How Union Contracts Get Covered In The Media

From the ever municipal union-friendly NY Post:

A day after the MTA offered its workers a new contract with retroactive pay, Mayor de Blasio insisted the deal doesn’t set a precedent for the city’s ongoing negotiations with its unions.

“We have a very different reality here — we have our fiscal circumstances. We have a separate history in terms of labor relations than that which state and MTA has,” the mayor said Friday at a press conference in Brooklyn.

“So we’re going to do things our own way with our partners in municipal labor.”

Chuck Brecher, research director at the Citizens Budget Commission, agreed that the proposed MTA deal — an 8 percent raise spread over five years — doesn’t directly impact the mayor’s options.

“He doesn’t have to be bound by any other model, and to the extent there’s been pattern bargaining, the pattern is usually what’s happened to other city unions rather than state,” Brecher said.

He estimated that if the city were to follow in the MTA’s footsteps the tab this year would run about $3.5 billion — and that doesn’t even include teachers-union demands for retroactive pay dating back to 2009.

The mayor has said previously there’s no way the city could afford to pay full retroactive pay to all 152 unions that have been working under expired contracts.

Ah, but when the state pattern was the old CSEA contract of 4% over 5 years, with three years of zeroes and health care concessions, that's when the editorial boards thought de Blasio should follow the state pattern (even though, as this Post article points out, pattern bargaining is relegated to what happens in city contracts, not state contracts.)

Funny how that is.

Even funnier is how the the MTA/TWU 100 deal is being talked about as if it's some grand giveaway, even though, as NYC Educator points out here, the MTA contract actually leaves TWU 100 workers a little bit behind inflation, so it's not that swell a deal at all.

Sure, the TWU contract is better than the CSEA contract pattern that came before, but it's still not replete with a "bunch of new goodies" as the Post's resident Ayn Randian specialist Nicole Gelinas says it is.

Somehow we've gotten to this point in American culture where any contract that pays union workers just below the rate of inflation, doesn't shove too many onerous work rules on them, and only nails them with a half percent in health care concessions is "full of goodies."

Meanwhile on Wall Street, the criminals at Bank of America and Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase continue to lose money hand over fist due to bad bets and/or criminal penalties lodged by the feds for fraudulent activity and yet, they still keep paying themselves more money.

Funny how that it is too.
 
Can't wait to see the Nicole Gelinas piece criticizing that.

Oh, right - that's the "free market".

You know, the one with the Too Big To Fail banks who took all those government bailouts after nearly taking the world economy to total collapse.

How Not To Be A Socialist

Sign it immediately, and free yourself from the tyranny of socialism and breathe in the freedom and liberty.

I love going Galt early in the morning.

Smells like - liberty!

Or pollution from the non-regulated privatized coal plants, I can't tell which.

Zombie Ayn Rand Ideas Eat The Brains Of Public Education Officials

Gee - maybe the Race to the Top competition was stupid?

It's like buying a fancy dress but having no date to the prom—dozens of states that crafted new education policies to compete for a share of the $3.4 billion "Race to the Top" school reform grant prizes were shut out.

Now, as the 11 winning states and the District of Columbia set about spending their awards, the losing states are left wondering what to do with ambitious reform plans they planned to fund with the money.

In Colorado, for example, lawmakers had the prize in mind earlier this year when they adopted a contentious plan to pay teachers based on student performance. Now, state educators are obligated to come up with a new evaluation for teachers—with no new money to pay for it.

"There was no Plan B for paying for these changes when they were rushing to get them for 'Race to the Top,'" said Henry Roman, an elementary school teacher in Denver and head of the city's teachers union.

"People have great ideas for reforming education, and we welcome that, but these great ideas need to be matched by resources," Roman said. "Our principals are really exhausted, and now they're being required to do more—with no support."

Many states are in the same boat. Almost 30 states tried to make themselves more attractive to federal "Race to the Top" judges by highlighting new laws or policies on charter schools, teacher evaluations and how to turn around low-performing schools.

Great more unfunded, poorly-thought out mandates!

More change we can believe in from the Change We Can Believe In guy that is EXACTLY like the Bush guy before him.

This idea that everything should be a competitive grant these days is disastrous on so many levels.

Here in New York Little Andy Cuomo plans to turn state aid into a Race to the Top kind of competition so that only the most reformy of districts get the money.

If Rahm Emanuel wins the mayor's race in Chicago, he would like to make everything in the Chicago school system a competition like Race to the Top.

And the Obama administration wants to make the Title 1 money the federal government grants to states into a competitive grant as well rather than base it on the demographics and poverty of each school district.

Zombie Ayn Rand politicians with the mantra of "Free Markets Solve Everything!" usually come from the Republican Party.

But these days, the Democratic Party Establishment is loaded with them.

And public education is slowly being destroyed by the zombies.

Knowing what I know about these corporate whores like Emanuel, Cuomo, and Obama, I suspect that's the point.