt that progressives' tax-the-rich schemes will help to make it the latter.

Whatever the case, sticking with the IRS data already on the table, one finds that the average gross income (AGI) of those in the top earning category ($200,000+) was down 5.79% in 2004 from 1997 in RI. In MA, it was up 0.52%, and in CT, it was up 3.85%.




IRS data shows that Rhode Island is attracting more affluent people. Migration data based upon state of residency on tax returns show that more people are moving from Massachusetts to Rhode Island than the reverse.

It's suspicious that this is the only claim for which the Poverty Institute provides no illustrations — as if they wish the point to be made, but not considered. I'll take the Institute at its word that "the median income of in-migrants from Massachusetts has been higher than the median income of out-migrants to Massachusetts," although as an editor, I wonder whether "has been" means "has been consistently" or "has, at times over this period, been." As an intellectually curious fellow, it strikes me as odd that we're suddenly talking "median income," and I find it particularly peculiar that the only actual numbers come from the following:

This is true despite the fact that MA reduced its top income tax rate from 5.95 to 5.3 percent in 2000-2002 while Rhode Island’s top marginal rate at the time was 9.9%.

We've got quite a jumble of years, here. As I understand it, Massachusetts then raised its top rate, while Rhode Island lowered its rates. For these reasons, I'm confident that an analysis of the raw numbers would actually support the opposite argument from that which Crowley & Co. wish to make. Back to him:

Charitable contributions from the elite have rebounded better in Rhode Island than Connecticut and Massachusetts from the post-911 recession.

Based on the analysis above (not to mention long experience), it's easy to understand why readers ought to be wary of the Poverty Institute's presentation of percentages of increase and decrease. They give no dollar-amount basis for judging. Whatever the case, the overarching point is perverted: that Rhode Island's wealthy are particularly generous and therefore must be able to afford having more of their money taken by force of law.

I suspect that the Progressive Conspiracy's sky-ain't-falling points will become narrower and narrower as data approaching 2008 becomes available. Perhaps then they'll let their stripes show and declare victory over the rich.

ADDENDUM:

I've corrected a misfire of the synapses: The latter date in all of the above charts should have been 2004 — same data, different label — so I've fixed the problem.


February 3, 2008


Re: The All-American, Union Family

Justin Katz

Legend has it that, upon Napoleon's crowning himself emperor, Beethoven tore or scratched Bonaparte's name from his Eroica Symphony manuscript in a fury. The revolutionary inspiration had been perverted, but still, many followed the general even thereafter, some perhaps out of a nostalgic faith that the principles of liberté, egalité, and fraternité would win through until the end.

Thus must all movements that have gone sour barrel on with the blessings of well-meaning, good people whose lives are heavily invested in a formative period. Our narratives are surpassingly difficult to change, like watching the colors of the world invert, and the realities are almost irreconcilable in which, for example, a union local number evokes a contemptuous snort or the vision of a childhood barbecue, with its sense of safety and security.

I didn't live consciously through this change, but at some point over the past few decades American society shifted. Old ways of ordering our families and, extending that, our communities dissipated (or, more accurately, were attacked and decimated). It's easy, for example, to imagine public-sector unions of a previous generation voting, unbidden, to increase hours or cut pay for the benefit of the community. It could be the case, although I've no specific historical evidence, that a nearly universal impression of American union members in keeping with Michael Morse's memories helped to lead our society down the public union track, despite the obvious dangers that such an ordering presents.

If those days existed, they are gone, and who's to say but that the forward march of the union machine played a role in ending them. I can describe with confidence only the reality in which I find our state now, in the present. I can only testify to my experience, as a blue-collar worker, of being dismissed, in the Us v. Them bifurcation proclaimed by unionists, as a sycophant to the Establishment and that heartless class of avaricious businessmen.

Rhode Island desperately needs the all-American families of union members to look clear-eyed at the present and to ask themselves, with as much separation from their own circumstances as they can muster, whether their organizations further the American way of life, or just the Unionized American way of life.



Michael Morse: The All-American, Union Family

Engaged Citizen

[The following first appeared on Anchor Rising as a comment to this post.]

I grew up in a union household. My father belonged to the IBEW until he was promoted and took a job in management, taking with him the morality and ethics of his union membership. I remember my uncle, Bill, proudly wearing his Teamsters cap. Uncle Ron was a Warwick cop. Brian was president of his union at Rhode Island College. We would spend summer days at their homes, surrounded by family, the American flag always flying, either on a flagpole or attached to the house, the red, white, and blue flew proudly.

Modest homes meticulously kept, hard work, and an ability to enjoy the fruits of their labor and share them with friends and family was all they wanted. Uncle Bill was a WWII vet, my father a Navy signal man during the Korean War. Brian served in the Air Force during the Viet Nam War. They lived, and live, good, honest lives, are fiercely proud of their country, and fought for the freedoms we now enjoy. Union members. Not everybody in my family, but those I remember most.

My brother, Bob, just returned from Iraq. 500 days. Another union man. Myself, a firefighter in Providence. Union. We are living in the shadow of our uncles and father, and it is my belief we have made them proud.

Some of our union leaders have let us down, just as some of our elected officials have let us down. Politics is a cutthroat business, and like it or not, everything is political. Those that have risen to the top of our ranks thrive in that arena; most of us would rather do our jobs, do them well, and live our lives. We need people in positions of power for us to do that.

Relentless media attacks have insulated the union ranks. An us-against-them attitude prevails. Gone are the days when a union worked with management in a respectful, productive atmosphere. Maybe that never existed; I don’t know. "Gold Plated Benefits, Feeding at the Public Trough, Picking Our Pockets," and on and on. "Socialists, communists, serving the weak, protecting the incompetent...," enough already.

Maybe you grew up in a different world. Judging from some commentary here, you don't have a clue about mine.

Michael Morse is a lieutenant with the Providence Fire Department and the author of Rescuing Providence.


February 2, 2008


Stepping the Taxpayer Back

Justin Katz

For some reason, the Sakonnet Times publishes different letters online and in the paper. Therefore, I can't link to a letter of mine in the current edition. By all means, pick up a copy, but here's what I wrote:

To the editor:

Tiverton School Committee Member Leonard Wright made himself the union's champion when he declared that the district "should find another way to balance the budget" than "putting [teachers] behind" — that is, seeing a decrease — when it comes to their combined salaries and healthcare in the pending contract. Moments before, he'd asked Director of Administration and Finance Douglas Fiore to calculate the effect on teachers already at step 10 of one of Superintendent William Rearick's options for keeping the district's budget balanced.

For readers not familiar with the intricacies of collectively bargained teacher contracts, the step system is essentially a guaranteed raise for the first ten years of the teacher's tenure. Every teacher moves forward a step every year, until step 10, at which point their raises are limited to increases negotiated with each contract. The trick of the strategy (some might call it a scam) is that the unions negotiate those percentages to apply to every step, so newer employees' raises include not only the step, but also the global increase.

Following the previous contract, teachers moving into steps two through nine are slated to receive raises between 5.6% and 7.3%, with those moving into step ten receiving 10.6%. That's independent of any negotiated increases. So, when you read that Mr. Rearick is proposing a raise of 2%, or that the union is demanding an increase of 3.5%, they really mean that those percentages would be added to the steps. You can do the math. The percentages don't mean the same thing as the raises most of you get from your employers. (None of this, don't forget, takes into account additional teacher pay based on education, longevity, and extra responsibilities and activities.)

When it's time to negotiate, the union puts forward its most experienced members (currently earning in the mid-sixties, as a base) and decries their meager advances. At the same time, however, it requires that every teacher in the district — newest, oldest, best, worst — benefits by the same amount. For their role as leverage, those at the top get to be the only teachers who stand to see a decrease in their take-home pay (around $1,000 less for the year) under any of Mr. Rearick's proposals, assuming they take the healthcare benefit.

If that result is unfair, the step system would seem to be the place to look for equity. After all, in 2006 (the latest year for which information is available), the union's members claimed around 55% of the district's total expenditures. In a time of tightening belts, average guaranteed raises over 6% are a bit much to demand.

As a Tiverton property owner, I've noted reports that the Town Council may increase my tax rate by as much as 12.2%. That's several hundred dollars to every homeowner in the town. Why, I wonder, does Mr. Wright think it's fair to put us behind? Oddly, I didn't hear a single school committee member suggest finding another way to balance the budget than taking the maximum allowable increase in tax revenue.


February 1, 2008


Ward: "Whether Walsh likes it or not, the party is coming to an end."

Marc Comtois

Both Justin and I mentioned NEA President Bob Walsh's rather intemperate anti-business comments last week:

"We are never going to compete with folks, with employers who are so ridiculous they do not provide retirement security plans for their employees....If they don’t, they are terrible people and they shouldn’t be allowed to exist and that’s always going to be the union position on those issues.” ~ Bob Walsh
Tom Ward, publisher of the Valley Breeze (h/t Dan Yorke), is similarly unimpressed.
If Walsh's comments are a true reflection of what small business and honest taxpayers are up against, we should all sell our businesses to others and leave. Really. Obviously, Walsh wouldn't mind if we left - or died. Saturday's story centered around Rhode Island's overly generous pension system, showing how our state pays far more to retirees than other New England states. How, for instance, a 55-year-old Rhode Island retiree with 30 years of service, having earned $57,000 per year at retirement, would receive $37,620 per year - with annual raises for life - in his retirement. The same Vermont retiree would receive $24,966. Over the normal lifetime of the two retirees, the Rhode Islander would be paid almost $1 million more than his counterpart in Vermont.

Walsh doesn't like the reform talk, and seems to harbor some lingering bitterness over the state pension reforms put in place a few years ago that already save taxpayers millions each year....

Let me explain something to you, Mr. Walsh. You only have money for the rich pensions because you and your friends in the General Assembly have been given the power to confiscate our money. You don't earn anything. You don't create any wealth. You just take what you need, and when you come up short - like now - you just try to take more. In polite company, it's called "taxation," but you and I know it's just greed.

I and my hard-working employees, on the other hand, have to go out and earn our customers' money every day. And our customers have to go out and earn their customers money every day. When we fail, we go out of business. No pension. No safety net. We don't get to confiscate anybody's money to keep our sorry boat afloat. You can - and do.

All across Rhode Island, business is suffering today. We are the wealth creators, working long hours and risking it all to run a business against all the obstacles you and your friends place in our way. If we eventually succumb to the state's jack-booted thuggery, we stop filling your wallets. Get it? We don't succeed with you. We succeed despite you.

And despite having our state leaders picking our pockets with new fees and taxes at every turn, many of us provide the 401 (k) pension plans we can afford for our employees. For that, you call us "terrible people." What a disgraceful comment, Mr. Walsh.

Ward also gives an example on par with the example I gave regarding former Providence Administrator John Simmons' pending pension.
A few years ago, Macera was Woonsocket's assistant superintendent, earning on average $103,000 per year for her final three years of service in that post. Three years ago, she was promoted to superintendent. Upon her promotion, she called for the elimination of the assistant superintendent's post, asking the School Committee to fold those duties into her own and asking for a much larger compensation. The School Committee agreed, and in the past three years, Macera earned $152,900 in year 1, $162,900 in year 2, and now earns $172,900 this year.

In Rhode Island, a pensioner like Macera, with more than 35 years service, receives 80 percent of their highest three years' pay.

Union leaders like Walsh keep complaining that we just don't understand; that pensioners have to pay into the system. In fact, he's correct and Macera and others pay 9.5 percent of their pay into the pension system.

Was it a good investment for her? You decide.

Had Macera retired as assistant superintendent three years ago with a top three-year average pay of $103,000, she would have a pension of $82,400 per year.

Instead, she took the promotion and worked for a new three-year average wage of about $163,000. Her annual pension now? $130,320. For those of you without a nearby calculator, that's $2,506 per week. Oh yeah, she gets a 3 percent raise (about $75 per week) every year, too.

If you do the math, you'll learn that as superintendent Macera paid an extra $17,100 into the state pension system in her final three years. Her return? An extra $48,000 per year in her pension. She'll have all her money back in four months. Should she live 20 years she'll take away more than one million extra dollars for her $17,000 investment.


January 25, 2008


Redefining Corporate Welfare

Marc Comtois

Ian Donnis points to a "strong post" (alluded to earlier) which illustrates how approximately $11.2 million of taxpayer dollars are going to government supplied health care for workers who don't get health care through their jobs.

Where is that money going, you might ask….

It is going to Bank of America, and their 382 employees on RIte Care / Rite Share/ or Medicaid. It is going to the 610 employees of Citizens Bank that are getting our taxes. It is only 310 folks at CVS (plastic bag, anyone) but 500 Wal Mart employees are paid for by the State. In total more than 4,000 workers for these corporations get us to pay for the health insurance. That, my dear reader, is corporate welfare.

First, a correction. The numbers above are taken from the Public Health Access Beneficiary Report and are equal to the combined total of employees + dependents covered by RIte Care / Rite Share / Medicaid, not just the employees as was claimed. In reality, the numbers of employees of Bank of America, Citizens Bank, CVS and Wal Mart that qualify for the aforementioned programs are, respectively, 112, 179, 86 and 140 (not 382, 610, 310 and 500).

Regardless of all that, underlying the charge is the false premise that companies should be obligated to provide all employees (including part time and temporary workers) health care. Last time I checked, there is no such law or rule. So companies aren't shirking their responsibilities--and taking "corporate welfare" from the government--if they never made the promise in the first place.

Additionally, as the Health Insurance Commissioner Christopher F. Koller explained in his overview of the 2005 Rhode Island Employer Survey Report (both referenced in the Public Health Access Beneficiary Report):

Faced with annual double digit premium increases, small employers are being forced to decide between increasing cost sharing with employees, dropping health benefits altogether, or taking a hit to core business performance. Employees are forced to decide between the risks of going uninsured or sharing in the rising costs.
Thus, even if employers had offered generous health care benefits in the past, the economics have changed and adjustments had to be made so that companies could remain competitive. (Something the public sector seems to have a hard time grasping, incidentally). This includes reducing their ability to subsidize employee health care plans (or offer defined benefit pension plans for that matter). So long as we continue to rely on an employer-centered health care system, that is the way it will continue to be. Such reductions don't mean employers are shirking their responsibilities. Often times it's just the opposite: they're trying to remain competitive and continue to employ people.



Presumptive Contempt

Marc Comtois
We are never going to compete with folks, with employers who are so ridiculous they do not provide retirement security plans for their employees....If they don’t, they are terrible people and they shouldn’t be allowed to exist and that’s always going to be the union position on those issues.” ~ Bob Walsh

I wonder if [Helen Glover] knows, or if the Governor knows, how much we taxpayers give corporations to insure their workers since they are too cheap to do it themselves. ~ Pat Crowley

Charming.

Taken together, the statements by both Walsh and Crowley illustrate two things: 1) Their fundamental presumption that all employers owe their full-, part-, and temporary employees not just a salary, but also a defined benefit pension and full health-care coverage; 2) Their contempt (and ignorance) of the realities of private sector business. Of course, implicit in these charges is the notion that "if only all employees were unionized, it would all be better...." Well, until reality (and the free market) interrupted the good life in Labortopia.


January 24, 2008


Spin in Ink

Justin Katz

The National Education Association couldn't have asked for better coverage of the Tiverton School Committee meeting on Tuesday from the Providence Journal's Gina Macris if the union had paid for it:

Amid the continuing rancor over an unsettled teachers’ contract, School Committee member Leonard Wright injected a conciliatory tone.

The town has high-performing schools and high-performing teachers, he said,

"I don't think we should put them in the position of putting them behind" financially, Wright said.

"We should find another way to balance the budget," he said.

In the end, the rest of the committee took his advice — to the extent that it put off making any decisions that would ask teachers to take a cut in pay during the next school year.

After the meeting, Amy Mullen, president of the teachers' union, said she applauded Wright for quickly realizing that teachers would end up with a pay cut and "stating that it wasn't fair." ...

Schools Supt. William J. Rearick presented the committee with three scenarios for next year's budget that pit salaries against rising out-of-pocket premiums for health care, with teachers ending up in the red. ...

Wright said one of Rearick's options would give teachers an added $1,300 in salary — a raise of about 2 percent for those with the most experience — but make them pay $3,500 toward the cost of a family health insurance plan.

That figure, more than triple the $1,100 teachers now pay for family health care, represents about 25 percent of the total cost of a family premium.

The tell-tale phrase is "those with the most experience" — as opposed to, for example, "those who have been with the district longest." "Experience" makes it sound almost like a gauge of merit. More significant, though, is that the phrase allows Macris to avoid entirely her responsibility to explain the step system to her readers. Note that she actually flips the calculation so that the raise is $1,300, or "about 2 percent," when in fact it is the two percent that is given.

The math that Macris lays out is for teachers at step 10, which is the top step, relying entirely on the percent salary adjustments with each contract for raises. Teachers at every other step would receive the two percent on top of whatever percentage increase the step calls for. So, for Rearick's "Option 3," which is the one on which Wright and Macris focused, and his "Option 1," for which there is no salary increase, but only a 15% co-pay, the numbers would fall out as follows for teachers who take the family plan health insurance (with the "net change" as the dollar amount for teachers entering that step, including healthcare copay adjustment):

Option 3 Option 1
Step 2006–2007
Salary
2007–2008
Salary

Net Change

Net Change
1 35,484 36,194 NA NA
2 38,077 38,839 -145 493
3 40,672 41,485.44 -92 495
4 43,415 44,283 111 643
5 46,255 47,180 265 740
6 49,177 50,161 406 822
7 51,974 53,013 336 697
8 54,860 55,957 483 786
9 58,041 59,202 842 1,081
10 64,205 65,489 3,948 4,064
Above 64,205 65,489 -2,216 -2,100

In summary, it is not at all accurate for Macris to offer her numbers as if they apply to teachers as a whole. Indeed, under no scenario do any teachers who do not take the health insurance suffer a "pay cut," and the fact that Option 1 is better for teachers across the board, if they take health insurance, indicates that a not-insignificant number must not take it. (Otherwise, the options wouldn't be interchangeable from the administration's point of view.)

To be honest, it strikes me as indicative of the intellectual habits of those who are used to the bottomless pit of public revenue to calculate healthcare as part of the salary in this way, because it assumes that teachers oughtn't bear some burden of increasing costs, leaving it all to the taxpayers to eat the increase. That aside, it's quite a negotiating scam to position the "most experienced" teachers such that, for them to get raises, everybody else must, as well.


January 20, 2008


The Voices on Either Side

Justin Katz

Tiverton School Committee member Jan Bergandy has an excellent letter (which is unfortunately not online) in the current Sakonnet Times:

The bird-flipping spiritual leader of the NEA has not been seen in town recently but I would not be surprised if his teachings inspired the followers. This is what happens when you do not have a mind of your own. You find yourself in a place where you do not want to be and you do not know how you got there. We teach this to kids and teachers cannot get it. This would not happen if you did not lose the compass of professional ethics. For teachers the single most important rule is: "If it can harm a student — do not do it!"

Well, who am I to give advice — just a parent, taxpayer, and a teacher of 30 years. How can my humble voice compete with the great wisdom of 13 "negotiation tactics" published by your spiritual leader, the tactics faithfully followed by the worshiping masses of Tiverton teachers? But for whatever it is worth, here is my advice:

  1. Break our hearts doing for the kids more than you have ever done before (some teachers are doing just that) instead of telling us what you are not going to do for them.
  2. Lead, encourage, and inspire young teachers instead of forcing them to "work-to-rule" or making them do your dirty work (publishing the letter).
  3. Serve as role models for our kids and inspire them by your actions instead of breaking the law by going on strike, making obscene gestures during your demonstrations, planning to picket the hospital, and at your "greatest" attacking a parent using her child as a hostage.
  4. Teach the kids by example how to behave rationally. Look at the numbers (financial data) before you lead 200 intelligent people to war with their proven allies (Tiverton citizens, superintendent, and school committee) for something that does not exist (money beyond what was offered) using a strategy that can lead to your self-destruction.
  5. Your spiritual leader, just before "flipping the bird," had the moment of his greatest inspiration. He was heard exclaiming "People (addressing the demonstrating teachers) help me. I am running out of options here!" It is a pity you did not hear him. Maybe he forgot to use his magic horn. After this he left to bless other communities of Rhode Island with his teachings.

    As parents we will never forget the great things some of you are doing for our children. But let there be no mistake, as parents and taxpayers we will also never forget the harm you may try to do to even one of our children. This community should stand united to condemn the despicable actions of a group of teachers who planned and executed an attack on a parent using her child as a pawn. Every child in Tiverton is special and every child in this town is our child! Yes, Ms. Mullen, no matter how much damage control you will do in the press there will be no bargaining even one child for a contract!

The one thing that Mr. Bergandy fails to acknowledge, considering his advice, is that, were the teachers to follow it, they'd have no use for a union. If the union can't get them money beyond what is offered, what good is it? Our awashedness in Democrat shibboleths notwithstanding, it's about time we stopped pussyfooting around this reality.

Tiverton Town Council member Brian Medeiros insisted, while proposing another resolution to support the school committee, that his action "is not in any way anti-teacher or anti-union," but on the latter count, it should be. Have we no trust in ourselves to treat teachers fairly if there are no bullhorn-wielding and politically powerful thugs behind them?

Let's take this ordeal as an opportunity for self-edification. Tiverton NEA President Amy Mullen explained the following to the Providence Journal:

Because of the committee's adverse reaction to [bird-flipping Assistant Executive Director Patrick] Crowley, however, Mullen said that the Tiverton union has distanced itself from him.

"The School Committee reactions and feelings toward Mr. Crowley made it very difficult for us to get anywhere" in negotiations, she said.

The presence of Mr. Crowley on the scene was only an outward manifestation of the illness within — infecting the entire state. Teaching should not be a unionized profession, because union goals, practices, and priorities are anathematic to those of education.


January 14, 2008


Differences of What's on the Table

Justin Katz

Clarity on meaning is going to be absolutely crucial as competing visions are put forward to solve Rhode Island's ills, and one pair of concepts that may have confusing overlaps in education policy is "statewide funding formula" versus a "statewide teacher contract."

The former phrase, as came out in my discussion yesterday with Representative Joe Amaral (R, Tiverton/Portsmouth) refers to an equation whereby the state provides a predictable amount of money to districts based on set criteria. Such a formula could be devised fairly or unfairly, depending on how carefully the criteria are termed in order to benefit certain districts (such as Providence) according to a priori demands and on whether the formula makes unfunded mandates from the state less tenable.

The latter phrase appears to be the wishlist approach of officials in East Providence:

The school district has been running with a deficit for the last six years. The highest amount was over $2.7 million in 2004, but since then it has been reduced to as little as $1.3 million in 2006.

It's back up again and school and city officials said this week that it will take multiple measures to rid the nearly $3.3-million deficit that will be a reality at the end of this fiscal year.

At a joint meeting Monday, the City Council and School Committee brainstormed a slew of cost-saving possibilities. They included reducing the state's 36 school districts to five regional operations; privatization of some schools; selling or leasing the school administration building on Burnside Avenue; and pushing the General Assembly for relief and a statewide teacher contract.

Whether the state steps in to unify the districts or "just" to negotiate teacher remuneration via a single contract from border to border, the result would likely be catastrophic. All that such centralization would accomplish would be pulling the tax-draining practices of the education establishment (including the unions) further away from the voters and probably adding a few more layers of obscurity on the question of who should be held accountable for excesses.

My own preference would be for the state to act as little more than an escrow holder paying out tax funds to parents' chosen schools. Until such a system becomes politically feasible, though, state disbursement of education funds ought to be as straightforward and evenly distributed as possible, with no demands that aren't inherently tied to funds.



When Evidence of Need Doesn't Matter

Justin Katz

"We teach our children every day not to accept the easy answers but to get all the information they need before they make a decision," writes NEA-Tiverton President (and teacher) Amy Mullen in a letter to the Sakonnet Times (which is not online). What follows that opener is, not surprisingly, another iteration of the union's talking points.

Mullen does, however, inadvertently point toward an interesting comparison that the school system's union mindset tends to obscure:

I received a tongue-in-cheek 13 tactics of the Tiverton School Committee which focused around the committee refusing to listen or do the job they were elected to do. Teachers see the realities of this every day. Just look at the lack of substitutes. We don't pay them enough so they go elsewhere. So now some classes go unsupervised, some are sent to study hall, some are covered by the principal, others are covered by teachers during their instructional planning time. What do we have to do to attract good subs? Well soon we will be saying that about our teachers.

One could note, of course, that classroom teachers are the largest line item within any given town's largest expense category (education), that substitutes' role is to relieve some of the pressure on teachers to be in the classroom come hell or high water, and therefore that money for substitutes would logically come from their oversized wedge of the pie. A way in which some districts have sought to attract subs is to free them from the discomforts of awaiting the 6:00 a.m. wake-up call, before which they've no idea whether they're working, by hiring them as full-time employees, often on a track to become full teachers themselves. Given budget constraints in Tiverton, of course, that option would probably require the loss of a position or two in some other area.

What's most interesting about Ms. Mullen's look down her dark slope, though, is the marker by which we realize that we've got a problem when it comes to substitutes and financing of them: we don't have enough of them to fill the demand. Mullen would like her readers to apply the sub-shortage principle to teachers, but there is no shortage of them. Rhode Island's public schools are not struggling to find professionals to take charge of their classrooms. And that indicates that there is room to lower their employment packages — salaries, benefits, perks.

I do see a parallel between subs and teachers, although not one that Mullen would like for many people to consider: The pool of substitutes has generally been treated as a collection of volunteers and next-step-up interns, when really what districts ought to do is to treat them as professionals (perhaps with some number of the old style on reserve). The pay wouldn't have to be much better, I don't think; it's the opportunity and the career track that matter.

Treating teachers as actual, individualized professionals, which would require the end of collective bargaining, might just lower their cost to tax payers and, counterintuitive as it may be, increase their quality.


January 8, 2008


Back to Normalcy (Or Is It New?)

Justin Katz

I'm not going to lie to you; solely in consideration of entertainment, I miss seeing Pat Crowley at the Tiverton School Committee meetings. He gives off the aura of a TV villain, and drama requires such characters.

But for the school system, for the town, and even for the teachers, the quiet, respectful atmosphere of the audience, tonight, is undoubtedly a good thing. NEA-Tiverton President Amy Mullen has a freestanding sign (which I cannot read from my seat) sitting in the third row, but other than that, things are quiet.

I'm very curious what discussion has gone on beind closed union-hall and teacher-lounge doors. I also kinda wonder whether I give off the aura of a villain. (Surely my major-key theme music is audible.)


January 5, 2008


We Might Have to Start Another Evidence Box

Justin Katz

Maybe we can plug the state deficit with Ethics Commission fines:

The Ethics Commission voted yesterday to prosecute state senator and union official Frank Ciccone on two charges, but dropped five other charges that his votes in the General Assembly amounted to ethics violations because they benefited unions he works for.

The decision means that in at least some circumstances, union officials who are members of the General Assembly can support legislation that benefits their unions. But commission Chairman James Lynch Sr. said that "this is not a blanket endorsement" for similar actions, and that the commission will deal with future cases one at a time.

The two charges the commission voted to prosecute relate to Ciccone's failure to publicly disclose his income from the Rhode Island Laborers' District Council of the Laborers International Union of North America — where he is president and a field representative and the union's Local Union 808, where he is business manager — for 2005 and 2006.

The Senator claims that it was a "mistake." You know, sort of like just happening to wind up with a half-billion dollar (and climbing) budget shortfall.



On the Immorality of Unions (Public or Private)

Justin Katz

Here's how even private-sector unions "negotiate":

A carpenters union that has been shut out of a $34-million renovation project at the Hyatt Regency Newport Hotel and Spa picketed yesterday at the Goat Island causeway, accusing the hotel of improperly removing mold.

Representatives of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters, Local 1305, passed out leaflets stating that "mold is not being remediated in specification laid out in federal guidelines." A photograph on the leaflet purports to show mold on a wall being refurbished.

"Makes you wonder what your room looks like under that wallpaper," it read, adding, "Where a room with a view offers much more than an ocean view and a salty breeze."

The hotel yesterday called the allegations untrue and questioned the union's motives.

The union's motives are clear: to send the message that companies must hire union or face attacks on their business. Imagine if a private company that lost a bidding contest behaved in the same manner.


January 4, 2008


Benefit/Cost Disconnect

Justin Katz

Marc offered the substantive commentary yesterday, so all I've got in response to bad news about Rhode Island's high schools is a quip (emphasis added):

But proficiency rates among students statewide are stagnant. Despite an aggressive statewide high school reform effort, test scores of high school juniors have remained flat for the past several years, with about 53 percent scoring proficient or better on the English portion of the test and 43 percent scoring proficient or better in math.

And yet the teachers continue to demand annual raises, on top of annual step increases. Personally, I'd be embarrassed to demand more money if I couldn't show improvement. Before anybody doubles down on the good work of individual teachers, let me remind y'all that the teachers have chosen to negotiate as a group. So thus must their performance be judged.


January 2, 2008


Cogs Aren't Usually Inspired

Justin Katz

Julia Steiny has a good column explaining one area in which the union model is a poor fit for teachers (the best parts aren't quoted):

Traditional "defined benefit" pensions motivate some teachers to become deadwood. Teachers who have lost their appetite for the work must continue to put in their time, however half-heartedly, to qualify for retirement benefits that are far more valuable than most private-sector employees get.

In general, one of the biggest problems in public education is that the field is rife with badly designed policies that motivate the wrong behavior. Pensions are only one example. ...

... not only are the pensions themselves unsustainably expensive, they can also richly reward poor service. ...

Labor-market pundits tell us that most people these days not only change jobs, but even careers several times during their lifetime. “Defined benefit” pensions presume a lifetime of employment in the same field, in the same state. There is no way of getting the full benefit of the pension unless you stay for the full haul.

If a teacher goes into a different line of work, or even moves to a cooler school in a different state, she loses all or most of her investment in her future. Big disincentive.

The essence of the thing is that the union approach — across the board — is designed for employees who are essentially machines in the workplace. Low skilled. Replaceable. Perhaps tough work, but no real leverage in the company.

That certainly oughtn't describe teachers, who should be encouraged to find ways to remain intellectually engaged, interested, and enthusiastic. Sometimes that'll require some experimentation — risks, even. (Gasp! Did I say "risks"?)

The NEA's local brain, Bob Walsh, will declare that his organization's goal is "a high-quality teacher in every classroom," but by their nature, unions aren't built to enhance the individualism and creativity that teaching ought to require. In the union frame of mind, "high quality" is indistinguishable from "competent," and neither comes near "inspired," except by accident, which is a contingency that pensions, bumping, seniority, and white-knuckled job security increasingly prevent.



A Story of Heartbreak and a Good Financial Decision

Justin Katz

Not to make light of others' hardships (even if those hardships are relative), but this line from Local 1033's "business manager," Donald Iannazzi, on the layoffs of his walking-guard clients truly deserves highlighting:

"Here we have 18 people from working-class families who are members of the Warwick community," he said. "They care about our kids, the neighborhoods and their city. They're heartbroken right now.

"We know that if we can get the city back to the bargaining table we can put together something that's fair for our union and for the city as well."

If they're heartbroken over the loss of their roles in the community, then I'm sure the city would be willing to hire them back at the new terms. If they're heartbroken at the loss of their golden egg, well, as understandable as that might be, I'm sure there are plenty of regular Rhode Islanders (or, more pointedly, ex–Rhode Islanders) who'd be willing to compare sob stories.


December 28, 2007


Light on the Spin

Justin Katz

The paper didn't put it online, but my response to a recent letter to the editor by the NEA's Pat Crowley is in the current edition of the Sakonnet Times. I just hope that I've done a little something to help clarity and truth foil the union's plans.


December 24, 2007


Evidence of a United Strategy?

Justin Katz

Boy does this sound familiar:

"There is a process called negotiation by which issues get resolved," James P. Dwyer III, a teacher, wrote in a Nov. 29 e-mail to School Committee member Stephen A. DeCastro. It was titled, Democratic Society. DeCastro read it at the committee's meeting last Tuesday. He read his two-page response aloud as well. "Unfortunately, you have chosen to violate this with the proposal and vote at the Nov. 13 School Committee meeting. ... The place to discuss contract changes is at the bargaining table."

The contract for the local teachers union — the largest union representing the city’s school staff — doesn’t expire until October 2008, but it agreed to meet early to help the district with its "financial difficulties." Dwyer said the union's negotiating team offered proposals that would have saved the department "a significant amount of money," but they were refused.

"One must question to what degree the School Committee really wants to foster trust and positive working relations with the professional staff within the East Providence schools," Dwyer wrote. "Especially after the [health care change] vote was taken against the advice of legal counsel! I am appalled by the lack of thoughtfulness and disregard for the professional staff in our School Department."

Who'd have thought that multiple municipalities would elect school committees that would rebuff unions' brilliant and well-intentioned plans to save taxpayers money? It's almost as if the unions are making proposals that they know will be rejected so they can then put fliers in local newspapers (as the Tiverton-NEA has been doing) decrying the school committees' poor financial sense.


December 21, 2007


Giving the Axe [sic] to the Finger

Justin Katz

Seemingly to change the topic after the NEA's many missteps in Tiverton (including the widely distributed image of his own middle finger to the townspeople), NEA Assistant Executive Director Patrick Crowley adds insult to injury by attempting to sell Sakonnet Times readers a portrait of deception. His letter in yesterday's edition ends with a statement that "people with a political axe to grind" should not "get away with distortions of the facts," and I agree so wholeheartedly that I cannot do otherwise than note his own.

He starts with a comparison of the 19.9% national inflation from 2000 to 2006 with the concurrent 19.8% increase in RI "instructional expenditures," which includes instructional teachers, substitutes, instructional paraprofessionals, pupil use technology, and instructional materials and trips. Here, high school English teachers have an opportunity to quiz their students concerning the reason that Mr. Crowley would include technology, materials, and trips in data for his argument that teacher salaries and benefits are not "driv[ing] the acceleration of education costs in Rhode Island."

Any student who answers that the union executive is hiding something gets a star: The increase in the teachers subcategory by itself was 28.1% (both in total and per pupil). The combined expenditures for technology, materials, and trips actually fell 3.3%, while teachers' percentage of the instructional category climbed from 84.5% to 90.4%.

Crowley proceeds to jump from statistical category to statistical category in order to paint an impressionistic picture of exploding costs beyond the union's scope and only modest increases within. Sticking with ridoe.org's IN$ITE data, however, the paint evaporates right off his canvas. As a percentage of total expenditures, leadership and operations have both dropped over the time period in question. Meanwhile, the increases in the share of the pie claimed by "other commitments" and instructional support includes (among other things) a 25.5% increase for guidance and counseling (with professionals very visible in recent union activities), a 113.2% increase for retiree benefits, a 144.1% increase for teacher support (mentoring programs, trainers, aids, graders, etc.), a 155.5% increase for therapists, psychologists, et al (e.g., for special education), and a 171% increase for teacher sabbaticals.

It is important to remember, when reviewing these percentages, that no other subcategory comes anywhere near the expenditures on teachers. The second largest expenditure in education is building upkeep, utilities, et al, at 7.7% of the total. Instructional teachers, by contrast, account for 47.1% of the total.

One must give credit to Crowley for providing (most of) his sources. It takes some guts to give others the tools to prove that you're attempting to deceive them. Of course, it also takes an arrogant belief that residents of the East Bay area are too lazy or stupid to do so.

It would seem that Mr. Crowley hasn't changed the topic at all.


December 20, 2007


Whoda Thunk? A Double-dipping Union Hack

Marc Comtois

Surprised?

Providence Fire Union president Paul Doughty has not come to work for much of the last three years, staffing what Chief George Farrell said appeared to be a no-show position in the department’s training division instead of working a fire truck.

At the same time, Doughty was making extra cash working overtime shifts to fill the vacancy created when he left his job on a special hazards truck, according to a Journal analysis of department records; Farrell said that amounted to double-billing the city.

Perhaps the most illustrative aspect of the whole story is the "that's the way it's always been done" attitude of both Doughty and past union president Stephen Day. Guess what guys, business as usual ain't gonna cut it this time.
Doughty asserts that he has done nothing wrong: he acknowledges that he did not come to work for almost three years, but said he had been authorized to work full-time on union business by Farrell’s predecessor as chief, David Costa. He said that previous union presidents — including Farrell — have been allowed to do union business full-time. The union contract allows the president to take time off for union business, but it does not specify how much.

***
Doughty said that he was not double-billing by working overtime shifts. Once he was assigned to the Division of Training, he said, it was irrelevant where he served previously.

“I know it doesn’t sound good, but no matter where I go, because of the way minimum manning is structured, either they’re paying me or they’re paying someone else,” he said. “But at the end of the day, it’s not my spot … for 17 years it’s been my spot, but for those three years or whatever, it wasn’t my spot.”

***
All agree that Doughty’s predecessor as union president, David Peters, worked on a truck at least 20 hours weekly. Peters served the union between Farrell and Doughty, from 2002 to 2004.

But Stephen T. Day, fire union president from 1988 to 1996, said that he was allowed to work on union business full-time, and that he, too, worked overtime shifts on his former truck.

Day said that past practice proves that Doughty’s actions are proper.

“This is a smokescreen issue, this is retaliation for Paul Doughty speaking up to defend his members,” Day said.

To Farrell, that’s ridiculous. He said that had The Journal not started asking questions, he would have handled this internally — to have it come out in public just makes his department look bad.

You got that right, Chief. And it confirms all of the worst suspicions the public has.


December 17, 2007


Next Time, I Won't Be Pre-Outraged

Justin Katz

Seemingly because of Bobby Oliveira's attempts to talk some sense into the NEA's Pat Crowley (I know!), the Tiverton teachers' union moved its planned picket from the hospital at which School Committee Chairwoman Denise DeMedeiros works to the superintendent's office.

Maybe next time, we on the other side shouldn't forecast our outrage so explicitly. So let me just say, in advance, that I think burning effigies of the school committee on the football field would be very tasteful. Effective, too.

ADDENDUM:

Here's a thought: If Crowley truly wants to advance the negotiations, rather than play the role of hardcore unionist, he could fall on his sword as the bad cop. Alternately, the teachers could give him a push.

That would send a clear message that the union is more interested in coming to an equitable resolution, rather than flexing its muscles in a bear hug.



The Price of Public Service Goes Up

Justin Katz

Newport Superior Court Judge Vincent Ragosta has rebuffed the Tiverton School Committee's attempt to "block the teachers' union from picketing on Monday [this afternoon] at the workplace of the committee chairwoman, St. Anne's Hospital in Fall River." Anybody considering elected office in Tiverton with the intention of upholding citizens' interests against the unions — or at least the teacher's union — should be on notice that their places of business are now considered open game by so-called professionals who believe they've a positive right to pay raises beyond the private-sector norm.

Personally, that would be a plus, if I had any inclination at all to eschew my journalistic objectivity and run for office. (Yes, yes, tongue in cheek.) I'd love to have the union visit me on the jobsite. Right now, for example, we're installing rafters, and it'd be nice to have somewhere to throw all of the snow on the second floor deck. In warmer weather, I could find it necessary to do such things as run a few hundred lineal feet of pressure-treated lumber through the table saw upwind from the picket lines.

