Category Archives: Government workers and pensions

The Virginia State Budget and the Rising Costs of Registered Nurses

Posted on September 4, 2023 by | 7 comments

by James C. Sherlock

I was asked yesterday by a reader about the relationship between nursing homes, rising registered nurse salaries and the new Virginia budget agreement.

Good questions. Virginia’s workforce includes nearly 70,000 registered nurses.

The state pays its workers, but it also pays its Medicaid share for private sector nurses. Pay for private sector workers is based upon market conditions. The market wage for registered nurses nationwide increased dramatically during COVID.

Perhaps the only good thing to come out of that mess was that registered nurses, of whom Virginia has 11% fewer than demand calculated by the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, got very large pay and bonus raises, and the new wage points appear to have stuck.

If the laws of economics work here, that will over time increase the number of nurses if we can educate and train them in the required numbers.

The latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for all states show that the median wage for an RN in Virginia was $79,700 a year. In Northern Virginia portion of the D.C. metro area, the median was $92,800.  The underlying data are a couple of years old.

Wages and bonuses can vary a lot among Virginia hospitals, nursing homes, home health agencies, nursing school staff and government employees, and are higher or lower depending on specialty. The private sector offers $10,000 to  $20,000 signing bonuses paid out after the first year.

Employers of course must pay payroll taxes and other expenses related to employees, and thus their costs will generally exceed $100,000 per RN.

Virginia RNs are still underpaid compared to national figures. The mean annual wage for America’s 3 million registered nurses in May was $89,010 compared to Virginia’s $79,900.

The federal Centers for Medicare/Medicaid Services, aware of some of the questionable business models of bad actors in the nursing home industry, published last week a proposed rule to both increase the minimum number of RNs in nursing facilities and to require all nursing facilities to reveal every year how much of the Medicare and Medicaid payouts go to salaries and related expenses.

So, Medicare and Medicaid costs will go up yet again. Continue reading →

7 Comments

Posted in Budgets, Change Management, Federal, Finance (government), General Assembly, Governance, Government Oversight, Government workers and pensions, Health Care, Labor & workforce, Long Term Care and Nursing Homes, Medicaid, Regulation

Tagged

Check Out Which New Virginia Laws Go Into Effect July 1st

Posted on June 30, 2023 by | 11 comments

by The Republican Standard staff

The Virginia General Assembly passed several small bills due to the split between the Republican-led House of Delegates and the Democratic-controlled Virginia State Senate. Yet the areas where they did find co-operation could matter to many Virginians as we head into Fourth of July weekend.

Enhanced Penalties for Fentanyl Manufacturing or Distribution
Reeves SB1188 Senate 35-5 House 50-42
Provides that any person who knowingly and intentionally manufactures or knowingly and intentionally distributes a weapon of terrorism when such person knows that such weapon of terrorism is, or contains, any mixture or substance containing a detectable amount of fentanyl is guilty of a Class 4 felony.

Universal Occupational License Recognition
McDougle SB1213 Senate 40-0 House 99-0
Establishes criteria for an individual licensed, certified, or having work experience in another state to apply to a regulatory board within the Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation and be issued an occupational license or government certification if certain conditions are met.

Police Chiefs May Enact Local Curfews during Disturbances
Norment SB1455 Senate 27-12 House 53-45
Enables the chief law-enforcement officer of a locality to enact a curfew under certain circumstances during a civil disturbance.

Making Sure Every District has a Legislator
Suetterlein SB944 Senate 39-0 House 99-0
Requires special elections to fill a vacancy in the membership of the General Assembly be held within 30 days of the vacancy if the vacancy occurs or will occur between December 10 and March 10 which coincides with time right before and during the General Assembly session. Continue reading →

11 Comments

Posted in Business and Economy, Courts and law, Crime , corrections and law enforcement, Economic development, Elections, Finance (government), General Assembly, Governance, Government Oversight, Government workers and pensions, Law enforcement, Politics, Regulation, Uncategorized, Virginia Law

Tagged

VRS “Diet COLA” Squeezes Pensions Second Time

Posted on June 16, 2023 by | 20 comments

by Steve Haner

Virginia’s “Diet COLA” approach to calculating annual inflation increases to Virginia Retirement System pensions has constrained the increases once again.  Beneficiaries will see a benefit increase of 5% effective July 1, up from the 3.85% increase they received a year ago.

