April revealed the teachers unions’ desperation over losing control of top-down, one-size fits all government-run schools. In many ways April was normal for teacher union monopolists. Early in the month, the Washington Teachers Union said it would challenge a new law in the Evergreen State that corrected problems in the way that charter schools, which...
$15 Minimum Wage Sends California Businesses Fleeing By Connor D. Wolf, April 26, 2016, Daily Caller California businesses are already starting to move out of state less than a month after lawmakers raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour, according to reports Monday. California beat New York by a couple hours April 4 to become...
The signatures for an initiative that would extend 2012’s “temporary” tax increase in California are due today. Four years ago Californians voted in Prop. 30, a “temporary” tax, to pay back schools “from the years of devastating cuts.” But as I show here, there was hardly any devastation; in fact, our spending had continued to...
Calif. Grower Interfered With Union Election By Elizabeth Warmerdam, April 19, 2016, Courthouse News Service California’s farm labor board upheld a ruling that the state’s largest tree fruit grower interfered with its employees’ election on whether to decertify the United Farm Workers as their union representative. The Agricultural Labor Relations Board voted unanimously Friday to uphold...
The real costs of minimum wage hikes By Norm Groot, April 12, 2016, The Salinas Californian Just this past week, our governor and Democratic legislators reached a compromise on the state’s minimum wage, mostly to avoid a costly ballot initiative fight precipitated by the unions that was due to occur this fall. While we all...
How a $15 minimum wage went from ‘extreme’ to enacted Katrina Vanden Heuval, April 5, 2016, Washington Post What once was considered “pie in the sky” is slowly becoming law. In New York, state legislators just agreed to raise the state minimum wage to $15 an hour, with the full effect beginning in New York...
California’s minimum wage is set to rise to $15/hour over the next six years. While this topic has been beat to death, it is seldom pointed out that the inflation-adjusted minimum wage, based on 78 years of precedent, at most should only be around $10 per hour. A recent UnionWatch post “Raise the Minimum Wage, or...
Supreme Court deadlocks over public employee union case; Calif. teachers must pay dues By Robert Barnes, March 29, 2016, Washington Post The Supreme Court on Tuesday said it was unable to resolve a major challenge to organized labor, and the result was a defeat for a group of California teachers who claim their free speech...
Rolling back the power of government unions in a state like California is almost impossible. Their power has been unchallenged for so long that they now virtually control the state legislature, and their grip on local politicians extends to nearly every city, county, school district and special district. But there have been reforms in some...
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...
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...
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...
A hospital association just pumped $12.5 million into an effort to extend a tax on top earners — a tax that’s provided billions of dollars in education funding since 2012. In fact, the California Association of Hospitals and Health Systems quadrupled its investment from four years ago when Prop. 30 passed. So why do hospitals...