I'm not, of course, saying that I think the union thugs' First Amendment rights ought to be curtailed. But I do hope that citizens will take note of the fact that the intimidational picketing is scheduled for 2:00 p.m. — a reminder that the hard-working educators somehow have the ability to do their street-walking at a time when counterprotests are sure to be hindered by regular folks' need to earn a living. I heard one Tiverton resident mention to WPRO's Matt Allen on Saturday that he'll be outside St. Anne's opposing the teachers, and I can only hope that he won't be alone.

ADDENDUM:

As a follow up to my notes from the last school committee meeting, I'd like to mention that, according to a print-edition Providence Journal article, the union member who was surprised that the school committee could find the money to move some children out of an overcrowded and antiquated school building into a temporary classroom was high school guidance counselor Lynn Nicholson.

What is it with the Tiverton school system guidance department, I wonder?


December 13, 2007


Teachers Shouldn't Be Bullies

Justin Katz

This is a plea to the teachers of Tiverton: Please step back for a moment and consider the depths to which your union is bringing you:

Tiverton teachers plan to picket the workplace of School Committee Chairwoman Denise deMedeiros on Monday afternoon and have notified the president of St. Anne’s Hospital in Fall River, Mass., where deMedeiros works as a nurse, that she is the target of their informational demonstration.

DeMedeiros said she learned of the intended action Monday after the hospital president, Robert E. Guyon Jr., received a letter from Patrick Crowley, assistant executive director of the National Education Association-Rhode Island, notifying him of the plan. ...

Other School Committee members may be the target of informational picketing in the future, [NEA-Tiverton President Amy] Mullen said.

I'll even make a plea to NEARI head Bob Walsh: Please rein in your attack dog. You're poisoning our community.

Whether it's The Finger's brainchild or not, the tactic isn't "informational." It's intimidational picketing. People who see the protest won't know (or care) that it has to do with a school, let alone one in another state. People who read about it in the news will merely say, "Huh. Another teacher protest."

This is all about putting negotiating heat on an elected official of the town by creating difficulties in her workplace. It's a new low, reached for the reason that a unionized group — with members already well remunerated — wants to squeeze more blood from the taxpayer stone.

The union has crossed the line. Which is something that (in another sense) teachers should begin to do. I wish I weren't facing such dark financial circumstances, myself, or I'd take some time off to counterprotest with a sign reading:

Teachers Shouldn't Be Bullies

If they persisted campaigning in this manner, I'd stand outside a different school each morning and afternoon to yell:

Teachers Shouldn't Be Bullies

If I didn't need my vehicle for work, I'd park it in front of the schools with a sign in the window, so parents, students, and neighbors could read that:

Teachers Shouldn't Be Bullies

The unionists and teachers have worked it into their job-lives to organize and to protest. To picket and to scheme. So they're in a position to take advantage of the fact that part-time, small-town officials must have outside lives by which to survive, which makes them vulnerable to attack. And the citizens must work regular hours, which makes them dispersed and weak.

Such are the hallmarks of bullies, which teachers shouldn't be.


December 11, 2007


Protest Under Cover

Justin Katz

Not a group to let some rain disrupt their protest, the teachers stood at their seats in the auditorium before tonight's Tiverton School Committee meeting:

teachersstand.jpg

My habitual area for sitting is occupied, so I thought it best to hide in back. (That, and I'm afraid that Pat Crowley might be in the audience and offend me with hand gestures.)

ADDENDUM:

I should note that, from my more discreet vantage point, I can see one teacher who appears to be using this time to correct papers. I'm not sure what the unionistas would say about that, but as a parent, I find it encouraging. (Although, when one considers that she appears to be the only one...)


December 7, 2007


Here's a Question

Justin Katz

Will Ricci makes an interesting comment to my post on Mr. Crowley's self expression:

... I think it's a golden opportunity for those of us who are actually concerned about our state's below average educational quality to show what the other side (those who don't care if kids fail, as long as their check clears) really thinks about taxpayers and the children they use as pawns. He can be our new poster boy / duck!

Those few prime billboards on I-95 outside Providence run just under $10,000 for a month. Bus stops and other billboards are much less. How much would Anchor Rising readers be willing to throw in to make sure that Mr. Crowley's message to Tivertonians is conveyed to all Rhode Islanders?

And perhaps more importantly: Any of our lawyer readers have a notion of whose permission we would need to use the photo for such a purpose?



NEA to Residents of Tiverton:

Justin Katz

Not one to shoot ducks in a barrel, I've resisted the urge to post this photo, but NEA-Tiverton President Amy Mullen's reaction in the Sakonnet Times suggests that more should be made of it:

Amy Mullen, a special education resource teacher at Pocasset Elementary School, treasurer of the National Education Association Rhode Island and president of the Tiverton branch, described Mr. Crowley's action as an "unfortunate incident" the NEA-Tiverton does not support.

"It is regretful communication has deteriorated to this level. We have been going through very difficult and very frustrating attempts at negotiating with the school committee. When First Amendment rights are violated, things can get heated," Ms. Mullen said. "It is unfortunate that Mr. Rearick chose to use the media to address this situation when there were other options available to him."

Note the linguistic distance and the spin back to the school committee. Shameful.

This wasn't an "unfortunate incident"; it was a deliberate statement, made out of either profane calculation or an adolescent lack of control. In a sane system — a professional one — the teachers would be requesting a new rep from the union and telling any reporter who would listen that they absolutely don't want Crowley to be seen as representative of them.

Sadly, as I've been finding, the teachers don't appear to be unwilling pawns in the union's games. One gets the impression that the "unfortunate" part of the "incident" was that somebody had a digital camera handy.

ADDENDUM:

For the sake of clarity: Ms. Mullen's reference to First Amendment rights probably has to do with two teachers' suspension (with pay, of course) for publishing an anonymous letter in local union newsletter attacking (and making allegations about) individual school committee members. The photo of Crowley was taken at the protest related to that matter.

(I apologize for any confusion. My "to post" pile has been growing in proportion to my too-heavy schedule, and this story is in it.)

ADDENDUM II:

For the record, I first saw this picture on Dan Yorke's exhibits page about a week ago. Inner turmoil kept me from pointing it out until today.


November 22, 2007


A Curious (Un)Dynamic

Justin Katz

I suppose the truth of the following depends on the measure by which one gauges "control":

"There is no plan to subcontract people out of these jobs. It hasn't been studied. It's just kind of like shooting from the hip to justify those cuts," said Richard Ferruccio, president of the prison guards' union. "It's not about being cost effective, it's about control. They have more control over the outside vendors than the state worker."

If one is merely talking about the power to hire and fire, then contract workers allow more control, but it seems to me that Ferrucio's union mentality misses the fact that there's a freedom to being an independent contractor — and, more importantly, that freedom is in general a good thing.

In a healthy employment environment, the employer can allocate his workers to various roles as necessary and merited. He has a stronger hand in determining feasible salaries and benefits. Therefore (as one sees in plentiful evidence in the construction field), subcontracting can be an attractive option, allowing the worker to set his own wages and determine exactly what work he wishes to do. Of course, there are plenty of advantages to being a regular worker, from consistency to the capability of long-term growth.

In Rhode Island's public sector, however, union demands (and the pliant politicians who requite them) have — as Ferruccio admits — diminished the employer's control of regular workers to the extent that the state is being driven out of businesses, so to speak. The unions, in effect, are subcontracting companies that can't be fired.


November 13, 2007


A School Committee Meeting as It Should Be (Without Crowley)

Justin Katz

Tonight's Tiverton School Committee meeting gave a taste of how things might operate in a union-free school district: a quiet and respectful audience; parents and teachers making reports and suggestions as if giving testimony as concerned and/or informed parties; a general feel of give and take. In other words, there wasn't the sense that a lynching atmosphere was building over relatively small negotiation items for the packages of well-paid professionals.

As always, I wish more parents and citizens would make a point of attending these things. Witnessing the meetings at their worst, and contrasting them at their best, is extremely edifying.


November 8, 2007


Tiverton School Committee Teaches Union How to Release Spreadsheets

Justin Katz

A while back, the NEA's Patrick Crowley released a highly spun spreadsheet related to union and school committee healthcare proposals in Tiverton. It left me with more questions and concerns than I initially had. Recently, I asked the school committee whether they'd publish an itemized budget, as the town council does, and although it might not be a direct response to that request or not, a spreadsheet is now available, illustrating what it means to feed a public hunger for information:

In light of the recent teacher's contract negotiations the Tiverton School Committee feels obligated to provide the residents of Tiverton with the data it is using to project departmental expenditures for FY09 and FY10. We have compiled a summary of financial information that we have been using to make decisions during contract negotiations. It is our hope that by sharing this information with the residents of Tiverton, you will better understand our position and the challenges that we will be facing.

Now the union can publicly explain why particular items are incorrect or irrelevant, what's included and shouldn't be, or what's missing. Otherwise, I'd like to know the union's justification for demanding percentage increases when the 2010 projection is for a $130,739 shortfall, even as the cost of accumulated step increases will cost the town an additional $304,464 that year compared with 2008.


October 26, 2007


The Difference Between Professional Advocacy and Unionism

Justin Katz

In the comments to a previous post, Brendan writes (beginning by quoting me):

I simply don't believe that communities would begrudge them ample provisions, remuneration, and benefits no matter their employment structure.

Entirely too trusting Justin. Look at West Warwick and Johnston- running two men per truck when NFPA calls for 4. Look at Providence- Captains with 20 years in making less than a first-day recruit in Warwick.

Whatever government can get away with, they'll do it. Same goes for privatization. I've been inside the trucks of every private ambulance company in this state- NONE of them have the equipment necessary to effectively respond to 911 calls, because in Rhode Island they aren't REQUIRED to.

Private companies running EMS works in other states because the minimum equipment standards are different. That is to say, far higher.

It would be entirely appropriate for emergency professionals to organize in order to advocate for changes that will improve their operations. If Rhode Island's ambulances are ill equipped, then a guild — which could, let's not overlook, include regular ol' interested citizens — could surely make strides in changing the law. If firefighters lack safety equipment, then attempts to increase public understanding and pressure for political and administrative change is justified.

It is when personal profit enters into the equation that the tendency for corruption begins to sift into the group. That is also, not unrelatedly, when interested outsiders are locked beyond a wall of mutual self-interest. It begins to be less assumable that the interests of those being served are of primary focus.


October 10, 2007


Unleashed a Beast, Eh?

Justin Katz

Among the qualities from which I recoiled during last night's school committee meeting in Tiverton was the teachers' apparent enthusiasm for playing the unionist role. I'm simultaneously amused and discouraged to learn that they have actually gotten so much into it that the union itself is having to do some reining in:

Last week, Rearick said there was so much confusion about "contract compliance" that the union leadership had to hold meetings in each school building "to clarify for teachers what they can and cannot do."

Before the building-level meetings, students were telling administrators and their parents that teachers had refused to serve as class advisers, Rearick said.

"The parents are very upset that kids are being used as pawns, especially at the high school," Rearick said last week.

"Another issue is that the teachers talk about the dispute at the high school and the middle school" in class, Rearick said.

"The union had to send an internal memo to the teachers telling them to knock it off," he said.

And of course, Mr. Crowley does his best to wear down whatever meager patina of credibility he has when it comes to concern for the students, the schools, or the community:

Crowley replied, "It's baffling that he would rely on what the students are telling him to make determinations in a situation like this."

"That's really immature," Crowley said.

Ain't he clever? It almost makes you want to laugh.

ADDENDUM:

By the way, the woman who brought up the recommendations of Denise deMedeiros's daughter and (I believe) hissed "twerp" with reference to another school committee member is apparently guidance director Elizabeth Farley.

Yes, the case for private school gets stronger by the day. (As does the case for making school choice a personal crusade.)



East Greenwich Teachers' Union Contract Negotiations Update: School Committee Stays Focused on Priority #1, Educational Programs for Children

Donald B. Hawthorne

This official statement from the East Greenwich School Committee has been distributed to the media and updates us on the NEA teachers' union contract negotiations:

The School Committee and the East Greenwich Education Association met last evening for over 5 hours with the assistance of a state appointed mediator. Unfortunately, we were unable to settle our contract differences.

The Committee is not able to grant teachers the salary increases they are demanding. Funding those increases would require even more layoffs and program cuts than are already anticipated. Multiple factors, including the recently enacted tax levy cap and double digit increases in pension cost, have contributed to a tight budget situation.

Indeed, we have asked the teachers to pay a slightly higher portion of their health insurance premiums to help defray the high cost of healthcare for the district. Our proposal would also provide every teacher a net increase in salary for each year over a three-year period. However, it will still necessitate teacher layoffs and program cuts in order to balance the budget.

We recognize that this is one of the most difficult financial periods ever faced by Rhode Island public school districts and communities. We will continue to ask the teachers for their understanding and to work with us and the East Greenwich community to deliver a quality education program for our children during this difficult financial environment.

More from the ProJo here.

Congratulations to the East Greenwich School Committee for focusing first on the educational programs which are so important to the town's children. Doing that in a fiscally responsible way that looks after the interests of the tax-paying residents they were also elected to serve is very much appreciated.

In spite of the NEA's rhetoric, the School Committee is also treating the teachers more than fairly. For example, if you look at Table II in the analysis linked in the Extended Entry below, you will also see how the School Committee's latest proposal offers $4,080-7,224 or 8.1-11.2% in annual salary increases to 9 of the 10 job steps in 2007-2008, before the offset from any higher health insurance co-payments. In fact, many of us think those salary increases are far too high. Step 10 teachers would receive a $1,675 or 2.4% increase, before any offset.

(Note: Some of us would be willing to offer a higher salary increase to Step 10 teachers but only on the condition that the 8-11% annual increases for Steps 1-9 are brought down substantially. That approach, which the NEA does not appear willing to endorse, would require an overhaul of the existing 10-step salary schedule.)

Separately, you may have noticed how Anchor Rising stopped the "pay cut" analysis hostage day count on September 30. There was no reason to continue. None of us expected a substantative response from the NEA and that 9-day series of posts was done for the express purpose of making that point publicly.

So we made our point, town residents now know the real story, and that is all that matters.

At some later time, I will pull together all the lessons learned from these developments into one summary post. It will remind everyone how many other NEA myths - besides the "pay cut" claim - were busted along the way.

See the Extended Entry below if you want to review the analysis showing how there were never any "pay cuts" for East Greenwich teachers in contract proposals from the School Committee.

Continue reading "East Greenwich Teachers' Union Contract Negotiations Update: School Committee Stays Focused on Priority #1, Educational Programs for Children"

October 9, 2007


They're Like a Mob

Justin Katz

I wish more parents and townspeople attended these school committee meetings, because were more to witness the behavior of the unionists (one hesitates to speak of them principally as teachers), I've little doubt that support for them would evaporate even more rapidly than it is currently doing.

The committee discussed volunteers for various extracurricular activities, and just before the meeting moved on, teachers started taking the podium with somewhat related statements. The first (the woman who referred to a committee member as a "twerp" at the last meeting I attended, I believe) cited a press release in which a member of the committee had stated that teachers are not writing recommendations. "There are 63 recommendations in the file in my office," she said.

In the back and forth, it wasn't clear when the letters had been written or whether students were aware that they had been completed. (Indeed, the mob took the opportunity to jeer at Committee Chairwoman deMedeiros over her asking whether they'd been handed to the children, which apparently is not how it's done.) Personally, I'd have liked to know whether they were recommendations that predated the union's "work to rule" action or perhaps whether a bunch had just been filed since the media mentions.

Unfortunately, discussion didn't get that detailed, as the teacher noted that two of the recommendations in her possession were for deMedeiros's daughter. Hoots and laughter again. Ms. deMedeiros noted that her daughter and a friend had both been told that their teachers weren't sure whether they were allowed to write recommendations.

At that point, the committee attempted to bring up the pertinent person for the next item on its agenda, but additional teachers took the microphone and refused to step aside. (If I were the requested Mr. Alves, I believe I'd have stayed away, as well.) Seeing no progress — in fact, hearing an escalation of the shouts to "stop lying!" and "do your jobs!" — the committee moved to adjourn, and everybody began filing out.

Memo to the teachers: the school committee is the group whom the people of Tiverton have elected to conduct the town's business vis-a-vis the schools. You don't run these meetings. You oughtn't be attempting to intimidate the people with whom you're negotiating for increases to your already-generous remuneration packages.

I know the Bob Walshes and Pat Crowleys have encouraged the teachers — most of whom took up their vocation for more noble reasons than to be paid for days of striking — to see this behavior as appropriate, but they have been deceived. This is not how professionals act. It's how thugs act. It might be appropriate if union members were being forced to work under hazardous conditions. It might be appropriate if all salaries (or the number of positions) were being cut to a disastrous degree. As the circumstances exist, informed citizens would surely be astonished to recall that these are people with enviable salaries and benefits for rewarding work in a comfortable atmosphere.

And to be honest, speaking strictly as a parent, it sparks anxiety about my children's experiences as they (possibly) go through the school system over the next sixteen years.



Pat Takes the Stand

Justin Katz

Patrick Crowley took the podium making his case for the teachers' to be paid for striking, and I can see that the teachers, at least those in attendance, are not but so embarrassed by his antics.

He began his presentation by insisting that he be able to cross examine administrators. The committee's lawyer stated that it isn't a trial, so there would be no questions.

A few minutes later, one of the committee members posed a question to Crowley, who asked, "Is that a question?" Then he turned around with a smirk and invited the audience to laugh and hoot; they complied.

What seemed clear to me (a member of the public), as the committee wrapped up the issue and declined the grievance with respect to pay, was that Crowley and the union had set themselves up for such summary treatment. Frankly, I wouldn't feel obliged to offer courtesies either.

Subsequent quips and jeers have solidified that impression.

ADDENDUM

In fairness, I should note that I laughed aloud when Crowley misspoke and said that the teachers should be paid for "a day of work," quickly correcting his statement to something on the order of "a pay day."

I encourage the school committee to fight this one as far as the union insists on taking it.



Pat Takes the Stand

Justin Katz

Patrick Crowley took the podium making his case for the teachers' to be paid for striking, and I can see that the teachers, at least those in attendance, are not but so embarrassed by his antics.

He began his presentation by insisting that he be able to cross examine administrators. The committee's lawyer stated that it isn't a trial, so there would be no questions.

A few minutes later, one of the committee members posed a question to Crowley, who asked, "Is that a question?" Then he turned around with a smirk and invited the audience to laugh and hoot; they complied.

What seemed clear to me (a member of the public), as the committee wrapped up the issue and declined the grievance with respect to pay, was that Crowley and the union had set themselves up for such summary treatment. Frankly, I wouldn't feel obliged to offer courtesies either.

Subsequent quips and jeers have solidified that impression.

ADDENDUM

In fairness, I should note that I laughed aloud when Crowley misspoke and said that the teachers should be paid for "a day of work," quickly correcting his statement to something on the order of "a pay day."

I encourage the school committee to fight this one as far as the union insists on taking it.


October 7, 2007


Re: Black-Ties Have the Best Toasts, but Workers Eat Asbestos

Justin Katz

I have to admit to being somewhat astonished, Michael, at your protestation that the American worker is at the rock bottom of exploitation. Perhaps I've been distracted by the sheer volume of consumer goods that workers are able to afford. By their lengthening life spans. By their expanding educations. It is true that I lean toward the college-loans-as-indenture interpretation, but somehow that doesn't seem to be what you're talking about.

On what grounds, I wonder, do you make your dehumanizing judgment of your private-sector peers? If, that is, you consider proudly indignant cattle to be your peers. I'll be the last to insist that Rhode Island is defined by an insistence on the empowerment of private sector workers. The state is a cauldron constructed to distill exploitation to its purest form. Still, I think my understanding of my own circumstances is sufficiently considered that a theoretician of the sort who founded our country might consider me free.

In contrast, I'm not sure exactly how a system in which "people who decide who gets what are not spending their own money" is at all more likely to offer workers "decent wage[s] commensurate with their ability and value to the economy." Indeed, one need only look to the structure of teachers' salaries to find a tendency toward calculations that shun such distinctions (unless, of course, union bosses are taken as supremely valuable).

Like it or not, there is a market rate for a given job — what the performance of that job is worth. If unions wish to embellish that amount, they must ultimately do so by limiting the number of people who can hold it. Either prices must be forced higher, reducing the amount of work available, or barriers must be erected to enter the field of work. In the case of arbitrary price increases, the battle will be made more bloody for the shrinking opportunity. Exploitation will increase, as will incentive to behave as powerless pawns. In the case of a shrunken employment gate, somebody must decide on its shape and location, and somebody must guard it, thus creating an additional position of power, at which exploitation and siphoning can occur.

In any system that we might contrive to implement, some people will begin from positions of advantage. Qualitatively, these are the same folks (which is to say that they are equally human), whether they are businessmen, public policy intellectuals, union bosses, or career politicians. Whatever the basis for their initial advantage, I would prefer to see those strings in the tenuous grasp of men and women whose positions depend mostly on their ability to find work and ensure that it gets done.

How much more the pawns are those who, by their submission to unions, haven't even the leverage that comes with the threat of switching from employee to competition. Unionization may serve to enhance the income of a minority — especially when they are negotiating with people who aren't spending their own money — but where they become universal, they become imperious and oppressive. Where they are not universal, they squeeze their advantage not from the powerful, but from the trapped herd.



Michael Morse: "Re: Black-Ties Have the Best Toasts, but Workers Eat Asbestos"

Engaged Citizen

The hardest job I ever had was a line cook. 110 degree air, steaks on the grill, fries in the frialator, toast ready for the club sandwich, waitresses waiting, orders coming in, orders going out, sauté ready, steamer buzzing, this one well done, that one rare, fries are ready, I need that club, 86 corned beef, I need a Reuben! Too late, order up! Order in! Hour after hour. It took every ounce of energy to make it through the shift. I was good, one of the best. I barely made minimum wage. People won't pay $20.00 for a burger, that's life; I don't need an economics degree to figure that out.

Construction wasn't much better. One November morning I lost the argument with the foreman and climbed the ladder to the roof of a four-story condo that was under construction. He had a deadline to meet or the company would be fined. The sun was on the horizon, no time to melt the thin layer of frozen dew that glazed the surface. I got to the peak, slipped, and then started sliding to the edge, nothing but icy plywood to grab on to. A foot from the edge, a roofing nail that wasn't fully embedded lodged into the skin just below my knee, slowing my momentum and stopping me just before I went over, fifty feet onto a pile of rocks. I still have the scar; it reminds me of how fortunate I am. I made ten bucks an hour, no benefits.

Private employment is no picnic, I am well aware of that fact. I think the "market" needs to reassess itself and get its priorities straight.

Public employees have a huge advantage over the private sector. The people who decide who gets what are not spending their own money. It makes it easy to pay well and offer decent benefits. Public outcry dies down when the economy improves and the private sector starts doing better. Everybody wants to keep their money in their own pockets; that is human nature. Private sector employees, especially those employed by small companies are at the mercy of the marketplace. What is right is not necessarily what is done. There is always somebody waiting to do the job for less regardless of the risk. If they are not willing to do it themselves, they will find some desperate soul to do it for them. Competition has replaced common courtesy and common sense. We are all in this together. Paying people what they are worth rather than what you can get away with is a dying sentiment in the private sector.

Competition in the workplace keeps prices low and goods affordable. It is one of the basic principles of capitalism. My concerns are that we have gone as low as we can, our health and safety are being compromised, those with the power are exploiting those without, and those without are willingly being led to their own demise with a badge of righteous indignation proudly worn while suffering from the illusion that they are their own men in control of their destinies. They are like cattle being herded to the slaughterhouse, unknowing, thinking they are safe, the illusion of freedom and a fair market blinding them to the reality that they have become powerless pawns whose minds and backs serve those holding their purse. They want to take the public sector with them.

I would prefer to see everybody paid a decent wage commensurate with their ability and value to the economy. Unions, far from perfect, are better than the alternative. The money is there; we need to figure out how best to make it work.



Black-Ties Have the Best Toasts, but Workers Eat Asbestos

Justin Katz

Readers who have never gained the insight that comes with wearing a blue collar more extensively than for part-time teenager jobs might benefit from some explanation of the way in which incentives work in that world — specifically in residential construction.

The boss wishes to make money and expand his business, both of which require, first, that he finds work and, second, that he finds people to do it. When a particular job becomes available, he submits a bid, or otherwise comes up with a price, and too often the size of the dollar amount is the sole determinant of who wins the bidding process. In fairness to the client, of course, there's a straightforward inverse correlation between the cost of work and the amount of home improvement that can be afforded.

In the case of renovation, the house is usually intact, with furniture and so forth still in place, during this part of the process. In other words, the contractor can only stick his head in so many crevices. Unless he is either bold enough to request permission to bang in some walls in search of such snags as asbestos pipe insulation and to take various samples for lab analysis or a good enough salesman to pitch additional costs for remediation, his incentive is to give the best-case scenario price that he thinks won't come back to bite him.

Bring in the workers.

At some point in the demolition phase, somebody opens up a wall and finds corogated pipe insulation that looks like cardboard or pokes a hole in a ceiling and releases a small shower of spongy vermiculite insulation or pulls up a carpet covering ugly nine-inch floor tiles. Assuming anybody on the jobsite even knows that the material might contain asbestos, what are they to do?

In a salaried corporate or unionized public environment, the workers might stop production, send samples out to a lab, consult the client, get estimates from remediation companies, make an appointment, wait for the process to be completed, and then resume work. If the asbestos' presence is moderately extensive, the entire demo phase might have to be subcontracted to a licensed remediation crew, during which time the original workers — in private-sector construction — are simply biding their time, most likely unemployed. Or they could just make the problem go away in an hour here and there throughout the project.

Clearly, when the "right way" (the legal way) is too expensive and dilatory, the incentive is extremely strong just to make the asbestos disappear, and the fastest ways to accomplish that are also the most likely to contaminate the jobsite throughout the project. A more realistic solution — one not so amenable to the hopes and dreams of lawyers or likely to create a remediation industry — would make objective information easily accessible and require employers to ensure that their workers take reasonable (and minimal) precautions.

Having periodically poked around the online body of knowledge about asbestos, and having discussed the matter with a variety of folks from different walks of life, I've discerned a wide range of opinions about it, usually regardless of the statistics and facts, or even personal experience. While we shouldn't allow those who feel that the danger may be dismissed to set the standards, we shouldn't allow those who feel that any risk ought to be stamped out of life and work to place the safety bar prohibitively high. There are those who simply wouldn't tolerate the possibility of asbestos in the air; there are others who'll reduce it to dust before their own laughing faces. The latter will gravitate toward a vacuum left by the former if a rational middle is disallowed.

I haven't run through this exercise because I think asbestos to be one of the central issues of our times, or even especially relevant to Providence firefighters' cancer claims, but because it allows a tangible response to the the comments of one Providence firefighter, Michael Morse:

Our society should strive to protect the workers who make this country work. Why emulate a company that puts profit before worker safety and financial security? Instead of knocking down government programs that ensure a decent standard of living for disabled workers our time would be better spent improving conditions for everybody. The money is there in the private sector, take a look around, it's right there in front of you. Getting people to do the right thing is the problem.

That is the question of the modern era, isn't it: How do we get people in whose lives money has pooled to do the "right things" with it? That may be the defining difference between schools of economic thought. Arguably, wars have been fought over the answer. Me, I'd be lying if I pretended that I didn't believe one side to be right and one wrong, with the distinction mainly a matter of having mastered emotion sufficiently to think things through. I suspect that somewhere behind his good intentions, Michael understands as much, because he's attempted to divide the options unnaturally: profit for the business/owner versus safety and financial security for the workers.

As the asbestos example shows, the options don't break down thus. If safety means specialized workers with expensive licensing requirements, then the regular construction workers are out of luck. If the profit motive doesn't exist for a contractor to expand or to take as many jobs, then the workers are out of luck. If requirements are such that construction becomes even more expensive, homeowners won't have as much work done (or perhaps they'll simply leave), and... workers are out of luck.

Indeed, Michael elides the problem of social interdependencies in presenting "knocking down government programs" as something distinct from "improving conditions for everybody." Rhode Island has reached the point at which it can no longer pretend that it is taking away from the haves on behalf of the have-lesses. To the extent that our state and municipal programs continue to strangle our economy, the equations of risk, necessity, and willingness that govern life in the working world will require ever greater willingness to take risks just to keep food on the table.


October 6, 2007


The Dramatics of the "Professionals"

Justin Katz

I heard an eye witness account, last night, of the daily start-of-day ritual at Tiverton High School. Apparently, the teachers all sit in their cars until exactly the time at which they have to report to their classrooms, and then they all march in as a group. As anybody who has ever worked in a professional setting can attest, this sort of dramatic display is frequently seen outside office buildings. Right?

Or perhaps Tiverton Budget Committee member Alexander Cote is correct in his assessment of the teachers' professionalism:

Senior students are not receiving recommendations to colleges and internships. They are not allowed to work on class projects or accumulate the requisite community service. Nor are they allowed to participate in college awareness events, math clubs, mock trial teams, class trips, senior proms, yearbooks and whole host of events tat are part of every graduating class. Worse than declaring their intent to work to rule is the daily flaunting and badgering directly to students of their unwillingness to provide any assistance beyond contract. How quickly they have forgotten that someone early in their career provided the very services they are denying the youth of Tiverton. Working to "rule" is extremely hurtful to the very individuals these so-called professionals professed they wanted to help when they entered the field of teaching.

Not too long ago, the town finalized police and fire contracts, which provided relief for both the community and the unions, after more than a year and a half of working without a contract. Not once during the contract dispute did any fireman/EMT fail to provide public safety services for our residents. Not once was a ride to the hospital held hostage over their contract dispute. Nor did any police officer fail to protect the citizens anywhere within Tiverton. Respect is earned through rational actions and appropriate demeanor, not through underhanded tactics that exploit the future of our youth and bombastic lies about the actions of the school committee.

And any readers who have followed Anchor Rising's interactions with members of the NEA will find that this sounds very familiar:

While the recent actions taken by the teachers against children are truly unprofessional, their statements condemning the School Committee for hiding a million dollars in their budget is so far out of line it can only be described as utter desperation. After repeated requests by the school committee to the union to substantiate their claim, the union has not offered one scintilla of financial evidence to support their allegation. Obviously, their latest negotiation tactics has resorted to throwing crap against the wall hoping some part of it will stick. Their willingness to say anything to rally community support is nothing more than a childish attempt to fractionalize the community.

Take note, all students of the sort who haggle with teachers over their scores on tests and papers, of the example that those teachers' union is setting. Evidence is optional.



Another Non-Truth from the Tiverton Teachers' Public Face

Justin Katz

Here's what the NEA's man in Tiverton, Patrick Crowley, had to say when I suggested that a particular legal claim of his — that a failure of the administration to pay the teachers for their day of striking proved that they were not considered salaried and were therefore entitled to overtime — was, well, deceptively selective:

I am arguing that the law has many other sections and decades of case law. Maybe Justin should cite my entire letter since he seems to have been forwarded a copy of it. He seems to have left out a few sections, including the case citations, the RELEVANT section of law, and the other sections cited.

If he doesn't. I'd be happy too.

At the time, I thought that last word was a typo, but it may be the correct "too," after all, considering that Crowley never got around to further explanations or to sending me or publishing his letter. Luckily, a little persistence has paid off, and I've managed to find a copy of the original document, on NEA letterhead, no less (PDF). As readers can see for themselves, the letter contains a single case citation, and it is irrelevant to the point that I was making, relating, instead, to the penalties for not paying overtime "if it is the policy now of the school committee to consider the teachers non-exempt employees."

Presumably some teacher or other in the Tiverton system will have occasion to correct any students who've gotten the idea from the teachers' union that lies of omission are perfectly acceptable in rhetorical writing.


October 5, 2007


Math Mea Culpa

Justin Katz

An apology may be in order for my having not been fast enough on my feet as I've attempted to keep track of Tiverton teacher union negotiations amidst all of the other things on my schedule. I should have caught the accounting trick in this, but the reporter's and the union's presentation left me merely confused:

Teachers changed their proposal from a three-year contract to a two-year contract, but deMedeiros said the percentage salary increases did not differ much from a previous proposal. Instead of asking for 3.75 percent each year for three years, the latest proposal was for a total of 8 percent over two years. ...

A second offer made by the union at the end of the night was for 3.5 percent salary increases in year one, 3.75 in year two, and annual health benefit co-shares of $1,150 in year one and $1,300 in year two, Crowley said.

The Providence Journal clarified some today:

The financial impact of the two union proposals made on Tuesday appears to be in the eye of the beholder.

The one with 2 percent raises every six months would have resulted a cumulative hike of 8.25 percent in teachers’ base pay at the end of the second year.

The subsequent union offer raised the base pay by a cumulative 7.25 percent, or 1 percent less.

But because of the way the 2-percent raises were timed in the first offer, the cumulative 7.25-percent increase proposed in the second proposal would have cost the town more.

And here's how the NEA's Patrick Crowley attempted to deceive Anchor Rising readers into buying his spin:

Their proposal would cost you, as a Tiverton Taxpayer, more money. You should be outraged. Also, even using their math, what is more... 8 or 7.25? Obviously, it is 8. Unless you are a Tiverton School Committee member, and then 7.25 is more than 8.

Crowley's assessment is correct, I suppose, if one is mainly concerned with the rate at which teachers will find themselves when they negotiate their next contract in two years. But from the point of view of the school committee — and the taxpayers who elected them — the second proposal would indeed cost more. If (on top of step increases, remember) teachers get two percent raises every six months, that is equivalent to a little over three percent more money for the year.* Therefore, putting the first proposal in the terms that Crowley uses for the second proposal, the comparison is actually between 6% and 7.25%.

I guess we can take comfort in the knowledge that any teachers seeking examples while explaining to their students how numbers can be used for deceptive (dishonest) purposes need look no farther than their own union. Me, I'm still shaking my head that teachers want this to be their representation to the public.

* It's "a little over" because the second two percent would be based on the first two percent raise: Starting from $100 per year, the first raise would bring the six-month pay amount to $51, and the second raise would yield $52.02, for a full year salary of $103.02, or 3.02% more.


October 4, 2007


Facts and Figures in Tiverton

Justin Katz

Sometimes I find myself shaking my head at how teachers — of all people — are willing to allow themselves to appear:

Teachers changed their proposal from a three-year contract to a two-year contract, but deMedeiros said the percentage salary increases did not differ much from a previous proposal. Instead of asking for 3.75 percent each year for three years, the latest proposal was for a total of 8 percent over two years.

"We felt they were going backwards," deMederios said. "It's bad faith bargaining. They're still not recognizing that the money is just not there." ...

A second offer made by the union at the end of the night was for 3.5 percent salary increases in year one, 3.75 in year two, and annual health benefit co-shares of $1,150 in year one and $1,300 in year two, Crowley said.

"Their final offer is what did it," deMedeiros said of the committee's decision to seek arbitration. ...

Several weeks later, teachers voted for "contract compliance," which calls for them to perform only work spelled out in the contract.

The college fair, organized in past years by members of the guidance department, has been canceled, Rearick said. It was scheduled to be held in mid-October.

The mock trial team doesn't have an advisor; neither does the math team or the National Honor Society. The haunted house that is organized by the senior class as a fundraising event may still take place with the aid of parent volunteers. Teachers also helped organize homecoming events in the past, but parents may be asked to take their place.

"This hasn't made them popular," deMedeiros said. "I don't see how this works to their advantage. It's like they're holding the kids hostage. That's who they're punishing."

Rearick said school officials have been informed that there will be no field trips. School officials are waiting for a reply from teachers about writing recommendations for seniors who are applying for early admission to college.

Crowley said this morning that teachers have been writing recommendations and will continue to do so. He also said that teachers who are advisers to groups or classes are doing their advisory work, but only during normal school hours.

The unions are a cancer in our education system. Cut them out, and teachers, parents, and elected officials can be on the same side again.


October 3, 2007


The Other Side of the Mediation in Tiverton

Justin Katz

Tiverton School Committee Vice Chairman Michael Burk offers the following response to some late night positioning from the NEA's spinner for Tiverton:

Yes, the School Committee did decide to go to arbitration — which by state law is not binding for financial issues but is binding on non-financial issues (most of the non-financials were settled long ago). We did this because it is clear to us that the NEA leadership does not live in the same fiscal reality as we do and they seem to think we can simply find money that isn't there to pay for what they want. The last proposal they gave us last night actually asked for a greater salary percentage increase than the one they gave us earlier in the evening — which in our eyes is bad faith bargaining.

The arbitration process allows the School Committee to consider recommendations made by the arbitration panel that are related to financial issues. However, if we still believe that we can't afford those recommendations, we can impose a contract for 1-year which does recognize
current fiscal realities.

There is one simple solution to all of this — the NEA leadership can acknowledge current reality, that funding their proposals on the backs of our property taxpayers is irrational and that we have the dollars we said we have to spend and not a penny more. Then we would be able to come to an agreement that is fair to our taxpayers, fair to our students, fair to our
parents and fair to our teachers.



October 2, 2007


Not to Be That Guy (Yet Again), But...

Justin Katz

I certainly don't want to raise opposition to men battling cancer, but I'm a little confused, and not entirely assuaged by this:

Providence Firefighters James Petersen Jr. and Jay Briddy have colon cancer, and Lt. Steven Schora has lymphoma. All three are out injured — Petersen since 2005, Briddy since 2004 and Schora since 1997. They are still paid their full salaries and benefits in anticipation that they’ll return to work. But their doctors have told them they aren’t well enough.

Firefighters can retire after 20 years with a pension equaling 50 percent of salary. An accidental-disability pension — which is what the union wants for firefighters with cancer — equals two-thirds of salary, tax-free, with full benefits. Disabled firefighters can also take back all the money they’ve contributed to the pension system, with interest.

According to WebMD, while the causes of both colon cancer and lymphoma remain mysterious, environmental hazards are still considered likely suspects, and if firefighters are exposed to such hazards, the presumption ought to be in their favor. But for all of the noise, I'm not clear on the specifics of the current controversy.

Mr. Schora, for instance, appears to have been collecting full pay and benefits for ten years while on the injured list. Presumably, even if he never makes it back to work, after 20 years, he can retire with the 50% pension. Is the union saying that, in that case, he ought to get the two-thirds pension (etc.), or would he be able to retire sooner because of disability? If he beats the cancer before retirement; does he go back to the regular pension, or would his designation be clinched? Do all other cities offer that deal, or are there a handful that the guys in Providence would like to emulate?

I don't wish to be unduly contentious, but the union ought to consider other people's perspective. As somebody who periodically comes into contact with asbestos, for example, there's a chance that I could contract job-related colon cancer. If that were to happen, I'd be on my own.

Now, I'm not arguing that everybody ought to be in my undesirable circumstances, but part of the reason I'm in them is the horrible absence of opportunity in this state, and part of the reason for that absence is the government and public sector's unsustainable generosity. That being the case, I guess I'm just not as ready to submit to the tone du jour and be relieved that the union didn't actually intend to threaten the disaster drill. Starting from my personal baseline of zero pension and zero concessions should I find myself battling cancer, I'm left with the question of why decades of full pay and a 50% pension isn't enough for people who are surviving their own battles. I also wonder whether improved tracking of hazardous incidents that may result in disease couldn't be put forward as a compromise governing future cases.


