Category Archives: Unions

Why Public Schools Must Be Abolished

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Teachers unions are a cancer. In Los Angeles, this cancer has reached stage 4:

Local 99, which represents teacher’s aides, food-service workers, and other non-teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District ecosystem, demanded a 30% across-the-board salary increase plus a $2/hour addition for the lowest-paid worker, reported the Los Angeles Times.

The LAUSD offered a 23% raise, starting with 2% retroactive hike as of the 2020-21 school year and ending with a 5% boost in 2024-25, among other perks. However, Local 99 turned down the offer and determined not to continue negotiations.

Pathological greed inspired the union to go on strike, closing schools throughout the district.

American schools are dismal failures. Accountability is required to make them functional. In addition to raiding the public treasury and driving an ultraleft political agenda, teachers unions prevent accountability.

Like the socialist ideology they espouse, unions work great for the people at the top:

The Daily Mail reported that United Teachers Los Angeles president and BLM member Cecily Myart-Cruz, who represents over 35,000 members in the city, rushed off to attend an NBA game in a box suite after announcing the strike.

Suites run anywhere from $3,765 to over $12,547…

Students were set back when teachers unions, backed by the Biden Regime, exploited Covid as a pretext to avoid work. When asked about the impact keeping schools closed would have on kids,

Myart-Cruz told Los Angeles Magazine in August 2021, “There is no such thing as learning loss.”

True enough — because with moonbats like her in charge, there is no such thing as learning.

Test scores are collapsing. Instead of learning to read and do math, students are indoctrinated with antiwhite race hate and a depraved sexual agenda. The only constructive purpose of public schools at this point is to babysit children so their parents can work. But unions have made teachers too lazy to be relied on for even this minimal service.

Meanwhile, taxpayers are forced to pay over $24,000 per LA Unified School District student.

This isn’t education or even babysitting. It is a looting spree.

Boasts the arrogant union thug Myart-Cruz:

“You can recall the Governor, you can recall the school board. But how are you going to recall me?”

Here’s how. Public schools must be abolished. A voucher system allowing for competition between private schools would guarantee access to education and provide accountability that would radically improve the quality.

On a tip from Mr. Freemarket.

Alarming Nomination Escalates War on Freelancers

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We will know we no longer live in any kind of land of the free when the federal government has prevented us from working on an independent basis. This continues to be an objective of the Biden Regime, which wants to throw tens of millions of freelancers out of work on behalf of the unions that purchase power through Democrats.

This tyrannical insanity has already been inflicted in California:

The bill known as AB5 which restricts freelance employment so severely that it’s practically a ban on freelance workers has been blamed for contributing to the mass exodus with California unprecedentedly losing population every year that the law has been in effect.

It is harder to escape leftist policy when it is inflicted at the federal level, as Democrats have been attempting.

Now, Biden has nominated Julie Su, an architect of AB5’s war on freelance workers, as Secretary of Labor. …

California congressional representatives warned that Su’s AB5 has “cost tens of thousands of freelance workers and independent contractors their economic livelihoods.”

This is a big deal, and not only for the freelancers whose lives could be ruined. Senator Tim Scott notes that inflicting AB5 nationwide would “jeopardize more than 85 percent of our nation’s GDP.”

As the Labor Secretary, Su will be in a position to help Biden kill millions of jobs. Eliminating freelance workers was one of Biden’s campaign promises to unions.

A ban on freelancing would throw so many people out of work and wreak such havoc on the supply chain that inflicting it through democratic means has proven difficult. The PRO Act, a federal version of California’s AB5, passed the House when it was under Democrat control but stalled in the Senate. So the Biden Regime wants to inflict it through the Deep State, which does not have to face voters.

While the PRO Act would face congressional challenges, the Biden administration has been trying to use the Labor Department to create a backdoor assault on freelance workers by reclassifying the status of independent contractors under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

That’s where Julie Su will come in.

