There are some very excited clerks in Indianapolis who have been interested in joining the union since 2006, when the UPS Freight organizing drive began here.Said Kevin McCaffrey, president of Teamsters Local 707 in New York,
The clerical workers in Long Island who signed cards and are now represented by the Teamsters are eager for more workers to sign cards, so we can get down to the business of negotiating a contract for them.Welcome aboard!
On August 19, 2011, the Joint Council 25 Charitable Trust celebrated its 8th Annual All-Charity Event in suburban Bensenville, welcoming more than 200 golfers donating more than $160,000.Over the past eight years, the Joint Council has raised more than $1.5 million for charities in Illinois and Indiana.
A push to privatize South Florida prisons is already $25 million over budget, even though nothing has happened, thanks to the exorbitant cost of paying for the vacation and sick leave for the 4,000 corrections employees the move would get rid of. The department last week also scrapped plans to privatize health-care services in its prisons statewide.
Both initiatives were pushed by Republicans to save costs.You don't have to be a criminologist who studies prison privatization to know why it's a bad idea. But here is one such criminologist who trashed Florida's plan. Again, the Sentinel:
Michael Hallett, chair of UNF’s criminology program and author of Private Prisons in America, ...(wrote) “There are so many serious problems with this RFP that it is not easy to digest in one document,” he wrote in the memo he sent to Fasano.
Hallett ... said ... the program could cost the state more money instead of saving it dollars. The biggest problem, he said, is that the the state indicates that it favors awarding the contract for 18 counties to a single vendor.
...The term of the prospective contract will be five (5) years with one five (5) year renewal available.
Hallett argues that this would favor an industry already dominated by just a few companies, making it difficult to create cost efficiencies.
“It renders the state subject to captivity once the contract is awarded, by giving one corporation so much power and control over such a significant segment of the state budget,” he said.Cory McCray hasn't written a book about prison privatization. He's a young union activist from Baltimore. But he nails the problem with privatizing government services. In a nutshell: less government accountability, rampant misclassification of independent contractors and loss of good middle-class government jobs.
Staffers at the Houston office of GOP Rep. John Culberson (R) must have gotten quite a surprise on Thursday when they looked outside to see more than 100 constituents gathered for a funeral. But this wasn’t a typical funeral — these Texans were gathered to mourn the loss of good, high-wage jobs in their state.
Mourners circled around a mock casket for “Good Jobs,” and Taps played in the background while Rev. Louis Dorsey eulogized. “I used to be middle class!” one woman cried out during the ceremony. Constituents also chanted “Hey, hey, what do you say? How many jobs have you killed today?”