October 1, 2007


The Providence Firefighters' Teach-In: The Issue at the Core

Carroll Andrew Morse

As Providence Firefighters' Local 799 President Paul Doughty made clear, the union job action/teach-in on Sunday afternoon was not centered on the general contract dispute between the union and Mayor David Ciciclline, but on a specific situation involving firefighters Jay Briddy, James Petersen and Steven Schora, all of whom who have contracted cancers that prevent them from performing a full range of active duties.

There are (at least) two different aspects to the grievance that Providence firefighters have with their city's handling of members of the department who develop cancer. One point of contention is that members of the Providence department do not receive the same level of cancer protection that firefighters in other Rhode Island communities receive. Amanda Milkovits explained this issue in her Projo coverage of the teach-in…

The three firefighters’ applications for disability pensions went before the city retirement board this year. Doughty said the city solicitor found a “legal loophole” where Providence’s disability pensions don’t conform to the state law that presumes firefighters can contract cancer from their occupation.
However, beyond the fact the Providence's handling of these situations is different from the rest of the state, an even more fundamental issue is in play, i.e. whether Providence will approve cancer disabilities under any condition.

The individual doctors for firefighters Briddy, Petersen and Schora will not clear them to return to duty because, in their professional medical judgements, returning to active duty firefighting would pose an unacceptably high cancer risk. However, the city will not allow the firefighters to claim a job-related cancer disability because, according to the union, city policy is to not approve cancer disability claims unless a specific call where cancer was contracted can be determined.

Given that it is extremely rare, if ever, that the cause of anyone's cancer can be tied to one specific event, the city policy doesn't seem wholly reasonable.

The union's position is that if a doctor determines that a firefighter cannot perform his duties because of cancer, the presumption should be that he is entitled to a cancer related disability. And there is pretty solid medical evidence that the cumulative effects of firefighting duties do increase the risk of contracting cancer. The University of Cincinnati, for example, released an extensive study last year on this subject that was reported on by the BBC

Firefighters are at a far higher risk of developing certain cancers than people in many other professions, US research suggests....Rates of testicular cancer were 100% higher and prostate cancer 28% higher among firefighters, their analysis of 32 US and European studies suggested....

The US researchers looked at studies covering 110,000 firefighters, which compared cancer rates in that profession with the general population or other professions, the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine reported.

In addition to the 100% increase in testicular cancer cases among firefighters, the researchers also discovered a 50% increase in non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and multiple myeloma.

At some point, when negotiating future contracts, the cold eyes of the actuaries are going to have to go over the figures, and make sure that benefits that are promised are reasonable, sustainable and won't bankrupt the city, which may require adjusting future disability levels, cancer or otherwise. But when an organization promises someone a benefit, it has a duty to deliver that benefit, especially in situations involving cancers and career callings, where there is precious little room for do-overs. If the City of Providence has been telling firefighters that they have special protection for cancer, then it has no right to create insurmountable bureaucratic rules intended to prevent anyone from taking advantage of that protection.



The Providence Firefighters' Teach-In: Discussing the Public Alarm

Carroll Andrew Morse

The focus of yesterday's firefighters' union teach-in was on the cancer situation facing three Providence firefighters; we'll take that up directly in the next post. However, for better or for worse, attention became focused on Local 799's job-action because of its potential to shut down a statewide Homeland Security drill, a possible outcome that alarmed many citizens and public officials alike. I had the opportunity to ask Local 799 President Paul Doughty about the perceptions that were created...

Anchor Rising: Sometimes things quoted in a newspaper read a little more harshly than they were said. In explaining your original job action plans, you said something to the effect of "how can we take care of you, when you won't take care of us". Do you understand how that might come across as frightening to the average citizens who depend on you guys?

Local 799 President Paul Doughty: I do. The context I was trying to put it in was this: In the Providence Fire Department, it is an extra responsibility, a voluntary responsibility, to join the department's hazardous materials team. As a regular firefighter, you are routinely exposed to carcinogens, but as hazardous materials technician, it's even worse. You may be going into situations involving high concentrations of known carcinogens, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and the like. You have to go in and mitigate this situation.

When I made the comment, I was saying how can you ask firefighters to do this extra but important work as hazardous materials technicians, knowingly sending them into carcinogen-laced atmospheres, but then telling them if they get cancer, they are on their own. That's what I meant. How can we provide a valuable and important service to the community, but if we get sick from that exact thing that we've agreed to do, not be allowed the cancer disability?

AR: You've also said that it was never your intention to shut down the statewide drill.

PD: That's correct.

AR: If that was the case, why did you feel it was necessary make the comment to the effect that this drill wasn't too important to improving the tactical-level response of firefighters?

PD: Again, that was a question about what the drill was going to do. As a street-line firefighter, for my exact membership, the skills that they're going over are tactical skills, getting in the suits and dragging people out. It's stuff that we're very comfortable with and we've done in other drills. For us, it wasn't a high-level drill. But I do recognize that my members benefit from state assets and Federal assets exercising together and coordinating their efforts.

AR: Last question. I'm a silver-lining kind of guy. Do you think that one of the reasons this snowballed like it did was because you misjudged, just a little, how seriously the public takes disaster training and preparation, and how clued in they are to how important it is?

PD: I will say yes directly to that question. And I think I also misjudged how much they care about our issues. I think there is an awareness of the cancer issue, and I think the public is concerned about it. Maybe I would have done better, just to raise the single issue. It's just that dealing with the Mayor has led to an unbelievable level of frustration.



The Providence Firefighters' Teach-In: Paul Doughty Speaks

Carroll Andrew Morse

Yesterday afternoon, following a statewide Homeland Security drill, the Providence Firefighters' Union (Local 799) held a teach-in on the steps of Providence City Hall. The purpose of the teach-in was to highlight the situations of Providence firefighters Jay Briddy, James Petersen, and Steven Schora, who have not been medically cleared to perform a full range of active duties due to cancer-related issues, but are not being allowed by the city to claim a cancer disability. Earlier in the week, Local 799 had planned an informational demonstration to run concurrently with the Homeland Security drill to bring attention to this situation, but altered their plans when the job-action threatened to severely curtail the training exercise. The president of Local 799, Paul Doughty, began the teach-in by explaining his union's position on the disability issue and on the choice of methods for bringing attention to it…

Local 799 President Paul Doughty: My name is Paul Doughty, President of the Firefighters Local 799. On behalf of all Providence firefighters, and particularly those of our brothers who are engaged in another kind of fight, the fight against cancer, I am proud to welcome you to this first of its kind of teach-in. I'd like to introduce, to my left, Captain Jeff Varone and Lieutenant Mike Morse, and to my right, firefighter Jim Petersen, firefighter Jay Briddy, and Lieutenant Steve Schora.

Before we begin our exchange on the issue at hand, which is the manner in which the City of Providence has chosen to ignore its firefighters afflicted with cancer, I'd like to clarify once more for the record the evolution of this event. Evolution is the best word I can come up with to describe our thinking, as we moved from the idea of a demonstration at the site of today's Homeland Security drill, to a post-drill teach-in at City Hall. Over the past 72 hours, many people have attempted to describe our change in plan as some sort of defeat. Nothing could be further from the truth. All along, our intention has been to take advantage of the intense media interest in the drill to hammer home our position on the tragic unfairness of the city's policy on cancer care for its firefighters.

It was never our intention to negatively impact the drill itself. Anyone who would have you believe anything to the contrary is misinformed.

Let me put it another way. Providence firefighters did not step back from their original plan to demonstrate. Rather we stepped forward, to a more refined and what we hope is a more effective method. In doing so, we're able to simultaneously support the drill and make our point here and now. I have no doubt whatsoever that many people are bitterly disappointed that the confrontation in which they had invested so much political capital has vanished and in its place, there has arisen an opportunity to communicate, teach and learn. I have no doubt whatsoever that they would have preferred to continue to invoke the holiest of holies, homeland security, to demonize Providence Firefighters as individuals who would place their own interests over the safety and security of our country.

I have no doubt whatsoever that Mayor Cicilline intends to continue to use the members of the firefighters' union as rungs on his ladder to the statehouse. Well, we're sorry to disappoint you Mayor, but you will not be allowed to mischaracterize our goals and actions any longer. We're sorry that we've denied you the opportunity to make political hay by spinning this issue cynically and unconscionably for your own political benefit. Mayor Cicilline, you may think you hold the high ground, but no ground is higher than moral high ground.

Firefighters have continuously demonstrated their wholehearted commitment to homeland security, not only in drills, but in real events. The smoke had not yet cleared when dozens of Providence firefighters voluntarily responded to New York City to participate in rescue and recovery efforts. The water had not yet receded when dozens of firefighters, again of their own choice, responded to the aftermath of hurricane Katrina to begin rescue and recovery efforts.

Throughout the years, since the words "homeland security" were introduced to our vocabulary, Providence firefighters have stepped up and led, not only this department and this state, but parts of this country, in training and preparedness. Actions, not words, define our commitment to homeland security. Don't you dare try to depict Providence firefighters as being less than wholly committed to the security of the United States. Don't you dare try to paint our insistence at protecting our brother firefighters from cancer as petty, unreasonable and unjust.

This fight, from the beginning, was about three members that were about to be forced off the job. One of those three members has cancer at this minute. In our mind, this is unconscionable. We had begun discussions in June of this year. The city turned their back both on the discussion and on this firefighter and they were prepared to send him out. If not for our actions this week, they would be on that path.

Again I'll repeat, we wanted to highlight the event. We needed the event to go on. Otherwise, I can't imagine how many people would be here today, if we had only sent out a press release saying there's an issue about three firefighters who have cancer.

We hope that the entire state takes notice of this unjust treatment, a situation where two firefighters, one from another community, and one from Providence, could be doing the same exact activity, both going into a hazardous material incident, much like what was simulated next door to here today. If they both contracted cancer, the one from the other community would be covered, and the one from Providence would not be covered.

And that's our story.


September 30, 2007


NEA "Pay Cut" Analysis Hostage Day Count: Day 9

Donald B. Hawthorne

Still nothing from the NEA so the "pay cut" analysis hostage day count continues. Day 9 is now history.

We eagerly await a response! The offer to post it here on Anchor Rising remains open.

Here is our blog post describing how there is NO "pay cut." It even includes spreadsheets with documentation of data sources and assumptions for public scrutiny!

Prove us wrong and we will admit to it. Or 'fess up that your claim about East Greenwich teachers taking a "pay cut" is false. It is crossroads time for the NEA.

Until we see a quantitative financial analysis response from the NEA, we will continue with daily blog posts noting that their "pay cut" analysis is being held hostage at NEARI against the wishes of East Greenwich taxpaying residents.

See more thoughts in the Extended Entry below.

Continue reading "NEA "Pay Cut" Analysis Hostage Day Count: Day 9"

September 29, 2007


NEA "Pay Cut" Analysis Hostage Day Count: Day 8

Donald B. Hawthorne

Still nothing from the NEA so the "pay cut" analysis hostage day count continues. Day 8 is now history.

We eagerly await a response! The offer to post it here on Anchor Rising remains open.

Here is our blog post describing how there is NO "pay cut." It even includes spreadsheets with documentation of data sources and assumptions for public scrutiny!

Prove us wrong and we will admit to it. Or 'fess up that your claim about East Greenwich teachers taking a "pay cut" is false. It is crossroads time for the NEA.

Until we see a quantitative financial analysis response from the NEA, we will continue with daily blog posts noting that their "pay cut" analysis is being held hostage at NEARI against the wishes of East Greenwich taxpaying residents.

See more thoughts in the Extended Entry below.

Continue reading "NEA "Pay Cut" Analysis Hostage Day Count: Day 8"

September 28, 2007


NEA "Pay Cut" Analysis Hostage Day Count: Day 7

Donald B. Hawthorne

Still nothing from the NEA so the "pay cut" analysis hostage day count continues. Day 7 is now history.

We eagerly await a response! The offer to post it here on Anchor Rising remains open.

Here is our blog post describing how there is NO "pay cut." It even includes spreadsheets with documentation of data sources and assumptions for public scrutiny!

Prove us wrong and we will admit to it. Or 'fess up that your claim about East Greenwich teachers taking a "pay cut" is false. It is crossroads time for the NEA.

Until we see a quantitative financial analysis response from the NEA, we will continue with daily blog posts noting that their "pay cut" analysis is being held hostage at NEARI against the wishes of East Greenwich taxpaying residents.

Continue reading "NEA "Pay Cut" Analysis Hostage Day Count: Day 7"

September 27, 2007


NEA "Pay Cut" Analysis Hostage Day Count: Day 6

Donald B. Hawthorne

Still nothing from the NEA so the "pay cut" analysis hostage day count continues. Day 6 is now history.

We eagerly await a response! The offer to post it here on Anchor Rising remains open.

Here is our blog post describing how there is NO "pay cut." It even includes spreadsheets with documentation of data sources and assumptions for public scrutiny!

Prove us wrong and we will admit to it. Or 'fess up that your claim about East Greenwich teachers taking a "pay cut" is false. It is crossroads time for the NEA.

Until we see a quantitative financial analysis response from the NEA, we will continue with daily blog posts noting that their "pay cut" analysis is being held hostage at NEARI against the wishes of East Greenwich taxpaying residents.

FURTHER CLARIFYING ISSUES IN THE "PAY CUT" DEBATE:

Ken offers some rathering "interesting" words in the Comments section, to which I offer this reply:

Ken conveniently ignores that it was the NEA who first turned this claim about "pay cuts" into a PUBLIC debate. They did it in the context of trying to influence public opinion during a labor contract negotiation.

They made it public when some of their member teachers made and continue to make PUBLIC claims about "pay cuts" to East Greenwich residents via strike signs, comments to parents at open houses, letters to the editors, etc.

They started a PUBLIC debate but now that they have been called on it in an equally public way - and been asked to justify their public claim - they have gone into hiding. How convenient.

So perhaps Ken can explain why he is comfortable letting the NEA off the hook after THEY started the PUBLIC debate.

It is also a fantasy to claim that the same labor negotiation process which allowed them to make PUBLIC claims to town residents in the first place suddenly restricts them from responding publicly to justify their position. Perhaps Ken can justify why NEA members can still write letters to the editor as recently as last week reiterating their "pay cut" claim but he thinks labor negotiations restrict them from providing analytical proof to support the ongoing PUBLIC claim they continue to make right now in public forums like newspaper opinion pages or in quotes for interviews found in newspaper articles.

And isn't it interesting that some people are so eager to question the legitimacy of an activist concerned citizen digging into issues by researching and gathering together publicly-available information? Isn't that exactly what America is about? Isn't that what self-government is about?

I am further struck by how negative responses like Ken's love to use phrases like "made up figures" and "slanted facts." Instead he will only find satisfaction in words from politicians and government bureaucrats - as long as it is delivered on their letterheads!

But nobody, including Ken, can offer any specific fact-based comments which identify what exactly is made up or slanted in my analysis:

  • Is it when I copied 10 historical salary numbers for 2006-07 from 1 salary table in the recently expired and publicly-available contract?

  • Or copied 2 historical co-pay percentages for 2006-07 off that same contract?

  • Or asked the School Department for publicly-available information on the actual 2006-07 and 2007-08 costs of family and single person health insurance premiums for teachers, a total of 4 additional historical numbers?

  • Or used the School Department's assumed annual growth rate for health insurance premiums during the next two years, another 2 numbers?

  • Or took the latest School Committee 3-year offer for salary step increases (3 numbers, 1 for each year) and co-pay percentages (3 more numbers, 1 for each year), as quoted previously in a public newspaper, and used them after confirming they were accurate?

Bluntly, those are the ONLY essential pieces of information needed to do the analysis and derive the NO "pay cuts" conclusion I did. 24 confirmable data points, 16 of which are documented historical data, all of which came from just 3 sources. It doesn't come any more easily verifiable than that! This is not rocket science.

In other words, some analyses are built on assumptions about assumptions and are, therefore, subject to analytical manipulation.

This analysis debunking the "pay cut" claim is most certainly not that kind of analysis. Which means that anybody could independently confirm every primary assumption used in my analysis. And the analysis could be done by any student who successfully passed Finance 101.

Instead, all the opposition can do is engage in name-calling.

And yes, Ken, I did make it through 5th grade! Even made it through Finance 101 at business school!

So we return to the issue at hand: The NEA has made and continues to make its "pay cut" claim central to its PUBLIC relations campaign in East Greenwich during the current contract negotiations time period. Their "pay cut" claim has been shown to be false here on Anchor Rising, using verifiable data from public sources - not just unverifiable words like the NEA prefers to use. Anchor Rising has invited the NEA to back up their public claim with facts, even to post it on this blog site. They refuse. Yet the NEA is known nationwide for its ability to play hardball politics well. So if the NEA really had the data which discredited an outspoken public critic, why would they hold back sharing it publicly? What could the NEA be afraid of? Could it be that maybe - just maybe - their "pay cut" claim is false and they know it?

The ball is in the NEA's court.

Or, to have a little fun with this from a musical perspective, the NEA is at a crossroads.



Leslie Carbone: Schools versus the NEA-borhood Bully

Donald B. Hawthorne

Leslie Carbone, an adjunct scholar at the Lexington Institute, writes these words in a ProJo editorial entitled Schools versus the NEA-borhood bully:

With the new school year under way, students, parents and teachers hoping for quality education face an ironic opponent: the National Education Association, America’s premier teachers union. When it comes to opposing common-sense education reforms, the 3.2 million-member NEA is the biggest, baddest bully in the playground. Sadly, students who want to learn and teachers who want to teach suffer most from the union’s misplaced policies and politics.

When parents and kids shop together for school clothes, supplies and extra-curricular needs, they enjoy a bevy of choices in stores and manufacturers. That means that they can shop around for the right products at the best prices. Makers of shoddy goods and retailers with lousy service will be forced to improve or lose business to better product providers. That’s how competition keeps quality and prices in line with customers’ needs and expectations.

But kids who go off to school with good, inexpensive clothes and supplies may receive education that’s just the opposite — overpriced and underperforming. That’s because the National Education Association fights every effort to let that same accountability and competition improve the product its teachers work hard to provide — the education of public-school children.

The NEA’s politicized leadership is fond of claiming that its efforts are in the best interests of students, but this is far from the case. Nowhere is this more clear than in its relentless mission to sabotage the accountability for results in the No Child Left Behind Act. While many groups have advocated ways to improve or change the law, NEA leadership has systematically worked to torpedo its reliance on academic standards and testing. Instead it proposes a meaningless jumble of apples-to-oranges comparisons and “portfolio assessments” that would make it nearly impossible to evaluate the progress a school or its teachers are making in teaching our children.

The NEA’s leadership also stands in firm opposition to any plan to shift its teachers to performance-based pay determined by the achievement of their students. Blocking efforts to compensate good teachers more than bad ones, the union insists on determining pay raises strictly by seniority. It rejects paying teachers based on their area of expertise — thereby maintaining America’s shortage of good math and science teachers. And it stops retirees or others who want to contribute expertise from volunteering as teachers.

The NEA consistently opposes giving parents and students freedom of choice among public schools — so kids in districts with poorly performing schools can’t seek better education in nearby neighborhoods.

On the other hand, the union protects teachers who clearly threaten students’ best chances for a quality education. The tenure system makes it difficult to fire bad teachers; it can cost taxpayers nearly $200,000 to discharge a poorly performing educator.

The NEA shows no reservations about taking teachers’ union dues and spending them to spread a radical political agenda. Annual NEA dues can reach as high as $500. A little of it goes toward core union activities, like collective bargaining for contracts that keep members from having to attend after-school meetings or teach another’s class in an emergency. Some goes toward the hefty paychecks of NEA staffers, thousands of whom rake in six-figure annual salaries, far more than the teachers who pay them.

And a lot — as much as half by some estimates — goes toward politicking. The NEA doesn’t restrict itself to lobbying on issues that directly affect education, such as the No Child Left Behind Act. It doesn’t even restrict itself to weighing in on issues that indirectly affect education, such as tax reform, which it sees as a threat to its own cash flow. The union lobbies on a host of unrelated issues, such as statehood for the District of Columbia, even though many of its members don’t want it to.

Fortunately, teachers do have some recourse. In right-to-work states, they don’t have to pay union dues at all. And in others, while they can be required to pay dues for core union activities, they cannot be forced to pay for politicking, public relations, or other non-essential union activities.

The NEA has done a solid job of stacking the deck against students, parents, and teachers who want good schools. But that can change, if everyone interested in quality education stands up — and stops turning money over — to the NEAborhood bully.

Many of Carbone's points about the NEA are not news to Anchor Rising readers as they were discussed in an earlier post here.


September 26, 2007


NEA "Pay Cut" Analysis Hostage Day Count: Day 5

Donald B. Hawthorne

Still nothing from the NEA so the "pay cut" analysis hostage day count continues. Day 5 is now history.

We eagerly await a response! The offer to post it here on Anchor Rising remains open.

Here is our analysis showing there is NO "pay cut." It even comes with spreadsheets and documented assumptions for public scrutiny!

Prove us wrong and we will admit to it. Or 'fess up that your claim about East Greenwich teachers taking a "pay cut" is false. It is put-up-or-shut-up time.

Until we see a quantitative financial analysis response from the NEA, we will continue with daily blog posts noting that their "pay cut" analysis is being held hostage at NEARI against the wishes of East Greenwich taxpaying residents.


September 25, 2007


NEA "Pay Cut" Analysis Hostage Day Count: Day 4

Donald B. Hawthorne

Still nothing from the NEA so the "pay cut" analysis hostage day count continues. Day 4 is now history.

We eagerly await a response! The offer to post it here on Anchor Rising remains open.

Prove us wrong and we will admit to it. Or 'fess up that your claim about East Greenwich teachers taking a "pay cut" is false. It is put-up-or-shut-up time.

Until we see a quantitative financial analysis response from the NEA, we will continue with daily blog posts noting that their "pay cut" analysis is being held hostage at NEARI against the wishes of East Greenwich taxpaying residents.


September 24, 2007


UPDATED: Excuse me, but this is NOT how to win friends & influence people in East Greenwich

Donald B. Hawthorne

Are East Greenwich teachers being asked to take "pay cuts" by the School Committee? The NEA says yes but cannot and will not prove it. What follows below is an analysis which shows the "pay cut" claim is a lie and that can only mean the NEA is intentionally misleading East Greenwich residents.

Background

In five previous and core blog posts, I have made my case about the various economic issues in the East Greenwich teachers' union contract negotiations - including debunking the NEA's quite public claim about "pay cuts" for teachers. You can find links to all five at the bottom of this post.

In aggregate, they represent a highly visible, public set of multiple analyses ready for anybody to critique. However, nobody at the NEA has offered any tangible criticisms of the analyses that withstand even just elementary scrutiny. The analyses were developed with publicly-available information provided to me by both school department and town officials. More on that below.

I have offered multiple times to post the NEA's own analysis on Anchor Rising and let town residents compare the two. Let the two analyses withstand simultaneous public scrutiny and may the most accurate and precise analysis carry the day! I have even said I will publicly apologize if my analysis is proven inaccurate or wrong. Nonetheless, the NEA refuses to engage in a rational public discussion and offer its analysis to prove its "pay cut" claim. What are they afraid of?

In the end, this comes down to economic tradeoffs. How do we live within the budgets of the working families and retirees of East Greenwich while offering a reasonable total compensation package to the town's teachers? The NEA's actions thus far have shown how it doesn't care about the family budgets of town residents and it is not interested in negotiating a reasonable package for teachers.

Salary Increases

So let's review some of the economics: For starters and to refresh your memory, look at this salary-only Excel spreadsheet for East Greenwich teachers with Masters (about 60% of the teachers in town). Perhaps the NEA can tell the residents of East Greenwich how one $1,675 salary increase for step 10 and other salary increases ranging between $4,080-7,224 for job steps 1-9 represent a "pay cut" for 2007-08. For the less analytically inclined, this analysis is actually far easier to grasp than a first glance might make you think:

  • The far left columns present job steps 1-10 and their salaries from the last contract. No judgment required there, only enough skill to copy ten salary numbers off one of the exhibit pages to that old contract.
  • Then the latest proposal by the East Greenwich School Committee included a 2.4% salary increase. So the 2007-08 numbers for job steps 1-10 are determined by the simple arithmetic of multiplying 2006-07 contractual numbers for each of the 10 steps by 1.024.
  • Then recall that each job step 1-9 teacher moves 1 step higher in 2007-08, except for each job step 10 teacher who stays as a 10.

That's it! No judgment calls required anywhere. No higher mathematics necessary either. Just all basic and verifiable facts. And there simply is NO "pay cut" anywhere to be found.

Net Changes in Total Cash Compensation

This is a new section as of September 24. It presents a more complete financial model showing net changes in total cash compensation for teachers in all 10 job steps.

To be complete though requires going beyond just salary and that means the next question which must be asked is: What happens to net changes in total cash compensation for teachers when the School Committee's latest offer of 12%, 15% and 18% co-pays are introduced from 2007-08 through 2009-10, up from the current 5% (job steps 1-3) and 10% (job steps 4-10)? Still NO "pay cuts."

Here are the data which support that claim:

This updated section of the post contains a new and second Excel spreadsheet which presents projected changes in net cash compensation for all 10 job steps for teachers with Master's degrees based on the latest offer. Previously posted analyses on Anchor Rising showed only steps 5 and 10 as examples.

Not surprisingly, there are NO "pay cuts" anywhere to be found - even after deducting the incremental after-tax expense of a higher health insurance premium co-pay. (Bob Walsh of the NEA argued previously on Anchor Rising that there were "pay cuts" if the analysis was performed on the original School Committee offer. To address his concern, I ran the same analysis as here with those revised numbers and showed that his claim was false. It is documented in this earlier post.)

The bottom line is this: Even AFTER including the negative cash impact of higher co-pays as proposed by the School Committee beginning in 2007-08, Table VIII in the spreadsheet presents the net salary increases - in $ and % - as realized by teachers over the 3 years of a proposed contract, assuming the latest School Committee offer:

  • Job step 1 with family health coverage: $3,395-3,755/year or 7.5-8.1%/year increases.
  • Job step 1 with single health coverage: $3,823-4,065/year or 8.1-9.1%/year increases.
  • Job step 2 with family health coverage: $3,506-3,824/year or 7.1-7.8%/year increases.
  • Job step 2 with single health coverage: $3,934-4,134/year or 7.7-8.7%/year increases.
  • Job step 3 with family health coverage: $3,580-3,885/year or 6.8-7.4%/year increases.
  • Job step 3 with single health coverage: $4,008-4,195/year or 7.4-8.3%/year increases.
  • Job step 4 with family health coverage: $3,659-3,952/year or 6.5-7.1%/year increases.
  • Job step 4 with single health coverage: $4,088-4,262/year or 7.1-7.9%/year increases.
  • Job step 5 with family health coverage: $3,939-4,190/year or 6.3-7.6%/year increases.
  • Job step 5 with single health coverage: $4,203-4,340/year or 6.8-7.9%/year increases.
  • Job step 6 with family health coverage: $4,003-5,465/year or 6.4-8.0%/year increases.
  • Job step 6 with single health coverage: $4,267-5,775/year or 6.8-8.4%/year increases.
  • Job step 7 with family health coverage: $4,341-6,750/year or 7.1-9.1%/year increases.
  • Job step 7 with single health coverage: $4,491-7,060/year or 7.3-9.5%/year increases.
  • Job step 8 with family health coverage: $954-6,682/year or 1.3-9.2%/year increases.
  • Job step 8 with single health coverage: $1,264-6,947/year or 1.7-9.5%/year increases.
  • Job step 9 with family health coverage: $954-6,998/year or 1.3-9.8%/year increases.
  • Job step 9 with single health coverage: $1,264-7,148/year or 1.7-10.0%/year increases.
  • Job step 10 with family health coverage: $954-1,449/year or 1.3-2.0%/year increases.
  • Job step 10 with single health coverage: $1,264-1,599/year or 1.7-2.2%/year increases.

So take a deep breath after reviewing these numbers and ask yourself: How could the NEA tell the residents of East Greenwich that the School Committee is trying to force teachers to take "pay cuts?" It is a grossly dishonest claim and the NEA should be ashamed of themselves.

A few observations: There are some very hefty salary increases in those numbers. They help to clarify why some of us believe strongly that the School Committee should be making no offers with co-pay percentages below 20% in any of the three years. Even with that higher co-pay assumption, re-running the model shows there are simply NO "pay cuts." The magnitude of these salary increases also points out why there are some fundamental structural problems with the existing job step format on which salary schedules are based.

This second spreadsheet is an indepth analysis and will take careful reading. But, with some concentration, it is possible to follow the logic in it as I have tried to explicitly identify all major assumptions and data sources on a step-by-step basis. After which, I believe people can only conclude both that there are no "pay cuts" and that there are too many rich salary increases spread across these job steps.

(Thanks again to the East Greenwich School Department which provided me with publicly-available information upon my request.)

The NEA Engages in Personal Name-Calling Instead of an Open Public Debate Based on Facts

Meanwhile, nobody who says there are "pay cuts" is capable or willing to offer the residents of East Greenwich any analytical proof of such alleged cuts. They just declare it is so and, presumably, expect the residents of East Greenwich to click their heels and say "Of course, master, whatever you say." Sorry, NEA, but this is 2007 and you are insulting the intelligence and decency of town residents.

Into that milieu, the following exchange occurred between a teacher named Ann - whose husband she discloses later is an East Greenwich teacher - and me in the Comments section of this prior post. Note how throughout the exchange she simply refuses to be factual or respond to facts. This is my whole point - either the data support the "pay cut" claim or they do not. I have put forth an explicit analysis for public review while the NEA has not and continues to refuse to do so. What are they afraid of? Instead they resort to name-calling in an effort to make it personal instead of factual. And then, in a truly Orwelllian twist, they try to turn hard-hitting fact-based answers into illegitimate responses:

Ann:

Donald, Your figures are wrong, in fact they're off by hundreds of dollars. But, I am going to assume you were mistaken, not that you are a liar. I don't know where you got them or why you didn't confirm them. Wait, yes I do. You enjoy trashing teachers too much to care if you're accurate or not. An angry zealot with a little information and/or MISinformation is dangerous and sad. It only creates an avenue for these individuals to spew more venemous statements about your teachers. The teachers are not lying. They know how much they pay for insurance. If you confirmed your numbers you would see that it is indeed a paycut. Now, do teachers realize that times are tough? Of course they do, they're tax payers too. But you can't reach an agreement if one side only offers a paycut to some of its employees. Would you agree to that???? Teachers are very willing to get creative and structure a contract that's fair to everyone. But I'm sure you don't (or aren't willing) to believe that because you seem to be one dimensional on this issue. You're too busy name calling, making accusations, and going out of your way to villify teachers. They're actually very good people you know. They deserve better treatment than this (and I'm not referring to salary). Your remarks are rather typical of a junior high gossip fest. Step back and take a breath please. Maybe you'll gain some understanding of both sides of the issue if you do. In fact, usually people go out of their way to understand both sides of an issue so they don't appear to be ignorant.

Don:

My, oh my. I am afraid you are the one who comes across as the angry zealot here. The kindest thing that can be said about your invective is that its logic is specious and and its tone is demagogic.

As a result, my blunt challenge to you is this: I put all of my analyses in full public view, even the supporting spreadsheets. I offer links to many 3rd-party documents to support other claims. Nobody to-date has offered any tangible proof that there are any errors in any of the work. (For goodness sake, nobody has even offered a tangible counter-proposal of any kind!) So demand that your NEA union reps do exactly the same as what I have done - Demand that they conduct a similar analysis, provide 3rd party sources to justify other claims they make, and then put it all out in full public view for the same level of scrutiny.

So far all they have done is what you have done: Whine endlessly in public about pay cuts and offer NO proof. That is demagoguery, plain and simple. Prove it or shut up!

Heck, I will even post their analysis on Anchor Rising if you send it to me.

I am not afraid of any such debate. But I think they are. And here is why:

Dare them to prove it to you because I predict that they can't prove it - without errors. Why? Because what you probably don't know is that when your union reps were challenged in the negotiations to show the School Committee members where there were pay cuts, I am told that the union reps admitted there were no pay cuts. Hmmm. Are you sure your NEA leaders are telling you the truth?

Think about that: The NEA union reps won't show any proof of pay cuts in public and they can't show any proof in private.

Unlike your reps, I have been tracking these issues since 2000 when I first joined the East Greenwich School Committee. In this most recent effort, I have taken data off salary schedules from legally executed contracts - and posted the schedules for public review. I have gotten official town and school summary budget information in FTM documents from the Town Manager's office - and posted the documents for public review. I talked directly to the Town Finance Director to confirm the contract terms mentioned for town employees covered by an NEA contract - and posted the information for public review. I met twice with the School District's Director of Administration to review current budget and historical school spending data for salaries, health benefits and pension costs - and posted the information for public review. All my statements about salaries, healthcare, and pensions come directly off documents generated by the school department in response to my requests for information that is available to concerned taxpayer citizens. Where it was necessary to conduct an analysis of raw data provided to me, I subsequently asked certain school officials to critique my work - before I posted it for public review on Anchor Rising. All of that makes for some junior high gossip fest! And, with all that information, go reread your specious claims that you don't know where I got the figures and I did not confirm them because I don't care if I am accurate or not. During 7 years of making public statements, nobody at the NEA has ever proven me wrong on any substantive analytics. Period.

And spare me the nonsense talk about "trashing" and "vilifying" teachers. I don't but you are too angry to notice. I do distinguish between teachers and the NEA. I readily - and happily - admit to trashing the NEA and their union hacks who brainlessly repeat the NEA's misleading and outright false claims. Good grief, the Soviet model is a proven failure; why is there any desire to replicate old-time Kremlin disinformation practices here at NEARI!?!

I conclude with a challenge to the teachers: Throw off the yoke of NEA servitude and declare yourselves true professionals. Decertify the NEA in East Greenwich and I bet all sorts of creative things could start to get done on both educational policies and compensation practices. Let's create an educational revolution that lets principals and teachers really run their schools like they know how to do. Let's find ways to reward great teachers without any upside caps on what they can earn financially or what they can do in their classrooms. Let's get rid of the weak teachers and bring in more strong ones. Let's figure out how to become a model school district for American education.

Ann:

My,oh my. More misinformation that you wish to hang your hat on. If you're not sitting in negotiations I wouldn't be so quick to comment on them, just as I won't. But I do pay a percentage of my insurance premium and I know that your numbers are incorrect. Unfortunately, you repeatedly take SOME information and spin it to your own personal satisfaction. You are now comparing the NEA to the Soviet Union? And calling teachers liars? Have you ever stopped to think that maybe you are the one being fed false information? I'm trying to maintain a positive attitude with all of this negativity surrounding the teaching profession. This kind of conversation makes that almost impossible and goes nowhere. Appreciation is shown in the form of a fair salary in other fields. Stock options, bonuses, etc. also come into play. Teachers are not part of that kind of a system, and don't expect to be. But we would like a fair and reasonable salary based on the average around our state-nothing more. The NEA happens to be the only group that supports this idea. Maybe if you came around and supported us we wouldn't need the NEA. Just a joke to lighten things up-don't worry. I won't hang my hat on that idea. It's hard to be happy and positive with this kind of negativity in the air so I'm done conversing for now. I'm off to my students and plan on having a wonderful day with them!

Don

Of course, the numbers are not going to tie to what is in Ann's paycheck - because she is still paying 5% or 10% co-pays from the last union contract and getting her 2006-07 salary.

The false "pay cut" claim has nothing to do with what is in her current paycheck and it is a scary thought that anyone would think so.

It has everything to do with PROSPECTIVE & INCREMENTAL pay dynamics when two likely events occur:

  • Base Salary Increase: A base salary increase in 2007-08 results from an increase to the 10 steps in the salary schedule, which I have assumed to be 2.4%. As shown in the spreadsheet in this post, that 2.4% translates into 8.1%-11.2% pay increases for job steps 1-9 - or $4,080-7,224 annual salary increases. It is a 2.4% or $1,675 annual salary increase for job step 10.

  • After-Tax Cost of Higher Co-Pay: The salary increase is offset by the incremental after-tax cost of implementing a higher co-pay, which I have assumed to be 20%, which yields an estimated incremental after-tax cost in 2007-08 of $550-989 per teacher.

Neither of these two events has happened yet. Which means you have to do some analytics. And, I reiterate again: No matter how you slice the numbers, there is no "pay cut."

If some teachers are that unclear about how to measure the alleged "pay cut," then it is not at all surprising that they reach the wrong conclusion. The starting point for the teachers should be a straightforward one: Demand that the NEA prove quantitatively to them where there is a "pay cut" in the future. Make the NEA earn its dues money! Before offering baseless criticisms of other people's work, get your own house in order.

Which means, the rest of us are still waiting...

For someone on the NEA's side to put the same kind of tangible analytical information like I have put into the public domain for scrutiny by all.

Still waiting...

I will even post it on Anchor Rising, if you send it to me. Let's have a real and public debate.

Still waiting...

Until you do, whining loudly about unproven "pay cuts" only decreases your credibility by the day.

Show us...if you can...

Happy to debate substantive issues in a meaningful way...

Completely unwilling to listen to whining without any analytical backup...

Show us...

Oh, it's not done! Keep reading in the Extended Entry below.

Continue reading "UPDATED: Excuse me, but this is NOT how to win friends & influence people in East Greenwich"


NEA "Pay Cut" Analysis Hostage Day Count: Day 3

Donald B. Hawthorne

Still nothing from the NEA so the "pay cut" analysis hostage day count continues. Day 3 is now history.

We eagerly await a response! The offer to post it here on Anchor Rising remains open.

Prove us wrong and we will admit to it. Or 'fess up that your claim about East Greenwich teachers taking a "pay cut" is false. It is put-up-or-shut-up time.

Until we see a quantitative financial analysis response from the NEA, we will continue with daily blog posts noting that their "pay cut" analysis is being held hostage at NEARI against the wishes of East Greenwich taxpaying residents.


September 23, 2007


"Pay Cut" Analysis Hostage Day Count: Day 2

Donald B. Hawthorne

The NEA's very public claim that the East Greenwich School Committee's contract proposals would result in "pay cuts" for teachers has been discredited in this post and several earlier posts mentioned at the beginning of that referenced post.

Along the way, many commentators on this blog and I have all challenged the NEA to put up quantitative proof to their "pay cut" claim or shut up.

I have also offered to post their analysis on this blog site for public scrutiny - just like I have already offered my own analysis for similar public review.

This new post is written in response to commentator John, who wrote:

Now, back on planet earth, as we come to the end of another chapter of "RI public sector union negotiations -- better than the Sopranos", can we start the hostage count for how many days will go by before [Pat] Crowley [of the NEA] puts any comparative quantitative analysis up on this blog?

We eagerly await a response! Prove us wrong and we will admit to it. Or 'fess up that your claim is false.

Until we get a response from the NEA, we will continue with a daily update on the "pay cut" analysis hostage count.



We Can Only Do What We Can Do

Justin Katz

In a comment to the previous post, WillP asks why we haven't mentioned this:

Tiverton police officers are looking forward to their paychecks that will contain 14 months of retroactive salary increases.

Fourteen months' worth of retroactive health-care co-share increases, however, will reduce that amount.

The 26 members of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, Local 406, last Thursday re-ratified a new three-year contract that gives them salary increases totaling 10 percent and increased health-insurance co-shares. The union vote did not include a side agreement that would have allowed more people to apply for the job of police chief. ...

