Tag Archives: jobs

Well, NSS

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AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka might be getting buyer’s [sic] remorse over the election of now-President Joe Biden (D).

Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, wishes President Biden hadn’t canceled the Keystone XL oil pipeline his first day in office, agreeing the move will cost a thousand union jobs and 10,000 projected construction jobs.

Especially:

If you destroy 100 jobs in Greene County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, and you create 100 jobs in California, it doesn’t do those 100 families much good. If you’re looking at a pipeline and you’re saying we’re going to put it down, now what are you going to do to create the same good-paying jobs in that area?

And

You know, when they laid off at the mines back in Pennsylvania, they told us they were going to train us to be computer programmers. And I said, “Where are the computer programmer jobs at?” “Uh, they’re in, uh, Oklahoma and they’re in Vegas and they’re here.” And I said, “So, in other words, what we’re going to be is unemployed miners and unemployed computer programmers as well.” I think what doesn’t get understood quite enough in the country, particularly in DC politics, is that that culture is very, very important to the people who live there[.]

NSS, indeed.

Another thing that’s carefully unaddressed by Green New Dealers and Progressive-Democrats is the timing of the destroyed jobs and when “replacement” jobs actually might become available. Even were “learning to program” or “making solar collectors” serious alternatives, they’re not going to be available for years, the Left’s empty words about programming jobs, at least, being immediately available notwithstanding.

“Employment Levels”

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Candidates to replace term-limited Bill de Blasio (D) as mayor of New York City are coming out of the woodwork like the city’s rats. The opening sentence of a Wall Street Journal article covering their plans to “job recovery” is riddled with irony.

More than three dozen New York City mayoral candidates are vying for one of the toughest jobs in the country: leading the nation’s largest city back to pre-pandemic employment levels while trying to find the funding to do so.

The candidates—the city—do not need to “find the funding” to put folks back to work. In an actual free market environment, private employers provide the funding for their own employees. They get that funding from private citizens buying those employers’ goods and services. The city—any government—is a cost center for every business in it jurisdiction, from the taxes the city exacts (some of them actually legitimate charges) to the regulations (very few of them serving any legitimate purpose, being merely revenue centers for the bureaucracy charging them) it imposes.

Returning New York City to pre-Wuhan Virus situation levels is breathtakingly cost-free—and revenue-generating for the city: get out of the way, let the businesses reopen so folks can go back to work, let schools reopen so kids can go back to school—reducing both private and public medical costs—and letting even more folks go back to work.

It’s just that straightforward. It shouldn’t be as hard as even well-meaning, but overthinking, politicians make it.

Disposability

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At the end of an op-ed in last Wednesday’s The Wall Street Journal‘s editors included in image promoting a short video that showed an alleged teacher along with someone behind her holding up posters saying, “Masks are Disposable. Teachers Aren’t!”

Actually, teachers are disposable, as are folks in all jobs. And, in fact, as the Chicago Teachers Union has demonstrated, teachers already have been disposed of. All that’s left in Chicago are unionists.

Good Union Jobs

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But not good enough for President Joe Biden (D).  Recall that Biden ran on “good union jobs,” among other causes, and that phrase—”good union jobs”—became so ubiquitous in his speeches as to resemble a tic.

But not all union jobs—labor is another area where Progressive-Democrats choose winners and losers. When Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline, he killed roughly 11,000 good union construction, construction-related, and ancillary jobs. No matter: Progressive-Democrats, led by Biden, don’t approve of those jobs.

And that doesn’t begin to address the job losses in Canada, jobs that depended on both the pipeline construction and on the subsequent flow of oil.

A Teachers Union Rebellion

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The Chicago Pubic Schools district intends to reopen kindergarten through 8th grade for in-class schooling and in-person teaching on 1 February. To that end, the teachers were required to show up for work last Monday to prepare for the reopening.

The Chicago Teachers Union refused.

The union’s excuse was their holding of

the clear and present danger that [in-person classes and teaching] poses to the health of our families and school communities.

This, of course, is nothing more than an exercise in power for power’s sake and a preliminary round leading to demands for more money. The “clear and present danger” has long since been debunked. Children are the least likely to get sick from the Wuhan Virus, both in relative terms and in absolute, and those that do carry the virus are extremely unlikely to spread it, either among themselves or to adults.

The CTU badly wants decertification and the rebellious teachers fired for cause.

The only question is whether Chicago’s management has the moral courage to do so. Sadly for the kids, that’s doubtful.