The Challenge of Getting Back to Basics in Education
Our education conundrum: We’ve layered too much mere stuff in the system and created too many incentives for people to advocate against reform.
To Join or Not? Public Workers Have A Choice
At the Center, we believe that public workers deserve to know that they now have full freedom to decide whether or not it is in their best interest to pay union dues. That if they choose not to pay, these employees cannot be recriminated against by corrupt union officials.
National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation Calls Out Kilmartin, NEARI
The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation today called out Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Kilmartin and the National Education Association of Rhode Island (NEARI) and its Bristol-Warren local for attempting to mislead government employees in the Ocean State:
The notice comes after Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Kilmartin – who signed onto an anti-Janus brief at the Supreme Court and received major support from union officials in his runs for public office – made the false claim that the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling “only affects non-union members” and does not apply to union members.
The Attorney General is wrong. Under Janus all government employees have the right to resign their union membership and immediately stop any financial payments to union officials. Because the Supreme Court decision made it clear that public workers must opt-in to any union payments and explicitly waive their constitutional rights, union members cannot be restricted if they seek to resign from the union and stop the payment of any union dues or fees.
The Bristol-Warren Education Association (BWEA) and the National Education Association of Rhode Island (NEARI) also issued a letter blatantly misleading teachers about their Janus rights. The letter claims that union nonmembers must pay a NEARI attorney to file a grievance against the union. However, as the Foundation’s notice states, unions are legally obligated to provide grievance service to both members and nonmembers as part of its exclusive monopoly bargaining status.
The BWEA and NEARI union officials’ letter also incorrectly claims that nonmembers are unable to request days from the Sick Leave Bank, even though the BWEA’s monopoly bargaining agreement establishes the Sick Leave Bank for all teachers, including nonmembers, covered by the agreement.
National Right to Work’s statement is in line with the analysis offered in this space in August.
Government employees in Rhode Island who want more information about their rights can visit MyPayMySayRI.com or National Right to Work’s MyJanusRights.org, where employees can also request free legal assistance.
It shouldn’t be too much to ask that the state’s lead law enforcement agent would offer accurate legal opinions to the public and that labor unions would be more truthful with their own employees.
The Practice of Commuting Children Around Providence Every Day
Dave Talan has an interesting (by which I mean “ought to be obvious”) take on Providence’s school busing woes:
The Providence school bus drivers strike, the extreme hardships it is causing for families, and the city’s total inability to react to it, raises this question: Why on earth are 9,000 students riding the bus when every one of them lives within walking distance to a neighborhood elementary or middle school?
We need a policy to allow most students to go to the closest school, one that is within walking distance from their home. The parents of most of these 9,000 students would choose this option if it were available to them.
I’m all for a school choice policy that allows families to choose other schools, but that presupposes a default option. If the assumption is that children go to the school that’s within walking distance, with extra capacity available to students elsewhere, the families that choose different schools can be expected to account for the distance.
Sending students around the city as a general practice seems like it unnecessarily uproots them from their neighborhoods, while (naturally) adding expense for union jobs.
An Uncomfortable Truth Buried in the Narragansett Teacher Contract
Those who keep an eye on unionized public education often observe the peculiarity that their contracts apply the same pay rates to every teacher at every level, no matter what they teach or the ages of the children. This makes it difficult to pay teachers with more-rare skills dealing with more-difficult children what would be required to attract enough candidates while sending signals to the market that draw too many candidates into easier roles.
Recently, I came across language in the Narragansett teacher contract that implicitly recognizes this difference:
There are occasions when registrations exceed the above recommended limits [for number of students per class] and adding a classroom is not reasonable. The Committee will compensate teachers for each student over the above listed maximums. At the elementary level this compensation will be at $3 per student, per class, per day; at the middle school level the compensation will be $8 per student, per class, per day; and at the high school level the compensation will be at $13 per student, per class, per day.
If each student at the high school level adds more than four times the work or challenge that each student at the elementary level adds, how do districts justify paying teachers across the board the same base rate? Of course, there is a level of preparation and plain work that is the same across the board (getting up every day, meetings, preparing the classroom, etc.), so it would go too far to say that elementary school teachers should be paid one-fourth the amount that high school teachers are paid.