The contract calls for police who have either a family or single health-care plan to pay $800 per year, or double the $400 they have been paying. In year three of the contract, the cost for the employee will increase to $900 annually. Plan changes that increase the amount of co-payments for office visits, emergency visits and prescription drugs helped reduce overall costs to the town, Steckman said.

The town's contribution for a family plan is $1,069 a month. The new plan will cost the town $1,056 a month. The cost to the town for a single plan is $422 a month. Under the new plan, it will be $417.

There are two reasons that I haven't mentioned this story. The primary reason is that I just didn't see it. I haven't the time to add The Newport Daily News to my daily dead-tree skims, and having long ago found the periodical's Web site next to useless, I lapsed from the practice of checking it regularly for news. It bears mentioning, here, that we're just folks who keep this site up in our spare time, of which Rhode Island has been working hard to ensure that I have a decreasing supply.

The second reason is obviously made moot by the first, but it's worth noting: I've only recently forced myself to take an interest in the local government, here in Tiverton, so even if I'd caught this story on the 12th, I wouldn't have had much background for any statements. Part of what makes the teachers' union's negotiation so egregious is that it had the audacity to up its percentage demands in a context of extreme fiscal restraints, as well as the way in which the percentage increases compound with the step increases. I already knew some of the tricks hidden in the numbers.

I've less historical foundation for assessing police contracts, both for comparison with previous contracts and for understanding how the remuneration adds up. I certainly intend to remedy this gap in my knowledge, but until such time as Anchor Rising can dispel my need to work as a carpenter on Saturdays, that remedy will have to be pursued in due course.



The Evidence of Affordability

Justin Katz

WillP left a curious comment to my "Just a Quick Shake of the Head" post:

On what basis do you assume that this is an "unaffordable contract?" Do you have access to details of the current contract negotiations or budget data that the rest of us residents and parents don't have? Again, you are assuming one side is telling the truth and the other isn't, which is my dilemma. Based on my experience with this school committee and Superintendent over the last four years, reliablity and integrity aren't high on the list of their positive traits. So finding myself in a quandary, if you have info I don't have, please share.

Sure thing: The General Assembly flat funded schools. At the time of the strike (at least), the union was asking for larger raises than they'd gotten in the previous contract. I simply cannot afford for the cost of living in Tiverton to go up any more. Unaffordable.

From the perspective that WillP takes, affordability is apparently an actual dollar amount that the school committee and administration can conceivably produce to increase teachers' remuneration. Certain caveats may or may not be involved: affordable if money is taken from other segments of the school's budget; affordable if the town allocates a greater percentage of revenue to the schools; affordable if the town finds some way to draw more money from citizens' pockets.

Of course, if one stands among a group that prioritizes the drawing of every possible penny out of a public body — and the willingness to strike as a negotiating tactic suggests that as a priority — anything is affordable. If one stands among families that can barely afford to keep their houses, nothing is.


September 21, 2007


Rearick Leads the Way (And Doesn't the Projo Have Access to Google?)

Justin Katz

Hot on the heels of the Tiverton teachers' union's unanimous vote to follow a moderated work-to-rule practice as a negotiating tactic, Schools Superintendent William Rearick has done the minimum that most bosses would do were employees to openly skip work for an expressly inappropriate reason:

The teachers’ union is balking at Schools Supt. William J. Rearick’s decision not to pay teachers for what he calls “the illegal job action” they took when they held a one-day strike on Sept. 4.

Reporter Meaghan Wims goes on to relay some automated ballerina spin from the NEA's Patrick Crowley:

In a letter Monday to Rearick, Patrick Crowley, assistant executive director of the National Education Association of Rhode Island, said the teachers are protected under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires salaried employees be paid a "predetermined amount" that is "not subject to reduction because of variations in the quantity or quality of the work performed."

Crowley said that Rearick’s decision could be interpreted to mean that the employees are now considered nonsalaried workers eligible for overtime pay.

If that's not Rearick's intention, Crowley writes, "it occurs to me that the withholding of pay is a willful violation under the federal statute and may subject the violator to criminal sanctions." The School Department, Crowley writes, could face up to $10,000 in fines for withholding teachers' pay.

"Please clarify your understanding of the exemption status for the workers in the NEA bargaining unit in order for the members to adequately calculate the overtime pay owed to them in time for the next pay roll period," Crowley writes. "If, however, the refusal to pay the teachers their agreed upon salary was inadvertent, we will work with you to remedy the situation as expeditiously as possible."

Leaving open the very real possibility that everybody else is better informed than I am, after a quick Google search of Crowley's legal quotation, it appears that he has been very selective in his review of the law (emphasis added):

a) An employee will be considered to be paid "on a salary basis'" within the meaning of the regulations if under his employment agreement he regularly receives each pay period on a weekly, or less frequent basis, a predetermined amount constituting all or part of his compensation, which amount is not subject to reduction because of variations in the quality or quantity of the work performed. Subject to the exceptions provided below, the employee must receive his full salary for any week in which he performs any work without regard to the number of days or hours worked. This policy is also subject to the general rule that an employee need not be paid for any workweek in which he performs no work.

(1) An employee will not be considered to be ``on a salary basis'' if deductions from his predetermined compensation are made for absences occasioned by the employer or by the operating requirements of the business. Accordingly, if the employee is ready, willing, and able to work, deductions may not be made for time when work is not available.

(2) Deductions may be made, however, when the employee absents himself from work for a day or more for personal reasons, other than sickness or accident. Thus, if an employee is absent for a day or longer to handle personal affairs, his salaried status will not be affected if deductions are made from his salary for such absences.

I'd argue that seeking to bully the school administration into assenting to an unaffordable contract should count as a "personal reason."


September 20, 2007


East Greenwich Pendulum Viewpoint: Clarifying the Teachers' Union Contract Debate With Facts

Donald B. Hawthorne

Today's East Greenwich Pendulum town newspaper contains a Viewpoint editorial in which I wrote these words:

The NEA teachers’ union strike and their contract demands are not about doing right by our children or about education. They are about maximizing adult entitlements where the NEA is willing to use our children as pawns to get more money.

And their claim about unacceptable working conditions does not stand up to scrutiny.

THE CONTEXT

From the outset, be clear about the context for this debate: It has nothing to do with a lack of desire to treat teachers well. Out of the 50 states, Rhode Island’s spending per pupil is the 9th highest and teachers’ salaries are the 8th highest - with East Greenwich paying above the RI average. We are generous and willingly so.

The resistance is to union contracts that continue an expensive entitlement ride which the state and individual communities can no longer afford. Union contracts directly impact over 80% of the school budget. In the last 10 years, the school budget has increased 87% while the town budget has increased 36%. That differential is why taxes have gone up relentlessly and a tax cap bill became state law.

The average East Greenwich teacher received nearly $62,000 in cash compensation last year. According to Claritas, the median income for East Greenwich residents is about $83,000, with 46% making less than $75,000. In other words, there is not that much difference between the cash compensation received by teachers and many taxpayers. Which makes the overriding question: Why should the teachers’ compensation package differ materially from those who pay for their compensation?

SALARY COMPENSATION ISSUES

School and teachers' union officials are all guilty of misleading the public about the real salary increases going to teachers under contracts around the state. Handing out 9-12%/year salary increases for 9 of the 10 job steps has been the practice in town going back to the 1990’s. We can't afford it anymore. The salary step schedule needs to be radically restructured in these negotiations.

The resistance is also to giving the same 9-12% annual salary increases to the worst teachers when we would gladly give high salary increases to the great teachers. But the NEA won't give principals the freedom to make such judgment calls.

There is an important nuance:

Roughly 60% of the East Greenwich teachers are at the top step 10 and their increases have been 3.25-3.8% over the last 3 years. As part of the step schedule restructuring, the top step needs to be adjusted so these teachers get an appropriate increase moving forward. But the pragmatic issue the NEA won't address is that future increases above 2% for these teachers – which many of us support – will require non-step 10 teachers to give up their 9-12%/year increases.

What part of 3-12%/year salary increases creates unacceptable working conditions? Or even an average of 3-4%, like the private sector?

LIES ABOUT PAY CUTS FOR TEACHERS

One of the most offensive statements by the NEA is that teachers would take a pay cut under the School Committee proposals. Simply and demonstrably false.

Example: Nearly 60% of teachers have a Master’s degree. I took the 2006-07 salary Master’s schedule from the last contract and increased each step by 2.4% to get a new 2007-08 salary schedule. Recall that each job step 1-9 teacher moves up 1 step each year while job step 10 teachers stay at 10. Job steps 1-9 would receive $4,080-7,224 (equal to 8.1%-11.2%) salary increases next year while job step 10 would receive a $1,675 or 2.4% salary increase.

The Excel spreadsheet documenting these pay increases is here. [NOTE: The Pendulum was not able to run this spreadsheet. Please take a look at it as it shreds the "pay cut" argument with verifiable numbers.]

Offsetting those pay increases is the after-tax incremental cost to teachers, under their Section 125 plan, for going to a 20% co-pay: $550/year for single coverage and $989/year for family coverage.

[Addendum, not in Pendulum editorial: Note in this additional spreadsheet how the annual after-tax cost to teachers of maintaining a 20% co-pay declines substantially in years 2 and 3 to incremental after-tax costs of $73-210/year. This is because the teachers would go from 5%/10% to 20% in year 1 and that change includes both the co-pay % increase and the annual increase in healthcare insurance premium costs. In the latter 2 years, the teachers only pay their pro-rata share of the annual cost increase of the premiums since they remain at a 20% co-pay in each subsequent year.]

Some pay cut. Remember this lie the next time the NEA says something publicly.

HEALTH INSURANCE CO-PAYMENTS

Teachers at job steps 1-3 have only a 5% co-pay. Teachers at steps 4-10 only pay 10%.

The East Greenwich town employees under an NEA contract pay 20%. What should teachers be treated differently?

I don’t know a single person in the private sector who pays less than 20%.

How does a 20% co-pay create unacceptable working conditions?

HEALTH INSURANCE CASH BUYBACK

East Greenwich teachers receive a cash bonus of $5,000/year when they do not use the health insurance plan provided by the district. 68 of the 235 teachers in the district receive this additional cash payment. The $5,000 bonus is among the highest in the state.

East Greenwich town employees under an NEA contract receive only a $1,000 cash payment. Why should teachers be treated differently?

I don't know a single person in the private sector who receives any cash buyback payments.

How do changes to that payment level create unacceptable working conditions?

PENSIONS

We will save the pension debate for another day. Just know that pension costs in the school budget went up 11% in 2006-07 and are going up 12% in 2007-08. The fact that nearly every public sector pension plan is under-funded doesn't deter the unions from resisting further reforms.

THE CHALLENGE MOVING FORWARD

While lying to the public about pay cuts to teachers and accusing the School Committee of negotiating in bad faith, the teachers’ union relentlessly demands only status-quo contract terms: (i) health insurance co-payment percentages at or below the current 5-10%; (ii) no change in the $5,000/year cash bonus for not using the district’s insurance programs; (iii) 9-12%/year salary increases for job steps 1-9; and, (iv) at least 3%/year increases for job step 10.

These demands, as in past negotiations, have resulted in school spending – and taxes – rising faster than the increases in the incomes of the working families and retirees in town who pay for the teachers’ compensation out of their incomes. This longstanding practice reduces the standard of living of the residents. They cannot afford for the school department to continue these reckless spending habits from the past and the recent tax cap state legislation now requires these bad habits be ceased.

Bluntly, none of the School Committee’s contract proposals has been sufficient to stay under the 5.25% spending increase allowed under the tax cap.

Everyone needs to start over with new proposals and get real.

That said, the School Committee is faced with the following choice, just like every family who has to live within its means: Either teachers’ salary and benefit costs are going to be reined in or educational programs and teachers’ jobs will have to be cut.

The School Committee strongly prefers the former alternative, which will allow the district to maintain academic and extra-curricular programs as well as teachers’ jobs that make a difference to our children’s education. The union negotiating position advocates the latter position, which only serves to provide ever greater adult entitlements, even at the expense of what benefits our children and at the potential cost of their member’s individual jobs.

It is possible to support teachers but not support their union’s extortion-like demands. I hope you will speak up against union demands which reduce your standard of living while not helping our children.

Contract terms like the rest of us, the people who pay for their salaries and benefits. It is all we ask.

I just received this email from an East Greenwich resident:

The article will have perfect timing. The tax bills came out yesterday and I nearly choked--it was reality time. Last night I went to an Open House at one of the schools and a teacher said to the parents: "I know this is hard for you but a 20% decrease in pay for a step 1 teacher isn't fair." I couldn't believe it---I am so happy you did that article.

As I said, clarifying the teachers' union contract debate with FACTS.

ADDENDUM:

In response to questions from Thomas in the Comments section, here is some further information worthy of more visibility. The information is based on data provided directly to me by the East Greenwich School Department:

  1. The median 2007-2008 East Greenwich teacher total cash compensation is between $69,000-70,000, which is higher than the average total cash compensation of $61,748. (There are 23 teachers earning between $69,000-70,000 and I didn't try to figure out the precise answer.)

    Here are some other data points for teacher total cash compensation for 2007-2008 -

    • Over $80,000 - 6 teachers
    • $75,000-80,000 - 20 teachers
    • $70,000-74,999 - 73 teachers
    • $65,000-69,999 - 34 teachers

    So 133 of the 235 teachers in East Greenwich have a total cash compensation in excess of $65,000.

  2. The average total cash compensation for teachers of $61,748 includes base salary ($58,674) plus other cash ($3,074).

    The "other" categories is primarily the cash bonus for not using the health insurance plan (29% of teachers get this bonus).

    It also includes department chair, coaching, advising, etc. fees. More about this in the Addendum to this post.

  3. Of course, the median household income for East Greenwich residents ($82,629) is higher than the median individual East Greenwich teacher (call it $69,500). The Addendum to the earlier post highlighted immediately above also provides independent 3rd-party data on the incomes of East Greenwich residents, including this summary description:

    • Median household annual income: $82,629, with 46% of the households earning less than $75,000.
    • 77% of households have incomes below $150,000.
    • 4% of household have incomes over $500,000.
    • Average household income: $122,723.

    Note that the $82,629 is East Greenwich HOUSEHOLD data for residents which includes all incomes earned in that house - and that will be more than 1 person in many cases. The $69,500 teacher salary is for the individual only and does not equal their median household income.

    So you are not comparing apples-to-apples and the 32% differential between the two numbers that you raise is therefore irrelevant. I also discuss this point further in the same Addendum referenced above. Here is an excerpt, modified to reflect median income and not average income data:

    ...we also know that 29% (68 out of 231 FTE's) of teachers take the cash bonus for not using the district's health insurance plan so those teachers are clearly living in a household where another member works - and provides both a second income and health insurance. Furthermore, we know another 47% (110 out of 231 FTE's) of teachers utilize the family health insurance plan where it is safe to assume some are the sole breadwinners and others are not but still provide the health insurance for the family. Therefore, we can conclude that more than 29% and less than 76% of teachers in East Greenwich have working spouses/significant others where there are 2 incomes in the household.

    If we were to assume another working adult in the family earned another $60,000/year for 29-76% of the teachers, then the median household income for East Greenwich teachers would range between $86,900-115,100/year.

    If the other working adult in the family earned $90,000/year, then the median household income for East Greenwich teachers would range between $95,600-137,900/year.

    Note that all four projected numbers for East Greenwich teacher median household incomes - $86,900, $95,600, $115,100, and $137,900 - are HIGHER than the median household income of East Greenwich residents.

    Which means the economic lifestyles of East Greenwich teacher households are quite similar to (or even better than) the median of all East Greenwich households - my point all along. And, since East Greenwich is one of the wealthier communities in Rhode Island, that suggests that teacher households may be as well off or more well off than the median household in the state.

    That is a rather startling conclusion, isn't it?

    And that tells you what a good job the NEA has done in its public relations efforts.

    Putting that conclusion aside, my reason for making the point in the first place was because the NEA persists in saying that there are: (i) loads of "rich people" in EG making over $500,000/year; (ii) these people aren't paying enough in taxes already; and, (iii) they need to be soaked for more taxes.

    My response is straightforward: Their comments have been shown to be lies using third-party data in the earlier post.

    And, even if they were true, so what? And why should it matter? RI already has the 7th highest taxes of the 50 states in the USA and we already pay our teachers the 8th highest out of the 50 states - and East Greenwich above the RI average. Is the NEA suggesting all East Greenwich residents are not taxed enough?

    Besides, even suppose every East Greenwich teacher had NO working spouse and their income was equal to their household income: If we are going to get into the pay comparison you are seeking, then we have to introduce the number of work days/year - something that doesn't make your argument any stronger.

    E.g., Teachers work roughly 180 days/year. People in the private sector work roughly 240 days/year (52 weeks minus two weeks for holidays and two weeks for vacation).

    Suppose - quite incorrectly - that the median household salary for an East Greenwich teacher was only their income of $69,500/180 days = $386/day.

    Median household salary in East Greenwich of $82,629/240 days = $344/day.

    So even when making the utterly false assumption about household versus individual incomes, those day-pay numbers don't look favorable for teachers - and we have not touched the other relevant consideration: the relative differences in the length of the work days between the two.

    Any way you slice the data, it is reasonable to conclude that East Greenwich teacher households are doing just fine in general and also when compared specifically to East Greenwich residents.

    The NEA story line of "poor teachers" versus "rich East Greenwich residents" just does not hold water.

  4. You miss my point here: Taxes have been going up faster than the incomes of the residents of EG because of the terms of the NEA contract. That is an economically unsustainable proposition. The days of being able to afford that trend are gone.

  5. Yes, the school budget increased 87% over the last 10 years while the town budget only increased 36%. Don't have the data on how much of that 87% was driven by salary increases versus health insurance cost increases. But the health insurance cost data is unlikely to materially change the conclusion of this post because even today the insurance costs are still "just" 20% of the median teacher salary. The math won't make the point I think you are trying to make - it is the teachers' salaries which have been the primary driver in increased school budgets. I remember salaries alone going up about 7%/year during the years when I served on the School Committee.

    That said, based on data recently provided to me by the East Greenwich school department, here is the total 2007-08 compensation cost paid by taxpayers to support the "average" East Greenwich teacher:

    • Salary: $58,672
    • Other cash: $3,074 (2006-07 data only available at this time of year)
    • Health insurance, net of co-pay: $9,160
    • Pension costs: $7,263
    • Total compensation: $78,169

September 19, 2007


UPDATED: The Entitlement Mentality of Certain Union Teachers & Their Leaders

Donald B. Hawthorne

I got a phone call today which passed along the following story:

When the Judge recently heard the case involving the illegal East Greenwich teachers' union strike, a teacher went up to a parent at the courthouse and said "Thank you for your support."

To which the parent replied: "I am supporting my child's education and I want you to get back to work."

And the teacher replied: "The town of East Greenwich has a lot of money. You have enough money to pay us more. You are hiding it all."

Aren't these union hacks brilliant?

Reminds me of the same entitlement nonsense talk said by the NEA back in 2005. Here is what NEA reps Roger Ferland and Jane Argenteri were quoted as saying about East Greenwich residents in a May 26, 2005 article entitled "Work-to-rule affecting EG school children" in the East Greenwich Pendulum newspaper (page 1, continuing onto page 6; hard-copy only available but referenced in this 2005 post):

  1. "The teachers had to do [contract compliance] to show parents how much extra teachers really do."
  2. "[Work-to-rule] simply means we won't do anything extra."
  3. [Tutoring (i.e., any form of academic assistance) before or after school] is not part of their job description."
  4. "Teachers have been doing more than what's required for no money in the past."
  5. "...a majority of East Greenwich residents can afford to hire tutors for their children but have been receiving these services free from public school teachers for years."
  6. "More than 50% of East Greenwich residents have a very high income, $500,000 or over."
  7. "In the private sector no one works overtime without getting paid. And if they're off the clock at 5 p.m., you can bet they're out the door at 5."
  8. "...contract compliance is not hurting the children. Not going on a field trip isn't hurting a child."

Separately, I am told that certain union negotiators believe that, should the 3050 tax cap be eliminated or neutered, they expect all the "extra" monies to flow directly into higher teachers' salaries and benefits - thereby ensuring taxes continue to go up faster than the increases in taxpayer incomes.

These people are smoking some serious mind-altering substances if they think that will ever happen. After all, the East Greenwich Town Council cut the school budget in each of the least two years - even before 3050 took effect.

Must be nice to live in the Entitlement Fantasy World.

Or, as Lawrence Reed of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy said in an October 2001 speech to the Economic Club of Detroit entitled Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy:

Economist Milton Friedman elaborated on this some time ago when he pointed out that there are only four ways to spend money. When you spend your own money on yourself, you make occasional mistakes, but they’re few and far between. The connection between the one who is earning the money, the one who is spending it and the one who is reaping the final benefit is pretty strong, direct and immediate.

When you use your money to buy someone else a gift, you have some incentive to get your money’s worth, but you might not end up getting something the intended recipient really needs or values.

When you use somebody else’s money to buy something for yourself, such as lunch on an expense account, you have some incentive to get the right thing but little reason to economize.

Finally, when you spend other people’s money to buy something for someone else, the connection between the earner, the spender and the recipient is the most remote — and the potential for mischief and waste is the greatest. Think about it — somebody spending somebody else’s money on yet somebody else. That’s what government does all the time.

But this principle is not just a commentary about government. I recall a time, back in the 1990s, when the Mackinac Center took a close look at the Michigan Education Association’s self-serving statement that it would oppose any competitive contracting of any school support service (like busing, food or custodial) by any school district anytime, anywhere. We discovered that at the MEA’s own posh, sprawling East Lansing headquarters, the union did not have its own full-time, unionized workforce of janitors and food service workers. It was contracting out all of its cafeteria, custodial, security and mailing duties to private companies, and three out of four of them were nonunion!

So the MEA — the state’s largest union of cooks, janitors, bus drivers and teachers — was doing one thing with its own money and calling for something very different with regard to the public’s tax money. Nobody — repeat, nobody — spends someone else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.

A truly cavalier attitude by the unions about their right to tap the hard-earned pay of working families and retirees in Rhode Island. Enough to make you really upset, isn't it?

ADDENDUM, further updated on September 19:

I look forward to addressing some of the comments made below in a new blog post!

In the meantime, this post caused an East Greenwich school official to contact me and say that Jane Argenteri is making the same comment in this year's negotiations about all the $500,000+ incomes in East Greenwich. This class warfare talk does get a bit old, especially when it - again - has no basis in fact. Sigh.

I recently held a second meeting with Maryanne Crawford, the Director of Administration for the East Greenwich School District. During that meeting, I learned the following:

  • The average base salary cash compensation for East Greenwich teachers in 2007-08 is $58,674.
  • The average of all other cash compensation for teachers in 2006-07 was $3,074. Nearly all of this is the impact of the $5,000 cash bonus for not using the health insurance plan. Other sources of cash payments come from serving as: (i) an advisor; (ii) a coach; (iii) a curriculum leader; (iv) a department chair; (v) a committee member; and, (vi) summer work.
  • Therefore, the average total cash compensation paid to East Greenwich teachers is approximately $62,000.

From an earlier post, we also know that 29% (68 out of 231) of teachers take the cash bonus for not using the district's health insurance plan so those teachers are clearly living in a household where another member works - and provides both a second income and health insurance. Furthermore, we know another 47% (110 out of 231) of teachers utilize the family health insurance plan where it is safe to assume some are the sole breadwinners and others are not but still provide the health insurance for the family. Therefore, we can conclude that more than 29% and less than 76% of teachers in East Greenwich have working spouses/significant others where there are 2 incomes in the household.

If we were to assume another working adult in the family earned another $60,000/year for 29-76% of the teachers, then the average household income for East Greenwich teachers would range between $77,000-106,000/year. If the other working adult in the family earned $90,000/year, then the average household income for East Greenwich teachers would range between $86,000-128,000/year.

According to the US census in 2000, the median household income in East Greenwich was $70,063 - as of 2000 but expressed in 1999 dollars.

In addition, I received some further information about the incomes of East Greenwich residents. A firm named Claritas, a company that tracks and projects demographic information. This person who contacted me works with them and contracted them to run projected 2006 data on the town.

The uploaded PDF report shows the following projections for the town of East Greenwich in 2006:

  • Median household annual income: $82,629, with 46% of the households earning less than $75,000.
  • 77% of households have incomes below $150,000.
  • 4% of household have incomes over $500,000.
  • Average household income: $122,723.

Besides it being clear - again - that Argenteri doesn't know what she is talking about, my simple takeway is this: 46% of East Greenwich households earn less than $75,000/year and the average household income is $122,723. Teachers in East Greenwich make an average of about $62,000/year and - since somewhere between 29-76% of them have second incomes in their household - could realize average household incomes between $77,000-128,000/year.

So why should the taxpayers - many of whom live the same economic lifestyle as the teachers - have to fund entitlements which are greater than what they receive in their own paychecks? Should these same taxpayers, who are already taxed more than 80% of America, be required to suffer a further reduction in their standard of living?

And, even if you are unsympathetic to the plight of East Greenwich residents, do not forget that the NEA will take the terms of an eventual East Greenwich settlement to other less well-off towns around the state and demand that they accept similar contractual obligations.

Remember: Anchor Rising broke the news first about the East Greenwich teachers' strike and remains THE place to go for information on the teachers' strike and contract issues in Rhode Island. See the Extended Entry for all relevant links.

Continue reading "UPDATED: The Entitlement Mentality of Certain Union Teachers & Their Leaders"

September 17, 2007


What's in Your Interest?

Justin Katz

The New York Times smells self interest in industries' recent support for federal regulations. A variety of factors are in play, but one quoted source for the story voices the overall gut reaction of public advocates:

"I am worried about industry lobbyists bearing gifts," said Edmund Mierzwinski, consumer program director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group in Washington. "I don't trust them. Their ultimate goal is regulation that protects them, not the public."

That strategy isn't a new contrivance, as illustrated by an historical note from Milton and Rose Friedman's Free to Choose:

As the campaign against the railroads mounted, some farsighted railroad men recognized that they could turn it to their advantage, that they could use the federal government to enforce their price-fixing and market-sharing agreements and to protect themselves from state and local governments. They joined the reformers in supporting government regulation. The outcome was the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887.

It took about a decade to get the commission in full operation. By that time the reformers had moved on to their next crusade. The railroads were only one of their concerns. They had achieved their objective, and they had no overpowering interest to lead them to do more than cast an occasional glance at what the ICC was doing. For the railroad men the situation was entirely different. The railroads were their business, their overriding concern. They were prepared to spend twenty-four hours a day on it. And who else had the expertise to staff and run the ICC? They soon learned how to use the commission to their own advantage.

These examples come to mind because David Palmisciano, a member of the Special House Commission to Examine the Issue of Licensing Builders and Contractors and president of Carpenters Local Union 94 today insisted, in a letter to the Providence Journal responding to my piece on increased regulation of building contractors in Rhode Island, that the public must be protected from "unscrupulous contractors." Why unscrupulous practices can't simply carry civil or criminal penalties as an after-the-fact disincentive, Palmisciano doesn't explain. Instead, he writes:

Requiring contractors to have some basic qualifications and training is certainly no hurdle — a good contractor should be interested in furthering their knowledge of the trade. As this is no more than is required of the nurses and doctors who work to ensure the public health in our hospitals, it is certainly not an unreasonable requirement for those building the hospitals.

Personally, I'm very interested in expanding my knowledge of my trade of carpentry. (That is, after all, my main route toward increased pay.) I'm just not persuaded that my limited time and resources are better spent on official "continuing education" than on, oh I don't know, plying my trade. And as far as I can see, no educational regime is required before becoming a contractor. No doubt the unions and other established players would salivate over the possibility of forcing all potential competition to go through a certain number of years of training, but those who currently look to construction as a reasonably well-paying alternative to poverty might find the investment impossible, or the narrowed entryway to the career impassible. Moreover, the housing market would surely suffer — and consumers would surely balk — if all carpenters were as well remunerated for their investment in training as nurses and doctors.

I've a feeling, however, that, rhetoric notwithstanding, the consumer is not top of mind for the regulators. Writes Mr. Palmisciano:

... the commission sought to create a level playing field for legitimate contractors to compete. Currently, both union and reputable non-union contractors are facing a dilemma. Unscrupulous contractors who skimp on basics such as carrying workers’ compensation insurance or illegally misclassifying employees as independent contractors gain an incredibly unfair advantage over contractors who follow the rules.

My op-ed called the sponsor of the relevant legislation, Charlene Lima, "the champion of the established player," and apparently Mr. Palmisciano agrees. "Leveling the playing field" means increasing the cost of construction to working Rhode Islanders and raising barriers against competition to the benefit of just those players.

There are all sorts of ways to be unscrupulous Mr. Union President, and some of them involve selling protection to the public for work that will gradually become too expensive for more and more families performed by workers who are more and more smug in their incumbency.



Quantifying the Trend Which Led to the 3050 Tax Cap Law

Donald B. Hawthorne

Why did the Rhode Island Senate Bill 3050 tax cap bill become the law of the land?

Because of this unsustainable economic trend:

...These [union] demands, as in past negotiations, have resulted in school spending - and therefore taxes - rising faster than the increases in the incomes of the working families and retirees who reside in East Greenwich and pay for the teachers' salaries and benefits out of their incomes. This longstanding practice reduces the standard of living of the residents. As such, they cannot afford for the school department to continue these reckless spending habits from the past and the recent state legislation now requires us to cease these bad habits.

The School Committee is faced with the following choice, just like every family who has to live within its means: Either teachers' salary and benefit costs are going to be reined in or educational programs and teachers' jobs will have to be cut. We cannot afford to continue the gravy train ride of past years...

Recalling that teacher salary and benefits comprise just over 80% of the total school budget, here are some hard cold facts for East Greenwich which quantify the problem with the economics of today's teachers' union contracts:

From the June 11, 1997 Financial Town Meeting (PDF document) regarding the FY1997-1998 budget:

  • The town operating budget was $8,814, 281.
  • The school operating budget was $16,490,358.
  • The total operating budget was $25,304,639.

Fast forward to ten years later: From the June 12, 2007 Financial Town Meeting (PDF document) regarding the FY2007-2008 budget:

  • The town operating budget is $11,954,197.
  • The school operating budget is $30,889,947.
  • The total operating budget is $42,844,144.

In other words, over the last ten years:

  • The town operating budget increased 35.6% or 3.1%/year.
  • The school operating budget increased 87.3% or 6.5%/year.
  • The total town and school operating budget increased 69.3% or 5.4%/year.
  • The school budget went from being 65% of the total operating budget to 72% of the total operating budget.

These numbers show how the school budget has resulted in living beyond the means of taxpayers, the working families and retirees of East Greenwich. Driven by outrageous and unaffordable teachers' union contract terms demanded by the unions and enabled by spineless politicians and bureaucrats.

And that is why 3050 became law in the state.

Ask your town officials to do the same analysis for your community.


September 15, 2007


East Greenwich Teachers' Union Contract Negotiations Update

Donald B. Hawthorne

The East Greenwich School Committee met with the mediator and NEA union negotiators last night for over 7 hours. No progress occurred.

Here is the Word document-based press release they issued today.

This was the first time I have been disappointed in the public statements of the School Committee. If I was on the School Committee, here is what my press release would have said instead:

The School Committee and the teachers' union met with a mediator for over 7 hours last evening, September 14, 2007. No progress was made. In fact, the School Committee members sat for close to 3 hours waiting for a counter-proposal from the NEA. When the counter was finally received, there was essentially no change from their original proposal. Later in the session, the union negotiators refused to consider any cost-saving measures, such as a change in the healthcare provider.

This behavior is the norm for NEA negotiators as they try to induce citizen committee members to negotiate against themselves - and then allege bad faith negotiating practices when they do not do so.

Therefore, the teachers' union continues to demand status-quo contract terms: (i) health insurance co-payment percentages at or below the current 5%/10% levels; (ii) no change in the $5,000/year cash bonus for not using the district's insurance programs; (iii) 9-12%/year salary increases for job steps 1-9; and, (iv) at least 3%/year increases for job step 10. Pension benefits would also remain unchanged.

These demands, as in past negotiations, have resulted in school spending - and therefore taxes - rising faster than the increases in the incomes of the working families and retirees who reside in East Greenwich and pay for the teachers' salaries and benefits out of their incomes. This longstanding practice reduces the standard of living of the residents. As such, they cannot afford for the school department to continue these reckless spending habits from the past and the recent state legislation now requires us to cease these bad habits.

The School Committee is faced with the following choice, just like every family who has to live within its means: Either teachers' salary and benefit costs are going to be reined in or educational programs and teachers' jobs will have to be cut. We cannot afford to continue the gravy train ride of past years.

The School Committee strongly prefers the former alternative, which will allow the district to maintain academic and extra-curricular educational programs and teachers' jobs that make a difference to our children's education. The union negotiating position advocates the latter position, which only serves to provide ever greater adult entitlements, even at the expense of what benefits our children and at the potential cost of their own member's individual jobs.

A statewide educational funding formula will likely not solve this impasse. The NEA appears to believe that any increased state funding will automatically flow directly to maintaining the unaffordable large salary increases and outrageous benefits that exist today. That simply cannot happen any more and this School Committee will not agree to such a course of action.

The mediator did not schedule our next meeting until October 9th. It is also our understanding that the state union representative is out of town until that time.

The School Committee has received many inquiries from parents about teachers initiating "work-to-rule" actions, specifically some teachers are refusing to write recommendations for seniors applying to college. It is our understanding that the teachers' union has not called "work-to-rule" action. We expect all teachers to perform their duties as they have done in a non work-to-rule environment. If we find that any rogue teachers are acting in ways which are harmful to our children, swift disciplinary action will be taken with those individual teachers. We encourage any parent of a student who is negatively impacted by work-to-rule type actions to immediately bring the issue to the attention of the school principal, the Superintendent or a School Committee member.

One of the key takeaways here: The NEA's negotiating position means that they are willing to throw some of their own members under the bus and let them lose their jobs before they will bend on modifying contractually-defined adult entitlements.

Told you we would learn a lot about the priorities and values of the various stakeholders as these negotiations unfold. Yes, indeed.

Remember: Anchor Rising is THE place to go for information on the teachers' strike and contract issues in Rhode Island. See the Extended Entry for all relevant links.

Continue reading "East Greenwich Teachers' Union Contract Negotiations Update"


The Teachers' Unions' Lack of Moral Character

Donald B. Hawthorne

In my most recent post, I wrote these words: "We will learn a lot in the coming weeks and months about the priorities and values of the various stakeholders, won't we?" Yes, indeed.

Reinforcing the point of that question, John McCain is quoted in an earlier post about war:

"Character," writes the younger [John] McCain, quoting the 19th century evangelist Dwight Moody, "is what you are in the dark," when nobody's looking and you silently make decisions about how you will act the next day.

The teachers' unions are conducting a war against our children, using them as pawns to blackmail School Committees and citizens into caving into their contractual demands for further adult entitlements. Their demands have nothing to do with education. The unions' actions are devoid of character and are morally offensive.

The actions by the West Warwick AFT union are the latest unprincipled actions and are described in this earlier post:

The School Committee has exercised its option to let its current teachers contract lapse after three years rather than four, a move that prompted the union to announce that its members would immediately start working to rule — doing only what is strictly required under the contract.

The contract with the West Warwick Teachers Alliance [an AFT teachers' union group] that took effect last Sept. 1 was a four-year agreement — providing annual raises of 3.9 percent — but it includes the proviso that either party could choose, before Sept. 1 of this year, to eliminate the fourth year (ending in 2010) and instead negotiate a fresh agreement.

The School Committee voted unanimously on Tuesday of last week to take that option, Chairman Daniel T. Burns Jr. said.

Given the district’s fiscal straits — it entered the current fiscal year with a budget $1.7 million out of balance — it "would have been fiscally irresponsible to let it go to the fourth year," Burns said on Tuesday. "I can’t promise you a rose garden if all I’ve got is weeds."

Yesterday, Donald E. Vanasse, president of the 340-member teachers union, announced its new stance.

"The long and the short of it is that, over time, teachers will not be performing duties that are not part of the school day," said Vanasse. "The teachers will do what they’ve been contracted to do. They’ll do their jobs and do them well. But they’re not going to do the extras that aren’t required but that they always do anyway."...

In July, the school board reconciled its budget, slashing after-school programs and middle school athletics, and laying off a number of teacher assistants. It also proposed cutting transportation spending, reducing the number of substitute teachers and reducing its special-education tuition budget, with the hope that the state Department of Children, Youth and Families cuts down on the number of placements it sends the town...

The next fiscal year is expected to be even harder. The state-imposed cap on tax-levy increases will tighten, leaving the town with even less money to provide to the district.

With those kinds of cuts, Burns said, it would have been unjustifiable to keep the current teachers contract in force for the full four years. Now, he said, the district can assess its finances when the time comes to decide what it can reasonably offer the teachers.

Burns said he has no qualms about the board’s vote because it was an option available to both parties.

"I don’t know why they’re upset," Burns said. "Their side could have chosen to opt out if it wasn’t to their benefit."

For now, the union will wait to see if the board will rescind its vote — an action that would allow the dynamic to return to normal, Vanasse said.

"The union door remains open, but someone has to walk through that door," Vanasse said.

And from a second ProJo article:

..."The teachers that serve the West Warwick Public Schools felt that their trust has been broken and that their professionalism is not recognized," Donald E. Vanasse, president of the West Warwick Teachers Alliance, said in the letter to board Chairman Daniel T. Burns Jr. "Your committee’s recent actions have left all teachers feeling that they have been devalued in the eyes of their own employer."...

A few days after the committee’s vote on the contract, the union announced its decision to work to rule. In his letter, Vanasse said: "It is unfortunate that these events have unfolded in this matter, but be assured that we, as an organization, will continue to value the process of good-faith negotiations.

"In that vein, we stand prepared to rebuild the relationship that previously existed between the West Warwick Teachers Alliance and the West Warwick School Committee once your body takes steps to reconcile the manner in which it has recently begun to conduct labor/management relations."

However, Burns said it is the union’s current posture that will make it difficult for the next contract negotiation session in a few years.

"The work-to-rule environment that the union leadership has instructed classroom teachers to practice is not sitting well with this School Committee," Burns said. "And it is the wrong move if the teachers are looking for a better contract in the future."

Schools Supt. Kenneth M. Sheehan said he’s baffled by the union’s actions. Sheehan, who once headed the teachers union in Seekonk, said he’s seen unions employ the "work to rule" strategy when teachers were working without a contract, but never when educators were in the midst of a "lucrative" agreement.

Some of the "unwritten rules" of the strategy, Sheehan said, include refusal to volunteer for nonpaid clubs or activities, participate in parent-teacher organization meetings, or sit on unpaid committees for the district. (The school open houses, which began in the district last week, are a part of the teachers contract, Sheehan said.) Those moves, he said, undoubtedly hurt the quality of education in town and, ultimately, shortchange students.

"I have difficulty in accepting [using] children or students as pawns when the fight is with the School Committee," Sheehan said. "It’s always a problem when you put kids in the middle."...