Both are below what they would have been if the increase had simply matched the full annual change in the consumer price index. The CPI-U measure of inflation for the calendar year 2021 was 4.7% and for 2022 was 8.0%.  The compounded rise was 13%.  But instead of rising those amounts, the VRS retirement benefits will have risen less than 10% over two years.  (Those figures have been corrected since the initial posting.)   Continue reading →

20 Comments

Posted in Budgets, Government workers and pensions

Tagged

Countering the VEA… on a Shoestring Budget

Posted on June 16, 2023 by | 13 comments

The Internet ad displayed above, produced by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, reached 12,000 Virginia teachers. The return on the modest investment has been impressive. Says Co-President Chris Braunlich: “Inquiries about alternative educator associations are pouring in. Some have already cancelled their union membership (taking $700 in annual dues with them).”
— JAB

13 Comments

Posted in Education (K-12), Government workers and pensions, Unions

Tagged

Deflating Degree Inflation

Posted on June 3, 2023 by | 30 comments

by Robin Beres

In May 2021, The Harvard Business Review featured a column by Michael Hansen, CEO of Cengage Learning titled, “The U.S. Education System Isn’t Giving Students What Employers Need.”

Hansen argued that today’s education system is not equipping students “with the skills and capabilities to prepare for a career where they can obtain financial stability.”

It’s no secret the pandemic drastically upended the American workforce. After millions of workers lost their jobs and were sent home, they began to appreciate the value of downtime and a stress-free lifestyle. So much so that many of those newly-unemployed were reluctant to return to the nine-to-five grind.

Businesses, anxious to be up and running again, have been desperate to get warm bodies back on their payrolls and in the office. Many CEOs have come to realize that degree-inflation — requiring an often-unnecessary bachelor’s degree for entry- and mid-level positions — has been a barrier to bringing on good, hard-working men and women.

These types of jobs can include well-paying positions such as regional managers, supervisors, support specialists, administrative workers, and countless others. While a kid right out of high school may not have the skills necessary for many of these jobs, someone who has worked in the field for five or 10 years or more usually has picked up the qualifications necessary to do the work well.

Last week, Gov. Glenn Youngkin joined six other state governors in a trend that began last year when he announced that the Old Dominion will no longer require college degrees for nearly 90 percent of state government jobs. It will also no longer give higher preference to degree holders. Every year, Virginia state agencies advertise more than 20,000 job openings. Continue reading →

30 Comments

Posted in Business and Economy, Education (higher ed), Government workers and pensions, Labor & workforce, Uncategorized

Tagged

Read It and Weep – DEI at UVa

Posted on May 18, 2023 by | 124 comments

Navy helicopter overflies UVa Disharoon Park as team stands at attention for national anthem. Photos By Sanjay Suchak, sanjay@virginia.edu

by James C. Sherlock

Kerry Daugherty’s column this morning was heart-wrenching for anyone who cares at all about kids’ educations.  The Norfolk School Board voted 6-1…

to begin teaching gender ideology, masturbation, sexual identity, homosexuality, abortion and lesbianism in middle and high schools.

To kids who cannot read or perform mathematics at grade level.

Now we get a look at what awaits any kid who escapes Norfolk public schools with sufficient skills and diversity credits to get accepted into the University of Virginia (UVa).

They will be welcomed by a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy so large, powerful and widely distributed that a DEI factotum will:

  • review and grade their application in the recruitment process;
  • exercise authority over the curriculum and faculty;
  • monitor their progress; and
  • interview each candidate for graduate school and meet with each annually to assess political views.

If I just told you how this works as above, you would think I was making it up.

