Boeing Production Problems and Unions

Yes, the two are related. This is from a Wall Street Journal article on Boeing’s production sloppiness (my term) in its airline assembly operations. “Traveled work” is work done on the production line at a later station on the line than it should have been done, and generally by the personnel at that later step rather than by those who should have done it moving to the next station to complete it. For instance,

Impact of Biden’s Border and Immigration Policies on Employment

Another outcome of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s disdain for our national borders and for actually vetting who comes into our nation is this. Notice, too, that the graph isn’t some tenuously done aggregation of data from questionable sources; it’s a FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data, compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) graph.

In just February, 1.2 million immigrants (legal and illegal) gained a job. Meanwhile, 500k native-born Americans LOST their job.
Since Covid, native-born workers have actually LOST 2 million jobs. All of the net job gains are immigrants.

 

This Is Why Unions Need to be Busted

Iowa State Senator Adrian Dickey (R, Packwood) has introduced SF 2374, which is a bill that would

require each public employer to “submit to the [Public Employee Relations Board, or PERB] a list of employees in the bargaining unit” within 10 days of a union recertification election.

Never mind that Iowa’s taxpaying citizens have every right to know what their tax dollars are being used for and who’s being paid with them. Never mind, either, that the bill requires public employers, not unions, to submit lists of eligible employees. Never mind, either either, that unions insist on precisely this information when it’s useful for them; unions just call it card checking.

India vs PRC

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece comparing the People’s Republic of China’s economic future with India’s. In the second paragraph (the semi-lede?), there’s this:

The country’s population surpassed China’s last year. More than half of Indians are under 25.

A couple of graphs from the CIA World Factbook put the two nation’s population structures in sharp relief, and at this stage of the two nations’ economic development, those structures are their future.

This is the structure of India’s population (scroll down a skosh):

This is the structure of the PRC’s population (again, scroll a tad):

Here are the Jobs to Cut

A bunch of Washington Post journalists and staffers struck the print news outlet Thursday, upset over planned buyouts of 240 job holders, and layoffs if 240 don’t agree to buyouts.

WaPo reporter Marissa Lang:

We did not come to this decision to do this walkout lightly….

No, of course not….

The union, represented by the NewsGuild, said in an unsigned statement posted on X by New York Times(!) media reporter Ben Mullin,

Despite a year and a half of efforts, Post management has refused to bargain in good faith for a fair contract that keeps up with inflation and our competition[.]

Who Needs Knowledge?

Plainly not teachers union teachers, at least according to the union. The New Jersey Progressive-Democratic Party-run State legislature agrees with them, too, which says volumes about the contempt Party has for ordinary Americans.

A major New Jersey education union is pushing Democratic Governor Phil Murphy to sign a bill into law that would eliminate the basic skills test requirement to become a teacher in the state.
The New Jersey Senate and state Assembly passed a bill in June that would allow the State Education Board to issue an alternative certificate to a teacher candidate who meets all eligibility requirements except for the requirement to achieve a minimum basic reading, writing and math skills test score.

91%

That’s the outcome of a Freedom Economy Index survey of 70,000 small businesses, of whom 905 responded, producing a survey with a 3% margin of error and a 95% confidence interval for the outcome.

And having delayed the lede, here is that outcome.

Fully two-thirds of the respondents think college graduates have educations that are useless to business needs, and another quarter of them think those graduates don’t have very useful educations. Here are some of the comments from respondents, which the survey reported verbatim:

  • The Talent shortage will just get worse because high schools and colleges produce no talent.

Another Counterproductive Union

This one is ad hoc, but it’s no less destructive of consumer well-being. That’s especially ironic here, given who this group is: a collection of pharmacy employees at chains like CVS and Walgreens, and soon-to-be-defunct for a variety of other reasons, Rite Aid.

From Monday through Wednesday workers at Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid have pledged to call in sick[.]

A fake-sick move that they’re calling, in their manufactured angst, “pharmageddon.” Never mind that the employees’ lying about the reason for their absence should itself be a firing offense.

“Why Did Harvard Students Cheer on Hamas?”

That’s the title of one section of The Wall Street Journal‘s Wednesday Letters section. One Harvard student wrote regarding the plethora of Harvard student groups’ open support of the terrorist Hamas gang,

The morally bankrupt claims made by these groups are not representative of many of their members. They used theirs, Harvard’s, and their members’ names to lend credence to their outrageous claims. These statements were published by organization leaders, often without serious debate or voting by members.

Say that’s true. How many of those members, allegedly omitted from open debate or voting, have resigned from those student groups?

Featherbedding

It’s not just for railroads, or auto unions. It seems to have come to the Writers Guild of America. The WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers appear to have reached a tentative agreement, wanting only fleshing out the details and then a WGA rank and file vote.

The tentative agreement appears to include these items:

  • a minimum number of writers per television show
  • guaranteed employment for those writers from conception to postproduction