Think about this: Both sides had the contractual right to opt out of year 4, the school district is in deep financial trouble and had already cut programs, the school committee exercised its legal right to opt out, and the teachers' union went work-to-rule even as the remaining 3 years of the contract remain in force. And the union said that only outright capitulation by the school committee would undo the new dynamic, restore trust and show respect for teachers. And, of course, the children are the pawns who suffer along the way - because the union does not give a damn about them.

Forget the happy public relations talk. West Warwick is the latest real-world example which shows citizens what are the priorities and values of the teachers' unions.

And why do we let these unions retain monopoly control over our public education system?

Remember: Anchor Rising is THE place to go for information on the teachers' strike and contract issues in Rhode Island. See the Extended Entry for all relevant links.

Continue reading "The Teachers' Unions' Lack of Moral Character"

September 13, 2007


The Two Alternatives Before Us: Educational Programs & Teacher Jobs OR Excessive Adult Entitlements

Donald B. Hawthorne

Valerie Forti, President of The Education Partnership, wrote these words yesterday in a ProJo editorial:

This year, the Rhode Island General Assembly sent a very clear message to school districts and to unions.

In level-funding state education aid, after passing a Senate bill last year that checks property-tax increases, legislators sent the message that school committees and unions should not expect to get more money if they cannot appropriately account for what they are spending. The legislature is (finally) noticing that, under the current approach, simply sending more money to the districts increases salaries and benefits — but does not necessarily benefit the children in our public schools, particularly in our urban school districts.

...it is encouraging that some school committees are resisting union pressure to simply give more and more to teachers in salaries and benefits while programs that directly benefit students — sports, arts, etc. — are being under funded or cut out altogether.

In several recent contract negotiations, unfortunately, school committees agreed to a quid pro quo for unions' paying part of their health and dental benefits. In a number of new contracts, any savings were completely offset by a shorter school year, special stipends and increased "buy-backs"...Instead of helping students, the money continues to go for excessive adult entitlements.

...Students are suffering because of over-generous contract obligations. The legislature has begun to understand that fact — and this year, did not see fit to send more money to schools to simply increase salaries and benefits...

The Education Partnership honors good teachers. We want good teachers to have good salaries, health and dental care and a retirement benefit. But what our school committees are currently negotiating into teacher contracts in Rhode Island is not sustainable, and vastly outstrips the resources that we have for our children, and should be devoting to them.

When are we going to start to talk about real reform to help support our students? For almost a year, The Education Partnership worked closely with the legislature, the Rhode Island Department of Education, and various advocacy groups (including teachers unions!) to help increase public understanding of why Rhode Island needs a permanent school-funding formula, and to help design the formula. (Only one other state, Pennsylvania, does not have a permanent funding formula.)

At the end of the legislative session, though, after it became clear the formula was being distorted to support bloated and unrealistic spending, The Education Partnership felt compelled to withdraw its support for the formula that was ultimately proposed. Thankfully, the legislature refrained from passing a school-funding formula and it level-funded school districts, sending a clear message that it's time for a change.

This state needs to think about real financial reform and ways that truly bring resources into school districts for students. For starters, when are we going to work on changing the pension system for teachers (and all municipal and state employees)? We should not be distracted by talk about consolidating school systems and redesigning the funding formula — which could cost enormous political capital while doing little to help students directly.

Let's talk about a real reform agenda and pass legislation that redirects education spending more toward students.

Require that every school district (as well as municipal and state) employee who is more than three years away from retirement to be part of a defined-contribution plan — and take that issue off of the negotiation table...

Additionally, we need one statewide health-care plan for all school district employees — taking that issue off the local negotiation table. Let's end sick-day abuse that is costing taxpayers so much. The state law should set a cap of 10 sick days for all school-district employees (how about adding municipal and state workers?) with assignment beyond that to Temporary Disability Insurance (TDI). There should be no more insurance buy-backs of any kind. The state should mandate teacher and principal evaluations in every district, every year, to measure outcomes and bring accountability to our school systems.

...This year's decisions indicate that our legislators now understand something: Rhode Island does not have adequate public-education performance, and increases in funding have been going to excessive adult entitlements, rather than toward improving student achievement.

The citizens of Rhode Island need to work now to send a message to the unions and the legislature. We need a strong new pension-reform plan that seriously gets to the heart of the problem, a statewide health-care plan, no more insurance buy-backs, 10 sick days and TDI, and a research-based evaluation system in every district.

What we are doing is not working for our children and is not sustainable. Unfortunately for our students and the taxpayers of Rhode Island, that is eminently clear.

This ProJo editorial has more on health insurance issues.

Forti's recommendations highlight one of the under-addressed issues in teachers' union contract negotiations: One side of the table has 7 unpaid, part-time citizen volunteers and the other side of the table has professional teachers' union negotiators plus some teachers who are union representatives. And all it takes is for the union to find one weak district and then those contract terms are pushed as the norm for subsequent negotiations elsewhere in the state.

Having the state legislature pass bills which would take some of the issues off the table at the local level would begin to level the negotiating playing field - and benefit our childrens' education.

The power of the tax cap legislation is that it is forcing more and more economic terms of teachers' union contracts into the public eye. Once public, things will never be the same.

Or, to put it in more tangible terms for East Greenwich, based on information in this post:

  • 68 out of 231 teachers received a $5,000/year cash bonus last year for not using the district's health insurancee program. A $340,000/year cost for this buyback program.
  • 110 teachers had the family health insurance plan and 37 teachers had the single health insurance plan, at an estimated 2008-09 cost of $1,860,624.

As the School Committee negotiates a new contract with the NEA now, it knows the underlying issues which it will face after the contract is signed:

  • The tax cap will limit the allowable increase in spending.
  • If the new contract maintains the status quo and does not eliminate the cash bonus for the buyback program, then the budget will be $340,000 higher.
  • If the new contract maintains the status quo of a 5%/10% co-pay mixture and does not yield at least a 20% co-pay, then the budget will be about $200,000 higher.
  • If the new contract only tweaks the status quo, the tax cap will likely force school budget cuts next year. And the "price" for maintaining the current excessive adult entitlements will mean the School Committee has only two other alternatives: Cut educational programs or cut teachers - or both.

As Ms. Forti asks in her editorial, how do either of these two alternatives benefit our children's education?

Educational programs and jobs for teachers OR excessive adult entitlements. The power of the tax cap law is that it is finally forcing everyone to make conscious tradeoffs between these two alternatives so towns can live within the financial means of their taxpaying citizenry.

Which alternative will the School Committee choose? Which alternative will the NEA choose? Which alternative do individual teachers prefer and will they speak to the NEA about it? Which side of the debate will you personally choose to be on? And are you going to speak up about your opinion right now - when it matters?

We will learn a lot in the coming weeks and months about the priorities and values of the various stakeholders, won't we?

Remember: Anchor Rising is THE place to go for information on the teachers' strike and contract issues in Rhode Island. See the Extended Entry for all relevant links.

Continue reading "The Two Alternatives Before Us: Educational Programs & Teacher Jobs OR Excessive Adult Entitlements"

September 12, 2007


Behind My Reaction

Justin Katz

My purpose with last night's post from the parking lot, now that I'm able to do it, was to convey my gut reaction to the experience. Having slept on it, I think I can better articulate what was bothering me.

The truth is that some of the requests from the teachers raised worthwhile questions, even those pertaining to the procedural minutia. The school committee ought, for example, to emulate the town council in reading summaries of such things as the consent agenda (wherein they mainly acknowledge receipt of letters or information). And of course leaks and the like ought to be fixed as quickly as possible.

What struck me about the behavior, and its seemingly deliberate fostering of an atmospheric tension, was that it was more appropriate to those holding democratic authority (such as stockholders or, in this case, voters and parents). It is their role to put an elected or appointed body's feet to the fire.

Of course, it's worth noting that teachers are most definitely stakeholders. It also oughtn't be forgotten that some of them are probably both voters and parents. However, other channels are in place to address their suggestions and concerns in their capacity as professional employees. It is perhaps laudable that they would step up their advocacy on behalf of the schools and their students in response to public apathy, but even there, their activism would be more appropriately directed toward motivating parents than leaning on the school committee.

The problem with their assuming the role of the democratic authority is that, as a group, they are also advocates in their own self-interest as employees. And not only shouldn't professionals presume to behave as they did last night, but the context of the ongoing contract negotiations suggests that they created that tension more to benefit themselves as employees than as stakeholders. After all, in times of tight school district budgets, infrastructural problems and faulty PA system are in direct conflict with their compensatory demands.



The NEA in East Greenwich: Reflections On The Week That Was

Donald B. Hawthorne

Some reflections on the week that was, on what happened last week in East Greenwich and how it connects to broader issues across Rhode Island:

LESSON #1: THE NEA LIES REPEATEDLY

Just like they did in 2004-05, the NEA resorted to its typical Kremlin-esque disinformation campaign of lies and distortions to the working families and retirees of East Greenwich - including these false claims:

  • Teachers would take pay cuts under any School Committee contract proposal. FALSE.
  • After informing the School Department on August 29 of their intent to strike at the beginning of school in September if there was no contract, teachers were not told in advance that their paychecks for September classroom work - to be paid prospectively on August 31 - would be withheld. FALSE.
  • Declining to pay teachers (prospectively for work not done) was a blatant act of coercion by the school leadership. FALSE.
  • Teachers were not paid for summer work done prior to the start of school in September. FALSE.
  • The School Committee forced the teachers not to report to work on September 4 because the Committee refused to bargain on September 3. FALSE.
  • Teachers can strike or do work stoppages. FALSE.
  • The School Committee has created an environment of intimidation and demoralization and failed to negotiate in good faith, including being unavailable to meet with the mediator until August. FALSE.

All of these NEA claims were debunked in Anchor Rising blog posts listed in the Extended Entry below. The bottom line: East Greenwich residents learned - again - how they cannot trust anything said by the NEA and its union hacks.

LESSON #2: THE TEACHERS' UNION CONTRACT MATTERS GREATLY BECAUSE ITS TERMS DOMINATE TOTAL SPENDING IN EAST GREENWICH

Michael Isaacs, President of the East Greenwich Town Council and someone I have known for upwards of 10 years, was kind enough to pass along some summary 2007-08 budget information and related web links:

  • The town budget is $11,954,197.
  • The school budget is $30,889,947. (A not-quite-the-final version of the budget can be found here.)
  • Total debt service is $2,496,591, of which $1,049,503 is for the schools.
  • The total budget is $45,340,735.

More information here.

In other words, the school operating budget is 72% of the total town and school operating budget. I have been told that expenses related to teachers' compensation are roughly 82% of the school budget.

Therefore, the teachers' union contract is critically important to overall spending and taxation in East Greenwich because it represents nearly 60% of total town and school operating spending.

LESSON #3: RHODE ISLAND RESIDENTS ARE ALREADY GENEROUS IN THEIR SUPPORT OF PUBLIC EDUCATION

A new study from the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council (RIPEC), entitled How Rhode Island Schools Compare, notes:

  • Spending per pupil of $11,089 in Rhode Island is the 9th highest among the 50 states and 122.9% of the national average.
  • The average Rhode Island teacher salary of $54,730 is the 8th highest among the 50 states and 111.4% of the national average.

Given the performance of our public schools, it is easy to say that Rhode Island taxpayers are overpaying for under-performance.

LESSON #4: RHODE ISLAND RESIDENTS HAVE THE 7TH HIGHEST TAX BURDEN AMONG THE 50 STATES

But there is a price being paid for that generosity: Another report by the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council documents how Rhode Island has the 7th highest tax burden among the 50 states, up from 14th highest in 1995.

It is this high and perpetually increasing tax burden which led to the passage in 2006 of Senate Bill 3050. The goal of the tax cap is to ensure taxes do not keep going up faster than the taxpaying public's incomes, thereby reducing their standard of living. The latter is what has been going on for years in Rhode Island and nobody in the NEA cares about all the working families and retirees in our towns who experience that decline. But residents in many towns are the (increasingly less silent) majority who are now saying enough already, we have been generous for years and willingly so - but we will not fund the gravy train ride any longer.

LESSON #5: IT IS TIME FOR A PARADIGM SHIFT IN OUR THINKING

We cannot afford the status quo in Rhode Island - financially or educationally. It is time for a paradigm shift.

Financially:

A crushing tax burden and the tax increase limits imposed by 3050 together create a new incentive for thinking outside the box, for a change in our approach to the financial structure of public-sector union contracts, including teachers' contracts.

Alternatively, the aggressive actions this Fall by the NEA confirm its goal is to blow up or neuter the tax cap so it can continue its relentless campaign for higher spending and taxes which enable further adult entitlements in its contracts.

History shows that public-sector players - like the NEA - always fight relentlessly to undermine spending limitations imposed by the will of the people. We are in a race against time to determine if we can develop a public consensus around a paradigm shift before the tax cap possibly gets watered down.

Along the way to developing such a consensus, be leery of fanciful talk that a new statewide education funding formula will somehow magically solve our problems. Here is why:

An earlier cited RIPEC report and this ProJo article note that:

Rhode Island, which has long depended heavily on local property taxes to pay for schools, has become even more reliant on those taxes over the past decade, and now ranks third highest in the country.

Nationally, local property taxes covered 43.3 percent of school costs in 2006, compared with 60.2 percent in Rhode Island...This year, the council compared information from 1996 to 2006.

RIPEC's analysis found that a decade ago, Rhode Island ranked 14th highest in its dependence on local property taxes to finance schools. By last year, the state had jumped to third...

But then ask yourself: What caused this huge increase in local property taxes? It was the terms of the teachers' union contracts negotiated over the last decade in each town. In other words, there have been tangible and adverse financial consequences to giving out 8-12%/year increases to 9 of the 10 job steps as well as having almost zero health insurance premium co-payments, $5,000/year cash bonuses for not using the school insurance program, and outlandish pension benefits. 3050 is a direct response to the never-ending increases in local property taxes.

Unlike the local tax cap, a statewide funding formula - as discussed to-date - does nothing to change the incentives which have resulted in far-too-expensive public-sector contract terms over the last ten years. In fact, it would neuter the local community tax cap by shifting more education funding from those communities to the state level where there is no cap and where the public-sector unions' power is greater. Why is this in the best interests of the average taxpayer? How does this encourage economic growth in the state?

Besides, when Rhode island already spends the 9th most out of 50 states on education, there is not an overall educational funding problem. It could be said that we have an overspending problem. Why is it in the best interests of the local taxpayer to transfer more spending power to a state government which has no history of disciplined financial behaviors and where the taxpayer has less direct input and control over their spending and taxation practices?

Furthermore, there have been ongoing disagreements between the urban and surburban towns on how to structure a statewide funding formula. If there was a logical and affordable solution, it would have surfaced already. But it has not and Andrew explains why. With thanks to Andrew for a brainstorming session, here are some further thoughts: As a result, it could be argued that a single funding formula will be deemed acceptable to politicians and bureaucrats across the entire state only if all of them get more money. But there is no extra money to be had in this era of endless budget deficits. So that only leaves one option: New tax increases on an already overtaxed citizenry. Think of the storyline they will pitch to provide political cover: "It is for the children." Nope, it is just to provide more adult entitlements. Why is this in the best interests of the taxpayer? How does this encourage economic growth in the state?

In summary, taxpayers need to be vigilant to ensure that the purpose and power of the 3050 tax cap is not diluted by power plays from politicians, bureaucrats, and public-sector unions - all of which have no incentive to look after the personal interests of taxpayers.

Educationally:

The second area requiring a change in our thinking revolves around these four strategic questions about public education:

  • Do we believe a quality education is the gateway to the American Dream for all children?
  • Whom do we trust to make better educational decisions for children: their parents or the government?
  • Within each neighborhood school, who is in the position to make the best decisions regarding individual students, individual teachers, and the curriculum: federal bureaucrats, state bureaucrats, unions or the school's principal and teachers?
  • What incentives will ensure accountability to taxpayers and parents as well as reward behaviors which lead to improved educational performance outcomes?

Summary:

The overarching strategic question which should drive our thinking about the required paradigm shift is this:

  • Can the failed status quo be made to work by minor adjustments at the margin OR will the delivery of affordable and high-quality performance only come from a completely different structural approach to union financial contracts and to how we deliver educational services?

Stay tuned for more thoughts in the coming days on how to shift the paradigm.

LESSON #6: GETTING UP TO SPEED ON THE BASIC ISSUES IN EAST GREENWICH

If you are new to these issues, I would strongly encourage you to read 3 important blog posts.

The first two define the issues in East Greenwich:

More on the Issues in the East Greenwich Teachers' Union Strike
Another Lie by the NEA: East Greenwich Teachers Would Take Pay Cuts Under School Committee Proposals

The final post highlights the political agenda and financial resources of the NEA itself:

Reflecting on Labor Unions on Labor Day

Remember: Anchor Rising is THE place to go for information on the teachers' strike and contract issues in Rhode Island. See the Extended Entry for all relevant links.

Continue reading "The NEA in East Greenwich: Reflections On The Week That Was"


Other Public Education News

Donald B. Hawthorne

Word is in that Franklin, MA settled its contract with a 33% health insurance premium co-payment. Plus step increases of 2%, 2.25%, and 2.5% over 3 years. Starting to make 20% look like a deal!

The ProJo weighs in on the teachers' strikes.

More on developments in West Warwick here and here.


September 11, 2007


These Are Professionals?

Justin Katz

In response to tonight's post from the minivan in the Tiverton High School parking lot, the usual suspects will declare that I'm writing to script. My sympathizers will respond as if what I say is just common knowledge. But I have to admit that I was a little surprised at the comportment of the audience at tonight's school committee meeting.

As the committee went through the initial components of the agenda, microphone feedback led the young man running the PA system to kill the audio and run to the media room. It isn't surprising that, in the intervening time, members of the audience asked for certain things to be repeated more loudly, but the tone with which the requests were made was, shall we say, not what one would expect from people who daily have their patience and understanding tested by children. That tone was also audible in the requests that the minutia of the regular opening business of the committee be explored in detail.

At one point, a gym teacher of some sort shouted out, regarding a leak that has just been fixed in the gymnasium: "I have twenty-five young ladies who want to know why they waited until two weeks into the school year to fix the leak, when the gymnasium was empty all summer, and they want the right answer!" I'm sure very few of those 25 young ladies inconvenienced by the leak share even a fraction of their teacher's indignation, but I'd be surprised if their disinterest saves them from some choice comments about the committee and administration.

Another woman asked whether a leak in some new construction is still covered under warranty. The superintendent answered that it is and would be addressed on a punchlist. As the conversation continued, one of the council members interjected to ask whether the school's administrators had been alerted to the problem. When the relevant administrator responded in the affirmative, the councilman told the woman that that was the appropriate channel, before the committee need be brought into it. Somewhat abashed, the woman returned to her seat, but not before turning around on her way to give the councilman a catty glare and to hiss, for the benefit of anybody within a fifteen-foot radius, "Twerp."

The committee then voted to enter into executive session in order to discuss the contract, and the crowd began to depart. Perhaps if some other interested Tiverton resident than myself was within that crowd, I am not the only one who left the room thinking, "These are professionals?"

Behaving like testy adolescents at a public meeting of those whom the townspeople (the parents of their students) have elected to run the schools does not suggest that the schools' employees have any respect for their authority. Directing open hostility toward those with whom they must negotiate suggests that they know how imbalanced the union's power is in this situation.

If what I witnessed tonight is any indication, concerned citizens have reason to fear that the dynamic created by unionization makes our school systems much less effective, making it more difficult for all of those involved to work together in mutual respect. The teachers were acting as if the committee members are their representatives and are attempting to drive them into poverty to perpetuate some mysterious corruption.

I hope that future participation will disprove my impression that these meetings could be, and often are, worse than the mild dose that I experienced tonight. If not, I'd suggest that anybody who is interested in encouraging professionalism in our schools ought to call for the end of teachers' unions.

ADDENDUM:

I think it goes without saying, but I want to make absolutely explicit, one, that my habit at all events that I've described on Anchor Rising is to behave more as an observer than as a reporter (i.e., I don't mingle or roam the room in order to make sure that all "voices" are represented in my impressions) and, two, that I'm still relatively new to the local Tiverton public scene and may be missing part of the backstory. All that I can claim for these vignettes is that they are my honest impressions — no doubt colored to some degree by my ideology and expectations, neither of which I keep secret.


September 9, 2007


Tiverton School Committee Shuffles Its Offer

Justin Katz

The Tiverton School Committee has notched up its pay proposal slightly, and although, to be honest, I can't testify to the comparative values of the various health proposals, there's a new one on the table:

The school committee's latest position on salaries made Wednesday, according to school committee vice-chairman Michael Burk, consists of an offer of a two percent increase in the first year, and 1.5 percent increases in each of years two and three, for a total of five percent over the life of the contract

"This is part of the total salary/benefit package we offered," he said, which also included a health cost element.

The health plan, he said called for "a 15 percent copay in year one for all teachers (no more sliding scale); [and] 20 percent in years two and three for all teachers."

I'll be pleasantly surprised if the union acknowledges the obvious and realizes that there simply isn't much more to be wrung out of the town, no matter how brazenly it attributes the small increases in the school committee's proposals to obstinacy.


September 8, 2007


A Mere Suggestion for the Teachers' Unions

Justin Katz

When we at Anchor Rising and the Providence Journal's Bob Kerr are (at the least) headed toward the same page, you might want to turn some of your questions inward:

A lot of years later, conditions are obviously better. Teacher pay has gotten downright comfortable. Teachers are often seen showing up at school in some very nice wheels. Benefits are wonderful. And there are the summers.

But there has been a high cost for the relative prosperity. It is the gradual erosion of that special place teachers used to hold in their cities and towns.

It usually shows itself in the late summer when parents start telling stories of how they have had to reorder their lives because children who they expected to be in school are not.

There are scowling, finger-jabbing citizens who point to hard times in their communities while teachers exploit their unique hold on the most important service those communities provide. ...

And, of course, they go on strike sometimes, knowing they are risking absolutely nothing because they will still be required by state law to work the same number of days. And days lost in September are recovered in June. They’re not really putting a whole lot on the line. None have gone to jail in a long time.

Every year, the teacher strike or strikes of the season seem a little more tedious, a little more tacky, a little more out of touch.

What a horrible, corrosive blow this whole unionized system has become to our communities. Kerr does open describing the low pay that his teacher parents accepted as the tradeoff for "personal satisfaction," and I, as one of a certain many, would fight against a return to those days. Instead, I find myself fighting against the teachers, with an unshakable feeling that being known as doing so may affect my children adversely.

It shouldn't be this way. The union organizations' hands have no business in our schools, in our pockets, or around our necks.


September 7, 2007


Another Lie by the NEA: East Greenwich Teachers Would Take Pay Cuts Under School Committee Proposals

Donald B. Hawthorne

One of the other lies being spread by the NEA is that the proposals offered by the East Greenwich School Committee would result in pay cuts for teachers.

The NEA tried to pass off this lie as fact in 2004-05 and Anchor Rising showed it was a lie then.

And it is a lie in 2007, too.

An example of the propaganda being spread this year came earlier from Pam, a teacher in East Greenwich, who wrote these words in the Comments section of another Anchor Rising post:

Please ask the administrators to take the same pay cut I would take if my contribution to health care went up to 15-20% and my salary increased 1-2%.

In the early years of my career, I served as a Chief Financial Officer at several companies. Bear with me while we go granular in this post and do a CFO analysis to blow this latest lie out of the water.

As a citizen concerned about this NEA claim, the first step I took was to have a meeting with Maryanne Crawford, Director of Administration for the East Greenwich School Department. I met with her on September 6 for the purpose of getting empirical data so I could complete my own independent analysis. Therefore, please note that this analysis has not been prepared by the East Greenwich School Department.

After the meeting, I completed this Excel spreadsheet with 7 tables so my analysis would be completely transparent and subject to public scrutiny on this blog, unlike the NEA's claims. If you want to dive into this issue, I would encourage you to open the spreadsheet and read the rest of this post while referring to the tables in the spreadsheet.

Here we go:

TABLE I: MASTER'S DEGREE PROJECTED SALARY SCHEDULE (2006-07 THROUGH 2009-10)

Maryanne informed me that 156 of the 231 East Greenwich teachers employed last year held Master's degrees. I then chose to use that salary schedule because it represents the most likely pay scenario for teachers.

The first 2 columns present the actual 10 job step salaries for Master's degree teachers in 2006-07, based on the most recent signed contract.

According to the East Greenwich Pendulum issue on September 6, the School Committee's most recent offer was to increase salaries for every job step and education grade by 2.5% in 2007-08, 2% each in 2008-09 and 2009-10.

The balance of Table I then calculates the higher salaries for the 3 upcoming years based on those rates of increase.

TABLE II: MASTER'S DEGREE PROJECTED SALARY INCREASES (2007-08 THROUGH 2009-10)

For every job step below the top step 10, a teacher moves up each year to the next higher step. This is how teachers in job steps 1-9 realize 8-12%/year salary increases. I picked job step 5 as the example to review as it is the mid-point between step 1 and step 10 and would, therefore, have roughly the average increase among non-step 10 teachers.

Once at step 10, however, the salary increase each year equals just the rate of increase shown in Table I. Maryanne told me that just under 60% of last year's East Greenwich teachers were at step 10. Therefore, if anyone is going to suffer a "pay cut" in a new contract, it will be these teachers who receive the smallest annual increase in salaries (albeit after up to 9 years of receiving 8-12%/year increases).

Table II shows that:

  • Step 5 teachers receive $4,372-4,525/year salary increases over the next three years
  • Step 10 teachers receive $1,431-1,745/year salary increases over the next three years.

TABLE III: HEALTH INSURANCE PREMIUM PROJECTED COSTS

Table III notes that family coverage with Blue Cross Blue Shield - Healthmate is the most common form of health insurance utilized by East Greenwich teachers, with 110 FTE's out of 231 teachers using such coverage last school year.

Second highest is the single person coverage with Blue Cross Blue Shield - Healthmate, with 37 FTE's using such coverage last year.

All other school department health insurance options were only used by 16 additional FTE's as the remaining 68 FTE's did not use any form of the East Greenwich schools-based health insurance coverage and instead took a buyback cash bonus of $5,000 in 2006-07.

Therefore, Table III focuses on the family and single person health insurance premium costs for Healthmate over the next 3 years. Actual premium costs in 2007-08 for such family coverage costs the school department $13,618 and the actual single coverage costs them $5,229.

Premium costs are assumed to go up 10%/year in the two years following 2007-08. The East Greenwich School Department's policy is a self-insured, claims-based policy through the West Bay Collaborative.

TABLE IV: HEALTH INSURANCE CO-PAYMENT EXPENSES PROJECTED TO BE INCURRED BY TEACHERS

In 2006-07, teachers at job steps 1-4 paid a 5% co-pay while teachers at job steps 5-10 paid a 10% co-pay.

According to the East Greenwich Pendulum, the School Committee's most recent offer proposed increasing co-pays for all job steps to 12% in 2007-08, 15% in 2008-09, and 18% in 2009-10. Table IV assumes those percentages and computes what the teachers would pay in co-payments for the next three years:

  • Family coverage annual co-pays would increase from last year's $655-1,311 to $1,634, $2,247, and $2,966.
  • Single coverage annual co-pays would increase from last year's $260-519 to $627, $863, and $1,139.

TABLE V: NET INCREASES IN PRE-TAX HEALTH INSURANCE CO-PAYMENT EXPENSES PROJECTED TO BE INCURRED BY TEACHERS

Table V simply takes the data in Table IV and calculates the annual net increases in pre-tax co-pays made by the teachers.

  • The single step 5 and step 10 teachers would pay $235-368/year in higher pre-tax health insurance premium co-payments.
  • The married step 5 and step 10 teachers would pay $323-719/year in higher pre-tax health insurance premium co-payments.
TABLE VI: NET INCREASES IN AFTER-TAX HEALTH INSURANCE CO-PAYMENT EXPENSES PROJECTED TO BE INCURRED BY TEACHERS

The East Greenwich School Departments offers what is called a Section 125 plan where teachers can pay their health insurance premium co-payments in pre-tax dollars, thereby lowering their taxable income and subsequent taxes.

Using a 2006 Federal Tax Rate Schedule, married couples filing jointly pay 25% income taxes on every marginal dollar earned above $61,300. So I assumed 25% plus the Rhode Island income tax rate is about 25% of the Federal rate or about 6.25%. I rounded the two percentages to 30% and Table VI calculates the true, after-tax cost to teachers of the higher health insurance co-payments.

  • The single step 5 and step 10 teachers would pay $165-257/year in higher after-tax health insurance premium co-payments.
  • The married step 5 and step 10 teachers would pay $226-503/year in higher after-tax health insurance premium co-payments.

Bluntly, that is not asking very much and suggests the School Committee should be more aggressive in demanding higher co-pay percentages in its next offer.

TABLE VII: NET CHANGE IN CASH COMPENSATION PROJECTED TO BE REALIZED BY TEACHERS

Table VII gives us the "bottom line" and proves the NEA has lied once again when they claimed that the offer from the School Committee would result in the teachers taking pay cuts.

  • The single step 5 teacher would realize annual net cash compensation increases of $4,207-4,332/year.

  • The married step 5 teacher would realize annual net cash compensation increases of $3,943-4,243/year.

  • The single step 10 teacher would realize annual net cash compensation increases of $1,266-1,487/year.

  • The married step 10 teacher would realize annual net cash compensation increases of $956-1,518/year.

No negative numbers anywhere to be found.

[Later Note: Enjoy Bob Walsh's challenge of this conclusion in the Comments section - and my response debunking his claim. To provide the numbers in support of my conclusions, I have added an additional summary analysis of the net cash compensation numbers for the original School Committee offer - even adding the modified spreadsheets for public scrutiny. It can be found at the bottom of the Extended Entry section below.]

As an aside, the negotiating teams can debate whether step 10 teachers should get larger increases but my position - if I was on the team - would be that such changes are only possible if the hefty increases to steps 1-9 teachers are reduced to at least offset the additional step 10 salary increases.

CONCLUSION #1 ABOUT INTENT

Every East Greenwich teacher should bluntly ask their union leadership why the NEA is lying to them. And then every adult resident in town should ask the NEA the very same question.

The NEA likes to run around and accuse School Committees of negotiating in bad faith. But the NEA is the only party which has been shown - multiple times now - to lie to the taxpaying public and even its own members.

CONCLUSION #2 ABOUT ECONOMICS

It is not at all clear that the School Committee's latest proposal will allow its budget increases to remain under the tax cap restrictions. (That is a separate analysis for another day. Stay tuned.)

Whether all of us want to admit it, the gravy train ride is over. Welcome to the real world of constraints, like ordinary working families and retirees live with every year.

I believe the only really effective contract that both does right by deserving teachers and lives within the tax cap will require wholesale changes to the 10-step salary schedules. That kind of change won't happen quickly and it certainly won't happen with a mediator trying to split the status-quo baby. The latter is a process which ensures the unsustainable economics of past contracts is only tweaked when it needs a complete overhaul.

I am concerned that the School Committee, which has shown decidely more courage than the norm so far, is still not thinking sufficiently outside the box.

Nobody expects the NEA to think outside the box. After all, their agenda here is to blow up the tax cap so uncontrolled spending can continue.

I hope the School Committee appreciates how much support there is already for them taking a firm stand to find a new way. It is too bad that the negotiating party across the table is only capable of lying instead of being constructive problem solvers.

Remember: Anchor Rising is THE place to go for information on the teachers' strikes issues in Rhode Island. See the Extended Entry for all relevant links.

Continue reading "Another Lie by the NEA: East Greenwich Teachers Would Take Pay Cuts Under School Committee Proposals"

September 6, 2007


News Flash: Judge Orders East Greenwich Teachers Back to Work on Friday, September 7

Donald B. Hawthorne

More details when we have them.

UPDATE

I just got off the phone with Superintendent Charlie Meyers who told me the Judge made these primary points at court this afternoon:

  • There would be irreparable harm if the children were not back in school tomorrow.

  • The School Department clearly demonstrated the point about irreparable harm in court today.

  • The court order states that teachers in Rhode Island are prohibited from engaging in any work stoppage or strike.

I then talked to a School Committee member [Subsequent note: As a point of clarification, this member was not present at the courtroom.]. The member told me that the Judge also read off the names of the East Greenwich teachers who serve on the NEA negotiating team and, paraphrasing, said these words:

If you are not performing your jobs tomorrow in your schools, then you must report back to me here in this courtroom at 9 a.m. tomorrow.

It was the impression of this School Committee member that the Judge would have them arrested if they were not back in their classrooms.

East Greenwich NEA members are meeting tonight at 7 p.m. Not much for them to talk about now, is there?

A public relations disaster for the NEA.

And it is a disaster even before any East Greenwich students ask them why they went out on strike when the teachers already knew it was illegal for them to do so in Rhode Island.

Anchor Rising is THE place to go for information on the teachers' strikes issues in Rhode Island. See the Extended Entry for all relevant links.

Continue reading "News Flash: Judge Orders East Greenwich Teachers Back to Work on Friday, September 7"


The Continuing NEA Disinformation Campaign in East Greenwich: Lies, More Lies & Even Some Melodrama

Donald B. Hawthorne

The NEA disinformation campaign continues.

It is so patheticly transparent that it should be funny. But it is hard to laugh when they willingly and consciously exploit our children as pawns in their game of greed.

However, just like we saw during the collapse of the Iron Curtain, technology allows us to immediately skewer the outmoded NEA playbook and point out their lies and deceit.

The latest NEA-East Greenwich Letter contains lies, more lies and even some melodrama:

An Open Letter to East Greenwich Residents:

East Greenwich Teachers returned to school on August 30, participating fully and enthusiastically in our jobs. On Friday, August 31, we were scheduled to receive a paycheck according to the town payroll schedule. We did not. Why? We don’t know. Our representatives were negotiating a contract as state law permits us to do. But apparently the school committee and school department who represent the Town of East Greenwich do not believe in the right to collective bargaining, as granted by state law. In a blatant act of coercion, the school department simply decided not to pay us. Citizens of East Greenwich, is this the way you want your elected officials to treat the educators who care for your children?

We were there when your children forgot their lunch money and we made sure they ate. We were there when your children didn’t have a ride home, and we made certain they were safe. We were there when your children called us at 10pm because they didn’t know where else to turn for help. We have been here from their first day jitters through their post graduate plans.

We have been and will continue to be there for your children. We believe you care. Please do not allow your school committee to dismantle and destroy one of the best things about this town. They have created an environment of intimidation and demoralization amongst the teachers that will not resolve itself for a very, very long time. Please consider what we have meant to your children. Please pick up the phone and demand that the school committee engage in good faith bargaining – regardless of what you believe the contract should read. Fair and reasonable people understand that contract negotiations in a civilized society cannot take place under coercion.

The teachers have been working extremely hard in an effort to achieve a fair settlement. A cut in pay to go back to work is not a fair settlement. The school committee forced the teachers to not report to work by refusing to bargain on Monday night. Those representing the school committee did not have the authority to reach agreement. They would not call other school committee members who were not present in order to gain that authorization.

It is the union’s wish to reach settlement as quickly as possible.

Thank you for supporting the quality education your children deserve.

You would think the Kremlin's former press office had taken over the communications function for the NEARI! With about as much success and professionalism.

The East Greenwich School Committee has issued a September 6 press release (Word document) response to the NEA letter:

The East Greenwich School Committee continues to be disappointed and frustrated that the East Greenwich teachers’ union has decided to continue their strike and refuse to return to school. We are proceeding with court action to force the teachers back to the classrooms based on our concern that our students are suffering irreparable harm due to their actions. It is our hope that the judge will agree with us and order the teachers back to work. The Committee will continue to pursue negotiations with the teacher’s union.

The School Committee has been actively involved in the negotiation process since February, designating Superintendent, Charlie Meyers, as our representative with full authority to act on our behalf in order to reach an agreement at any point in the negotiation process. At every negotiation and mediation session, Superintendent Meyers has had full authority to reach an agreement on behalf of the School Committee.

While constantly involved and informed over the status of the negotiations, school committee members joined the mediation process, in person, to offer support to Superintendent Meyers in reaching an agreement. Unfortunately, we have offered multiple proposals that have consistently been rejected by the teachers’ union and they have not offered any substantial compromise in return.

The School Committee was notified by the teachers’ union on Wednesday, August 29th, that their members would strike if no agreement was reached. We asked, twice, for a clarification of this through the mediator. Our hope was that they would return to school, while continuing negotiations. The union officials confirmed, through the mediator, that they would strike without a contract. Since the teachers are paid two weeks in advance, it was determined that we could not pay people for not working. The scheduled pay period for the first two weeks of the new school year was scheduled for August 31st. We felt it was a prudent decision to withhold the advanced payment of wages until we knew for certain the teachers would be back to work. Teachers were paid for all summer work. Out of concern for their families, we notified the teachers’ union through the mediator on Wednesday, August 29, that we would be withholding paychecks because we could not pay anyone for not working.

The School Committee will continue to act in fairness and good faith with the teachers’ union and will endeavor to bring them back to the negotiating table. We will also continue to do what is in the best interests of our children and our community.

The NEA is on the wrong side of history and they tell lies.

Anchor Rising is THE place to go for information on the teachers' strikes issues in Rhode Island. See the Extended Entry for all relevant links.

Continue reading "The Continuing NEA Disinformation Campaign in East Greenwich: Lies, More Lies & Even Some Melodrama"


East Greenwich School Committee: Press Release & General Update

Donald B. Hawthorne

A late Wednesday night press release (a Word document) from the East Greenwich School Committee:

The East Greenwich School Committee is disappointed and frustrated that the East Greenwich teachers’ union has decided to continue their strike and refuse to return to school.

When the Committee asked the union to return to the classrooms while continuing to negotiate, they refused, leaving Superintendent Meyers no choice but to cancel school for yet another day. We are greatly concerned over the irreparable harm being done to our students and will seek relief from the court system to get the teachers back to school.

The Committee has continued to negotiate in good faith since February of this year. Our proposals have consistently been rejected by the teachers’ union and they have not offered any substantial compromise in return.

We have persisted in explaining to the union the very serious impact that the tax levy cap (SR 3050) without a viable funding formula will have on our budget over the next 6 years. We cannot act in a fiscally irresponsible manner nor will we run a deficit over the length of the contract. We had hoped that the teachers union would work with us and not against us under these circumstances.

The School Committee will continue to act in fairness and good faith with the teachers’ union and will endeavor to bring them back to the negotiating table. We will also continue to do what is in the best interests of our children and our community.

Related ProJo article here.

Events which occurred on Wednesday or are anticipated for Thursday include:

  • The School Committee and NEA negotiating teams met in conference with a Judge on Wednesday. There was no formal action which came from that meeting.

  • There is another meeting with the Judge on Thursday, at which time the School Committee will ask that the Judge issue an order requiring the teachers to return to the classrooms.

  • The entire School Committee, the NEA negotiating team, Jane Argenteri from NEARI and the mediator met from 5 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon until about 12:15 a.m. Thursday. Larry Purtell (NEARI President) and Roger Ferland (former head of NEA in East Greenwich) were "around" and joined their NEA colleagues in breakout sessions. No progress was made.

  • At the end of the meeting, the mediator said that there needed to be a cooling off period, they should all go think about the issues, and he did not want any further meetings before Friday, September 14.

Can you say....paradigm shift?? Stay tuned because it is time to think - and act - outside the conventional box.

