Category Archives: jobs

Self-Serving and Dishonest

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The Chicago Teachers Union wanted to raise dues on its Chicago membership to the tune of an additional $800 per year. They claimed they wanted the additional money for

win[ning] a majority of the first 21 person fully elected school board

and

resources to fund a statewide millionaires tax campaign

Union management doesn’t care that their own union bylaws say

…our dues are not used for political purposes—so our PAC relies on extra contributions from our members to support progressive candidates….

The CTU’s dues and its PAC are entirely separate from each other. So why raise dues in order to fund political purposes? Because CTU’s management is that dishonest and that contemptuous of union members’ intelligence.

It turns out that CTU members are not as dumb as their Betters think they are. The dues increase was voted down by roughly 3:2.

Members will need to be actively vigilant, though, these Betters have shown their colors, and they’ll be back with more attempts, or they’ll simply weasel-word their way around the members’ No and go ahead, anyway. This is, after all, Chicago.

Couldn’t Possibly Be

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It seems that more than 3 million folks once getting “Federal food aid” have stopped getting that aid. This is due, primarily, to tighter work requirement restrictions:

Under the new rules, able-bodied adults aged 18 to 64 without children under 14 must work, volunteer or participate in approved job-training programs for at least 80 hours a month. The previous age limit for work requirements was 54, and allowed exemptions for adults with children under 18.

Naturally, the Left is engaging in its manufactured angst over this.

Colleen Heflin, a professor at Syracuse University who studies food insecurity, said larger state drops like Arizona’s were “beyond anything we’ve ever seen.” Heflin said she was concerned it would result in vulnerable Americans not getting enough to eat.
“These large state drops in SNAP caseloads represent a fundamental restructuring of the food-assistance safety net,” she said. “We should expect to see a surge in food insecurity and its related negative consequences at new levels.”

Of course. The large drop couldn’t possibly be an indication of the bloat in the program and the number of ineligible folks taking the aid “beyond anything we’ve ever seen.”

And there’s Bruce Meyer, a University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy Professor, who accidentally let that cat out of the Leftists’ bag:

Most of the people who are getting food stamps are needy. When you’re cutting that many people, you’re probably cutting into some people who really do need the benefits.

It certainly should be “most,” and it should be far more than just that. Only cutting “some” who really need the benefits is a strong indicator of the amount of bloat that’s been present.

A Thought on Farmworkers and Welfare

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Pity the poor American farmworkers. That’s what Jason Yarashes, Legal Aid Justice Center‘s Director of its Worker Justice Program, wants us to do. He was responding to an earlier Letter in which that letter-writer was lamenting the troubles that farmers are having as a side effect of our government regaining control of our borders and the ensuing lack of illegal aliens coming in to do those farmers’ farm work.

Yarashes is correct that such labor is backbreaking, and most of it goes unaccompanied by Social Security benefits or health insurance, despite paying taxes. Never mind that the illegal laborers are happy to get the work and most of them succeed in sending some of their pay back to their families in their home countries.

There’s an obvious solution to this conundrum, although it’s one that Leftists like Yarashes will decry to the heavens.

The US has a bloated collection of welfare programs, each of which is itself bloated. Most of those on these programs are able-bodied, healthy, and unemployed, even with the light work requirements attached to these programs.

Put these folks to work on the farms. Let them pick the lettuce, detassel the corn, harvest the apples and oranges, and on and on as a criterion for collecting welfare payments.

Let the farmers pay these modern day CCC workers the wages they would have paid their illegal alien workers—not Yarashes’ precious minimum wage rate—and collect their welfare payments on top of that, which the illegal aliens do not get. The kicker: the farm work is heavily seasonal, but these farm CCC-ers would be eligible for their welfare collections year-round. And: boost the farm workers’ welfare payments by some amount—say 10% as an opening move—to reward them for their actual, and harder, work than skating by on volunteering, entering “work training” programs, or scattering around resumes like so many advertising fliers.

One onus on the farmers: they would have to rate these farm CCC-ers on the quality of their work, with their eligibility for continuation in the next year’s farm work contingent on getting satisfactory ratings this year.

Failing Public Schools

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And failing teachers union schools, but I repeat myself. These are the favorites of the Progressive-Democratic Party, and that favoring is independent of teacher performance. The Los Angeles Unified School District is the latest example.

Only 18% of Los Angeles eighth-graders scored proficient in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, compared to 27% nationwide.

That’s OK, though. Here’s those teachers’ and their union’s participation ribbon:

United Teachers Los Angeles increases salary scales by 11.65% over two years—double the rate of inflation—plus four weeks of paid parental leave….

And

The agreement comes after the district warned in February that a looming $877 million deficit could require thousands of layoffs.

Guess, though, who will pay for this. The parents on the lower end of the area’s economic ladder. These are the ones who can’t afford to move away from these failures and move to live and work in jurisdictions with better schools. But the ones who will pay the biggest priced are those parents’ children. These are being consigned to a lifetime of ignorance, inability to perform the most basic functions of managing their own lives, and so to a lifetime of continued poverty and dependence.

How Onerous

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Florida, in addition to requiring in-state unions to hold periodic recertification elections, is about to enact a bill that would require at least 50% of the members of government unions to show up in person to vote, with a majority of those voting “aye” to achieve recertification. I can hear the union squalls here in Texas.

South Florida [Progressive-]Democratic Senator Shevrin Jones said the bill would be “unions’ nail in the coffin.” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the bill is “designed to decimate our Florida locals and their contracts” because it “effectively forces” elections where “you have to turn out 50% of your entire bargaining unit or you lose your contract.”

50%! The horror. If it’s really that difficult to find that much union support—a quarter of the membership plus one—among its members, there’s a hint there regarding the utility of unions in the minds of their members.

Union managers should take this and run. The bills could have required a majority of union members to vote “aye” in a recertification election, rather than just that puny minority to get recertification.