Still, failing to allow the market to differentiate between teachers, who even the union recognizes have very different jobs, serves nobody except those who manage to secure jobs that pay much better than they otherwise would — not the teachers who implicitly must accept less pay for this reason, not the taxpayers who have to make up some of the difference, and certainly not the students whose schools can’t apply their budgets according to fairness and need.
Fire the Providence School Bus Drivers’ Union
Justin says, “Fire the Providence School Bus Drivers”. Maybe. Fire their union, the Teamsters? Absolutely.
What Teamsters Local 251 are trying to do to the drivers – whose best interest they supposedly represent – borders on criminal. It WOULD be criminal if they had a fiduciary role with regard to their members’ retirement.
Fire the Providence School Bus Drivers
Sometimes officials and business owners have to respond based not only on a specific event, but also on the long-term precedents and incentives that the event creates. That is why First Student should fire its bus drivers or Providence should cancel the company’s contract. This is not tolerable:
Union school bus drivers in Providence are expected to continue their strike Monday, the third school day of a labor dispute that has caused an upheaval for thousands of city students, according to school officials. …
School attendance on Thursday was 84 percent, the district said. On Friday, it was 79 percent. School officials said Friday that there were “minimal problems” with arrivals that day.
If you won’t do your job — and especially if you do lasting harm to children by not doing your job — you ought to lose it. This isn’t complicated.
The excuse for the strike only makes matters worse:
Teamsters Local 251, which represents the bus drivers, threatened to strike if First Student doesn’t allow the drivers to begin earning a pension rather than a 401(k). The union overwhelmingly voted down an offer from the company last week before approving a separate contract of their own.
First Student says it has offered pay raises and increases to its 401(k) contributions, but the company is unwilling to begin making payments the Teamsters’ existing regional pension system.
Defined benefit pension plans don’t work. They exist mainly in government, at this point, because only government can hide the costs and kick the can continually down the road to make it somebody else’s snowballing problem.
First Student offers a 401(k). Many private-sector workers don’t even get that. If that isn’t good enough for some employees, they should work somewhere else. And if the company can’t offer benefits that will attract competent employees, then it shouldn’t be given the contract for a service on which a city’s families rely.
Whom Elected Officials Really Represent
Snippets from the AFL-CIO’s endorsement meeting leave no doubt that Rhode Islanders generally have scant representation when our supposed representatives negotiate with labor unions:
Seeking the blessing of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education Convention this past Wednesday, elected officials came bearing their own visions of a better world for workers.
If reelected, Gov. Gina Raimondo promised to raise the minimum wage “again and again and again.”
General Treasurer Seth Magaziner said he’d help combat the U.S. Supreme Court’s “Janus” decision by working on legislation to keep government-employee information out of the hands of union-disaffiliation campaigners.
Senate President Dominick Ruggerio, a high-placed Laborers’ International Union official until last year, vowed to work on bills that would allow public-sector unions to stop representing non-members. (State lawmakers this year passed a bill letting police and fire unions do this, but legislation allowing it across government stalled.)
As Providence Journal reporters Patrick Anderson and Katherine Gregg put it, to the labor unions, “all of Rhode Island is a future job site.” Implied is that this perspective leaves government as the mechanism that is able to take money and land and hand it over. Raimondo would burden our economy. Magaziner — inexplicably, if one believes his role is to steward taxpayer funds — wants to throw obstacles in the path of those who would help employees to be more independent. And Ruggerio is intent on lightening unions’ burden while maintaining their near monopoly on employment with government.
By comparison, Republican gubernatorial candidate Allan Fung’s only promise appears to be that he is no longer in favor of right to work laws. That’s bad enough, but it’s a far cry from a pledge to shape the laws of our land in the unions’ favor even more than they already are. Interestingly, Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello (D, Cranston) is not mentioned in the article.
Two questions arising from the article:
- Why did “just the phrase ‘right to work'” trigger “tense words between firefighters and building trades workers”?
- Why didn’t the Providence Journal reporters note that they are members of the AFL-CIO, and did they vote on the endorsements?