Anchor Rising is the place to go for information on the teachers' strikes issues in Rhode Island. To get up to speed, here are the links - in chronological order - to other Anchor Rising posts about the East Greenwich teachers' strike and the NEA:

Saying "No" to Legalized Extortion
Education Partnership Reports: Learning a lot more about RI teachers' union contracts
Reflecting on Labor Unions on Labor Day
Update on the East Greenwich Teachers' Contract & Suggested Future Actions
Breaking News on Anchor Rising: East Greenwich Teachers to Strike on Tuesday
More on the Issues in the East Greenwich Teachers' Union Strike (This is a particularly important post on the substantive issues in dispute.)
The NEA's Latest Disinformation Campaign in East Greenwich
Sometimes What is Old is New: Misguided Incentives Drive Public Sector Taxation

Other relevant posts on Anchor Rising include:

Burrillville Teachers to Students: Let the Pawns Skip School
Crowley, You Charmer
Researching from Outside the Library
Children Are Their Life? No, Children Are Their Leverage.
Citizen Context for Negotiations
One Side of the Phone Conversation
My Favorite Samuel Gompers Quote
The Guidebook to Public-Abuse
Not Quite Breaking (Except of Taxpayers' Backs)
The Other Side of the Conversation in Tiverton
The Rhode Island Right's Bizarro Politics
A Case of Crossed Hands
Best We Can Do Is Get Involved Every Time
(The last two posts in this section address the important questions of (i) what RI law and court decisions say about teachers' strikes; and, (ii) the level funding of education and tax cap issues.)



Sometimes What is Old is New: Misguided Incentives Drive Public Sector Taxation

Donald B. Hawthorne

As we debate the teachers' strikes, some of the issues at stake took me back to my second post ever on Anchor Rising:

Talking about a pro-tax ballot initiative defeated in Oregon during 2002, a Wall Street Journal editorial stated:

When the budget issue is framed in terms of higher taxes, voters don't understand why government should be exempt from the same spending discipline the rest of us live by. "I am a normal person and when I don't have enough money I have to change my habits," 26-year-old Heather Bryan told the AP, explaining her vote against the measure. "Government should be the same way."

But it isn't and that begs the question of why?

Terry Moe offers this opinion of why government behavior is problematic (PDF):

Public agencies usually have no competition and are not threatened by the loss of business if their costs go up, while workers and unions know they are not putting their agencies or jobs at risk by pressuring for all they can get. Governmental decisions are not driven by efficiency concerns, as they are in the private sector, but by political considerations, and thus by [political] power.

In comparison, when faced with competition in the private sector, irresponsible management action eventually results in loss of market share, lower profits, and loss of jobs. In other words there are direct and dire consequences to bad behavior.

Or, as Wendell Cox wrote last year in a National Review Online article:

How different government is to the real world of the private sector. When [corporations get] into financial trouble, they cut costs and get concessions from their unions, while doing everything they [can] to maintain service levels. When government gets into trouble, it threatens deep service cuts, all too often cuts aimed at the programs that cause the greatest public consternation, in a calculated strategy to obtain the additional funding necessary to maintain the status quo.

The bottom line consequences for working families and retirees are clear: When taxes increase, your standard of living declines.

Practically speaking, the decline in your family's standard of living results in some combination of the three following outcomes: (i) you incur new debt; (ii) you use some of your savings; and/or (iii) you reduce your current spending for items such as food, clothes, heating oil, medical care, car repairs as well as savings for college and retirement. All three outcomes are direct and tangible costs incurred by every family - you have less of your hard-earned income to spend on your family's needs.

It is worth noting that politicians, bureaucrats, and public sector unions suffer no similar consequences when they act irresponsibly. This creates a curious lack of incentive for them to change their behavior.

It was what led Calvin Coolidge to say:

Nothing is easier than spending the public money. It does not appear to belong to anybody. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody.

Or, as Lawrence Reed said in his October 2001 speech to the Economic Club of Detroit:

When you spend other people's money to buy something for someone else, the connection between the earner, the spender and the recipient is most remote - and the potential for mischief is the greatest.

The mischief is clear when you see powerful interest groups (including both corporations and unions) manipulate the system for their advantage, all to the detriment of individual families who lose more of their freedom through ever-increasing tax burdens.

So, what can we do about this problem? Any solution requires a vigilant citizenry that makes the mischief transparent to the voting public. And then it comes down to engaged citizens gathering enough political power to bring about change.

Do we have the courage to do so in Rhode Island?


September 5, 2007


Best We Can Do Is Get Involved Every Time

Justin Katz

Using his Rhode Island Law Journal blog for a much needed function, Jon Pincince digs into the judicial side of teacher strike law. You can go there for some relevant quotations from School Committee of the Town of Westerly v. Westerly Teachers Association (1973), but the part that requires further exploration is this:

[This] does not mean that every time there is a concerted work stoppage by public employees, it shall be subject to an automatic restraining order. Rule 65(b) of Super. R. Civ. P. specifically states that no temporary restraining order shall be granted without notice to the adverse party unless it clearly appears from specific facts by affidavit or verified complaint that irreparable harm will result before notice can be served and a hearing held.

What is Rule 65(b) of Super. R. Civ., and how did it come about? Yes, Jon is correct that the 1973 court stressed that the solution should come to the legislature, but in the meantime, it appears to have given itself the role of arbiter and, in doing so, has done nothing to give the General Assembly a nudge in the political will. In true Rhode Island fashion, the legislature appears to have spent the past quarter century behaving as if the problem has been adequately resolved.



The NEA's Latest Disinformation Campaign in East Greenwich

Donald B. Hawthorne

I wrote these words about the NEA's last disinformation campaign in East Greenwich back in 2004-2005:

Comments by National Education Association (NEA) teachers' union officials remind me of words spoken years ago by Soviet officials, whose views of the world were subsequently shown to have no connection to any form of reality.

As the union cranks up its disinformation campaign to intimidate East Greenwich residents, let's contrast their Orwellian comments in recent newspaper articles with the facts.

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan's comment to Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Presidential debate, here they go again:

In information being handed out by teachers picketing the schools in East Greenwich, the NEA has made these claims about the negotiating process in East Greenwich:

  • Teachers initiated negotiations in September 2006.
  • Negotiating team met for over 30 hours during the school year between December 2006 and June 2007.
  • Mediator requested and appointed in late June.
  • School Committee unavailable for scheduled mediation until mid-August 2007.
  • Teachers have met for over 100 hours of unproductive negotiations.
Here is what I was told when I asked for a response to those NEA comments:
  • The mediator was not available to meet until August.
  • Several members of the teachers' negotiations team were unwilling to give up their summer vacation to meet in July while the entire School Committee was here ALL summer working on trying to get this resolved.
  • We have had budget discussions since October 2006. The teachers have all had input: They put in their requests, the principals submit their requests, the superintendent drafts up his budget, the School Committee looks at it, and negotiations begin with the Town Council.
  • School Committee members have spend countless hours at the State House and RIASC working on financing while NO teachers ever helped because they always assumed they would get what they want.
  • School Committee members asked for help in front of the Town Council and only 1 teacher showed up. The Town Council has cut the school budget by $1 million in the last two years as part of its efforts to be fiscally prudent. There is a 5.25% tax cap and the Town Council is responsible for ensuring we pay all our employees - school, police, fire, public works, etc.

In other words, the NEA is handing out information which contains lies.

In addition, with the tax cap and massive state budget deficits, the NEA knows the state and towns cannot pay for their outrageous demands and yet they strike to break the cap and have the state spend more. This is confirmed when you read this morning's ProJo article with these words from NEARI's executive director Bob Walsh:

We predicted this would happen...We believe this is bad government decision-making and we believe they have a responsibility to fix it. They are killing public education.

So the NEA doesn't think you are paying enough taxes in Rhode Island! We are in the top 10 states out of 50 in overall taxes paid, in property taxes paid, in spending per pupil and in teacher compensation - and Walsh's only response is that all of Rhode Island needs to pay more taxes. Is this the best he can say?

If I was a State legislator, I would be insulted beyond words that Walsh stated that the legislative leaders were killing public education because they refused to raise government spending and taxes even higher - all while the State faces enormous structural budget deficits. Where does the NEA think this money comes from?

The legislators know that it comes from the budgets of working families and retirees in the state - and have said enough! The NEA's demands are nothing short of an attempt at legalized extortion and they are willing to use our children as their pawns.

But be clear, Walsh's comments are simply the latest example of the NEA's disinformation campaign: He is trying to change the focus to the tax cap and level funding of statewide education aid so there will be less attention paid to his union's demands for 9-12%/year salary increases, only 5-10% co-pays on health insurance, $5,000/year cash payments for not using the school's health insurance plan, and rich (unfunded) pensions - the costs of which all drive budget increases in excess of the salary increases received by the taxpaying public. While leaving little money for building maintenance, curriculum development, and school supplies.

Walsh is advocating a position which lowers the standard of living for all Rhode Island residents. Put another way, the NEA is willing to first punish our children with a strike so it can then punish all taxpayers with a reduction in their standard of living. I fail to see how this is a winning strategy!

Here, in a Word document, is the September 4 press release from the East Greenwich School Committee. It contains some important information about why historical contract terms are no longer economically viable.

To allow people to get up to speed, here are the links - in chronological order - to other Anchor Rising posts about the East Greenwich teachers' strike and the NEA:

Saying "No" to Legalized Extortion
Education Partnership Reports: Learning a lot more about RI teachers' union contracts
Reflecting on Labor Unions on Labor Day
Update on the East Greenwich Teachers' Contract & Suggested Future Actions
Breaking News on Anchor Rising: East Greenwich Teachers to Strike on Tuesday
More on the Issues in the East Greenwich Teachers' Union Strike (This is a particularly important post on the substantive issues in dispute.)

See the Extended Entry below for links to blog posts documenting the NEA's 2004-2005 disinformation campaign in East Greenwich.

It was fax machines in Poland back in the 1980's that helped the Solidarity labor union get the word out and build the momentum which eventually freed people from communism.

Today, it is blogs which are getting the word out and helping liberate people from the NEA's unfree world of monopolistic control, a world only made possible by their ability to coerce dues money from the wallets of hard-working teachers.

How ironic is it that labor unions were once leaders in the fight for freedom against communism but are now on the wrong side of history fighting against freedom for working families, retirees, and our children?

Continue reading "The NEA's Latest Disinformation Campaign in East Greenwich"

September 4, 2007


Don on Dan Yorke, WPRO 630 AM this Afternoon

Marc Comtois

Don Hawthorne will continue his media blitz and appear on Dan Yorke's radio show this afternoon to talk about the East Greenwich teachers' strike. Tune in!

UPDATE: Don will be on air during the 4 O'Clock hour.



More on the Issues in the East Greenwich Teachers' Union Strike

Donald B. Hawthorne

A lot of words are being said as the East Greenwich teachers go out on strike. Many of the public comments by union officials and some teachers have nothing to do with the facts.

These contract negotiations and strikes are not about doing right by our children or about education. They are about maximizing adult entitlements where the NEA is willing to use our children as pawns to get more money.

Along the way, they complain about unacceptable "working conditions." Let's spend some time on the facts underlying that claim.

SALARY COMPENSATION ISSUES

From the outset, be clear about the context for this part of the discussion: The debate has nothing to do with a lack of desire to treat teachers well. Out of the 50 states, Rhode Island is already in the top 10 in how much it spends per pupil and in teacher salaries. We are generous and willingly so, in spite of being in the bottom one-third among the 50 states for educational outcomes. The resistance is to continuing an expensive gravy train entitlement ride which the state and individual communities can no longer afford. The resistance is also to giving the same 9-12% annual salary increases to the worst teachers when we would gladly give high salary increases to the great teachers. But the NEA won't give school administrators the freedom to make those judgment calls.

Furthermore, school commmittees and teachers' union officials are all guilty of misleading the public about the real salary increases going to teachers under contracts around the state. I wrote about the hidden nature of these extreme salary increases in this 2004 ProJo editorial.

To further elaborate on this point and make it specific to East Greenwich, here is a 2004 analysis done when my term on the East Greenwich School Committee was ending. It is an Excel spreadsheet analysis based on data taken from union contracts over a 6-year period: 1998-99 to 2003-04 East Greenwich teacher salary data.

Here, again in an Excel spreadsheet, is an updated version of that salary increase data: 2003-4 to 2006-7 East Greenwich teacher salary data.

Handing out 9-12%/year salary increases for 9 of the 10 job steps is the norm. And we can't afford it anymore.

There are some nuances:

Roughly 60% of the East Greenwich teachers have now reached the top step 10 and that means their increases have been 3.25%, 3.6%, and 3.8% over the last 3 years. In other words, roughly what taxpayers working in the private sector have been receiving. But these teachers are unhappy about their recent "low" increases. After years of getting 9-12%/year increases, their expectations are skewed and out of line with the real world. But the pragmatic issue the NEA won't address is that if they want increases above 3.8% for step 10 teachers, then some other non-step 10 teachers are going to have to give up their 9-12%/year increases. And I repeat: Why should good and bad teachers get identical salary increases?

What part of 3.8-12%/year salary increases creates unacceptable working conditions?

On the John DePetro radio show this morning, one East Greenwich teacher called in to complain that there were 22 students in her class, 1 above the "approximately 21" contractual limit. What she didn't tell anyone is that her salary is increased pro-rata (22/21) based on that extra student. In other words, she is compensated under the contract for the difference. How many taxpayers working in the private sector get roughly 5% salary increases when their workload goes up 5%? [NOTE: Subsequent discussions have clarified that this extra pay is not the standard practice, although the idea had been thrown around recently.]

She also complained that recess had been "taken away" by the Superintendent. What she didn't disclose is that the Superintendent's original response to the State requirement of 20 extra instructional minutes was to extend their day by that 20 minutes. (9:10 a.m. is the start time at Meadowbrook; they are out around 3:10 p.m.) I understand that the high school did make some schedule changes. However, there was no apparent similar flexibility at this teacher's elementary school and that led to teachers there - and not just teachers' aides - having to spend recess time on the playground with students. So who is obstructing here?

HEALTH INSURANCE CO-PAYMENTS

There are 10 salary steps for East Greenwich teachers. Teachers at steps 1-4 only pay 5% co-pays. Teachers at steps 5-10 only pay 10%.

In my last company, the co-pays for employees were 25-35%. I don't know a single person in the private sector who pays less than 20%.

I am told the East Greenwich town employees under an NEA contract pay 20%. What should teachers be treated differently?

Why is it a matter of debate that a 20% co-pay creates unacceptable working conditions?

HEALTH INSURANCE CASH BUYBACK

East Greenwich teachers receive a cash payment of $5,000/year when they do not use the health insurance plan provided by the district. I am told that 68 of the 235 teachers in the district receive this additional cash payment. I am also told that the $5,000 payment is among the highest of any school district in the state.

Why do modest changes to that payment level create unacceptable working conditions?

Separately, I also understand the East Greenwich town employees under an NEA contract receive only a $1,000 cash payment. Why should teachers be treated differently?

I don't know a single person in the private sector who receives any cash buyback payments.

PENSIONS

We will save the pension debate for another day. Suffice it to say that Rhode Island public sector employees have some of the richest pension benefits of any state employees anywhere.

And private sector pension programs don't hold a candle to public sector programs in either dollar payouts or the age when such payouts can begin. The fact that nearly every public sector pension plan is underfunded doesn't seem to deter the unions from resisting reforms and demanding more.

WORK-TO-RULE

At some point, the strike will pass and teachers will return to the classroom. There is a good chance they will return to the classroom under work-to-rule conditions, where they only do the minimum legally required under the contract. In other words, they will continue to use our children as pawns while they demand retroactive pay and other financial benefits. They insist on being made whole financially but their actions do not allow our children's educational experiences to be made whole. Why do we tolerate them treating our children like that?

This is where contractual issues move from financial considerations to non-financial considerations. Here are excerpts of what a friend wrote me about work-to-rule:

The "rules and conditions" maintained in the contracts do not reflect the practices that have become expected of and provided by the school system. The unions always state that teachers typically work beyond the obligated work hours stipulated in the contract, including helping students after school, writing letters-of-recommendation for college apps, etc. Therefore, you would think these items and others should be written into the contracts. But, as much as unions like to point to these activities, they resist putting them into contracts because the more "best practices" or "past practices" are stipulated in the contract, the less leverage work-to-rule provides. This is why the unions are hesitant to write in either best practices or past practices - because the work-to-rule status quo allows them to extract more financial concessions. How is this good for the students?

The obviously fair thing for our children would be for all teacher practices not stipulated in the contract but which are, in fact, done must be continued because they represent past practices precedent under which school districts operated during prior contracts. But the union won't agree to that either.

So here we are, dealing with a union which doesn't negotiate in good faith, is all about adult entitlements, will use our children as pawns in the negotiations, funds its operations through coerced dues, and doesn't have the courage to allow its members to take a strike vote by secret ballot.

THE CHALLENGE MOVING FORWARD

The challenge for our society is to realize that many teachers not only don't want to be union hacks but they are classy professionals who want to be rewarded differentially for delivering excellence in the classroom.

But these teachers will never have the freedom to operate accordingly as long as we live in a world where unions have monopoly control over the public schools.

There is no way to tweak the status quo and improve public education as long as schools are controlled by unions whose mission is to maximize financial benefits to members, not produce excellence in education.

The more you learn about public education, the more compelling school choice becomes - for the great teachers and for all of our children. As Milton Friedman wrote:

...education...takes a system that should be bottoms-up and converts it into a system that is top-down. Education is a simple case. It isn't the public purpose to build brick schools and have students taught there. The public purpose is to provide education. Think of it this way: If you want to subsidize the production of a product, there are two ways you can do it. You can subsidize the producer or you can subsidize the consumer. In education, we subsidize the producer - the school. If you subsidize the student instead - the consumer - you will have competition. The student will choose the school he attends and that would force schools to improve and to meet the demands of their students.

Nothing will change until these great teachers and enough parents have the courage to say enough already and exert sufficient political pressure. It will be an uphill battle because we are not an organized big business like the NEA - which has monopoly control and over $295 million/year of cash from coerced dues money to buy political power through lobbying. But we all know history is full of examples where the rich and powerful fell - and fell hard. With all the failures of public schools and looming public sector financial implosions, the time is coming soon. The only question is how many children will be hurt along the way.

Only with such change will we then move toward a world of freedom where our children - especially the poor inner city kids - can break free from the enslavement of underperforming public school monopolies and get the education they so richly deserve.

For the good of our children, let's take up this fight and not give up until the battle is won!



John DePetro, WPRO 630 AM at 9 a.m. this morning

Donald B. Hawthorne

I will be on John's radio show at 9 a.m. this morning to talk about the East Greenwich teachers' strike.

TIMING UPDATE

I will now be on at 9:30 a.m. instead of 9:00 a.m.



The Other Side of the Conversation in Tiverton

Justin Katz

Having just received the press release that the Tiverton School Committee sent around on Sunday, I'm surprised not to have heard the details of its side of the negotiation elsewhere:

"Just as with the health care proposal, we have been working with NEA-Tiverton regarding salary issues," stated deMedeiros. "However, it was our understanding that the two parties were trying to negotiate these issues at the negotiation table, not in the media. Given the NEA's decision to suggest publicly that we have not provided them with salary proposals, we now feel obligated to share publicly the two proposals we've made to NEA. The most recent of these proposals was submitted to the NEA-Tiverton leadership on August 16th and the NEA has not yet responded."

The School Committee's original salary proposal, submitted to NEA-Tiverton on May 8, 2007 was for a 3% total increase over the life of the 3-year contract, spread out as 1% in each year. These raises would be in addition to step increases also included in the contract proposal. Additionally, the Committee suggested providing salary incentives for teachers who have attained a Doctorate and those who have achieved national teacher board certification.

The School Committee received a counter-proposal from NEA-Tiverton on August 8th which called for a 12% total increase over the life of the contract, spread out as 4% in each year. These raises would also be in addition to step increases included in the contract proposal. While the NEA agreed with the addition of incentives for teachers who attain a Doctorate or achieve national board certification, the amount of those incentives differed substantially.

The School Committee reviewed the NEA's proposal on August 14th and immediately provided NEA-Tiverton with a counter-proposal that would provide a 4.5% total increase over the life of the contract with the annual percentages to be determined as part of the final contract negotiations. This counter-proposal was submitted to the Union on August 16th. Again, these raises would be in addition to step increases included in the contract proposal and the Committee kept their recommendations regarding Doctorate and national certification incentives.

Additionally, the Committee indicates that the District’s health care proposal submitted to the NEA on May 8, 2007, is projected to save the District approximately $270,000 based on projected cost increases for health care. NEA-Tiverton has not yet provided a response to the Committee's proposal. The Committee twice considered and health savings account proposal given them by NEA-Tiverton and twice rejected it as too costly to the District.

"We are sharing this to make sure that it is clear that we have presented two proposals to NEA-Tiverton regarding salaries but have not yet heard back from the NEA on our latest proposal which they were given on August 16th," said deMedeiros. "As you can see, it is not the School Committee that has delayed in making decisions on proposals. The NEA did not respond to our initial salary and benefit proposal for three months after we gave it to them. Each time we've received proposals, we've responded within a matter of a week or two. We are still waiting on their response to the counter-proposal we gave them on August 16th."

deMedeiros finished with stating "We must also underscore that we have a very limited amount of money with which to negotiate. We anticipate that costs will increase in other areas, such as heating oil and supplies, as they do normally. We are obligated to come to agreement on a contract which is fair to all parties involved — our students, our parents, our taxpayers, our teachers and the District, which is one that allows Tiverton to maintain high-quality schools that are affordable to our taxpayers."

The union has been using the media to generate the impression that the school committee has been playing games, but given the information that didn't make it into the stories — at first because the committee didn't wish to publicly release details of its negotiations — it looks as if the union just didn't like the terms to which fiscal restraints limit the town. As I expected, for example, the union's healthcare proposal wasn't floating in a void; its savings were not equal to those planned by the school committee.

In response to an email from one of the NEA negotiators (also a Tiverton teacher), School Committee Vice Chairperson Michael Burk explained:

I am sure you are aware that the Committee could not hold a meeting without providing proper written public notice 48 hours in advance. I believe that [Superintendent] Rearick indicated yesterday morning that he would have us post a meeting for Tuesday evening, the earliest we would be able to do so in compliance with the open meetings laws. Since your team decided to not present Mr. Rearick with a proposal, we were unable to schedule such a meeting. However, as we have also noted, we do have a meeting scheduled for Thursday, September 6th which has been properly posted to allow us to consider any substantive counter-proposals submitted to Mr. Rearick by NEA.

Given that it is the School Committee which as been waiting for nearly 3 weeks for a counter-proposal from the NEA, it seems odd to me that the NEA would be calling a strike because of delays in contract talks. We haven’t left the bargaining table but cannot respond to something that is not there. I and I know my fellow School Committee members strongly believe that an illegal Teachers’ strike is not in the best interest of our students, our parents or our taxpayers. Unfortunately, we are not calling this strike and therefore have no control over that decision.

In an email to me, Mr. Burk details subsequent events, including a meeting with the full committee, the absence of which had been an ostensible sticking point from the unions perspective:

This afternoon [Monday] we held another emergency meeting. At the beginning of our Executive Session, we asked the union for this proposal but they would not give it to us. After about an hour of our Executive Session, we came back to the public session and again asked for the union's proposal. They stated they did not have it with them and it would take them an hour to get it to us. We said we would wait.

They came back in an hour with a proposal that changed very little in salary and, dollar wise, very little in contributing to health care costs. Their salary proposal was for 3.75% each year over 3 years for a total of 11.25%, in addition to step increases. Currently they pay flat rates for health care - $1100 family and $650 individual. They suggested in this latest proposal to raise that to $1150 and $700 in year one; $1250 and $750 in year 2 and $1350 and $800 in year 3. (Our original health care proposal to them asked for a tiered system based on where a teacher is in the salary steps with teachers at the lowest step paying 15% of the health care premium, teachers in the middle steps paying 20% and teachers at the highest steps paying 25%).

While we spent a few hours working through the numbers, we still came up short in being able to identify a counter proposal that would stay within our fiscal constraints but provide teachers with salary increases in the last 2 years of the contract. We asked the union to give us until Thursday to have our fiscal staff work through more details to see if we could find a way address those issues; they instead chose to strike.



The Other Side of the Conversation in Tiverton

Justin Katz

Having just received the press release that the Tiverton School Committee sent around on Sunday, I'm surprised not to have heard the details of its side of the negotiation elsewhere:

"Just as with the health care proposal, we have been working with NEA-Tiverton regarding salary issues," stated deMedeiros. "However, it was our understanding that the two parties were trying to negotiate these issues at the negotiation table, not in the media. Given the NEA's decision to suggest publicly that we have not provided them with salary proposals, we now feel obligated to share publicly the two proposals we've made to NEA. The most recent of these proposals was submitted to the NEA-Tiverton leadership on August 16th and the NEA has not yet responded."

The School Committee's original salary proposal, submitted to NEA-Tiverton on May 8, 2007 was for a 3% total increase over the life of the 3-year contract, spread out as 1% in each year. These raises would be in addition to step increases also included in the contract proposal. Additionally, the Committee suggested providing salary incentives for teachers who have attained a Doctorate and those who have achieved national teacher board certification.

The School Committee received a counter-proposal from NEA-Tiverton on August 8th which called for a 12% total increase over the life of the contract, spread out as 4% in each year. These raises would also be in addition to step increases included in the contract proposal. While the NEA agreed with the addition of incentives for teachers who attain a Doctorate or achieve national board certification, the amount of those incentives differed substantially.

The School Committee reviewed the NEA's proposal on August 14th and immediately provided NEA-Tiverton with a counter-proposal that would provide a 4.5% total increase over the life of the contract with the annual percentages to be determined as part of the final contract negotiations. This counter-proposal was submitted to the Union on August 16th. Again, these raises would be in addition to step increases included in the contract proposal and the Committee kept their recommendations regarding Doctorate and national certification incentives.

Additionally, the Committee indicates that the District’s health care proposal submitted to the NEA on May 8, 2007, is projected to save the District approximately $270,000 based on projected cost increases for health care. NEA-Tiverton has not yet provided a response to the Committee's proposal. The Committee twice considered and health savings account proposal given them by NEA-Tiverton and twice rejected it as too costly to the District.

"We are sharing this to make sure that it is clear that we have presented two proposals to NEA-Tiverton regarding salaries but have not yet heard back from the NEA on our latest proposal which they were given on August 16th," said deMedeiros. "As you can see, it is not the School Committee that has delayed in making decisions on proposals. The NEA did not respond to our initial salary and benefit proposal for three months after we gave it to them. Each time we've received proposals, we've responded within a matter of a week or two. We are still waiting on their response to the counter-proposal we gave them on August 16th."

deMedeiros finished with stating "We must also underscore that we have a very limited amount of money with which to negotiate. We anticipate that costs will increase in other areas, such as heating oil and supplies, as they do normally. We are obligated to come to agreement on a contract which is fair to all parties involved — our students, our parents, our taxpayers, our teachers and the District, which is one that allows Tiverton to maintain high-quality schools that are affordable to our taxpayers."

The union has been using the media to generate the impression that the school committee has been playing games, but given the information that didn't make it into the stories — at first because the committee didn't wish to publicly release details of its negotiations — it looks as if the union just didn't like the terms to which fiscal restraints limit the town. As I expected, for example, the union's healthcare proposal wasn't floating in a void; its savings were not equal to those planned by the school committee.

In response to an email from one of the NEA negotiators (also a Tiverton teacher), School Committee Vice Chairperson Michael Burk explained:

I am sure you are aware that the Committee could not hold a meeting without providing proper written public notice 48 hours in advance. I believe that [Superintendent] Rearick indicated yesterday morning that he would have us post a meeting for Tuesday evening, the earliest we would be able to do so in compliance with the open meetings laws. Since your team decided to not present Mr. Rearick with a proposal, we were unable to schedule such a meeting. However, as we have also noted, we do have a meeting scheduled for Thursday, September 6th which has been properly posted to allow us to consider any substantive counter-proposals submitted to Mr. Rearick by NEA.

Given that it is the School Committee which as been waiting for nearly 3 weeks for a counter-proposal from the NEA, it seems odd to me that the NEA would be calling a strike because of delays in contract talks. We haven’t left the bargaining table but cannot respond to something that is not there. I and I know my fellow School Committee members strongly believe that an illegal Teachers’ strike is not in the best interest of our students, our parents or our taxpayers. Unfortunately, we are not calling this strike and therefore have no control over that decision.

In an email to me, Mr. Burk details subsequent events, including a meeting with the full committee, the absence of which had been an ostensible sticking point from the unions perspective:

This afternoon [Monday] we held another emergency meeting. At the beginning of our Executive Session, we asked the union for this proposal but they would not give it to us. After about an hour of our Executive Session, we came back to the public session and again asked for the union's proposal. They stated they did not have it with them and it would take them an hour to get it to us. We said we would wait.

They came back in an hour with a proposal that changed very little in salary and, dollar wise, very little in contributing to health care costs. Their salary proposal was for 3.75% each year over 3 years for a total of 11.25%, in addition to step increases. Currently they pay flat rates for health care - $1100 family and $650 individual. They suggested in this latest proposal to raise that to $1150 and $700 in year one; $1250 and $750 in year 2 and $1350 and $800 in year 3. (Our original health care proposal to them asked for a tiered system based on where a teacher is in the salary steps with teachers at the lowest step paying 15% of the health care premium, teachers in the middle steps paying 20% and teachers at the highest steps paying 25%).

While we spent a few hours working through the numbers, we still came up short in being able to identify a counter proposal that would stay within our fiscal constraints but provide teachers with salary increases in the last 2 years of the contract. We asked the union to give us until Thursday to have our fiscal staff work through more details to see if we could find a way address those issues; they instead chose to strike.



Breaking News on Anchor Rising: East Greenwich Teachers to Strike on Tuesday

Donald B. Hawthorne

You heard it here first: East Greenwich teachers will strike on Tuesday morning.

More thoughts on their illegal strike here.

UPDATE: ARE THERE REALLY 8-12% ANNUAL SALARY INCREASES IN THESE CONTRACTS?

Regarding Bob's comment of "I am certain no one is asking for such high pay increases, as you propose...You might want to get accurate facts before claiming to know all..."

Bob is simply wrong. I sat on the East Greenwich School Committee from 2000-2002 and analyzed teacher salary schedules in contracts from the late 1990's through 2004. I subsequently looked at the salary schedule for the last 3 year contract.

The salary increases are indeed that high.

I wrote about the hidden nature of these extreme salary increases in this 2004 ProJo editorial.

To further prove the point, here is a portion of my actual 2004 analysis. As noted, it is an Excel spreadsheet analysis and this portion of it is based on data taken from union contracts over a 6-year period: 1998-2004 East Greenwich teacher salary data.

As WJF notes in the Comments section, the Education Partnership has analyzed all teachers' union contracts in RI in recent years, including looking at salary data. They discuss many aspects of the union contracts in their 3 reports which are linked to in this earlier post.

UPDATE #2: 2003-04 TO 2006-2007 SALARY INCREASE DATA SHOWS SAME HIGH ANNUAL INCREASES

In the Comments section, Ken and Bob asked to see the salary increase data for the last 3 years, 2003-04 to 2006-07.

Here, again in an Excel spreadsheet, is that data: 2003-2006 East Greenwich teacher salary data.

As predicted, salary increases of 9-12%/year for each of the last 3 years were realized by teachers in 8 of the 10 job steps.

Continue reading "Breaking News on Anchor Rising: East Greenwich Teachers to Strike on Tuesday"

September 3, 2007


Not Quite Breaking (Except of Taxpayers' Backs)

Justin Katz

All indications are that Tiverton's teachers will be striking tomorrow. This bit from the Providence Journal adds a little bit of flesh (although not much) to the rumors floating among parents in town:

The Tiverton School Committee and the union representing town teachers appear headed for a confrontation tomorrow, when the schools are scheduled to open, after contract talks broke down yesterday and the union notified the superintendent of schools that teachers will not report for work.

"A job action will start Tuesday morning," said Patrick Crowley, of the National Education Association Rhode Island.

The School Committee issued a news release in which it insisted the schools would open on time. The committee added what seemed to be a strange comment. The panel, referring to itself in the third person, said, "However, they caution parents to have a plan in place in case the teachers decide to illegally strike, especially in light of last Wednesday's attempted abduction of a middle school student from a bus stop." ...

The School Committee's release said that the panel had authorized its lawyer, Stephen Robinson, "to take all legal action necessary to stop an illegal strike should it be called, as well as to stop any other job action, such as a work stoppage."

The committee said that the union had "failed to provide a salary and health care proposal" at yesterday's curtailed talks.

My two cents as a Tiverton parent and taxpayer continues to be that the school committee should pen the want ad and prepare the emergency certification paperwork.

ADDENDUM:

Not surprisingly, a more local media source has more current information:

Tiverton's estimated 205 teachers will go on strike Tuesday morning, Sept. 4, and not show up for work, said Amy Mullen, lead negotiator for the teachers' union and the president of NEA-Tiverton, an affiliate of the Rhode Island chapter of the National Education Association.

Picket lines, she said, will be up Tuesday at the intersection of North Brayton and Bulgarmarsh roads from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m. and from 4 to 6 p.m. Under normal conditions, about 1,080 students, almost half of Tiverton's total student body of 2,140 students, pass through the intersection.

School committee vice chairman Michael Burk confirmed the all-school closure Tuesday for all of Tiverton's students. "We are cancelling school for students but expecting all staff to show for work," he said.

He said the school committee attorney has been authorized to take legal action against the teachers if they do strike as expected. He said a temporary restraining order compelling the teachers to return to work would be sought.

And get this bit of audacity:

Finally, Monday afternoon the teachers made a counter offer reducing their salary demand from 4 percent to 3.75 percent for each of the three years, and scuttling their high deductible health care proposal in favor of reverting to a variant of the traditional plan. Around 6 p.m. the school committee asked for more time to consider the proposal and "crunch the numbers," but by then time had run out.

The salary steps have increased 3% for each of the past four years, and this year, amidst a fiscal crisis, with worsening financial circumstances for the citizens in general and flat funding from the state, the union wants more? Sounds to me like the school committee should be less concerned with crunching numbers and more concerned with starting from scratch. Here's the updated version of the table that I posted yesterday:

Step 2006–2007
Salary
Requested (+3.75%)
2007–2008
Salary
Raise for Teacher
Entering
This Step
1 $35,484 $36,815
2 $38,077 $39,505 11.3%
3 $40,672 $42,197 10.8%
4 $43,415 $45,043 10.7%
5 $46,255 $47,990 10.5%
6 $49,177 $51,021 10.3%
7 $51,974 $53,923 9.7%
8 $54,860 $56,917 9.5%
9 $58,041 $60,218 9.8%
10 $64,205 $66,613 14.8%


Update on the East Greenwich Teachers' Contract & Suggested Future Actions

Donald B. Hawthorne

Here is the latest on the East Greenwich School District teachers' contract status:

The NEA voted last Thursday to let their negotiating team call a strike.

The current contract expired last Friday.

There was a special School Committee meeting last Saturday.

Tuesday is the first day of school.

Teachers are paid prospectively and, because of the strike vote on Thursday, were not paid last Friday for work that they may or may not choose to do in the first weeks of September.

In this time of no extra public monies, I hope the community is willing to support an aggressive stance by the School Committee toward the NEA's greedy demands. If the teachers actually strike on Tuesday, here is what I hope the School Committee will do:

Do NOT go to court to force them back.

Let the current teachers stay at home and remain unpaid. (Since the teachers are legally required to teach 180 days in a school year, staying at home only postpones their work year but does not shorten it.)

Give these teachers an ultimatum: It is illegal in RI for teachers to strike so every teacher who doesn't voluntarily return to work by Friday morning of this week is terminated.

Post job openings on Friday for all teaching positions which are unfilled on that day. (Just think of all the teachers in RI who would love to teach in East Greenwich!)

Hire new teachers for all openings.

If faced with work-to-rule after the teachers return, immediately declare all retroactive pay is off the table forever under any new contract. Immediately apply the funds which would have been used for such pay to hiring tutors for the children so their educational experience is made whole in spite of the teachers' actions.

In the meantime, I hope the School Committee rallies support in the community by letting the community see the NEA union for what it is. The NEA is not about our children. The NEA is not about education. It is only about adult entitlements for union members, about outrageous contractual costs which can no longer be afforded.

There are no more tax monies available to pay for 8-12%/year salary increases, anything less than 25% healthcare co-payments, or more than $1,000 cash buyback payments for not using health insurance. The gravy train ride is over.

Can you imagine if each of the 7 School Committee members went to 10 home meetings over the next 3 weeks to explain School & Tax Economics 101 to town residents? That would be 70 meetings and, if 20 people could attend each meeting, the School Committee would have directly reached over 1,400 of the 13,000 people in town. Add in spouses of attendees who would likely hear about the meeting afterwards and then another 1-2 friends for each home meeting attendee and the School Committee would have reached about 50% of the town before the end of September.

The NEA and its members need to join the real world where taxpayers live every day. Salaries and benefits just like the rest of us, the working families and retirees who pay for their compensation. It is all we ask.



The Guidebook to Public-Abuse

Justin Katz

I'd also like to thank Mr. Crowley — especially on Labor Day — for highlighting the tactical philosophy of one of his union heroes:

  1. Power is not only what you have, but what your enemy thinks you have
  2. Never go outside of the experience of your own people
  3. Whenever possible, go outside the experience of your opponent
  4. Make your opponents live by their own rule book
  5. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon
  6. A good tactic is one that people enjoy
  7. A tactic that drags on to long becomes a drag
  8. Keep the pressure on
  9. The threat is usually more terrifying that the thing itself
  10. Maintain a constant pressure on the opposition
  11. If you push a negative hard enough and deep enough it will break through to its counter side.
  12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative
  13. Pick the target opponent, freeze the issue, personalize the issue, polarize the issue.

Still wondering why the rift is growing between teachers and the communities of which they ought to (often want to) be a part?



My Favorite Samuel Gompers Quote

Carroll Andrew Morse

Since it's appropriate to Labor Day, and since NEA Executive Director Bob Walsh has already invoked his name in an earlier comment, let's post a few more quotes from Samuel Gompers, the first President of the American Federation Labor. This is my personal favorite...

The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.
Anyone want to take a stab at applying this wisdom to public-sector organizations?

Also, here's another quote from the Gomp, less pithy but still interesting, on the subject of social welfare policy…

Doing for people what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment. In the last analysis the welfare of the workers depends upon their own initiative. Whatever is done under the guise of philanthropy or social morality which in any way lessens initiative is the greatest crime that can be committed against the toilers. Let social busy-bodies and professional “public morals experts” in their fads reflect upon the perils they rashly invite under this pretense of social welfare.
Is the entire Gompers package of ideas still in play over on the left, or has the modern labor movement reduced him to a guy on a street corner shouting "I want more"?

(And is Pat Crowley now going to write Samuel Gompers off as a right-wing neo-con plant?)



One Side of the Phone Conversation

Justin Katz

I'll start by thanking Pat Crowley for taking the initiative of putting some actual details out there for consideration. Having read through his description of the NEA-Tiverton's healthcare proposal — doing my best to see past his ham-handed spin — I find I can only say that it's not enough information. Given the privacy of the negotiations and the lack of information about the other side's response, there's simply no way of knowing how this proposal fits in with the overall discussion.

