Tag Archives: jobs

Paying the Vig

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New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority has reached an agreement with the Transport Workers Union Local 100, the union representing the city’s 34,000 subway and bus employees. No news there. What’s interesting is a “side letter,” also agreed, about which both the MTA and the TWU carefully kept quiet.

A side letter of this sort is a separate deal that commits to paper the wink and nod that otherwise would represent an unspoken agreement that no one is supposed to know about, but that the winker and winkee reached on the q.t.

This particular side letter has the MTA paying, over the next three years, $6 million into a union slush fund “trust established for permissible purposes.”

The payments are being made “in the interests of sound labor relations.”

Of course.

The UAW and Its Volkswagen Union Vote Appeal

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The UAW has, at the last minute, withdrawn its appeal to the NLRB of the vote it lost in Chattanooga concerning its attempt to unionize the Volkswagen plant there.  The UAW lost the vote despite having had the most favorable conditions for their side imaginable, including union representatives proselytizing in the plant during working hours while plant management was not allowed to counter-proselytize.

UAW President Bob King offered this as the rationale for the withdrawal:

The UAW is ready to put February’s tainted election in the rearview mirror and instead focus on advocating for new jobs and economic investment in Chattanooga.

Why does this not feel like an acceptance of reality, but rather that the union has something up its sleeve?  Or is my concern simply borne of the distrust created by the UAW’s routine mendacity in the past, and now my mistrust is misplaced: the union really is interested in cooperation rather than contention as the means of generating jobs?

Gary Casteel, responsible for the UAW’s southern region operations, in fleshing out King’s position,

called on Governor [Bill, R] Haslam to reinstate an offer of $300 million in economic incentives to Volkswagen.  The offer was suspended just before the union vote.

Hmm….

Unionizing College Football

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The union argument for unionizing (Northwestern) college football goes like this, according to the College Athletes Players Association:

…the hours athletes spend practicing, the rights they give up to keep their scholarships, and the possible revocation of those scholarships should they break team rules.

Let’s see how this works for students on academic scholarships:

…the hours students spend studying, the rights they give up to keep their scholarships, and the possible revocation of those scholarships should they break academic rules.

Are these students employees of the school and not students getting a college-funded break toward their college educations?

But wait, you say—what about the football team walk-ons, those who try out for the team and make it but aren’t awarded athletic scholarships?  They’re to be allowed to join the union, as they’re employees of the school, too, according to the NLRB ruling.

Let’s see how that plays out for students who are academic walk-ons, those who apply to the school and are admitted but aren’t awarded academic scholarships.  Are these folks employees of the school, too?

Hmm….

Obama’s War

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…on women and on minorities in general continues apace.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would kill off 500,000 jobs…57% of those jobs are held by women.

Women would be disproportionately harmed: those 57% work out to a loss of 285,000 jobs for women.  I suppose, though, that given this administration’s current buzz, President Barack Obama and his coterie view this as a general good.

Obama’s war is just as devastating on other groups of Americans whom his mouth holds in high favor, but his actions plainly disdain.  The Employment Policies Institute has some of the sordid details.

  • For every 10% increase in the minimum wage, teen employment at small businesses is estimated to decrease by 4.6%-9.0%
  • For every 10% increase in the minimum wage, young black and Hispanic teen employment, in particular, looks to fall 4.9%-8.4%

Hmm….

Standards and Government Mendacity

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Some of you are familiar with EEOC v Kaplan, a case in which the EEOC sued Kaplan Higher Education Corporation for the crime of using background checks to screen job applicants prior to hiring them.  EEOC’s case centered on the nonsense of disparate impact: in the present case, since blacks have more bad debts than whites—for reasons wholly unrelated to the questions at issue in Kaplan—they were more often disqualified from hiring by Kaplan than were whites.

The EEOC’s case was further centered on something called multicultural, multiracial, treatment outcome research.  I can’t tell you what this thing is; it exists solely within the mind of EEOC’s “expert” witness, a person who has constructed this thing, whatever it is, out of the æther.  Interestingly, the EEOC was unable to tell the district judge what that was, either; they elided a definition altogether.

The 6th Circuit, in upholding the district court’s dismissal of the EEOC’s case, had this to say, among other things:

The EEOC brought this case on the basis of a homemade methodology, crafted by a witness with no particular expertise to craft it, administered by persons with no particular expertise to administer it, tested by no one, and accepted only by the witness himself.  The district court did not abuse its discretion in excluding Murphy’s [the “expert’s”] testimony.

This is the pseudoscience that our Progressive administration routinely brings to bear in its many wars—on religion, on women, on climate, on….

Demonstrating, perhaps accidentally, another aspect of this administration’s level of integrity, the 6th Circuit opened its opinion with this statement:

In this case the EEOC sued the defendants for using the same type of background check that the EEOC itself uses.

Going on,

The EEOC’s personnel handbook recites that “[o]verdue just debts increase temptation to commit illegal or unethical acts as a means of gaining funds to meet financial obligations.”  Because of that concern, the EEOC runs credit checks on applicants for 84 of the agency’s 97 positions.  The defendants (collectively, “Kaplan”) have the same concern; and thus Kaplan runs credit checks on applicants for positions that provide access to students’ financial-loan information, among other positions.  For that practice, the EEOC sued Kaplan.

The Circuit ruling can be read here.