An Analogy for Lack of School Building Maintenance
A crucial addition to Dan McGowan’s metaphor for lapsing school repairs.
A Wheelchair-Bound Cop Out There Being Human
With the United States continuing to accelerate into insanity, take a moment for some unifying relief by reading Mark Patinkin’s latest article:
[Providence Police Officer Mike Matracia] first noticed something was wrong while playing basketball in 1994. A few times, he fell while running down the court. But he dismissed it — he was 30ish and in great shape.
He kept brushing off the falls. But then came other signs, like being off balance. …
Seven years later, he began using the chair. That’s when a higher-up told him he should come to work in street clothes instead of his uniform.
It devastated him.
“Obviously policemen can’t chase down bad guys in a wheelchair,” he says. But he was still a cop putting in a productive day on the job.
So, Matracia strove for permission to wear his uniform to work, and he’s stayed on the job rather than finding some disability-funded way out.
Now, it’s entirely possible Matracia might credit a labor union for his continued employment and oppose everything the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity stands for when it comes to public-sector labor, or maybe he’d be interested in MyPayMySay. It’s also possible that at some point in his past as far back as high school he treated a girl or woman in a way that would bring him condemnation and rejection if he ever tried for some prominent position in the public eye. Maybe he thinks North Smithfield was right to boycott Nike for its elevation of Colin Kaepernick, wearer of pig-cop socks. Or maybe he’s sympathetic to the self-proclaimed anti-fascist progressives who see it as their duty to intimidate and silence people with whom they disagree.
I don’t know whether any of these apply. I list them only because they’ve all been in today’s tide of headlines, posts, and emails.
I do know that Matracia is a human being out there busily being human in a way we can all admire, and that’s one aspect of news stories that we seem to be losing sight of, recently.
The Missing Point of Teacher Complaints
Former Republican state representative Bobby Nardolillo promoted on Facebook a hand-made poster that reads as follows:
OK, Fine. You don’t want to pay teachers like a college educated professional? Then give them the glorified babysitter rate.
$10/kid x 8hrs./day = $80
$80 x 25 kids/class = $2k
$2k x 180 school days =
$360,000
Let’s put aside the haggling over the math (actual hours per day, value of benefits, days off, and so on). What’s striking is the economic illiteracy of this poster, undermines the premises of the people promoting it. You pay a babysitter a premium because you are seeking a limited, unpredictable engagement during non-business hours watching just a few children (with no economies of scale). Make the babysitter a full-time nanny or a day-care center, and the price goes down.
Also remarkable is the lack of gratitude. With reference to the likelihood of our moving into another house, one of my children and I got into a discussion about retirement age. I said that it’s generally thought to be about 65, although that should probably adjust up as we live longer, and that I don’t expect ever to retire, really, for both economic reasons and my hope to be doing work I don’t feel the need to stop at that point. I did not mention that it is not uncommon for public-school teachers to retire in their 50s.
Yet, I don’t think I’ve ever picked up a whiff of gratitude to the public for this remarkable career path. Instead, we hear about how it ought to be even better, how expressing reservations about the cost and the quality of the resulting services is disrespectful.
Yorke, Stenhouse, Walsh, and One-Way Fairness
In all the heat and contention, an important point slipped through on the episode of Dan Yorke State of Mind on which RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity CEO Mike Stenhouse debated National Education Association of Rhode Island Executive Director Robert Walsh:
Stenhouse was arguing, correctly, that teachers have a legal right to representation outside of their labor union. Walsh was arguing, correctly, that the labor union has an increased interest in conflicts that arise within the “four walls of the contract” — that is, grievances arising from matters that fall under its unique scope. And Yorke was stating, reasonably, that it isn’t really fair to force unions to spend money representing people who don’t pay into it.
On that last point, Stenhouse noted that the Supreme Court itself balanced this “free rider” issue against the decades of money that unions have collected from non-members against their will. I’d go a bit farther, though. Supporters of labor unions find it fair to force employees in a workplace to belong to unions and adhere to union contracts even if they’d prefer to make their own arrangements because that is for the good of the whole. Just so, having a unified system for representing people in a bargaining unit could be said to be in everybody’s interests, even if those people don’t pay into it. More directly, offering “free” services to non-members can still be in the financial interest of the union because accepting that burden gives them access to the larger, unionized workforce.
