For Immediate Release March 24, 2016 California Policy Center Contact: Will Swaim Will@CalPolicyCenter.org (949) 274-1911 SACRAMENTO — A California Assemblyman hopes to stop school officials before they recklessly spend again. AB 2116 author Rep. James Gallagher (R-Sacramento Valley) says his bill would limit the ability of school districts to take on debt through new bonds – even authorizing county auditors...

Colleges Brace for Overtime Overhaul By Melanie Trottman, March 22, 2016, The Wall Street Journal Schools across the country are bracing for a surge in personnel costs as they prepare for the Obama administration’s overhaul to overtime-pay rules. The Labor Department proposal, due to be released in final form as soon as this summer, would make...

Everyone supports public safety, but conservatives are a special case. In modern times, it was conservatives, reacting against the rebellious sixties and the lawless seventies, who supported law enforcement when it was fashionable for liberals to see them as pawns of a discredited establishment. It was also during the 1960’s and ’70’s that we saw public...

Rebecca Friedrichs, a third-grade teacher in the Savanna School District, which serves portions of northwest Orange County, is the lead plaintiff in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a lawsuit brought by several teachers that challenged the hegemonic power of their union to collect fees from non-union members. The challenge, made on First Amendment grounds, could...

Positioning themselves as strict Constitutionalists, teacher union leaders cry foul over a precedent that the unions helped create. In the wake of Antonin Scalia’s untimely passing, two national teacher union leaders are in a self-righteous snit because the Republican-led Senate is remaining firm in its conviction to hold off consideration of a new Supreme Court...

In 2012, those of us who opposed Proposition 30 were told that the measure, which was the largest state tax hike in American history, was just a “temporary” fix to address the emergency of a severe budget shortfall. But just as Milton Friedman noted that “nothing is so permanent as a temporary government measure,” here...

Stanton has become the stage for a political brawl: in one corner, city officials and the public employee union leaders who backed the measure to give Stanton – Orange County’s smallest city and one of its poorest – the county’s highest sales tax; in the other, residents and business owners working to repeal Measure GG,...

How to Cover Right-to-Work and Union Fees By Adam DeRose, March 15, 2016, Reynolds Center Since the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, many media organizations are following the tussle between President Obama and Congress about naming a successor to the court. Scalia’s death also impacts a number of cases under review of the...

During the industrial age, labor unions played a vital role in protecting the rights of workers. Skeptics may argue that enlightened management played an equally if not greater role, such as when Henry Ford famously raised the wages of his workers so they could afford to buy the cars they made, but few would argue...