In California, Julie Su abused her power to terrorize small businesses and drive freelancers out of work, warning that she would be “doing investigations and audits.”

The bigger the government, the more it can hurt those it doesn’t like. Democrats are the Party of Big Government. If you are working class and can’t be forced into a union, they don’t like you.

Under Su, the Labor Department will move forward with forcibly reclassifying freelance workers while auditing and fining anyone who resists. This campaign of terror that began in California will go nationwide. Independent truckers will go out of business leading to further grocery shortages and a collapsing supply chain. Countless other professions will also fall apart.

Personnel is policy. With Biden personnel, the policy is to destroy our freedom and the economy so as to consolidate the power of the Democratic Party.

On a tip from Blackjack.

Charter Schools Provide Better Education for Less Money

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When Democrats pander to the pernicious unions that bankroll them by attacking school choice, it is at the expense of both children and taxpayers. Consider New York City:

The charters’ mostly minority student population bested its public school counterpart by up to 8% on both state math and reading tests in the 2021-21 school year, show statistics compiled by New York City Charter Center.

And the impressive results come courtesy of a relative shoestring budget, with city charters spending just $17,626 per student compared to the $35,941 spent on each public student, according to the center and Citizens Budget Commission.

The blacks Democrats exploit while pretending to champion benefit the most from charter schools:

Black charter-school students bested their public-school counterparts in [English Language Arts] by proficiency rates of 55% to 36% and in math by 46% to 21%.

Charter schools provide better education for less money. But rather than save taxpayers a buck and give kids a chance to succeed, most Democrats prefer to impose the mess they have made in Chicago:

In 30 Chicago public schools, not a single student can read at grade level. In total, just 20 percent of 3rd through 8th graders in the Windy City are proficient in reading and only 15 percent are proficient in math.

It isn’t because the Democrats who control everything there aren’t spending enough:

When all local, state and federal dollars are added up, Chicago’s per student outlay is now $29,207.

Nor is it because Chicago does not shovel enough taxpayer money at teachers:

[A] starting teacher makes $64,000 a year and can earn up to $122,000 per annum—not including pension and healthcare perks.

Teachers unions have so much sway in the Biden Regime, they dictate Covid policy to the CDC. But this isn’t only about unions. The more uninformed you have to be to vote Democrat, the more interest Democrats have in keeping the population clueless. That makes them want to prop up both the liberal media establishment and failed public schools.

On tips from Jack D.

Now Teachers Unions Are Against Lockdowns

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Teachers unions constitute a central pillar of the liberal establishment, brainwashing children with leftist ideology, strategically keeping them ignorant, and funneling vast amounts of money that originated with taxpayers into the Democratic Party. On orders from Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers, Biden’s handlers ordered the CDC to advise the Covid lockdowns that allowed teachers to avoid work.

Now that even liberals are starting to understand that the lockdowns were not only tyrannical and unnecessary but profoundly destructive, teachers unions are against lockdowns. Weingarten keeps a straight face while making an impassioned case:

Rank and file Democrats will use doublethink to erase from their minds that unions took the diametric opposite stance when it mattered. They think whatever they are told to think, whenever they are told to think it. To quote Occam’s Stubble,

We have always been at war with East Schoolclosia.

Privately Schooled Katie Hobbs Opposes School Choice

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A liberal elitist is someone who gets to the upper echelons of society and then tries to pull up the ladder so that others can’t follow. This is why so many rich people support the Democrat Party, which inflicts malicious regulations that prevent others from becoming wealthy. It may also be why Arizona gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs wants to imprison children in dysfunctional public schools, after having enjoyed a private education herself.

The Daily Caller reports:

Hobbs announced her education plan on Sept. 12, which calls for significant reforms to Arizona’s newly expanded Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA). The ESA program allows taxpayer funds intended for public schools to follow the taxpayer’s child to whichever education institution they wish to attend.

