Saying that the management of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system hasn't been bargaining in good faith since workers ended a strike earlier this summer before a contract was settled, union workers
plan to go back on strike this weekend if contract negotiations don't progress. The workers have gone
five years without a raise have have in recent years made concessions to help BART's finances.
Visiting San Francisco, Erik Loomis was handed anti-worker BART propaganda; the message, he writes:
... seems to be that since all workers are getting screwed, their workers should get screwed too. Specifically, the agency is making a huge deal out of the fact that its workers are ONLY paying $92 a month for the health coverage, as if they are fleecing the taxpayers by this. Instead, it wants workers to pay 10% of healthcare costs. This is a classic 21st century corporate negotiating plan, turning everyone who has seen their economic stability fall apart against those who have managed to hold on to a standard late 20th century union contract package. The anti-union flyer also seems to think that people will be outraged that BART workers want more safety lighting and more restrooms in underground stations, which both seem like great ideas to me.
Management dismisses those safety concerns and has been exaggerating how much BART workers earn to make them look greedy. In other words, BART management is a pack of assholes.
Continue reading below the fold for more education and labor news.
A fair day's wage
- "I've always hated the idea of labor unions," writes Business Insider's Henry Blodget. But, after a review of the economy today, he concludes:
Anyway, it would be great if companies would start sharing their wealth voluntarily. But, as yet, with a couple of notable exceptions (Apple recently gave its store employees a raise it didn't need to give them), they've shown no signs of doing that.
So if companies can't be persuaded to do this on their own, maybe it's time to rethink our view of labor unions.
Although correlation is not causation, the chart below suggests that labor unions might be able to help induce companies to share their wealth, at least in some industries.
Way late to the party, but welcome to reality!
- Right now, if you want to mail alcohol, you have to use UPS or FedEx. That means there's a big source of potential revenue the postal service is locked out of—and is hoping to change.
- Palermo's Pizza has agreed to reinstate striking workers with back pay.
- Five myths about Detroit:
4. Public pensions sunk the city’s budget.
Detroit’s major financial problem is that its shrinking tax base has meant years of declining revenue. Remember, the city has lost more than 1 million residents since its population peaked in the 1950s. Those who blame pensions confuse cause and effect—like blaming a personal bankruptcy on a pesky car loan after one’s salary was cut in half. The difference, of course, is that getting rid of a car you can no longer afford isn’t the same as reneging on a promise to 21,000 retirees.
- What could President Obama do—without Congress—to create manufacturing jobs?
- Here's your list of American-made, union-made back to school supplies.
- John Merrow has been trying to place this op-ed, but newspapers don't seem real interested in Michelle Rhee's real record:
Six years after Michelle Rhee rode into town, the public schools seem to be worse off by almost every conceivable measure.
For teachers, DCPS has become a revolving door. Half of all newly hired teachers (both rookies and experienced teachers) leave within two years; by contrast, the national average is understood to be between three and five years. Veterans haven’t stuck around either. After just two years of Rhee’s reforms, 33% of all teachers on the payroll departed; after 4 years, 52% left.
It has been a revolving door for principals as well. Ms. Rhee appointed 91 principals in her three years as chancellor, 39 of whom no longer held those jobs in August 2010. Some chose to leave; others, on one-year contracts, were fired for not producing quickly enough. Several schools are reported to have had three principals in three years. [...]
Ms. Rhee and her admirers point to increases on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an exam given every two years to a sample of students under the tightest possible security. And while NAEP scores did go up, they rose in roughly the same amount as they had under her two immediate predecessors, and Washington remains at or near the bottom on that national measure.
The most disturbing effect of Ms. Rhee’s reform effort is the widening gap in academic performance between low-income and upper-income students, a meaningful statistic in Washington, where race and income are highly correlated. On the most recent NAEP test (2011) only about 10% of low-income students in grades 4 and 8 scored ‘proficient’ in reading and math. Since 2007, the performance gap has increased by 29 percentile points in 8th grade reading, by 44 in 4th grade reading, by 45 in 8th grade math, and by 72 in 4th grade math. Although these numbers are also influenced by changes in high- and low-income populations, the gaps are so extreme that is seems clear that low-income students, most of them African-American, generally did not fare well during Ms. Rhee’s time in Washington.