So I will quote from UVa’s website. Continue reading →

124 Comments

Posted in Civil Rights, Culture wars, Education (higher ed), Freedom, Government workers and pensions, Individual liberties, Marxism, Taxes

Tagged

Major Actions to Reduce Corporate Overhead Offer Lessons and Opportunities to Virginia Government

Posted on May 16, 2023 by | 27 comments

Courtesy Wall Street Journal

by James C. Sherlock

The chart above shows that management and administrative overhead growth has been a trend not limited to government. The difference is that corporations are making quick and decisive strides in reversing the trend.

It is axiomatic that government should minimize overhead to maximize efficiency in delivery of services. And to lower its costs.

Efficiencies need to be found:

  • to maximize value for citizens;
  • to speed decision-making;
  • to minimize administrative consumption of the time and attention of front line workers; and
  • to restore freedom of speech suppressed by government bureaucracies assembled for that purpose.

All senior government managers would sign up for those goals — as theory. But execution is hard. Internal pressures against change are seldom exceeded by external ones that demand it.

An excellent report in the Wall Street Journal makes an observation that they may wish to consult for inspiration.

Companies are rethinking the value of many white-collar roles, in what some experts anticipate will be a permanent shift in labor demand that will disrupt the work life of millions of Americans whose jobs will be lost, diminished or revamped partly through the use of artificial intelligence.

‘We may be at the peak of the need for knowledge workers,’ said Atif Rafiq, a former chief digital officer at McDonald’s and Volvo. ‘We just need fewer people to do the same thing.’

Continue reading →

27 Comments

Posted in Budgets, Change Management, Efficiency in government, Finance (government), General Assembly, Governance, Government workers and pensions, Labor & workforce, Public employee unions

Tagged

Teachers’ Unions and Virginia Schools

Posted on May 10, 2023 by | 15 comments

Courtesy VEA

by James C. Sherlock

Virginia is a government union state.

Because of the federal workforce in Northern Virginia, Virginia in 2021 had the third highest percentage of any state of government union members as a share of total union members at 64%.

That is a higher percentage than Washington D.C.

Of all employees in Virginia, 22.5% worked for the government in 2021. Virginia is one of only seven states over 20%. D.C. is 29%.

The National Teachers’ Unions. Many Virginia teachers and support personnel belong to local teacher’s associations and unions that are affiliates of the two major national public school teacher’s unions, the National Education Association (NEA, 3 million members) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT, 1.7 million members).

Together they represent one in four union members in the U.S. The leadership of both are hard-core progressives.

Those national numbers of members are provided by the two unions and include retirees. In 2021 together they had about 3.6 million working members.

In the years 2019-21, the National Center for Education Statistics counted three million teachers in public schools and 500,000 in private schools. But the NEA and AFT represent large numbers of other school staff to account for the apparent discrepancy.

The two unions are overtly political and focused on social issues warfare.

In Virginia, the two national unions claim 45,000 members, which, since they both include large numbers of non-teacher staff, means together they represent significantly less than half of Virginia teachers. Continue reading →

15 Comments

Posted in Children and families, Culture wars, Education (K-12), General Assembly, Government workers and pensions, Uncategorized, Unions

Tagged

Tuition, Room, Board and Fees Up 7% Next Year at Tech – Zero Cuts in Massive Administrative Overhead

Posted on April 25, 2023 by | 92 comments

Letitia “Tish” Long

by James C. Sherlock

From The Roanoke Times

Faced with inflationary pressures and state budget uncertainty, the school’s Board of Visitors voted unanimously to markup overall student costs by about 7%, increasing tuition and fees, plus room and board.

It was not an easy decision, said Rector Tish Long.

”This is one of the most important and most difficult decisions that this board has had to make,’ Long said. ‘This is a very difficult decision, and we did and continue to take everyone’s comments into account.’

Rector Long did not mention how easy it was to not cut administrative overhead:

  • No data required;
  • No difficult discussions;
  • No strained decisions;
  • No dispirited looks from the University President;
  • Let’s break for lunch. Early.

Tech’s Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, who would be the one to recommend cuts, is enthusiastic about that school’s “Administrative Transformation” project.

