Category Archives: jobs

‘Twas a Famous Victory

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The UAW is touting its strike resolution with GM as a victory and a model to be used against [sic] Ford and Fiat-Chrysler. A letter writer to The Wall Street Journal has pointed out some other aspects of the union’s most famous victory.

For every GM employee at an assembly plant, there are at least 30 working at suppliers providing parts, materials, and services to those plants.
…
During the strike almost all the tier suppliers were forced to shut down or seriously curtail their operations, meaning layoffs (union and nonunion alike). Many of those employees must seek other employment….
…
the [suppliers’] employees who do go back to their jobs will simply go back to work with accrued lost wages and benefits incurred during the layoffs. Those suppliers will also have to go out, recruit and train new employees to replace those who left and don’t return, adding to their costs.

But, hey, UAW management got theirs.

A City’s Attack on Privacy

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You’re aware of the Chicago Teachers Union strike against the city, demanding a ton more money—a 15% pay raise over the next three years (against Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s meek counteroffer of 16% over five years).  Here is another part of Lightfoot’s offer to the union [emphasis added].

1-5.8 Bargaining Unit Employee Information. The BOARD shall provide the UNION on at least a monthly basis, and on a weekly basis for the months of August, September, and October, a list of all current employees in the bargaining unit, which shall include each employee’s first and last name, shift, job title, department, work location, home address, all telephone numbers (including cell phone number if available), personal and work email addresses, date of birth, seniority date, base hourly pay rate (if available), language preference (if available), identification number/payroll code/job number, salary, status as a member or non-member, UNION dues, and COPE payment.

Nor can any school district employee, whether union member or not, opt out of this information grab.

Chicago is no place to live with a city administration that has no respect for its citizens’ personal information, their privacy, a city administration that considers such bits of information to be nothing more than bargaining chips.

Warren’s Assault on Hydrocarbons

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) want so ban new leases for oil and gas drilling offshore and on Federal lands, and she wants to ban fracking altogether. This assault on our national energy underpinnings would have far-reaching negative outcomes.

  • domestic natural-gas prices would jump to somewhere between $9 and $15 per million BTUs from last Friday’s $2.32
  • oil would rise to the $80-to-$85 range and could run to $150 during market shocks from last Friday’s $53.78
  • entire oil-field service companies would become obsolete
  • pipeline owners would suffer without replenishment, as existing wells peter out

Think how such price increases for basic transportation and such job losses would hammer “the little guy” that Warren pretends to so want to protect from Evil Big Business.

And some far-reaching positive outcomes: for Canada, Russia, and OPEC.

  • Canadian shale drillers
  • big global operators for which higher energy prices would offset losses on US assets.
  • Russia: our ability to free our friends and allies from dependence on Russian oil and gas
  • Russia and OPEC: the potential for political and economic dominance by these two from their enhanced ability to commit energy blackmail (both of which have demonstrated histories of engaging in such blackmail)—sources of market shocks

Here is a core part of Warren’s foreign policy.

Costs of a Strike

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There’s a lot of discussion about the costs of the UAW’s strike against GM.  The Wall Street Journal is an example:

Economists say the cascading effect of lost wages, production, and employment will likely linger even if the strike ends….

And

…suspended work at another two dozen company-owned parts warehouses and distribution centers and led to temporary layoffs of nearly 10,000 GM factory workers not represented by the UAW….

And

Striking GM workers also are pulling back on spending, having now lost a month’s worth of company paychecks. Many are trying to get by on $275 a week, the strike pay offered by the UAW to provide some financial assistance. That figure is a fraction of their regular pay, which ranges from $630 to $1,200 for a 40-hour week.

And

120 of GM’s direct suppliers furloughed some 17,000 workers in the US during the strike….

And the damage from the UAW’s action has spread even farther, as this example illustrates:

Sam Kassab, 65, owns the Chene Trombly market where he sells food and liquor close to GM’s Detroit assembly plant. The strike is costing him between 10% to 15% of his usual business, Mr Kassab said, with most of that caused by layoffs at the supplier factories nearby.

No one, though, is talking about the cost of the strike to the union—not the workers, but the UAW itself.  Who, or what, is propping up the UAW, covering its costs, as it prosecutes it blockage of GM’s ability to function at all unless the union gets its way (with all the resulting collateral damage to suppliers, about which the UAW so plainly cares not a whit)?

And another discussion not being held: how will the UAW make whole those collaterally damaged suppliers and their workers?

Lies of a Progressive-Democrat

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) now is claiming that when she became pregnant at a teaching job early in her career, she was let go from that teaching job.

I loved it, and I would probably still be doing it today but back in the day, before unions, the principal, by the time we got to the end of the first year, I was visibly pregnant. And the principal did what principals did in those days: they wished you luck, showed you the door, and hired someone else for the job. And there went my dream.

We’ve seen that her lie has been contradicted by her own earlier words: “As I became pregnant, I realized this just wasn’t working for me.”

…my first year post-graduation I worked in a public school system with the children with disabilities. I did that for a year, and then that summer I didn’t have the education courses, so I was on an “emergency certificate,” it was called. I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, “I don’t think this is going to work out for me.” I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years….

Now we learn that her lie also is contradicted by the public record of that school district.

The Riverdale Board of Education approved a second-year teaching contract [as a substitute teacher] for a young Elizabeth Warren, documents show, contradicting the Democratic presidential candidate’s repeated claims that she was asked not to return to teaching after a single year because she was “visibly pregnant.”

The minutes of that Riverdale school district meeting can be seen here.

And this bit. A couple months after that contract offer, the Board had this:

“The resignation of Mrs. Elizabeth Warren, speech correctionist effective June 30, 1971 was accepted with regret,” the June 16, 1971, minutes say.

Those minutes can be reviewed here (scroll to near the bottom).

This is the level of integrity we can expect from this Progressive-Democrat, were she to get elected President. Indeed, given Warren’s constant flow of lies, from her claim of being part Native American, through this sequence, her lie about being the first nursing mother to take a bar exam in the state of New Jersey, I have to wonder whether she can discriminate reality from fantasy at all.

 

h/t Dana Loesch via Eliana Johnson