The left-wing unions that have destroyed public schools don’t like this, so neither does Katie Hobbs.

Quacks Hobbs:

“As a parent and as a product of Arizona schools myself, I know our state can be the best place to live, work and raise a family and that starts with making sure our children [quack quack quack].”

She forgot to specify that she is the product of a private Catholic school, not the public ones that nowadays emphasize the LGBT agenda and Critical Race Theory rather than how to read and do math.

Hobbs’ twin sister, Becky Williams, is also the 2021-2022 president of the teachers union Scottsdale Education Association.

Naturally Katie Hobbs opposes the expansion of school vouchers. Kids don’t need to learn how to read in school; that’s what free college is for. Universities offer remedial classes.

Katie Hobbs did not respond to the Daily Caller’s request for comment.

Don’t feel bad, Daily Caller. Hobbs also refuses to debate her opponent, Kari Lake.

Then again, I don’t blame Hobbs for not wanting to step into the ring with someone who would rip her to pieces like Lake did to this CNN propagandist:

On tips from MrRightWingDave and Varla.

Minneapolis Teachers to Be Laid Off Based on Race

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Moonbats bark incessantly about systemic racism. To see how it works in the real world, consider a new agreement reached between the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and Minneapolis Public Schools:

The agreement states that if a non-white teacher is subject to excess, MPS must excess a white teacher with the “next least” seniority.

To “excess” is to lay off. If a black teacher would normally be laid off, the white teacher with the next least seniority gets laid off instead. Because white people are racist and bad.

The agreement also prioritizes the reinstatement of teachers from “underrepresented populations” over white teachers.

Systemic racism is real. It works in favor of the privileged identity groups the liberal establishment tells us are “oppressed.”

As noted by Hans Bader,

This violates a well-known Supreme Court decision overturning the race-based layoff of a white teacher, and contradicts a well-known federal appeals court decision, which ruled that race-based layoffs of white teachers violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. …

Since the teachers union supported the adoption of this discriminatory provision, it may also be liable for discrimination along with the school district. Unions are subject to liability for racial discrimination under Title VII and 42 U.S.C. 1981, see, e.g., Woods v. Graphic Communications (1991), and the Supreme Court has ruled that people who conspire with the government to discriminate can sometimes be sued along with it under the Constitution, see Adickes v. S.H. Kress & Co. (1971).

The race-based layoff provision also violates the law against racial discrimination in contracts, 42 U.S.C. 1981, for essentially the same reasons it violates the Constitution.

Such inconvenient laws and rulings demonstrate why it is so important to progressives to do whatever it takes to put unprincipled apparatchiks like Merrick Garland in charge of the courts — even if it means castrating the Supreme Court with the TERM Act.

On tips from R F and Blackjack.

War on Freelancers Will Cause Economic Havoc

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If all workers cannot be directly employed by Big Government, they must at least be controlled by Big Unions, which are a lucrative extension of the Democratic Party. Otherwise, workers would be independent — and independence is obscene from the point of view of our leftist ruling class. That’s why the Democrats have conspired to throw tens of millions of Americans out of work by making it illegal to work on a freelance basis.

Biden et al. has intended from the beginning to inflict a federal version of California’s AB5, which demonstrates the Democrat belief in the American dream by criminalizing working for yourself. AB5 is about to cause economic havoc.

The law decrees that

“a person providing labor or services for remuneration shall be considered an employee rather than an independent contractor unless the hiring entity demonstrates that the person is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of the work, the person performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business, and the person is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business.”

Those who find favor with California’s moonbat overlords get exceptions. Truckers are not among them.

A January 2020 injunction saved trucking from the insane and tyrannical law. However:

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra [currently head of Biden’s HHS] called on U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez to reverse the injunction. …

On June 28, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of the California truckers battling against AB5. …

Now, the truckers must be employees of trucking companies and not independent contractors in order to be able to work in California. …

If the law is enforced, California faces a possible mass exodus of the state’s estimated 70,000 independent truckers.