He notes that he has an Administrative and Professional (A/P) Faculty job architecture project underway. Alas, the obstacles include:

Currently there are over 2,400 A/P faculty positions with over 1,800 unique titles. This lack of structure creates inconsistent pay and titling practices — which can unintentionally create pay equity issues — as well as makes it difficult to benchmark salaries to the external market.

It makes it quite difficult to make cuts when the University COO has no idea what all those people do. Continue reading →

92 Comments

Posted in Change Management, Education (higher ed), Efficiency in government, General Assembly, Government Oversight, Government workers and pensions, Planning, Public corruption

Tagged

Assault and Battery in Schools – Virginia Law and School Division Policies Make “Marks” of Principals

Posted on April 15, 2023 by | 10 comments

by James C. Sherlock

This is addressed directly to Virginia public school principals.

You are compliant with current Virginia law whether you report assault and battery to police or do not.

Bad law makes for bad policy.

Depending upon your school division, your requirements may vary. A lot.

In gambling, and this issue is a big gamble for you, if you don’t know who the mark is, it is you.

The current law on reporting of assault and battery to police reflects a poorly conceived and poorly written attempt by Virginia Democrats in 2020 to break what they called the “school-to-prison pipeline.” They made reporting to police conditional upon on-scene medical and legal findings – by you.

The Board of Education has done nothing to improve the matter. School divisions are all over the spectrum on what to do about reporting. You cannot carry out either the law or many of the school division policies without personal jeopardy. Continue reading →

10 Comments

Posted in Children and families, Civil Rights, Courts and law, Crime , corrections and law enforcement, Culture wars, Discipline and disorder, Education (K-12), General Assembly, Government workers and pensions, Law enforcement, Scandals, Unions

Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” and the Suppression of Debate

Posted on April 8, 2023 by | 71 comments

Herbert Marcuse. Courtesy Britannica

by James C. Sherlock

There have been countless articles here on the tyranny of the left on Virginia college campuses. And nationwide.

I need not summarize them here.

But I think it useful on a weekend to consider the origins of that movement to better understand it.

It did not spring up randomly, and it continues to flow from its source, Herbert Marcuse and his book Repressive Tolerance (1965)*.

Marcuse abandoned the working class as a source of subversion of capitalism in 1964’s The One-Dimensional Man.  He

put his faith in an alliance between radical intellectuals and those groups not yet integrated into one-dimensional society, the socially marginalized, the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other ethnicities and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable.

You may recognize that target coalition.

Herbert Marcuse has been the campus left’s philosopher since the 60’s radicals were suckled on his writings and remained in academia. Their students have come now to dominate the heights of the culture, including academia, Hollywood, the media, and teachers’ unions.

What I call the “stupid right,” more useful to the left than to conservatism, seeks to use some of Marcuse’s tactics in an equally destructive way. But they remain a fringe.

They seek a different coalition, most of which utterly rejects them.

Because they are destructive of society. Continue reading →

71 Comments

Posted in Culture wars, Education - Early Childhood, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), General Assembly, Government workers and pensions, Individual liberties, Marxism, Politics

Tagged

Private Hospitals show Virginia’s State Hospitals, Colleges and Universities the Way to Efficiency

Posted on March 9, 2023 by | 46 comments

Valley Health Winchester Medical Center

by James C. Sherlock

We read far too often about funding “crises” in government institutions and programs.

The general public, me included, would be far more attentive and sometimes supportive if government would follow the lead of private companies and continually right-size itself and emphasize customer-facing services.

The health care industry — or rather the private healthcare industry — consistently shows the way.

Even not-for-profits are not for losses.

Count, if you can, the number of times in your life that a government organization has announced job cutbacks in administration in order to optimize expenditures and provide better service.

Yeah, me neither.

Students at one of my favorite state schools (it is northwest of Richmond and west of Orange County) are protesting that their faculty is underpaid.

The solution to that problem, if indeed the Board of Visitors considers it a problem, writes itself. Continue reading →

46 Comments

Posted in Children and families, Education (higher ed), Government Oversight, Government workers and pensions, Health Care

Tagged

Richmond’s Skinny Budget: Low Stakes Poker, High Stakes Rhetoric

Posted on February 27, 2023 by | 9 comments

by Shaun Kenney

Virginia’s General Assembly managed to pass the Richmond equivalent of a continuing resolution to fund the government until Senate Democrats and House Republicans can hammer out a compromise on corporate tax breaks.