As a starting point of explanation, consider this:

A High Deductible Plan is coupled with a Health Savings Account. Because the Tiverton School Committee would be responsible for funding 50% of the HSA, the actual year 1 savings in real dollars to the tax payer is more than $185,000.

Unless my understanding is mistaken, it makes no sense, in this context, to speak of funding some percentage of an HSA. There's only a maximum contribution to such accounts, not a minimum or required amount. According to the site to which Pat refers readers for further description of HSAs in general:

For 2007 and forward, your maximum annual HSA contribution is based on the statutory limit for your type of coverage. For 2007, if you have self-only HDHP coverage, your contribution is $2,850; $5,650 if family HDHP, no matter what your HDHP deductible is. Before 2006, the contribution could not exceed the deductible of your HDHP. If you are age 55 or older, you can also make additional “catch-up” contributions (see below).

How this fits in with the data in his spreadsheet is impossible to determine. He notes, thereon, that the teacher's HSA contribution for an individual plan would be $750 and for a family plan would be $1,500. The nature of HSAs, however, makes this number arbitrary (unless the specific plan, which he does not provide, makes it not so). If the HSA is underfunded, necessary health expenses below the deductible must simply be paid out of pocket.

A teacher on an individual plan who doesn't spend more than $750 each year (assuming that the district's "50% contribution" is that much) wouldn't pay a penny all year long. Moreover, if the total contributions are more than is spent, then that money accumulates in the account. It can be saved and invested, and it can be withdrawn — albeit taxably, with a 10% penalty for those under 65. It is also inheritable, should the owner die. Intelligently managed, HSAs could become a sort of back-door pension.

As like-minded readers may be wondering, I'm not arguing against HSAs. These are some of their best features, and I think school districts ought to give them serious consideration. If teachers are free, however — and I believe they should be — to contribute as little as they like and to keep what remains from year to year, then that arbitrary contribution demanded of their employer raises an obvious question: why aren't more of the savings being passed on to the town?

That brings us back to the reason that this information is nigh upon useless in judging the contract negotiations from the outside. Disregarding the possibility that the union sought to transfer the "savings" to some other part of the contract (such as higher salaries or other benefits), it could be that the school committee counter-proposed some sort of modification to the HSA formula — say, a decreasing employer contribution over time, as the accounts grow — or just refused to accept the healthcare proposal as balance to some other aspect of the contract.

Suggesting public outrage over the rebuff would then seem just one more posturing tactic.



Reflecting on Labor Unions on Labor Day

Donald B. Hawthorne

In a prior post, these words were written:

It is incredibly ironic that it is now the labor unions who spend lobbying monies like a Fortune 500 corporation - just so they can protect their powerful monopolies. Underperforming monopolies at that!...

[On the other hand], this belief in freedom also leads [others of] us to support school choice because we believe every poor inner city child should have the same educational opportunity that some of us - who are more economically fortunate - can "buy" for our own children...

Isn't it ironic that conservatives are the ones pushing educational freedom for poor inner city children while the teachers' unions want to keep those same children enslaved in their underperforming public school monopolies?...

On this Labor Day, to appreciate how labor unions have evolved into just another big business intent on promoting their own self-interest and maintaining their own economic and political power, reflect not on their public relations spin offered to the American public but focus rather on their actions:

A January 3 Wall Street Journal editorial (available for a fee) discusses the new Department of Labor disclosure requirements:
If we told you that an organization gave away more than $65 million last year to Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Amnesty International, AIDS Walk Washington and dozens of other such advocacy groups, you'd probably assume we were describing a liberal philanthropy. In fact, those expenditures have all turned up on the financial disclosure report of the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers union.

Under new federal rules pushed through by Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, large unions must now disclose in much more detail how they spend members' dues money. Big Labor fought hard (if unsuccessfully) against the new accountability standards...They expose the union as a honey pot for left-wing political causes that have nothing to do with teachers, much less students.

We already knew that the NEA's top brass lives large. Reg Weaver, the union's president, makes $439,000 a year. The NEA has a $58 million payroll for just over 600 employees, more than half of whom draw six-figure salaries. Last year the average teacher made only $48,000, so it seems you're better off working as a union rep than in the classroom...

..."What wasn't clear before is how much of a part the teachers unions play in the wider liberal movement and the Democratic Party," says Mike Antonucci of the Education Intelligence Agency, a California-based watchdog group. "They're like some philanthropic organization that passes out grant money to interest groups."...

When George Soros does this sort of thing, at least he's spending his own money. The NEA is spending the mandatory dues paid by members who are told their money will be used to gain better wages, benefits and working conditions. According to the latest filing, member dues accounted for $295 million of the NEA's $341 million in total receipts last year. But the union spent $25 million of that on "political activities and lobbying" and another $65.5 million on "contributions, gifts and grants" that seemed designed to further those hyper-liberal political goals.

The good news is that for the first time members can find out how their union chieftains did their political thinking for them...

It's well understood that the NEA is an arm of the Democratic National Committee. (Or is it the other way around?) But we wonder if the union's rank-and-file stand in unity behind this laundry list of left-to-liberal recipients of money that comes out of their pockets.

You can go to here for more/ongoing LM-2 report information on labor union financial matters.

A follow-up editorial (also available for a fee) added several other interesting points:

...the NEA also works though these same state affiliates to further its political goals by bankrolling ballot and legislative initiatives. To that end, the Kentucky Education Association received $250,000 from the NEA last year; the Michigan Education Association received $660,000; and the California Teachers Association received $2.5 million. We doubt this cash goes into buying more laptops for poor students.

And then there's the money that the NEA sends directly to sympathetic interest groups working at the state level, such as the $500,000 that went to Protect Our Public Schools, an anti-charter outfit in Washington State (never mind that charters are "public schools," albeit ones allowed to operate outside the teachers' union education monopoly)...

A January 28 ProJo editorial added several other insights:

...The national NEA spent $47 million on "representational activities," such as bargaining contracts; $25 million on political activities and lobbying; $64 million on overhead; and $65 million on contributions, gifts, and grants, many to political causes associated with the Democratic Party.

At the local level, National Education Association Rhode Island reported giving total compensation of more than $100,000 to nine people: Executive Director Robert Walsh ($142,015); Deputy Executive Director Vin Santaniello ($131,952); President Larry Purtill ($116,332); General Counsel John Decubellis ($109,862); Business Manager Walter Young ($106,306); and field representatives Jane Argenteri ($108,790), Jerry Egan ($110,111), Robert Roy ($103,985), and Jeannette Woolley ($107,252). Another four received total compensation of $86,000 or more.

The Rhode Island NEA spent $63,432 on "public relations" at Warwick's Cornerstone Communications, the company of Guy Dufault, who last made news by promising to defeat Governor Carcieri by revealing the names of Mr. Carcieri's apparently nonexistent girlfriends. Another $58,800 went to WorkingRI, a political group opposed to the governor also linked to Mr. Dufault.

(The Rhode Island chapter of the American Federation of Teachers also filed a report, showing five employees each receiving more than $100,000: President Marcia Reback [$128,542], Director of Professional Issues Colleen Callahan Delan [$116,243], and field representatives Robert Casey [$125,656], Michael Mullane [$116,243], and James Parisi [$116,243]. The AFT gave $5,000 to Cornerstone Communications, and $7,500 to the lobbying group Citizens for a Representative Government, also associated with Mr. Dufault, which helped block a constitutional convention in Rhode Island.)

If serving the unions' economic interests is the goal, it is hard to argue that these local leaders have been overpaid.

How well that has served the state's students is, of course, up for debate...

The 2006 NEA Rhode Island agenda calls for: increased spending on schools; reduced class sizes (translating into more teachers); shifting more of the burden of school spending onto state government from the localities; stopping privatization or outsourcing of jobs; revising pension reforms passed last year by the General Assembly; and removing any barriers on public employees' and their spouses' running for public office.

That is an agenda that would keep money and power flowing to the teachers' unions, something they are well within their rights to seek. But it's fair to ask how much good it would do our struggling students...

Michelle Malkin has more here.

The Editors at National Review offered these words:

More and more, union leaders are also putting their organizations on the record on issues unrelated to labor or collective bargaining. The National Education Association spends less than 15 percent of its dues money representing members in the workplace, according to disclosure forms filed with the Department of Labor. It gives its leftover millions to groups that do such things as resist Social Security reform and litigate to prevent restrictions on abortion. It has also declared its support for a government-controlled and taxpayer-funded health-care system. Other unions advocate such causes as same-sex marriage, higher taxes (which their workers would have to pay), retreat from Iraq, and an amnesty for illegal immigrants that would adversely affect the wage growth of many union members.

In ages past, when the worker’s lot was much worse than it is today, union leaders stuck to what they did best: collective bargaining and improvement of work conditions. They fought for the well-being of their workers, but frequently opposed government intervention in the workplace, understanding that a free market would create jobs and opportunities for all. Today’s labor leaders simply fight to preserve their power, often at the expense of both the workers they represent and the country as a whole. Unfortunately, their closest political friends hold a majority in Congress.

Which is why Milton Friedman once said:

The president of the National Education Association was once asked when his union was going to do something about students. He replied that when the students became members of the union, the union would take care of them. And that was a correct answer. Why? His responsibility as president of the NEA was to serve the members of his union, not to serve public purposes. I give him credit: The trade union has been very effective in serving its members. However, in the process, they've destroyed American education. But you see, education isn't the union's function. It's our fault for allowing the union to pursue its agenda. Consider this fact: There are two areas in the United States that suffer from the same disease—education is one and health care is the other. They both suffer from the disease that takes a system that should be bottom-up and converts it into a system that is top-down. Education is a simple case. It isn't the public purpose to build brick schools and have students taught there. The public purpose is to provide education. Think of it this way: If you want to subsidize the production of a product, there are two ways you can do it. You can subsidize the producer or you can subsidize the consumer. In education, we subsidize the producer—the school. If you subsidize the student instead—the consumer—you will have competition. The student could choose the school he attends and that would force schools to improve and to meet the demands of their students.

There is a pro-jobs and economic growth alternative to the forced-dues mentality which stifles economic opportunities for hard-working people across America.

So who then "stands for progress, for protection of the interests and rights of the masses" so no American is enslaved? Who then believes most fervently in freedom, self-government, and enabling every American to live the American Dream?


September 2, 2007


Education Partnership Reports: Learning a lot more about RI teachers' union contracts

Donald B. Hawthorne

A lot of fur is flying in the Comments sections of various posts on teachers' union contracts.

If you want to get some good information on such contracts in RI, your best bet is to go read the three annual reports by The Education Partnership:

Teacher Contracts: Restoring the Balance (Volume I, 2005)
Teacher Contracts: Restoring the Balance (Volume II, 2006)
Teacher Contracts: Restoring the Balance (Volume III, 2007)

Oh, you won't find it a surprise that the NEA whines about these reports. No doubt they will do it again. But just remember this: The terms of these union contracts have been the dirty little secret of government. Unions and their partners in government have thrived by being largely invisible to the working families and retirees whose hard-earned monies are taxed to pay for all of the outrageous public school teachers' salaries and benefits.

That invisibility is finally being destroyed now -- and the resulting transparency explains their vehement reactions.

The good news is that the new-found transparency will never go away.

FURTHER THOUGHTS ON UNIONS & BOTH ECONOMIC AND EDUCATIONAL FREEDOM:

In the Comments section, the NEA's Bob Walsh shares an 1893 Samuel Gompers speech which he suggests shows that labor unions have offered a consistent message over the years. It is worth reading for its historical value.

Here is what I wrote as a response to Bob in the Comments section:

It is now 114 years since that speech. A lot of societal dynamics have changed in major ways since then.

Many of us agree that private sector labor unions contributed to the betterment of society back in those days.

However, in recent decades, labor unions have become just another big business whose self-interest is promoting the ongoing strength of the unions, not doing things like ensuring our children get the best possible education so they can compete successfully as adults in a global economy.

Furthermore, an important distinction has arisen with the growth of public sector unions.

The demands of private sector unions have always been subject over time to market forces, where economic competition moderates the demands of both unions and management.

However, the demands of public sector unions are not subject to any market forces but achieve their ends through political power which then is used to protect their monopoly operations, like public schools.

It is incredibly ironic that it is now the labor unions who spend lobbying monies like a Fortune 500 corporation - just so they can protect their powerful monopolies. Underperforming monopolies at that!

For those of us in this century, the dominant issue is a passionate belief in freedom. But, my-oh-my, how times have changed who truly supports freedom. And who believes in the Founding principle that Americans are capable of self-government.

For some of us, this belief in freedom and self-government leads us to support entrepreneurial capitalism - not big business or country-club Republicans - because entrepreneurial capitalism enables any hard-working American to start a new business and have a shot at living the American Dream. (Nearly 20 years in Silicon Valley gave me a chance to see it up close.)

This belief in freedom also leads us to support school choice because we believe every poor inner city child should have the same educational opportunity that some of us - who are more economically fortunate - can "buy" for our own children.

Isn't it ironic then that conservatives are the ones pushing economic freedom for the average American who, like each contributor to Anchor Rising, was born with no silver spoon or trust fund?

Isn't it ironic that conservatives are the ones pushing educational freedom for poor inner city children while the teachers' unions want to keep those same children enslaved in their underperforming public school monopolies?

Who then "stands for progress, for protection of the interests and rights of the masses" so no American is enslaved? Who then believes most fervently in freedom, self-government, and enabling every American to live the American Dream?



Citizen Context for Negotiations

Justin Katz

So this is the final month of severance pay from the editing job that I lost in the spring.

We've resources for approximately another six months — longer if my wife goes back to work. The local economy is such, however, that even if we were comfortable putting our children in daycare to allow for a full 40-hour workweek on her part, it is unlikely that she could make up the deficit. (Our investment in her education, you see, was to qualify her to teach. Lapses in both certifications and continuing education requirements have placed the necessary additional investments beyond our reach.) If it proves necessary, some mixture of daycare, waitressing on my wife's part, and side work on my part could fill in the gaps, but then I'd have to loose the progress that I've made with writing for the second time in the space of a few years.

I offer this not to bemoan my circumstances, but to give a sense of the context in which I've been considering the following information from a Newport Daily News story about the Tiverton teachers' preparation to strike:

The School Committee's current proposal for salary and health care would decrease teachers overall salaries by 1.5 percent, according to union officials. The average loss in wages for a member on a family heath-care plan is $2,201 and the average loss in wages for a member on an individual plan is $1,315, according to union figures.

I haven't seen any specifics from the various proposals (although I'd note for Mr. Crowley's benefit that my email is linked beneath my name on the Contributors tab to the left), but I'd say it's a reasonable assumption that the union is factoring at least its usual 3% step raise into its calculation of teacher "losses." Taking the numbers as laid out in their most recent contract (PDF) and increasing them 3% as required by the one-year extension (PDF) that they accepted last year (all of which information Pat Crowley has helpfully provided on his Web site), the following table presents the amounts in question:

Step 2006–2007
Salary
Assumed
2007–2008
Salary
1 $35,484 $36,548
2 $38,077 $39,219
3 $40,672 $41,892
4 $43,415 $44,717
5 $46,255 $47,643
6 $49,177 $50,652
7 $51,974 $53,533
8 $54,860 $56,506
9 $58,041 $59,782
10 $64,205 $66,131

Readers should keep four things in mind when considering these numbers. First, these are not the whole story as far as cash remuneration is concerned. Advanced studies can add up to 6.53% to the salary. Teachers receive longevity bonuses from $200 for 10 years of service to $600 for thirty. Coaching or taking on advisory roles (whether of students or of fellow teachers) can add thousands of dollars to a salary. And other, professional development–type activities also yield additional money.

Second, these salaries are for a 7-hour 180-day work year, with school vacations and a full summer available for extra work, if desired. Add to that consideration the opportunity to accumulate a full year of sick days as well opportunities for partially paid sabbaticals and such.

Third, the health benefits cost teachers well below what most people in the private sector must pay. The copays (dental included) are $675 for an individual plan and $1,100 for a family plan — or $26 and $42 per biweekly paycheck. Any teachers who decline the dental coverage receive a $250 payment. Any teacher whose spouse also works for the Tiverton school district receives $1,000 stipend instead of a unique health plan.

Fourth, teachers go up a step each year, so the actual raise for any teacher not yet at step 10 is the step increase plus the 3% adjustment. With each step increase amounting to a 6–7% raise (10% from step 9 to step 10), the actual increase in earnings for teachers in their first decade with the district is around 10%.

Now reread the above paragraph from the Newport Daily News report. If I'm correct that the 1.5% "overall salary decrease" is calculated after the expected 3% step adjustment, then the union is complaining that the take-home pay of teachers who have no other adjustments to their compensation will only be increasing by 1.5% for those above step 10, only around 8.5% for teachers below step 10, and only 11.5% for teachers going from step 9 to step 10.

Forgive me if my heart doesn't bleed for them as I contemplate 80-hour-plus workweeks, 51 weeks per year, just to get by.


September 1, 2007


What do the Wobblies Seek to Deliver?

Carroll Andrew Morse

Ian Donnis writes in this week's Providence Phoenix about the Industrial Workers of the World's August 26 protest and the IWW mission in general. Donnis asks a sensible question, too often glossed over by the MSM when covering events like the North Providence rally…

Considering how the IWW has mostly been a barely perceptible entity since its pre-World War I heyday, one has to wonder whether the protest at North Providence High will mark a contemporary high point for the union in Rhode Island.
In other words, how much more to this movement is there than protest itself?

Donnis mentions a perspective offered by some observers at the rally to explain the group's limited appeal…

To a few curious onlookers at last Sunday’s protest, the band of gathered liberals and lefties were remnants of discredited political theories.
Rocco DiPippo discusses this perspective in great and colorful detail, over at the Autonomist website.

When asked about IWW goals and its fealty to the ideas of the past, organizer Mark Bray gave a similar answer as he did when asked by Anchor Rising if the goal of his organization was to criminalize private income

“We are not a communist organization, or a socialist organization, or anything ‘ist’ ” Democracy in the workplace, he says, is “perhaps our most important value.”
However, "democracy in the workplace" is not mentioned in the IWW Constitution, though "abolition of the wage system" and the "the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism" are. Those ideas are pretty difficult to separate from old-line, conventional Marxism.

The caution for young idealists to be aware of here stems not just from the specifics of what the IWW may or may not stand for as a group, but from the consistent unwillingness of local IWW leaders to state their most fundamental organizational goals when given the opportunity to reach a large audience. Such unwillingness to put to the public their ultimate objectives is difficult to reconcile with a legitimate belief in the system of democracy, be it in the workplace or elsewhere, as democracy depends on honest deliberation and exchange about the purposes and limits of what can be achieved collectively by the people.

Not coincidentally, the idea that the mechanics of building a movement are more important than its ultimate goals, and therefore saying anything to win hearts and minds is acceptable in the pursuit of power, is one that has corrupted collectivization movements throughout history. That idea may be one more point of commonality between today's IWW and those discredited 'isms from yesterday.



Saying "No" to Legalized Extortion

Donald B. Hawthorne

I endorse John's words in the Comments section of Justin's post entitled Children Are Their Life? No, Children Are Their Leverage.:

Maybe someday in RI a school committee will have the guts to fire striking teachers, replace them with new ones, and say to the union, "see you in court." I have no doubt where most parents' and other taxpayers' sympathies would lie.

And, as to the NEA's other favorite tactic of work-to-rule (doing only the absolute legal minimum specified in the contract) - combined with demanding retroactive pay increases - I wrote these words back in 2005 when those were the union actions during the East Greenwich negotiations:

The issues of retroactive pay and "work-to-rule" are at the heart of the dispute in the East Greenwich NEA teachers union contract dispute. The union expects salaries to be made whole via retroactive pay increases. But if the union believes they will get such pay, then they have no incentive to settle the contract for anything less than their one-sided outrageous demands. Yet, in the meantime, our children will not be made whole retroactively for all the times teachers have, due to "work-to-rule," refused to do the same things for our children that they did in past years. This is an inequitable situation that needs to be rectified.

Therefore, I would like to propose a straightforward settlement offer to the East Greenwich NEA teachers' union contract dispute:

• Retroactive pay: Tell the union that retroactive pay is off the table now and forever. Actions have consequences and teachers should not be made whole if our children cannot be made whole. Take away any incentive for the union to continue its refusal to negotiate in good faith and make time their enemy, not ours.

• Taking care of our children: Take some or all of the funds originally set aside in the budget for retroactive pay and dedicate those funds to paying for outside help, including tutors, for our children. In other words, let's take control of the situation and make our children whole from this day forward...

Parents will support such aggressive actions because they are in the best interests of their children.

Taxpayers will support such aggressive actions because they protect the standard of living of working families and retirees in the community.

And while we are at it, Just Say No to (i) 9-12% annual salary increases; (ii) healthcare co-pays less than 25%; (iii) cash buybacks of any kind for not using health insurance plans; (iv) dollar caps or dollar offsets elsewhere in the contract to offset higher co-pays, etc.; and, (v) rich pension plans.

They need to start living like the rest of us, the people who pay their salaries and benefits. See more here, here, and here.

In other words, Just Say No to union actions which amount to nothing but a form of legalized extortion of hard-working Americans.



Children Are Their Life? No, Children Are Their Leverage.

Justin Katz

It occurs to me that several buildings' worth of kindergarteners began their school experiences last week in Tiverton. What a wonderful early educational experience this would be:

The teachers union membership this evening authorized its negotiating committee to call a strike if it deemed it necessary next Tuesday.

Amy Mullen, the NEA-Tiverton teachers union president, said the members authorized the committee at a 4:30 p.m. meeting to "to take whatever action it deems necessary up to and including a strike on Tuesday."

So the negotiating committee has been authorized to commit union members to criminal activity? Can't the school request that a judge preemptively remind the teachers that striking is illegal? Perhaps the school committee should tell the union — which has declared that it "will not continue to meet with the School Committee's current configuration of negotiators" — that any empty classrooms on Tuesday will be presumed to be in need of a new teacher.

I also note that, instead of offering the public the look behind the contractual curtain that I requested from him, Pat Crowley has released quite a different document:

Crowley last night released a copy of a memo Schools Supt. William J. Rearick sent to teachers Tuesday apologizing for telling them to "sit down and shut up" at a district orientation meeting in the high school auditorium earlier that day.

“My intention was to get the meeting started in a timely manner, in retrospect I should have chosen my words more carefully,” Rearick wrote.

“I want to take this opportunity to apologize to anyone I may have offended,” the superintendent added.

Rearick last night said it happened after he'd tried to call the orientation meeting to order without success.

It's time these "professionals" — which teachers profess (and indeed ought) to be — learned that there are consequences to allowing the unions to make bullies and blackmailers of them.


August 31, 2007


Re: Researching from Outside the Library

Donald B. Hawthorne

As a former member of the East Greenwich School Committee, I read Justin's post about Pat Crowley's comments on the Burrillville teachers' strike with a certain bemusement.

Justin touches on one of the really big issues about RI teachers' union contract negotiations: It is my experience that it was the teachers' union who demanded that the negotiations be conducted in private with no taxpayer visibility to their contract demands and the ongoing status of negotiations. All while many union members - teachers, primarily - whined publicly about how they were being treated unfairly.

Things will only change - and the Pat Crowley's of this world will only have credibility - when the contract demands are made public to the people who pay their salaries and benefits.

It is only with greater visibility that the hidden secrets of these union contracts will seep into the public's consciousness. For example, I was the person in Rhode Island who blew the extreme (9-12%/year) salary increases buried in contractual step increases into the public domain with this 2004 ProJo editorial.

While the particular issues will vary somewhat by district, here are excerpts from a 2005 post about the tactics used by the teachers' union to accomplish its contractual goals in the East Greenwich negotiations.

The formal labor dispute between the residents of East Greenwich and the NEA teachers' union is now over. However, the dispute showed the true colors of the union and many teachers. With the veneer stripped off, residents have learned many valuable lessons.

First and foremost, we learned - by their practice of work-to-rule - the union and numerous teachers were willing to use our children as pawns in an attempt to avoid a health insurance co-payment. They even had the audacity to say publicly that work-to-rule was not hurting our children.

Second, the union demanded to be made whole financially via full retroactive pay for last year even though our children's educational experience could not be made whole - due to their work-to-rule actions.

Third, they confirmed how teachers-union contracts are the antithesis of good teaching practices when they stressed that work-to-rule was a contractual right - while at the same time protesting that they wanted us to treat them like professional workers. They stated publicly that before-school and after-school assistance was not part of their job description. They dared us to take them to court if we believed they were not working the legally proper hours.

Fourth, they insulted residents by claiming that a majority of us could afford to hire tutors for our children but have been receiving these services free from public school teachers for years. Teachers also claimed that they - not parents - were responsible for our town's favorable test scores.

Fifth, they showed how they live in a make-believe world when they said that no one in the private sector works overtime without getting paid and, if they're off the clock at 5 p.m., you can bet they're out the door at 5. They also claimed more than 50% of residents earn at least $500,000.

Sixth, we also learned they would make verifiably misleading comments to get what they want, including: (i) Taxes in East Greenwich aren't that high compared to other communities; (ii) Insurance co-payments would result in pay cuts to teachers; and, (iii) East Greenwich pays lower than other districts.

These are not honorable people. It is clear now that these union negotiations are nothing less than one big racket, rigged to yield financial gain to the union. They certainly are not for the benefit of our children or for excellence in education...

Unfortunately, work-to-rule and other management rights issues are specified in RI General Law, which means it is impossible to change these rules at the local level...

The 2005 post includes links to many other posts on those East Greenwich negotiations, RI public education and union issues, and broader public education issues. They can be found in the Extended Entry section below.

Continue reading "Re: Researching from Outside the Library"


Researching from Outside the Library

Justin Katz

In a comment to my post on the Burrillville teacher strike, Pat Crowley challenges me as follows:

Justin, I wish you would take the time to really investigate the issues instead of having this ivory tower, knee-jerk reaction.
This relates to something that has bothered me as I've followed news reports about the Tiverton teacher negotiation: the he said/she said regarding the contracts, especially, in Tiverton, with respect to some healthcare proposal by the union. As far as I can tell, the contracts and the specific proposals are not available to the public. Indeed, the school committee went into closed executive session to discuss it. I'm certainly willing to research these matters; heck, I'll probably be sufficiently interested to produce some pretty charts. It seems to me that, if the unions think they're objectively in the right, it would probably serve them better to get the information out there than to waste soundbites insulting the other party to negotiations. Send me the info, Pat, or direct me to it if I've missed it, and I'll be happy to do my homework.


August 30, 2007


Crowley, You Charmer

Justin Katz

Patrick lays on the charm in the public-media negotiation process with the Tiverton school committee:

Union spokesman Patrick Crowley replied, "It's unfortunate that the School Committee has not taken the time to do the math accurately, and in addition to our mediation request we're going to suggest that they get math remediation as well."

Yup, that's the voice of an organization that just wants to reach a fair compromise with the district so that its teachers can continue improving childrens' lives. I'm not ready to come down on Patrick too hard, though; for all I know, it's his job to play the bully role so Bob Walsh has room to play the reasonable guy.i



Crowley, You Charmer

Justin Katz

Patrick lays on the charm in the public-media negotiation process with the Tiverton school committee:

Union spokesman Patrick Crowley replied, "It's unfortunate that the School Committee has not taken the time to do the math accurately, and in addition to our mediation request we're going to suggest that they get math remediation as well."

Yup, that's the voice of an organization that just wants to reach a fair compromise with the district so that its teachers can continue improving childrens' lives. I'm not ready to come down on Patrick too hard, though; for all I know, it's his job to play the bully role so Bob Walsh has room to play the reasonable guy.i



A Finger Here, a Finger There

Justin Katz

I've been meaning to note the chutzpa of retired state employee Robert Davis's recent letter to the Providence Journal:

Why is The Journal so preoccupied with the money that state workers make?

Recent articles have explored who is the highest-paid state worker and how much overtime is being paid, as if the state workers were the ones at fault for Rhode Island’s financial trouble.

Here’s a suggestion: Why not look into how much the bond issues that voters approve every election are costing the taxpayers?

Last election, they approved about $200 million in bond issues without blinking an eye. Most voters didn’t even know what they were approving. They just looked at that title in big letters and said, “That sounds good; I’ll approve that!”

We've had this discussion before (in part in the comments to the posts linked here), but the bond issues do so well because they often are good ideas and often seem to be the sorts of things that government ought to do (such as road infrastructure work). The reason I refuse to vote for them out of principle is that I get the impression that the government gives away all of its revenue to special interests — notably unions and the poverty industry — and then comes back to the taxpayers for more in order to pay for things that ought to be central to its budget.

By contrast, the pill of public labor has the distinct flavor of utter waste, as Arlene Violet described a few weeks ago:

Another contributor to overtime is the staffing minimums in contracts. When there's a call for a rescue, many firefighters' contracts require a fire engine to accompany the call complete with four firefighters. Think about that for a moment. Why is a fire truck going to a call? ...

At the Adult Correctional Institutions, a guard cannot be called from another building to compensate for staff shortages in a facility. Other guards have to be called in, even if they haven't put in their full work week yet. The "call in" triggers overtime. So on Monday, a correctional officer not scheduled to begin work until Tuesday night gets time and a half if he goes in on Monday. The warden can't jigger schedules to avoid more than 35 hours per week. ...

Out in the private sector if you are a boss you are management. Your salary already reflects your responsibilities and the fact that you work extra hours. Allen LeBeau makes $88,537.72 in base pay as a supervising nurse at Eleanor Slater Hospital. He piled on $126,000-plus in overtime, apparently because he's on call! Psychiatrists earning six figures get overtime. Their counterparts in the real world get peanuts for answering calls outside of working hours. Quite plainly, if someone is in management or professional staff there should be no overtime. Period.

Another poor practice is employees getting called in for overtime based on seniority. Politicians have dealt away management rights. When overtime is necessary, the boss cannot call in workers at the lower pay levels but must call in the higher paid people. Even a rotation of overtime among employees would help stem costs.



A Finger Here, a Finger There

Justin Katz

I've been meaning to note the chutzpa of retired state employee Robert Davis's recent letter to the Providence Journal:

Why is The Journal so preoccupied with the money that state workers make?

Recent articles have explored who is the highest-paid state worker and how much overtime is being paid, as if the state workers were the ones at fault for Rhode Island’s financial trouble.

Here’s a suggestion: Why not look into how much the bond issues that voters approve every election are costing the taxpayers?

Last election, they approved about $200 million in bond issues without blinking an eye. Most voters didn’t even know what they were approving. They just looked at that title in big letters and said, “That sounds good; I’ll approve that!”

We've had this discussion before (in part in the comments to the posts linked here), but the bond issues do so well because they often are good ideas and often seem to be the sorts of things that government ought to do (such as road infrastructure work). The reason I refuse to vote for them out of principle is that I get the impression that the government gives away all of its revenue to special interests — notably unions and the poverty industry — and then comes back to the taxpayers for more in order to pay for things that ought to be central to its budget.

By contrast, the pill of public labor has the distinct flavor of utter waste, as Arlene Violet described a few weeks ago:

Another contributor to overtime is the staffing minimums in contracts. When there's a call for a rescue, many firefighters' contracts require a fire engine to accompany the call complete with four firefighters. Think about that for a moment. Why is a fire truck going to a call? ...

At the Adult Correctional Institutions, a guard cannot be called from another building to compensate for staff shortages in a facility. Other guards have to be called in, even if they haven't put in their full work week yet. The "call in" triggers overtime. So on Monday, a correctional officer not scheduled to begin work until Tuesday night gets time and a half if he goes in on Monday. The warden can't jigger schedules to avoid more than 35 hours per week. ...

Out in the private sector if you are a boss you are management. Your salary already reflects your responsibilities and the fact that you work extra hours. Allen LeBeau makes $88,537.72 in base pay as a supervising nurse at Eleanor Slater Hospital. He piled on $126,000-plus in overtime, apparently because he's on call! Psychiatrists earning six figures get overtime. Their counterparts in the real world get peanuts for answering calls outside of working hours. Quite plainly, if someone is in management or professional staff there should be no overtime. Period.

Another poor practice is employees getting called in for overtime based on seniority. Politicians have dealt away management rights. When overtime is necessary, the boss cannot call in workers at the lower pay levels but must call in the higher paid people. Even a rotation of overtime among employees would help stem costs.


August 29, 2007


Burrillville Teachers to Students: Let the Pawns Skip School

Justin Katz

Shame on the Burrillville teachers for striking. As the people — especially parents — of that town are discovering, there is no better example of the teachers' unions' profoundly unreasonable power than their failure to obey the law and decline to strike. The district should fire anybody who doesn't show up for work tomorrow, and we all should take the Burrillville teachers' bad example as reason to end teacher unionization in this state.

As a first step, I wonder whether a movement could be formed to make it mandatory that future strikes in Rhode Island will be punished with lost jobs, with the deadline for contract signing a few months before the first day of school.



Burrillville Teachers to Students: Let the Pawns Skip School

Justin Katz

Shame on the Burrillville teachers for striking. As the people — especially parents — of that town are discovering, there is no better example of the teachers' unions' profoundly unreasonable power than their failure to obey the law and decline to strike. The district should fire anybody who doesn't show up for work tomorrow, and we all should take the Burrillville teachers' bad example as reason to end teacher unionization in this state.

As a first step, I wonder whether a movement could be formed to make it mandatory that future strikes in Rhode Island will be punished with lost jobs, with the deadline for contract signing a few months before the first day of school.


August 27, 2007


Does the IWW Want to Criminalize the Receipt of Private Income? An IWW Leader Responds

Carroll Andrew Morse

I paid a visit to yesterday’s Industrial Workers of the World rally in North Providence, nominally a protest against the North Providence police department in response to the events of the August 11 confrontation between IWW protester Alex Svoboda and the North Providence Police. Mark Arsenault and Lynn Arditi describe the rally in today's Projo. While there, I was able to offer IWW organizer Mark Bray an opportunity to respond to my description of the IWW as an organization whose ultimate goal is to criminalize private income…

Anchor Rising: I wrote a blog post last week, after reading the preamble of the IWW Constitution, characterizing the primary goal of your organization as the criminalization of all private income in re-organizing how work is done in the world. Is that accurate or not?

Mark Bray: Our goal is to have democracy in the workplace, so that people that work in a specific place, as a group, can decide how the product of their labor is distributed. We are not saying that everyone ought to be paid necessarily the exact same amount of money or anything like that, but rather as we have democracy in society and municipalities, we ought to have it in our workplaces too. That’s the long term message of the workers' union.

AR: Would you call yourself a socialist?

MB: I wouldn’t call myself a socialist, no. If you read up on the history of the union, it was founded by some people that were socialists, such as Eugene Debs. There are overlapping features with the IWW and other political organizations, but it is not a political party and does not follow a specific "ism". It has similarities with other political ideologies, philosophies, and groups. There are socialists who also want democracy in the workplace, but there are ways in which we differ.

For example, Eugene Debs and many other socialists broke away from the union in the early 1910s because they disagreed on issues. In the 1920s, a lot of union members broke away to form the Communist Party. You can see that communism and socialism, as political ideologies, headed in different directions. It would be incorrect to characterize the IWW as communist or socialist.

As the primary organizer of the rally, Mr. Bray had to move on before I could ask the follow-up that my second question was leading towards. I'll throw it out here for discussion, for anyone who’d like to take it on.

Whether you want to call it socialism, communism, Marxism, Trotskyism, or something else, collectivization movements throughout history have failed to produce the combination of freedom and prosperity that capitalism has. I don’t doubt the idealism that’s driving the younger members of the IWW, but that kind of idealism was present also in earlier collectivization movements and did not prevent them from taking disastrous turns. So why do the members of the IWW, or anyone else at this point in history, think that their particular system of collectivization will succeed, when all of the others, across many times, places and cultures, have failed?



Does the IWW Want to Criminalize the Receipt of Private Income? An IWW Leader Responds

Carroll Andrew Morse

I paid a visit to yesterday’s Industrial Workers of the World rally in North Providence, nominally a protest against the North Providence police department in response to the events of the August 11 confrontation between IWW protester Alex Svoboda and the North Providence Police. Mark Arsenault and Lynn Arditi describe the rally in today's Projo. While there, I was able to offer IWW organizer Mark Bray an opportunity to respond to my description of the IWW as an organization whose ultimate goal is to criminalize private income…

Anchor Rising: I wrote a blog post last week, after reading the preamble of the IWW Constitution, characterizing the primary goal of your organization as the criminalization of all private income in re-organizing how work is done in the world. Is that accurate or not?

Mark Bray: Our goal is to have democracy in the workplace, so that people that work in a specific place, as a group, can decide how the product of their labor is distributed. We are not saying that everyone ought to be paid necessarily the exact same amount of money or anything like that, but rather as we have democracy in society and municipalities, we ought to have it in our workplaces too. That’s the long term message of the workers' union.

AR: Would you call yourself a socialist?

MB: I wouldn’t call myself a socialist, no. If you read up on the history of the union, it was founded by some people that were socialists, such as Eugene Debs. There are overlapping features with the IWW and other political organizations, but it is not a political party and does not follow a specific "ism". It has similarities with other political ideologies, philosophies, and groups. There are socialists who also want democracy in the workplace, but there are ways in which we differ.

For example, Eugene Debs and many other socialists broke away from the union in the early 1910s because they disagreed on issues. In the 1920s, a lot of union members broke away to form the Communist Party. You can see that communism and socialism, as political ideologies, headed in different directions. It would be incorrect to characterize the IWW as communist or socialist.

As the primary organizer of the rally, Mr. Bray had to move on before I could ask the follow-up that my second question was leading towards. I'll throw it out here for discussion, for anyone who’d like to take it on.

Whether you want to call it socialism, communism, Marxism, Trotskyism, or something else, collectivization movements throughout history have failed to produce the combination of freedom and prosperity that capitalism has. I don’t doubt the idealism that’s driving the younger members of the IWW, but that kind of idealism was present also in earlier collectivization movements and did not prevent them from taking disastrous turns. So why do the members of the IWW, or anyone else at this point in history, think that their particular system of collectivization will succeed, when all of the others, across many times, places and cultures, have failed?


August 25, 2007


Of Free Market Slaves and the Doomed Capitalist

Justin Katz

Some comments from Michael, of Rescuing Providence, touch on basic differences of assumptions and perspectives. The first was to my "Proud to Be Non-Union" post:

I never expected the folks here at Anchor Rising to be pro-union, but the depth of misunderstanding concerning organized labor and the willingness to serve as lackeys to powerful corporate thugs is unbelievable. When will people realize that most of us will never be rich! Our system, once fair and healthy now works against the individual. We are not the "investor class." Without organized labor we'll be no better off than the slaves in China. Unions are not the enemy.

Perhaps I've a tin ear for this tune, but it sounds as if Michael is expressing doubts that individuals can at the same time be autonomous and substantial. To wit, the only counter to powerful corporations is powerful union organizations (with or without their influence on powerful government). The only way to avoid servitude is to submit to collective management.

My own perspective, as one of those unaffiliated slavish lackeys, is that I have sufficient personal value to my employer to negotiate fair terms; if we cannot agree, then either I am not achieving what I ought or he is not conducting business as he ought. Whichever proves true, artificially perpetuating the relationship would maintain a state of affairs that ought to change. Worse, forcing my employer to give me more than he believes I'm worth will not make him a better businessman; it will lead him to move the burden of his bad practices elsewhere (and with the benefit of my talents).

