Tag Archives: jobs

Union Leadership Greed in Illinois

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Details of a plan reached last week appear to show [Illinois] state legislative leaders are attempting to solve Illinois’ $100 billion pension crisis in part by changing workers’ retirement age, reducing automatic pension increases, and limiting their collective-bargaining privileges.

Public union leadership disagrees with this, though, and they’re turning on that Democratic Party leadership.  These union leaders consider carefully selected and targeted Democrats to be “persuadable,” and these unionists are going to do some “persuading.”

Never mind that the plan will save roughly $160 billion over 30 years, according to Governor Pat Quinn (D) and the leaders of the Democrat-controlled State Assembly.

Illinois’ public sector union leaders object to their unions paying their fair share.  They have theirs, and to Hell with anyone else, to Hell with the fact that Illinois is bankrupt in every way but the filing.  Pay up, suckers.

Mendacious Public “Service” Unions

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The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Local 1028, which represents 1,300 employees of the Will County, IL, government, has taken its members out on strike.

The county offered to pay 90% of their health insurance costs along with a 14.5% pay increase.  This isn’t enough, though.  Anders Lindall, spokesman for AFSCME, objected: the pay raise is too little, and the 10% the union employees must pay for their health insurance is “double their current premiums.”

It’s “not fair.”

Cry me a river.

Government’s Existence and the Economy

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The jobs and GDP reports last week had a couple of interesting tidbits in it, aside from reflecting the continued anemic, below trend recovery in which our economy is mired, courtesy of this administration’s policies.  These reports covered October and the third quarter, respectively.  Now, what momentous things happened that month?  Yes, yes, the ObamaMart rollout, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.  The Democrats’ shutdown of the Federal government happened that month.  Also, the sequester cap on Federal spending continued that month.  Here are some of those tidbits:

  • BLM said private employers added 212,000 jobs on the month
  • [T]he economy grew by 2.8% in the third quarter
  • [G]overnment spending contributed all of 0.04% to that third-quarter GDP

All of this despite that pernicious shutdown and the evil cap on spending.

Government needs to get out of the way.

Obamacare Impact on Jobs

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Investor’s Business Daily‘s online site compiled, as recently as mid-October, a list of companies that are…adjusting…hours and employment policies in response to Obamacare.  Where IBD was able to discern the number of jobs affected for an individual company, they included that datum in their list.  IBD also updates the list at regular intervals.

The short version of their work is that, as of mid-October, 352 companies had been pushed into Obamacare-caused jobs-related action, and those actions impacted over 19,000 jobs.

President Barack Obama said repeatedly that if we liked our insurance, or our doctor, we could keep both.  Period.  We’ve seen already the veracity of that claim.  What Obama carefully did not promise is that our jobs would be unaffected.

 

h/t GayPatriot

Where to Cut

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As the recent government shutdown demonstrated, there’s a lot of fat that can be cut in the personnel department.  This is no fault of the personnel, but the fact is, we don’t need that many in Federal employ.

Here are a couple more items on that score.

The Department of Agriculture is fairly typical of most agencies in its sometimes incongruous responsibilities and huge some say too huge workforce.  It employs roughly 99,000 people to service the roughly 1.4 million Americans employed in farming.

That’s 14 farmers for every DA employee.

And this on the states being absolved, more and more, of their responsibilities by the Federal government:

“Ronald Reagan had a yellow book test,” said Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste.  “If something could be found in the Yellow Book, it should be done by the private sector.  Unfortunately, the administration now is taking the opposite view, claiming many services are inherently governmental, and therefore not subject to competition.”

Which feeds back into the bloat in Departments like the DA and those listed on the other side of the first link above.