Imagine the chaos this will cause at the Port of Oakland alone:

“There’s 9,000 trucks that serve the port on a daily basis, and 90% of them are independent contractors. So, this is a big, big impact,” said Bill Aboudi owner of AB Trucking in Oakland.

You think we have a supply chain crisis now? You think prices are already high? Just wait. Democrats are not through inflicting their agenda.

The California Trucking Association delivered a warning, “Gasoline has been poured on the fire that is our ongoing supply chain crisis. In addition to the direct impact on California’s 70,000 owner-operators who have seven days to cease long-standing independent businesses, the impact of taking tens of thousands of truck drivers off the road will have devastating repercussions on an already fragile supply chain, increasing costs and worsening runaway inflation.”

If they were merely fools, they might show contrition. But Democrats are pressing full steam ahead toward economic devastation.

Sneers Lorena Gonzalez, currently head of the California Labor Federation, who was the author of AB5:

“The fact that trucking companies will have to abide by basic labor laws in CA takes us one step closer to rebuilding the middle class that was almost deregulated out of existence.”

If there are two things Democrats love, they are regulation and unions. They are more than willing to make us suffer for them.

If you think the economy has been bad since Biden took power, think how awful it would be if he were able to get his favored legislation passed. His Build Back Better lurch deeper into socialism would push inflation into Venezuela territory. The Pro Act — a federal version of AB5 — would do to the whole country what malevolent leftists like Gavin Newsom and Lorena Gonzalez are doing to California.

On tips from Blackjack and Mr. Freemarket.

Freelance Work Saved for Now

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It would be one thing if Democrats were merely harmless kooks who in the privacy of their own insular world believe silly lies, like privileged identity groups being oppressed and electric cars improving the weather. The problem is, they will not leave other people alone. They may even ruin their lives by making their jobs illegal out of sheer moonbattery.

Fortunately, Biden and his party were dealt a setback in this regard when three squeamish senators who are trying to position themselves as moderates (Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, Mark Kelly) nixed the appointment of hard left union goon David Weil to run the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Weil had the same job in the Obama Administration, when he sought to destroy the franchise business model and gig economy as Americans know them. President Biden nominated him for a second stint on the expectation that he would impose via regulation much of Big Labor’s Pro Act that has failed to pass the Senate.

The Pro Act is modeled on California’s devastating AB5, which largely makes it illegal to work as a freelancer. Big Unions, which play a major role in financing the cancer that is the Democratic Party, can’t impose themselves on freelancers.

California’s AB5 law reclassifying most independent contractors as employees was inspired by none other than Mr. Weil. And this may be one reason the two Democratic Senators from Arizona opposed his nomination. They’ve seen the headaches the law has created for business and workers next door, and they don’t want them coming to Arizona. More workers have embraced freelancing during the pandemic. So why would Mr. Biden nominate someone to a top Labor job who wants to kill their jobs?

Two reasons: (1) Biden is a stooge for the ultraleft, and Big Unions are at the core of the ultraleft; and (2) progressive strategy assumes that the more people are thrown out of work by leftist policies, the more dependent they will be on Big Government, the more likely they will be to vote Democrat — particularly when the tyranny is imposed at the federal level so that they cannot escape it just by crossing the border from California to Arizona, as so many have done.

These regulatory appointees will take on more importance as progressives turn to executive action to impose what they can’t pass in Congress.

That’s why the millions who rely on the flexibility afforded by freelancing to go about living the way they want to live are not out of the woods.

Democrats know from the disaster of AB5 that the Pro Act would destroy many lives. Yet they are trying to slip it through the back door anyway. What they cannot accomplish by Democratic means, they will impose surreptitiously through their massive regulatory apparatus.

These people want to hurt you. They are not going to stop because three senators feared a backlash. Virtually every other Democrat is on board with an agenda that could best be described as malicious.

On a tip from Varla.