Fairness has to go both ways.
Now to the legal point: Walsh is correct to cite the four walls of the contract. In each district, that contract binds the school department, the union’s members, the non-union teachers, and the union. As I’ve already explained, at least in the case of Bristol-Warren, the existing contract does not allow an additional fee. However, it does place the burden of representing all teachers in grievances on the union.
If the union thinks this is unfair, then it must renegotiate the contract to include a fee, a concession for which a responsible school committee would extract something. The union can’t simply create new terms in its favor just because one of its provisions turned out to violate the rights of non-members. In asserting this future possibility as a present fact, the union is deceiving teachers.
Again: Fairness has to go both ways.
Please Consider Supporting Campaign To Educate Public Workers about Their Right to Leave Their Union
We need you. Our Center’s MyPayMySayRI campaign is under attack.
The Inherent Politicization of Government Unions
The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s new chairman, Stephen Skoly makes an important point in a recent op-ed (emphasis added):
At the root of the Janus case is the inherently political nature of government unions, which negotiate for taxpayer funded benefits. Prior to Janus, these activities were subsidized with dollars forcibly taken in dues or fees from public employee paychecks. Now that workers have been restored their rights to choose whether or not to pay, unions must become more transparent and diverse in their election and legislative advocacy, if they are to keep their members. Employees should know how their dues money is spent; this, too, will be part of our campaign.
For a sense of how true this inherent politicization is, look no farther than Dan Yorke’s interview with the director of the National Education Association of Rhode Island, Bob Walsh. Walsh makes light of the political allegation by breaking down the unions’ individual activities into their component parts, but that’s a distraction. Instead, look toward the end of the interview, when Yorke turns the conversation to politics.
Note, in particular, that Walsh is explicitly speaking in his role as a union leader and that his points are inextricable from the union’s activities. Explaining the two sides of the scale when it comes to his union’s decision not to endorse a gubernatorial candidate for the upcoming primary, Walsh says that Governor Gina Raimondo was “helpful in replacing Commissioner Gist.”
This is a reference to former Education Commissioner Deborah Gist, who tried to bring some measure of reform to Rhode Island’s system, in which it is badly needed. The union did not like her efforts to make its members accountable, so it helped to bring somebody into office who would appoint a commissioner more to its liking. One can see the same thing in unions’ efforts to determine with whom they’ll be negotiating in local school committee races.
Thus, government unions are on every side of every negotiating table, leveraging taxpayer funds that until Janus employees had no choice but to give them to affect who will be elected. That would be inherently political even if the unions weren’t leading advocates for a far-left ideology on issues having nothing to do with representing employees.
A Familiar Name on the Twin River Picket Line
Scarcely had the new Twin River Casino opened in Tiverton than a labor union was out on the street reminding people that this is still Rhode Island:
The union representing security guards at the Twin River’s Tiverton Casino Hotel said it will hold an informational picket at Saturday’s grand opening of the casino following the firing of five security guards, including union president Charles Mulcahy and union secretary Timothy Panell.
“We just want people to be aware that they’re opening a brand new beautiful casino and we want to be a part of the casino,” said Ralph Ezovski, a spokesman for the Casino Security Officers Association of Rhode Island. “But we feel we’re being treated unfairly.”
Introduction of the concept of fairness at the end of the second paragraph might bring the eyes of Tiverton residents back to the name at the end of the first paragraph. Unless it is an incredible coincidence of names, Timothy Panell is the police lieutenant who lost his job in Tiverton under accusations that he put in for hours that he did not work (including overtime) and led his entire shift in a habitual early morning nap time. The Town Council allowed him to retire with a big check for all of his “unused” time off and health care coverage to the age of 65.
A man’s got to go on with his life, even after losing a job in disgrace, but as I keep saying, a little humility would be nice.
Kilmartin Wants the Cogs to Stay on the Political Gear
The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity has already responded to a strange press release from Attorney General Peter Kilmartin in which the AG does little but attempt to sow doubt about information helping government employees decide whether they want to remain in their unions. The most important observation one can make about the press release is that Kilmartin never provides an example of the supposed “misinformation,” or even names the supposed interloper; he’s simply casting shade.