A company may seek to exploit those workers who are not individually indispensable, but it will seek to capitalize on — and retain — the talents of those employees who make themselves valuable in their own right. But through the dictation of employment terms, a union draws a line between those who are within its fold and those who are not. Unionists present the latter group as too-wealthy executives (or greedy, nepotistic politicians), but the pain of their smaller pie is more likely to be felt by lower-tier professionals and those who are not employed at all (a group that can include former members of the union). In The Road to Serfdom, F.A. Hayek suggested that Nazism was "a sort of middle-class socialism... to a large extent a revolt of a new underprivileged class against the labor aristocracy which the industrial labor movement had created." I couldn't help but think of Rhode Island's current situation when I first read Hayek's next paragraph:

There can be little doubt that no single economic factor has contributed more to help these movements [i.e., fascism and National Socialism] than the envy of the unsuccessful professional man, the university-trained engineer or lawyer, and of the "white-collared proletariat" in general, of the engine driver or compositor and other members of the strongest trade-unions whose income was many times theirs.

Contrary to Michael's protestations, to those whose lives are adversely affected by being outside of the union's embrace, the union is the enemy. And to the extent that we accept his view of employers as the enemy, those folks are only the more without friend. The only way to ensure that nobody is harmed by outsiderdom would be to force everybody into the same group; in other words, to bring about communism. Unfortunately, if our initial premise is that the individual cannot combat the will of those who are more powerful, it makes little sense to consolidate power totally. Those wealthy thugs will find themselves in the best position to transition into powerful positions in a system that will now allow them even more liberty in controlling circumstances to their advantage.

This ties into the reason that Michael is right about communism, but that it is in all of our interests to prove him wrong about capitalism:

Communism in its purest form might actually work, however, nothing is pure and communism was doomed before it got started, thankfully taken down by human nature. Human nature, in my opinion anyway, is what will be the downfall of capitalism. Too few have too much, whether earned or inherited. The system as we know it is destined for collapse, maybe in our lifetime.

The relevant quality in human nature is the inclination to seek improvement of one's own situation. Communism restricts the majority's ability to do so significantly, while increasing the planners' ability. Capitalism, by contrast, is designed to thrive on individual autonomy, so the same quality in human nature asserts itself as restrictions placed on others, increasingly by means of restricting everybody such that those whose advantages place them beyond an initial barrier have freer rein. Regulations — and unions — ensure that the truly powerful are less likely to find themselves threatened by competition, and the remedy is to enable that competition.

I'd note that the complaint of human nature applies backwards in the logical progression to unions, and is visible in another of Michael's comments to the first-linked post:

I have no desire to defend public or private unions. I only speak of my own experience. My union leaders are not thick necked thugs. Local 799's president is a front-line highly decorated and respected firefighter and an attorney, our vice-president is a fellow Bishop Hendricken grad, class of '80 and a class act, our secretary treasurer is one of my best friends, a great firefighter and better rescue lieutenant and a CPA. The image of unions as a bunch of thugs who care nothing about anything but themselves is plain wrong.

No doubt all of Michael's friends and fellow union members are good guys; I've no desire to treat them as Michael treated corporate executives when he lumped them together and called them "thugs." But note their close-knit nature, as Michael frames it. Note also the other attributes by which he describes them: an attorney, a private-school graduate, and an accountant. These are people who may indeed turn out to be rich, and who are certainly not a misnegotiation or two from slavery. I humbly suggest that there's a disconnect between the union rhetoric and its apparent reality.

Be all of this as it may, I'm among those who believe that firefighters and rescue workers ought to be well compensated for their work, which means that I agree with most of what Michael writes in a final comment:

I could go into detail about the lives I have saved (there are many) and property I have protected but I would rather not. The reason I do what I do and risk my health and my family's welfare is because my union negotiates benefits that our elected officials would take away in a heartbeat to fund somebody's friend's project, create a job for somebody's cousin or simply line their pockets. As taxpayers we should want the best equipped, staffed and trained personnel available. Instead, the sentiment in business, more for less, has pervaded our public safety agencies. Don't think for a second that thousands would line up for my job if I quit tomorrow and there was no reward. My job is hard, as I'm sure yours is. I'm not wealthy but I make a good living and have my union to thank. That my living is funded by taxpayer dollars does not make me less worthy. I have no intention of quitting unless things get so bad I can no longer afford to be a firefighter. If that happens, I'll get by, I always have. I made a lot more money before I became a firefighter.

As taxpayers, we should want the best equipped, staffed, and trained personnel available, which is why I'm not sure that unions are necessary to give them a boost. Under a healthy system, were elected officials to abuse their power at the expense of the security and safety of their constituents, somebody or, in a worst-case scenario, some tragedy would expose their behavior, leaving them open to electoral or even criminal repercussions. Paying critical personnel well below their worth would not be long sustainable.

As we see in Rhode Island, however, the clout of special interests, including unions, keeps our system from being a healthy one. The evidence that leads Michael to speak of the "heartbeat" speed of corruption is, in part, made so — and made to be accepted by way too many Rhode Islanders — by the interplay of powerful forces in the state. If everybody forms activist groups in their own interests, there remains only a battle between groups, all with some degree of sympathy for the corrupt behavior of the others. This is not to say that Michael or any of his coworkers condone or engage in corrupt behavior, but although there is a spectrum along which to balance principle and the insider-mentality, human nature will tend to present a group's benefit to one's self as deserved, but the benefits to others from their competing groups as suspect.


August 22, 2007


If You Want No More Games, Take Away the Ball

Justin Katz

New Hampshire employs more public employees per citizen than Rhode Island does — so explained the Rhode Island NEA's Bob Walsh in a comment to this post:

Mike - Well, I am not a Marxist (unless Groucho counts) but I assume you know by now that the "New Hampshire" miracle is really the New Hampshire mirage. NH, in fact, has 24,700 state employees in total (source: Governing Magazine, which lists RI at 17,500). More importantly, NH has 188 state government employees per 10,000 population (31st nationally) versus RI at 164 per 10,000 population (40th nationally).

Although I noticed that Mr. Walsh didn't address the fact that led commenter Mike to introduce New Hampshire into the discussion in the first place — that the larger state runs on significantly less public money — I'm always intrigued by arguments that Rhode Island isn't floating somewhere near the bottom of the pool and poked around for Bob's source. And sure enough, not only does New Hampshire have more state and local employees per 10,000 population (188 and 475, respectively) than Rhode Island (164 and 353), but Connecticut (196 and 463) and Massachusetts (187 and 425) do, as well. Of course, it bears mentioning that only Connecticut pays its public workers more and that Rhode Island's median household is significantly poorer:

As you can see, Rhode Island is the only one of the four states with an average public employee salary that is higher than the median household income. (The two data points aren't comparable to each other for a variety of reasons, though. For one thing, the salary numbers are averages, which is arguably more appropriate when discerning how much the average worker costs the state, while the income numbers are medians, which gives a better impression of the general wealth of the state's citizens by diminishing the effect of outliers. This consideration is probably far outweighed, however, by the fact that the income is for households, while the salaries are for individuals and often represent only a portion of a "public employee household.")

The information in the above figure ties in curiously with something that Walsh goes on to say:

We also have a higher cost of living, and our public sector compensation is generally in line with MA and below CT (which is our market).

The interesting — all too typical, from a public union guy — point is that Rhode Island, despite being poorer, has both a higher cost of living and union compensation packages to match the wealthier states. No wonder we feel so strained!

Now add pensions into the analysis. When it comes to public employees' contributions to their own pension systems (according to Bob's source), Rhode Island ties Massachusetts for the lowest percentage (13.4%, versus CT's 16.2% and NH's 22.3%). Not surprisingly, when it comes to the highest contributions from the public, Rhode Island (23.2%) is only outdone by Connecticut (31.5%) — a state with notably low returns on pension-related investments.

Here enters a counterintuitive finding that illustrates just how sunken Rhode Island is:

Somehow, Rhode Island manages to charge public employees a lower percentage of their pension plans, while still charging them more actual dollars than all states but Massachusetts — at the same time that it's charging its citizens a comparably high dollar amount. One possible reason for this result is that Rhode Island's pension offerings are just too generous. Walsh prefers a different spin:

This is an extremely important point regarding pensions - teachers already contribute 9.5% of salary towards their own pensions, and while the combined management contribution (state and local) is listed as over 22% of salary in the coming year, the vast majority of that contribution is related to the existing unfunded liability, and the sustaining contribution needed to actually support the pension for the individual teacher is less than 4%. So, if you did manage to stop the pension system on a going forward basis, the vast majority of the contributions would still need to be made in addition to a match for a 401-k type system. We need to stay on the path toward full funding of the system, without any more game playing, and when full funding is realized, the state and local contribution needed will be under 4% combined.

Check with the pension board, do your own math, consult with the experts, etc. - these are the actual mathematical facts - keeping the pension systme intact is cheaper, and it provides a better benefit in almost all respects.

(Explained another way - every time the pension system was underfunded in one way or another - early retirements, banking crisis, marked to market, less than market rate return, etc. - it was as if the state borrowed the money at 8.25% (the average expected annual yield on the fund.)

I suspect that I'm not alone in believing it unwise to structure our state's financial recovery around an assumption that our leaders will stop their "game playing." There's always something or other that needs to be financed; there's always some crisis causing fiscal insufficiency. I further suspect that I'm not alone in allocating much of the blame for previous "game playing" to the unions themselves, and their muscle in electing the very candidates who've created this situation.

Note how Walsh doesn't miss a step in spinning on behalf of the poverty industry, as well as his own: "We have more poverty in Rhode Island, and deal with it charitably, which matches the values of the majority of folks in our state" Clearly, he's not willing to see Rhode Island's welfare system as a competitor for overdrawn state and local funds. Also clearly, the NEA hasn't found a way to elect candidates who will forgo all other instances of waste and corruption for the sake of those two.

Not only would a 401K system likely save us money amid the corruption that we must expect, but it would get that money out of the hands of the legislators whom the unions work so hard to put into office.



If You Want No More Games, Take Away the Ball

Justin Katz

New Hampshire employs more public employees per citizen than Rhode Island does — so explained the Rhode Island NEA's Bob Walsh in a comment to this post:

Mike - Well, I am not a Marxist (unless Groucho counts) but I assume you know by now that the "New Hampshire" miracle is really the New Hampshire mirage. NH, in fact, has 24,700 state employees in total (source: Governing Magazine, which lists RI at 17,500). More importantly, NH has 188 state government employees per 10,000 population (31st nationally) versus RI at 164 per 10,000 population (40th nationally).

Although I noticed that Mr. Walsh didn't address the fact that led commenter Mike to introduce New Hampshire into the discussion in the first place — that the larger state runs on significantly less public money — I'm always intrigued by arguments that Rhode Island isn't floating somewhere near the bottom of the pool and poked around for Bob's source. And sure enough, not only does New Hampshire have more state and local employees per 10,000 population (188 and 475, respectively) than Rhode Island (164 and 353), but Connecticut (196 and 463) and Massachusetts (187 and 425) do, as well. Of course, it bears mentioning that only Connecticut pays its public workers more and that Rhode Island's median household is significantly poorer:

As you can see, Rhode Island is the only one of the four states with an average public employee salary that is higher than the median household income. (The two data points aren't comparable to each other for a variety of reasons, though. For one thing, the salary numbers are averages, which is arguably more appropriate when discerning how much the average worker costs the state, while the income numbers are medians, which gives a better impression of the general wealth of the state's citizens by diminishing the effect of outliers. This consideration is probably far outweighed, however, by the fact that the income is for households, while the salaries are for individuals and often represent only a portion of a "public employee household.")

The information in the above figure ties in curiously with something that Walsh goes on to say:

We also have a higher cost of living, and our public sector compensation is generally in line with MA and below CT (which is our market).

The interesting — all too typical, from a public union guy — point is that Rhode Island, despite being poorer, has both a higher cost of living and union compensation packages to match the wealthier states. No wonder we feel so strained!

Now add pensions into the analysis. When it comes to public employees' contributions to their own pension systems (according to Bob's source), Rhode Island ties Massachusetts for the lowest percentage (13.4%, versus CT's 16.2% and NH's 22.3%). Not surprisingly, when it comes to the highest contributions from the public, Rhode Island (23.2%) is only outdone by Connecticut (31.5%) — a state with notably low returns on pension-related investments.

Here enters a counterintuitive finding that illustrates just how sunken Rhode Island is:

Somehow, Rhode Island manages to charge public employees a lower percentage of their pension plans, while still charging them more actual dollars than all states but Massachusetts — at the same time that it's charging its citizens a comparably high dollar amount. One possible reason for this result is that Rhode Island's pension offerings are just too generous. Walsh prefers a different spin:

This is an extremely important point regarding pensions - teachers already contribute 9.5% of salary towards their own pensions, and while the combined management contribution (state and local) is listed as over 22% of salary in the coming year, the vast majority of that contribution is related to the existing unfunded liability, and the sustaining contribution needed to actually support the pension for the individual teacher is less than 4%. So, if you did manage to stop the pension system on a going forward basis, the vast majority of the contributions would still need to be made in addition to a match for a 401-k type system. We need to stay on the path toward full funding of the system, without any more game playing, and when full funding is realized, the state and local contribution needed will be under 4% combined.

Check with the pension board, do your own math, consult with the experts, etc. - these are the actual mathematical facts - keeping the pension systme intact is cheaper, and it provides a better benefit in almost all respects.

(Explained another way - every time the pension system was underfunded in one way or another - early retirements, banking crisis, marked to market, less than market rate return, etc. - it was as if the state borrowed the money at 8.25% (the average expected annual yield on the fund.)

I suspect that I'm not alone in believing it unwise to structure our state's financial recovery around an assumption that our leaders will stop their "game playing." There's always something or other that needs to be financed; there's always some crisis causing fiscal insufficiency. I further suspect that I'm not alone in allocating much of the blame for previous "game playing" to the unions themselves, and their muscle in electing the very candidates who've created this situation.

Note how Walsh doesn't miss a step in spinning on behalf of the poverty industry, as well as his own: "We have more poverty in Rhode Island, and deal with it charitably, which matches the values of the majority of folks in our state" Clearly, he's not willing to see Rhode Island's welfare system as a competitor for overdrawn state and local funds. Also clearly, the NEA hasn't found a way to elect candidates who will forgo all other instances of waste and corruption for the sake of those two.

Not only would a 401K system likely save us money amid the corruption that we must expect, but it would get that money out of the hands of the legislators whom the unions work so hard to put into office.


August 21, 2007


Lack of Strikes Would Be No Surprise

Justin Katz

According to 7 to 7, none of the teachers' unions in the eight districts that are currently without (or soon to be without) contracts are planning to strike:

With Rhode Island schools scheduled to start opening next week, teacher unions in eight districts have not signed new contracts -- including Providence, the state’s largest district, with 26,000 students and 2,100 teachers.

Contracts in Burrillville, East Greenwich, Exeter-West Greenwich, New Shoreham, Providence and Tiverton are due to expire Aug. 31. Teacher contracts in Jamestown and the Ponaganset regional district shared by Foster and Glocester expired June 30. ...

So far, no district is threatening to strike. Representatives of the state’s two teacher unions, the National Education Association of Rhode Island and Rhode Island Federation of Teachers, say they think teachers will report to work as usual, even if a new contract is not in place by the time school starts, although they emphasized that decision is up to individual districts.

Putting aside the fact that teacher strikes are illegal, with the state flat-funding schools and the public mood increasingly hostile to the status quo, it would be unwise to pick highly visible fights, just now. Of course, I can't speak to the possibility that school committees aren't pressing this negotiating advantage hard enough.


August 20, 2007


Proud to Be Non-Union

Justin Katz

Commenting to my initial mention of my latest Providence Journal op-ed, Michael writes:

I wonder why you find satisfaction in the "non-union" designation. I've worked for years in the construction trades and for the most part found union carpenters and their non-union counterparts have equal skills and ethics, only the union guys are making a fair and decent living and the non-union guys are struggling to make ends meet. Also, I've never seen an incompetent union carpenter, some non union contractors hire people with little or no skill.

The first thing to note is that I (in addition to my clients, I might add) am a manifest beneficiary of non-union contractors' willingness to "hire people with little or no skill." I'll add to that their willingness to throw employees into situations for which they are not clearly prepared. I've been doing this work for about two and a half years, before which time I scarcely knew how to denail a 2x4, and market demands threw opportunities at my feet that never would have come my way in a controlled system. Before my first year of experience was complete, I was running a job (under my boss's close watch, of course), and I had gained sufficient experience to begin finishing basements on the weekends. I suppose that some shifts in union tectonics might have yielded the same results, but I suspect that I'd still be "doing my time" and would certainly be further from the realistic possibility of going out on my own.

This ties into an overstatement on Michael's part, which in turn recalls the central argument of my column: some "non-union guys" are doing just fine — many of them because they have become contractors themselves. They earn a healthy living by fostering a healthy market, by which I mean one with competition.

Although space constraints didn't enable me to expound upon the "establish players" to whom my piece makes reference, union shops are clearly among them (perhaps chief among them). As Milton and Rose Friedman explained in Free to Choose, "A successful union reduces the number of jobs available of the kind it controls." The relevant method of accomplishing this reduction is through licensure and other requirements for working. Increasing the regulations that weigh down an industry will increase the value of an organization that addresses those impositions, and the cost of overcoming the obstacles (and then some) will be passed on to the consumer.

Why am I satisfied to be non-union? First, because I can advance as quickly as my talents allow, even razing my own career path. And second, because I am not part of a system that is ultimately unhealthy for society and exploitative of consumers and the workforce both.


August 19, 2007


The Business of the Union, the Business of the State

Justin Katz

Whenever I read about arrangements such as Paul Edward Parker describes at the end of his Projo piece about state worker overtime, I wonder how polluted the public budget is with similar tricks and instances of advantage-taking:

One area that [Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals Director Ellen R. Nelson] hopes to address is a contract provision for union business. Union officials who also work for the state can be scheduled for weeks off, with pay, to handle union-related duties, such as meeting with other workers. But those union officials can also put in for extra shifts that week and be paid overtime, at the same time the state may be paying someone else overtime to cover the union official’s regular shift.

Nelson did not offer a solution, saying she wants to hear suggestions from the unions.

One suggestion that I would make is to declare that union business is not public business, and union duties ought to be financed via union dues. (At the very least, there would be a reduction in the money that unions would have on-hand to throw into the political ring.)

I also noticed, in the piece, an echo of a point that I've made before:

One reason state administrators find overtime more attractive than hiring additional workers is the benefits package that state workers receive.

“We have absolutely one of the richest benefit plans around,” [Department of Administration Director Beverly E.] Najarian said.

[Rhode Island Council 94 Executive Director Dennis R.] Grilli countered, “I think we’re getting a fair wage and benefit package. I don’t think it’s excessive.”

Note the strategic misdirection from the union guy: Grilli doesn't address the comparisons, merely asserts his opinion. Suffice to say that his view of fairness isn't surprising.

Also not surprising is another one of the aforementioned tricks:

Najarian described how the employees’ shares for health insurance are calculated. For most Rhode Island state workers, it is based on a percentage of the worker’s pay. In other states, including Massachusetts, workers pay a percentage of the insurance premium.

That makes a difference because, as health-care premiums escalate, the State of Rhode Island picks up a larger share of the cost.

Najarian also said that Rhode Island state workers pay less than their counterparts in Massachusetts — or in private industry.

She said the premium for a family health-care package is $16,148. Most Rhode Island state workers contribute 2.5 percent of their pay. With an average state worker having a salary of $46,600, the employee’s share would be about $1,165.

But a survey Najarian cited showed Massachusetts workers contributing 25 percent of the premium. The same formula applied in Rhode Island would result in employees paying $4,037 each.

When multiplied by roughly 15,000 full-time workers, the difference between the two formulas would be $43 million.


August 15, 2007


Does the IWW Want to Criminalize the Receipt of Private Income?

Carroll Andrew Morse

The “Industrial Workers of the World” have been drawing some media attention due to their North Providence protest where one protester, Alex Svoboda, was hospitalized after a confrontation with police. In a Richard C. Dujardin article in today’s Projo on the latest developments, a local IWW leader briefly describes the history and the mission of the organization…

[Mark Bray], a candidate for two master’s degrees at Providence College in areas of European and American history, said the IWW was formed close to a century ago to help protect the rights of workers, though its Providence chapter experienced a revival during the last year.
However, Mr. Bray seems to have soft-pedaled his organization’s stated purpose. The IWW Constitution describes much more ambitious goals than “protecting the rights of workers". Here is a section of the preamble…
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
Seems like Mr. Bray missed a chance to get the watchwords printed by the mainstream media. I wonder why he decided to go with the milder description. Anyway, the IWW Constitution continues…
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
So here’s the question: Given the goals described in their Constitution, isn’t it fair to say that a primary goal of the IWW is the criminalization of private income?



Does the IWW Want to Criminalize the Receipt of Private Income?

Carroll Andrew Morse

The “Industrial Workers of the World” have been drawing some media attention due to their North Providence protest where one protester, Alex Svoboda, was hospitalized after a confrontation with police. In a Richard C. Dujardin article in today’s Projo on the latest developments, a local IWW leader briefly describes the history and the mission of the organization…

[Mark Bray], a candidate for two master’s degrees at Providence College in areas of European and American history, said the IWW was formed close to a century ago to help protect the rights of workers, though its Providence chapter experienced a revival during the last year.
However, Mr. Bray seems to have soft-pedaled his organization’s stated purpose. The IWW Constitution describes much more ambitious goals than “protecting the rights of workers". Here is a section of the preamble…
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
Seems like Mr. Bray missed a chance to get the watchwords printed by the mainstream media. I wonder why he decided to go with the milder description. Anyway, the IWW Constitution continues…
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
So here’s the question: Given the goals described in their Constitution, isn’t it fair to say that a primary goal of the IWW is the criminalization of private income?


July 31, 2007


Things That Make You Go "Oh C'mon!"

Justin Katz

It's amazing enough that Cranston firefighters can retire after twenty years at any age, but this is stunning:

Once retired, retirees continue to receive extra pay each year for longevity bonuses and extra pay for 15 holidays!

So, they get longevity bonuses for a job that they no longer do, as well as holiday pay for days they have off anyway. Jim Davey has more details on Cranston firefighters' new contract.


April 18, 2007


Giving and Taking Unions

Justin Katz

After slipping into another certainly fruitless discussion with a certain of our regular commenters, it occurred to me that one of humanity's detrimental tendencies, with particular implications for modern society, is to think of societal mechanisms with too narrow of a focus, usually adjusted to the breadth at which our preferences appear clearest.

The case in point: I would argue that the appropriate concept of workers' unions is as, themselves, a reaction to the market (using "market" in its broad, theoretical sense, of course). Workers needed a mechanism through which to assert their rights and needs, and in many respects, the unionization method worked out well. However, if we begin to see unions as the source of, rather than the means for, improvements, we create another institution that must constantly be justifying its existence. We also maintain a centralized power even in the absence of a centralized goal toward which to wield it, thereby giving those at its head unhealthy room to lead toward their own ends.

The question is not what good unions may or may not have done in the past. It isn't even what they boast of wrenching from employers (often taxpayers) now. The question that we must consider is whether unions currently help us to strike the appropriate balances between employers and workers and between freedom and regulation. Keeping them in their conceptually appropriate place, if we diminish the influence of unions — or even disband them altogether — now and need their services again someday, we can always reestablish them, no doubt in a more effective form for having scuttled entrenched interests.


March 6, 2007


In Allentown, Not So Crazy About Card Checks

Marc Comtois
Well we're waiting here in Allentown
For the Pennsylvania we never found
For the promises our teachers gave
If we worked hard
If we behaved

So the graduations hang on the wall
But they never really helped us at all
No they never taught us what was real
Iron and coal
Chromium Steel

And we're waiting here in Allentown
But they've taken all the coal from the ground
And the union people crawled away.

So goes a portion of Billy Joel's '80s hit "Allentown", a working man's song about how life was changing in a union town. With the news that the House of Representatives has passed the "Employee Free Choice Act", which really seeks to strip away the right of workers to vote up or down on unionization via secret ballot and requires a so-called "card check," Joel's song came to mind. For the heck of it, I thought that, instead of me rehashing (and here and here) why this was so wrong, it might be worth finding out what the local newspaper of a union town--like Allentown--had to say. The Morning Call of Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley is the Allentown hometown newspaper. After editorializing that "[i]t was a cynical and misleading vote, one that was more about politics than it was about helping workers," the paper explains:
Union leaders say employer intimidation contributes to this decline. They cite statistics that workers who try to organize fellow employees stand a one-in-five chance of losing their jobs. They complain about employers hiring consultants who specialize in pressuring workers into not supporting unions. It happens.

However, the solution this legislation proposes would replace one form of coercion with another. In doing so, it does away with one of democracy's most hallowed tools to preserve freedom of choice — the secret ballot. In its place, it would allow unions to organize workplace simply by getting a majority of employees to sign authorization cards — the so-called card check. In place of a boss leaning on a worker not to vote for the union, it puts face-to-face peer pressure from a labor organizer to unionize. Pressure can work both ways, and without the protection of privacy, workers could subject themselves to harassment, or worse, from just another source. It happens.

This isn't the way to make the workplace fair. The National Labor Relations Act already makes it illegal for employers to bully their workers into not supporting unions. There are legitimate questions about whether the act's enforcement provisions are adequate to protect workers' rights. In fact, the Employee Free Choice Act would give the National Labor Relations Board more power to penalize employers when they fire workers for trying to organize — something that gets to the heart of labor's concern. Paired with a secret ballot, it would allow workers to vote according to who they think made the better case — labor or management.

The union bosses and their Democratic friends have sought to use legitimate concerns about the shortcomings of the NLRB as an opportunity to strengthen their control over the rank and file--both current and prospective. As the Call's editorial staff wrote, this was indeed "cynical and misleading." And entirely unsurprising.


March 5, 2007


Imagine if the CVS CEO Served in the Legislature...

Marc Comtois

Douglas Gablinske, a Bristol Democrat, wrote a spot-on piece this weekend:

As a private person, Rhode Island resident, taxpayer and small-business owner, I have wondered about something for years: How can state legislators who are full-time business agents of unions write, promote, and move legislation through the General Assembly, yet not be in violation of the ethics law?

Now, as a recently elected legislator myself, I wish to shine a bright light on this issue and seek a logical answer to this obvious question. It is incredible to me that this flagrant conflict of interest has been allowed to go on for as long as it has, right under our noses.

These union business-agent legislators may do a good job of representing their constituents. However, their livelihood is derived from representing their membership. Faced with a choice of voting for what is in the best interest of their constituents or in the best interest of union members and their legislative agents’ paychecks, these union representatives find their integrity challenged.

Wouldn’t it stand to reason that their compensation is increased to the degree that they are successful in promoting the unions’ interests? After all, that’s their job! So, while the union members benefit, as do their business agents also working as legislators, taxpayers take it on the chin.

Gablinske further explains that such behavior is considered unethical when applied to a private (ie; non-union) individual who accepts money from business (John Celona), and asks:
If it is wrong for him [Celona] to do so, as is obvious to everyone, why isn’t it wrong for the union business agents, who are paid hefty salaries to basically promote their memberships’ interests through legislation? The conflict is as obvious as the nose on your face.
He also pleads with his fellow Rhode Islanders to realize that this practice is neither normal nor acceptable in other states and that we shouldn't tolerate it either. Finally, he explained that "my obligation is to the taxpayer first." Unfortunately, the same can't be assumed about the union business agents. Today, the ProJo echoes his call for a change and provides some enlightening numbers:
Several legislators get big salaries from public-employee unions who have a huge and direct financial interest in the actions they undertake in the State House — unlike mere members of unions, who are not as directly dependent on unions for money. Sen. John Tassoni (D.-Smithfield) is the $88,549-a-year business agent of Rhode Island Council 94, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Senate Majority Whip Dominick Ruggerio (D.-North Providence) receives $176,070 in “salary/benefits” per year from the New England Laborers’ Labor-Management Corporation Trust. Branches of the Laborers’ union also employ Senators Paul Moura (D.-East Providence) and Frank Ciccone (D.-Providence). (Those branches declined to report their hired legislators’ salaries.)

It is extraordinary that the Ethics Commission has ignored this glaring conflict for so long. “Sometimes unnatural things become natural because they go on for so long,” Mr. Gablinske noted. “The conflict is as obvious as the nose on your face.”

Indeed. In some other posts I've made the point that "Big Labor" and "Big Business" are more similar than not, especially "at the top." Additionally, the total membership of Council 94--the largest public employee union in the state--easily rivals the total amount of employees working for many of Rhode Island's largest businesses. How comfortable would voters be if the the CEO, CFO and a couple Vice Presidents of CVS were elected to the General Assembly? Not very. And what if they happened to sit on various committees in which their votes (and presence--and cash?) could influence bills that could impact their business? Would that pass the smell test? Didn't think so. The negatives sure seem obvious, huh? So isn't it time for Rhode Islander's to insist that the same ethics rules apply to the unions--especially tax dollar supported, public employee unions--as they do to "regular" big business?


March 1, 2007


Union Intimidation Tactics: An Extreme Example

Marc Comtois

So far, I've posted on how the Democrats in the House have attempted to remove the ability of workers to vote via a secret ballot if they want to unionize and how most workers dislike union card checks, which is the "approved alternative" of the House Democrats and their Labor Boss buddies. One area of contention seems to be over just who, exactly, intimidates workers more: unions or companies. As my last post indicated, it seems that most of the company-sponsored intimidation is anecdotal. Additionally, according to the poll I cited, "[o]ver 92 percent of union objections to employer misconduct during organizing elections in 2005 were either withdrawn or, upon investigation by the NLRB, dismissed."

Now, an Anchor Rising reader has emailed me some documents that provide an example of the types of intimidation tactics in which one particular union engaged during an organizing campaign. According to this source:

[T]he attached is quite “interesting” regarding the lengths to which union organizers will go.

It is an employee bulletin board notice that the National Labor Relations Board ordered posted at the trucking company Overnite Transportation facilities. The Teamsters agreed to this as part of a stipulated agreement (also attached) settling charges against the Teamsters, which at the time were attempting to organize Overnite.

By no means is this Teamster activity representative of union pressure during organizing drives, but “less extreme” union pressure certainly is: from fraud (telling employees that signing the card is only so that the union can mail information to the employee’s house) to nagging (many employees sign the cards simply to get the pro-union employees to stop bothering them) to subtle intimidation (groups showing up at employee’s houses seeking signed cards) to more shall we say “unsubtle” intimidation.

Here is a PDF detailing the settlement and here is a PDF containing the actual posting. Here's a sample of some of that "unsubtle" intimidation, which was subsequently prohibited in the postings:

Continue reading "Union Intimidation Tactics: An Extreme Example"

April 9, 2006


The Radically Different Visions of Tax-Eaters Versus Taxpayers

Donald B. Hawthorne

In an earlier posting, I introduced a book entitled The New New Left: How American Politics Works Today by Steven Malanga and a review of the book in the Claremont Review of Books. The core theme of the book was described by one reviewer as "American politics is not about [political] parties, it is about special interest group against special interest group."

Expanding on that comment, here are some excerpts from the Introduction: Tax Eaters versus Taxpayers, where the author writes:

...A new political dynamic has slowly been emerging over the past forty years, a face-off between those who benefit from an expanding government and those who must pay for it - the tax-eaters versus the taxpayers...coalitions of public employees, staffers at publicy funded social-services programs, and the recipients of government aid have emerged as effective new political forces...

This increasingly powerful public-sector movement results from the joining together of two originally distinct forces. First are the government-employee unions...

For years, government employees had no right to organize, on the grounds that there was no competition in the delivery of government services and that therefore public unions could hold cities and states hostage by going on strike and denying essential services to the public...that began to change in the mid-1950's...

...In 1960 the American Federation of Teachers mapped out a controversial strategy to win collective bargaining rights for teachers around the country, using...labor-friendly New York City as a test case...

...most of the warnings voiced about public-employee unions in those tumultuous years have proven accurate. Political leaders and labor experts predicted that government-employee unions would use their power over public services to win contracts with work rules far more generous and undemanding than in the private sector; and that without the restraints on salaries and benefits that the free marketplace imposes on private firms, unions would win increasingly meaty compensation packages that would be impossible to restrain or to roll back...

But what critics did not anticipate was how far public-employee unions would move beyond collective bargaining to inject themselves into the electoral and legislative processes...

Reinforcing the public-employee unions in the powerful new coalition of tax-eaters are the social-services groups created by the War on Poverty. Nominally private, they are sustained by and organized around public funding...This flood of money transformed many formerly private welfare organizations into government contractors, and their employees into quasi-public workers. It also spurred the creation of vast new networks of such organizations...

This social-services funding vastly expanded the publicly supported workforce almost overnight...

Almost from the War on Poverty's inception, these social-services employees and their clients began to show themselves as a powerful political force...

The gradual government takeover...has transformed...institutions, executives, and workers into unremitting lobbyists for ever greater public monies and expanding programs, and tireless foes of efforts to restrain costs...

The electoral activism of this New New Left coalition of tax eaters - public-employee unions, hospitals and healthcare -worker unions, and social-services agencies - has reshaped the politics of many cities. As the country's national political scene has edged rightward, thwarting their ambitions in Washington, these groups have turned their attention to urban America, where they still have the power to influence public policy...

Increasingly in cities around the country, the road to electoral success passes through the public-employee/health/social-services sector...

One reason why these politicians have succeeded electorally is that those who work in the tax-eater sector clearly have different voting priorities from private-sector workers or business owners...

....public-sector workers, who realize they are going to the polls to elect their bosses, make sure to remember to vote...

With so much of their economic future at stake in elections, the tax eaters have emerged as the new infantry of political campaigns, replacing the ward captains and district leaders of old-time political clubs...

Although it started out as a romantic but wrongheaded idea, the War on Poverty was the child of idealists who really believed that a benevolent, paternalistic government could offer solutions that America's private economy couldn't provide for the poor. But the most cherished ideals and programs of the movement have turned out to demonstrably wrong...

By the mid-1990's, Americans were eager for reform, and they got it...

In the face of such results, the new urban left has emerged as an increasingly cynical coalition, ever more focused on goals that benefit its members and their allies, even thought it retains the jargon of "social justice."...

Regardless of how transparent its aims now seem, this new coalition will remain formidable because the tax-eater sector is now so large in many cities and states that it can easily thwart reforms aimed at undermining its programs. With much of the legislative agenda merely concerned with expanding programs and enacting laws that add to its own numbers, the New New Left may be in the ascendancy for a long time to come.

A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled GM, France and Albany: What the declines of all three have in common (available for a fee) states:

At first glance, they seem to have little in common. But the riots in France over labor reform, the slow-motion suicide of General Motors, and the continuing decline of the New York economy all share one defining trait: entrenched and unchangeable union power.

These columns have always favored the right to collectively bargain...we should [not] fail to appreciate the consequences when unions become entrenched inside any organization...unions do not provide individual job or income security. On the contrary, they undermine security by contributing to broader business and economic decline.

At the national level, the French example is clear enough. While the French private sector is less unionized than America's, it must cope with mandated work rules that make it all but impossible to fire someone; so naturally companies are also reluctant to hire. The jobless rate is double America's, while youth unemployment is 23%. More significant is that the political clout of public-sector unions has blocked all but minor changes in these rules. Public-sector workers account for more than a quarter of the entire French work force (6.4 million of out 24.6 million), and their salaries and pensions made up 45% of the entire state budget as recently as 2003.

The current French protests are in response to a modest change that would allow employers to fire people under age 26 more easily. So entrenched has the politics of union entitlement become in France that even at the onset of their careers these young protesters are demanding security over opportunity. In the global economy, this means they will end up with less of both.

France remains a wealthy country, and its economic decline can be masked for a time as it lives off accumulated capital. But already the promises that its unions have extracted from the government seem unlikely to be kept. A growth rate of between 1% and 2% a year won't be enough to finance the pensions and health care of an aging nation. And facing up to those facts will require an increasingly painful political reckoning.

Here in the U.S., the same burden is slowly crippling New York...Power in the state capital of Albany is shared by Republicans and Democrats. But both parties bow before the public-sector unions, especially the teachers, and the health-care workers...

...New York's Medicaid costs are higher than those of Texas and Florida combined; a health-care insurance premium for a young family of four is roughly six times what it is across the border in Connecticut; and high-deductible health-savings accounts that can help the self-employed afford insurance can't even be offered in the state...

Another union-driven business cost is workers' compensation, and in New York the average cost per claim is second highest in the nation (after Louisiana) and 72% higher than the national average...

...upstate [New York] is a different story, with jobs and young people fleeing to better business climes. New York manufacturing employment fell by 41% between 1990 and 2005, or double the national rate.

Even Eliot Spitzer recently referred to upstate New York as "Appalachia." Alas, the Attorney General shows no sign of understanding that the heart of the problem lies in Albany...

As for GM, its management mistakes are legion and its weak product line well-known. But the root of its problem is that it long ago became a corporate version of the welfare state, with the same entrenched union interests...the size of its market dominance going back to its heyday 40 years ago allowed its managers to avoid confronting its uncompetitive wages, benefits and work rules even as they saw Toyota and Honda gaining in the rearview mirror.

In retrospect, GM management should have provoked a union showdown. Yet only a very brave CEO would have been willing to risk a potentially catastrophic strike on his watch for the sake of making the company more competitive after he retired. In any case, would the United Auto Workers really have budged? In 1998, young executive and future CEO Rick Wagoner endured a 54-day UAW wildcat strike at two plants in Flint, Michigan, after GM had tried to change some production rules. The strike shut down most GM production in North America and cost the company some $2 billion. In the end GM caved and the UAW escaped, having made virtually no concessions.

Even now at auto-parts maker Delphi--which is already in Chapter 11--the UAW is declaring it will take a strike that could destroy both Delphi and GM rather than agree to Delphi's proposed job cuts and work changes. As in France and New York, these union leaders would rather sink the company than make concessions that would reduce their own power.

This pattern has repeated itself again and again--in the steel and textile industries attacked by foreign competition, or the unionized grocery chains routed by Wal-Mart. The union answer has rarely been to work with a company to allow more job flexibility to become more competitive. The answer has typically been to seek a ruinous strike or lobby for political intervention that might stave off disaster for at best a few more years.

We recount all this because, even amid GM's decline and France's economic turmoil, most of America's liberal elites refuse to draw the right lesson. They cling to the belief that if only the Democrats can retake Congress, or the union movement can once again organize more of the American labor force, the old economy of union-backed job security and egalite will return. Or, worse, they propose seceding from global competition via protectionism. It is all a delusion. Down that road lies France--a nice place to vacation, but you wouldn't want to work there.

This is the central problem the liberal wing of the Democratic Party faces as it plots what to do if it does regain power this year, or in 2008...to govern for the long haul they need better ideas than trade barriers, a tax hike to increase the size of government, or the defense of the entitlement status quo.

They need to champion reforms to help individual workers better secure their own futures in a competitive global economy, rather than relying on the false hope of restoring the age of Walter Reuther. They need to promote portable pensions, cheaper health insurance and education choice. So far all we see is Jacques Chirac in American drag.