When it's NFL referees locked out, there are bad calls making headlines and fans screaming every weekend. When it's NHL players locked out, there's just ... no hockey. You notice if you're a hockey fan, but otherwise not so much. But hockey fans are noticing. After already losing their preseason, the
NHL has canceled two weeks of the regular season.
Remember that this is a straight-up money grab by owners, whose real problem is with each other but who think it's easier to go after the players.
Programming note:
Sorry the digest is late today. As you may have noticed, there was a debate last night, during which an awful lot of lies were told. It felt important to focus on those for a bit since the guy telling them wants to make every story here get that much worse.
A fair day's wage
- Time for a burrito! Chipotle signed an agreement with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to improve wages and working conditions for workers at Florida tomato farms.
- A nifty win from the National Union of Healthcare Workers:
The NLRB’s ruling affirms that employers must craft clear off-duty worksite access policies and apply them fairly and consistently instead of leaving them so vague as to afford managers broad leeway to improvise excuses to squelch workers’ rights to freely associate.
The National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) prompted this landmark ruling when it contested Keck Medical Center’s discriminatory treatment of four of its employees who were NUHW supporters and who entered the worksite while off duty.
The War on Education
- Chicago teachers voted overwhelmingly to approve their new, hard-fought contract.
- The Chicago Reader responds to a Tribune editorial dumping on public schools and praising Mayor Rahm Emanuel's favored (non-union) charter schools:
There are 541 elementary schools in Chicago. Based on the composite ISAT scores for 2011—the last full set available—none of the top ten are charters. None of the top 20, 30, or 40 either.
In fact, you've got to go to 41 to find a charter. Take a bow, CICS Irving Park!
Most of the 49 charters on the list are clustered near the great middle, alongside most of their unionized neighborhood schools.
- So fucking depressing:
California's public higher education system is, in other words, dying a slow death. The promise of a cheap, quality education is slipping away for the working and middle classes, for immigrants, for the very people whom the University of California's creators held in mind when they began their grand experiment 144 years ago. And don't think the slow rot of public education is unique to California: that state's woes are the nation's.
Miscellaneous