However, the most eye-catching part is probably this:
“If you are contacted about disaffiliating from your public-sector union in the wake of the Janus decision, it is critical that you seek advice either from your union, or from some other reliable source. No worker should rely solely upon any outside group seeking to have the worker waive such a critical right.”
So, this public official’s advice to any employees who have doubts about their unions is to get information from… the unions. One suspects that information would have a decidedly pro-union tilt, which is clearly what Kilmartin wants. Take special note of his formulation about “outside groups.” Implicitly, he’s saying that the unions are “inside groups.” Inside of what? Well, government. In his view, they are not essentially the privately run organizations that they actually are; they are part of a team with elected and appointed officials, helping to run government.
This is how progressives like to structure things. Every group is represented by some hierarchy, and the leaders communicate and then issue edicts to their constituencies. The “business community” works through whatever chamber or group government officials wish to select as their voice. Employees are addressed not as individuals, but as members of their unions. Even local communities aren’t so much electing representatives to go to Providence and advocate on our behalf as we are electing the people who will represent state government to us.
In this approach, employees aren’t valued individually for their work. They’re cogs in the unionized machine that does work for government (and cycles taxpayer dollars back into political campaigns). Those who fancy themselves not to be cogs in a machine should take a look at MyPayMySayRI.com.
The Common Goals of the Governor and the Labor Union Versus Home Care Workers
The SEIU has pledged to help reelect Gina Raimondo win election; how much is she willing to do to help the SEIU win its own election with home-care workers?
Providence School Unions Send Parents a Message
… and that message ought to be: These unions have too much power over your lives.
First up is the threat of a strike by the Teamsters who represent the bus drivers:
The union representing 200 bus drivers for Providence schools is threatening to strike.
A strike authorization was approved by the membership of Teamsters Local 251, secretary-treasurer Matthew Taibi said Wednesday.
Astonishingly, what they want is for the bus company for which they work, First Student, to switch out their 401ks for a pension. A pension! Everybody in the world is learning that defined-benefit pensions just don’t work. Reasonable contributions and a realistic rate of investment returns just can’t produce enough money to keep people living as well as they want for as long as they live. Wanting in to this system would be insane, except that the unions are banking on their ability to make governments (and government contractors) increase the cost of services to taxpayers.
Yet, precisely this sort of shenanigan is what should make taxpayers less sympathetic to their plight. The next time we have to choose between huge tax increases to “honor our promises” to employees and reducing the benefits that employees receive, remember that the unions are key players in forcing those promises to be made despite the risks.
Next up is the threat of work-to-rule from the teachers union:
The Providence Teachers Union has voted overwhelmingly to authorize work-to-rule in the event that tomorrow’s negotiations with the city do not show progress, according to PTU President Maribeth Calabro.
She said 1,940 members voted Monday to move to work-to-rule after two years without a new teachers’ contract. Work-to-rule means that teachers only do what’s is laid out in their contract.
Ah, life in a workers’ paradise, where bus drivers striking in order to enter a broken pension system could force families struggling to make ends meet to find some other way to get their children to schools in which well-paid teachers who work a significantly shortened work year refuse to do anything beyond the minimum in order to protect and expand their employment deal.
The Unspoken Solution for 195 Bridge Traffic
This thread jumped out at me from a Providence Journal editorial about the disaster-level traffic resulting from ordinary, planned bridge construction on Route 195 West:
Fortunately, Mr. Alviti, though not answerable to the voters, quickly caught wind of the uproar. He announced last week that he, his planners and traffic engineers will go “back to the drawing board” to see if anything can be done. They were working over the weekend on a new plan, looking at opening an additional lane and otherwise increasing capacity for vehicles. …
In the real world, there is no easy way out, of course. As one of the 235 deficient bridges in the state, Washington Bridge does need to be repaired. In the 20 years since its northern span was reconstructed, it has been rotting away, with rusty reinforcement rods sticking out of the concrete on its underside. …
To speed things up, the RIDOT already plans to work around the clock, toiling through the night, which adds to a project’s cost but makes the work go faster.
