Editor’s Note:  It is difficult to find a better example of how California’s labor movement fails ordinary workers than their support for high speed rail. Because that project, using foreign sourced materials and yielding virtually no benefits – economic, environmental, or societal – that justify the cost, is at the expense of projects that are...

Union representatives urge UC to support bill guaranteeing contractors, UC employees receive similar pay By Suhauna Hussain, May 26, 2015, Daily Californian Union representatives called on the UC Board of Regents to support a bill that would ensure that workers employed by private university contractors are compensated comparably with university employees doing similar work. At...

Using testing as a backdrop, NEA president promotes 1950s industrial-style education. The American Enterprise Institute’s education policy maven Rick Hess has been traveling around the country promoting his new book The Cage-Busting Teacher. So last week he left his Education Week blog in the hands of National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen García. Interesting choice,...

If the parent activists at Palm Lane Elementary School are successful in their battle to invoke SB54, the Parent Trigger Law, they would be well advised to study the network of high-performing charter schools in New York City founded by former teacher and City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz as the template for the school it must...

San Bernardino’s bankruptcy plan favors CalPERS By Paloma Esquivel & Joe Mozingo, May 18, 2015, Los Angeles Times San Bernardino’s plan to exit bankruptcy has at least one winner, plenty of losers and could have repercussions for other California cities. The city will pay every penny of the almost $50 million it owes to the...

“If you say there is an elephant in the room, you mean that there is an obvious problem or difficult situation that people do not want to talk about.” –  Cambridge Dictionaries Online If you study California’s legislature, it doesn’t take long to learn there’s an elephant in both chambers, bigger and badder than every...

A union-led initiative wants to eliminate Prop. 13 benefits for businesses. California’s Prop. 13, wildly popular on both sides of the political aisle, is under siege by unions. Using the Orwellian name “Make It Fair,” a coalition led by the California Teachers Association, California Federation of Teachers, SEIU and their friends has decided that they...

There’s a joke about public sector union bosses making the rounds in Sacramento lately:  What happens when the California Legislature hands over a blank check to the California Teachers Association (CTA)?  It’s returned the next day marked “insufficient.” No matter that spending on schools is up 36 percent over the last four years, the state...

In bankruptcy, the federal courts have ruled that cities can reduce pension obligations. They can, but they don’t have to. In Detroit, bondholders were sacrificed to maintain police and fire pensions with minimal haircuts. On Monday, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Meredith Jury ruled against bondholders in favor of Calpers in the San Bernardino bankruptcy. She acknowledged...

SUMMARY:  The price of health insurance in America has consistently risen faster than the rate of inflation and, despite the intentions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), is projected to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. A provision of the ACA known as the ‘Cadillac Tax’ is designed to discourage employers from purchasing...