For some reason, the most important point for us to discuss as a community in response to these government failings never seems to come up. If we were to lighten up on the ridiculous labor rules that make the cost of roadwork so high, project managers would gain all kinds of flexibility. That’s a side effect whenever the price of something goes down.
Drop the cost of construction 25–40% (or more), and the state and municipalities will find it easier to keep roads and bridges well kept so they don’t get to the point of needing major repairs as quickly. Working around the clock or only when traffic is light would more-often be an option. If the cost were lower, we might have the slack in maintenance budgets to (in some instances) build entire alternate routes while the main route is entirely shut down.
When insider deals and corruption eat up budgets to the maximum that people will tolerate for the minimum tolerable output, there is no room for spending on strategies that make Rhode Islanders’ lives better in the midst of construction.
Matt Brown Gets the Problems Right but the Solutions Dead Wrong
See, here’s the thing. I don’t think anybody outside of Matt Brown’s progressive base believes that his socialist policy suggestions will fix the problems he describes:
“How did we end up in the situation where the roads are broken, the hospitals are closing, the schools aren’t providing a good education for our kids, we’re 50th out of the 50 states for education of Latino children, the school buildings are falling down,” he said. “That’s a pretty extreme situation to be in. And that’s going to take some bold ideas and some real changes.”
How did we end up in this situation? Because big-government progressivism has redirected the money that we were taxed and feed from infrastructure maintenance to insider deals, interest-group buy-offs, and bureaucratic proliferation. Because the progressive urge to take control of everything has squeezed opportunity out of our state, leading to the exit of productive Rhode Islanders and a lack of paying demand for services such as hospitals (while lowering the availability and quality of those services and driving up the costs). And because co-opting public schools as a means of indoctrination and a funding mechanism for left-wing teachers unions has undermined the incentives for a healthy system.
If you agree with Matt Brown about the problems, you have to disagree with him about the solutions.
Bristol-Warren Teachers Union’s Coercive Deception
The teachers union covering Bristol-Warren is sending out letters warning teachers that they’ll lose certain rights and have to pay new fees if they exercise their right not to join, but those claims (and perhaps the letter itself) don’t appear to match the contract or the law.
Center To Spread the Word About Public Employees’ Restored Rights under Janus
I have big news. We’ve launched a major new campaign designed to inform public servants of their recently restored First Amendment rights, as ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark Janus v AFSCME case. You can see our new website at MyPayMySayRI.com. As a consistent champion of constitutional rights for all citizens, we believe that public employees deserve to know that they now have full freedom when it comes to deciding whether or not it is in their best interest to pay union dues.
Young Democratic Socialists Are a Little Late in the Game
The pamphlet described in an article by Zachary Petrizzo on Campus Reform reads like a smoking gun memo from a strategy that was implemented decades ago:
The Young Democratic Socialists of America organization is urging socialists to “take jobs as teachers” in order to exploit the “political, economic, and social potential the industry holds.”
“Why Socialists Should Become Teachers,” an 11-page pamphlet crafted jointly by YDSA and the Democratic Socialist Labor Commission, contends that education is “a strategic industry to organize,” and offers prospective socialist educators “a basic roadmap for how to get a job in education.”
Socialists enter education in government schools. They get a high-paying job that is stable to the point of being just about permanent. And they gain access to impressionable children whom they can indoctrinate. As a bonus, part of their pay goes to labor unions, which cycle the taxpayer money back into activism and political donations.
The synergies here are so obvious that the plan is already in effect and undermining our society. But kids always have to feel like they’re coming up with radical ideas.
The Balance of Freedoms in Rhode Island
A thousand discussions could be sparked by the Cato Institute’s Freedom in the 50 States ranking and Rhode’s Island’s 42nd place ranking.
The datapoints that go into the index cover a wide range of issues and are subjective. For example, Rhode Island is number 1 in “marriage freedom,” largely on the strength of its same-sex partnership laws, but some might suggest that the use of government to redefine a cultural institution is hardly a marker of freedom. Some might also note that same-sex marriage accounts for 2% of a state’s overall score while religious freedom accounts for only 0.01%.
On the other end of the spectrum, the only area in which Rhode Island is dead last is asset forfeiture. However, another low rank for the state could arguably be considered its defining problem: labor market freedom. Here, our 49th place ranking results from laws on:
- General right-to-work law
- Short-term disability insurance
- Noncompete agreements permitted
- Minimum wage
- Workers’ compensation funding regulations
- Workers’ compensation coverage regulations
- Employer verification of legal status
- Employee anti-discrimination law
- Paid family leave
The total effect of these policies has been that Rhode Island hasn’t budged from 49th since the first year measured: 2000.
Rhode Island has a great deal going for it, but if people can’t find work here, they won’t live here. The Ocean State is roughly in the middle fifth for fiscal and personal freedom — although dropping from 18th to 27th in fiscal freedom from 2000 to 2016 and from 12th to 31st in personal freedom. If we take Cato’s weightings as our guide, that decline has been making life less free. But those changes pale in comparison to our languishing at the edge of the bottom fifth in regulatory freedom throughout, and that’s an area in which we need great resolve and quick action to improve.
Michael Riley: Rhode Island May Have Dodged a Bullet, No Thanks to Our Treasurer
In assessing the effort to keep the PawSox in Rhode Island, it is important to review the role of General Treasurer Seth Magaziner. The state treasurer was asked to analyze the costs and opine on affordability, as would be expected with a large borrowing like this. Mr. Magaziner opined in October 2017 and in June 2018 as numbers changed along with the terms of the deal and then opined again recently, finally giving a nod to the deal.
But what everyone needs to know is that $350 million dollars in debt for Pawtucket’s other post-employment benefits (OPEB) for former employees was not used in his analysis. This is more than twice the city’s pension debt! In fact, it was purposely left out by Magaziner. Including OPEB debt would obviously have made the City of Pawtucket’s borrowing look dangerous and ill-conceived. Ignoring OPEB allowed for an outrageous abuse of taxpayer dollars by the treasurer.
Think about it. Seth Magaziner violated his own risk recommendations by hiding a liability in his analysis; this is the type of stuff they did with 38 Studios. Mr. Magaziner owes it to taxpayers to lay all the cards on the table and not to fall in line with political winds. Had he actually laid the cards on the table, looked at all the debt, and been transparent and honest, the PawSox deal would appropriately have never seen the light of day.
As can be seen in the comprehensive Debt Affordability Study, Pawtucket already exceeds Magaziner’s limits for debt, along with Woonsocket and Providence, before even considering borrowing for the new stadium or the $350 million in OPEB liability, which the board is to reconsider as a component next year. This $350 million is so significant and overwhelming, it would be irresponsible for any treasurer to think Pawtucket absorbing new debt was a good idea.
Information About the Rights of Government Employees
The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity has launched a statewide effort to inform government employees of their newly recognized rights under the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus v. AFSCME ruling:
A consistent champion of constitutional rights for all citizens, the Center believes public employees deserve to know that they now have full freedom when it comes to deciding whether or not it is in their best interest to pay union dues; and that they cannot be recriminated against if they choose to leave. Prior to the Janus ruling, all state and municipal employees in Rhode Island were forceed to pay their government-designated unions as a condition of employment.
However, the Supreme Court has decided that because it is their pay, union membership – or not – is rightfully the say of every public worker; especially when workers may disagree with their union’s political advocacy, which is paid for with their dues money.
Case in point is Michelle, a municipal employee in the Ocean State, who opted-out right after the Janus ruling and who said: “I don’t understand why some of my friends continue to pay their dues despite their political views being completely opposite of what the union supports.”
A related Web site, MyPayMySayRI.com, provides access to information for public-sector employees, as well as assistance for asserting their rights.
Article on Teacher Shortage Misses the Obvious: Economics
This Linda Borg article in the Providence Journal covers familiar ground:
The demand for high school math and science teachers, especially in chemistry and physics, is so intense that districts often resort to “poaching” from one another, superintendents say. But the biggest competition comes from private industry, which offers higher pay and a better career trajectory.
In contrast, however:
In North Smithfield, Supt. Michael St. Jean said he had 260 applications for four elementary education openings last year.
Oddly, over the course of around 40 paragraphs, nobody expresses the obvious observation from economics. We should change the way we structure employment in public schools so the system could rise to market price of the technical professionals who are in demand while reducing the pay offered to teachers in areas that have such a surplus.
That’s how the market would function in the private sector. If one job seems impossible to fill while another generates sixty-five times more applicants than there are positions, employers will try to get a qualified person to fill the second job at lower pay so that he or she can increase the offer for the first job. This will go on across the industry until the pay being offered for the second job can’t attract any qualified applicants.
Is This Representative of RI Teachers?
TEACHER ALERT: 100% of the Nat’l Educ Assoc of RI (NEARI) endorsements are for Democrats, including EVERY far-left PROGRESSIVE incumbent. If you pay union dues and this political extremism is not shared by you, the US Supreme Court ruled in June that you no longer have to give part of your paycheck to the union – and you cannot lose your job, status, or benefits.
What would it take for you to consider leaving your union saving about $7,000 over ten years for your family?
Relative Windfalls for Government Unions
A major not-quite-sub-text of the Supreme Court’s Janus v. AFSCME ruling is the issue of funding labor unions, which cycle the money into the political system. The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted some numbers along these lines:
Pennsylvania stopped collecting agency fees from 24,000 state workers that totaled $6.6 million last year, a state official said. The figure is expected to grow because it doesn’t include workers at municipalities across the state. In New York, which has the highest rate of public sector union membership, the state stopped collecting agency fees in July from 31,000 state workers which totaled between $9 million and $10 million last year, a spokeswoman for the New York State Comptroller said. That tally is also expected to grow because it doesn’t include local agency fees.
By one estimate, unions in New York state overall will lose $112 million in agency fees from 200,000 state and local workers, based on what workers paid in 2016, according to the Empire Center, a conservative think tank in Albany.
Writing for the majority of the Supreme Court, Justice Samuel Alito touched on this angle:
We recognize that the loss of payments from nonmembers may cause unions to experience unpleasant transition costs in the short term, and may require unions to make adjustments in order to attract and retain members. But we must weigh these disadvantages against the considerable windfall that unions have received under Abood for the past 41 years. It is hard to estimate how many billions of dollars have been taken from nonmembers and transferred to public-sector unions in violation of the First Amendment. Those unconstitutional exactions cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely.
Clearly, the windfall from government employees who have declined to join unions but have still paid them money pales in comparison with the money that unions have collected by virtue of their monopolistic role in government employment.
Ending Another Union Money Transfer
The characterization is perhaps too tidy, but many policy decisions in Rhode Island can be explained under the premise that politicians are striving to funnel money to labor unions in an effort of mutual assistance. The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity offers an example in its public comment in support of a proposed Trump administration rule removing the ability of states to send federally backed provider payments to third parties:
It is also morally unjust that federal dollars, earmarked for home care services, could have dues automatically siphoned-off by state government unions from workers’ paychecks, then transferred to the unions, with some of the funds ending-up in the political campaign coffers of SEIU. If the proposed rule is enacted, it would be just and proper that 100% of the allocated federal funding for home care services should first go to the workers; and it would then be up to the unions to collect dues – on their own – from those who freely choose to join.Earlier this summer, after a major push by SEIU and other progressive activists, legislation that had been on the back burner was rammed through Rhode Island’s General Assembly and signed by the Governor. This new law could transfer control of the home care services industry from the private sector to the government and its union allies. This proposed rule, by removing the government as its potential partner, would create less of an incentive for SEIU to attempt to unionize this industry.
At the same time, the burden on state taxpayers would rise, as the government would surely provide frivolous and unnecessary benefits to allow unions to offer a more compelling reason to unionize.
The new law in Rhode Island seeks to lure home care workers, most of whom are now employed under a successfully operating private ‘agency’ system, to register with the government, becoming quasi-public employees, with their names and other personal information then to be turned over to SEIU labor bosses for the purposes of unionization efforts.
Policymakers in Rhode Island strove to make this look like some sort of system innovation to provide better services, but it’s just an opening for labor unions to collect a cut of federal money.