One will have to pardon me for not getting terribly wound up about tax breaks for corporations while small businesses and working families are struggling with back-to-back  years of 9 percent inflation from Washington.

Meanwhile, much of the damage done by the Northam administration with regard to Critical Race Theory, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) requirements, gender ideology, and the long litany of progressive efforts to remake Virginia were left both untouched and unchallenged.

Even school choice — the marquee legislation championed by Lt. Governor Winsome Sears — was left to die in committee.

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are promising a “brick wall” against House Republicans until they get what they want — in other words, reneging on the pledge from conferees to honor a $950 million tax cut. The stopgap fixes the $200 million shortfall snafu created by the Virginia Department of Education’s spreadsheet, puts another $25 million into the Virginia Retirement System, and another $100 million towards cost overruns for existing building infrastructure. What mystifies most is that the Senate Democrats haven’t been precisely clear on what they want beyond platitudes for higher salaries for bureaucrats, public education, higher education, etc. Continue reading →

9 Comments

Posted in Budgets, Culture wars, Efficiency in government, Elections, Finance (government), General Assembly, Governance, Government workers and pensions, Leadership, Taxes, Uncategorized

Tagged

Unconstitutional Viewpoint Discrimination in Virginia K-12 Teacher Evaluation Standards

Posted on February 25, 2023 by | 31 comments

Daniel Gecker Esq., President of the Virginia Board of Education. Appointed to the Board of Education by Governor Terry McAuliffe and reappointed to a four year term by Governor Ralph Northam. Date of expiration of appointment – June 30, 2023

by James C. Sherlock

Progressives, in the fullness of their dogma, oppose the entire Bill of Rights.

The Bill of Rights is specifically structured to limit the powers of government, which progressives find not only unsuitable, but unimaginable.

In the Golden Age of Progressivism in Virginia, 2020 and 2021, they controlled the governor’s mansion, the General Assembly, the Attorney General’s Office and all of the state agencies.

With total control, they took flight.

They have always known what seldom occurs to conservatives not prone to offend the Bill of Rights.

With total control of state government, progressives can enact and have enacted laws, regulations and policies that violate both the federal and state constitutions.

They know it will take a decade or more for courts to push back. Meanwhile they can call opponents “haters.”

After which the worst that can happen is that nobody is held accountable. Except the taxpayers.

I just exposed unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination in the University of Virginia’s hiring process. that was implemented starting in 2020.

The same fertile progressive imagination is also present in the Board of Education’s new (in 2021) Standard 6. “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Equitable Practices performance indicators” (starting on page xv) in “Guidelines for Uniform Performance Standards and Evaluation Criteria for Teachers“(Guidelines). Continue reading →

31 Comments

Posted in Civil Rights, Courts and law, Culture wars, Democracy and Western Civilization, Education (K-12), Ethics, Freedom, General Assembly, Governance, Government workers and pensions, Individual liberties, Parental Rights

Tagged

RVA 5×5: Needed Resources for Human Resources

Posted on February 19, 2023 by | Leave a comment

by Jon Baliles

Last week we had a story about a glut of open positions at Richmond’s City Hall and the difficulty in filling them. Lo and behold, the Richmond Free Press this week put out an article about the struggle to fill positions as the department responsible for filling those positions (Human Resources, aka HR) is upside down and employees are being told to reapply for their jobs. In case you didn’t read last week’s edition, the HR department has a lot of vacancies which makes it hard to fill any vacancy in any department. HR “is involved in every aspect of employee services, from hiring and retention to designing and administering classification, compensation and performance evaluations, overseeing employee data, handling employee grievances and providing training and development.”

Think of it like a clogged sink — it takes forever for the water to get through. And reporter Jeremy Lazarus notes that word has leaked out that everyone in the department was “told at a staff meeting in early February and urged to reapply for new positions that are being advertised, but that there were no guarantees they would have jobs. But three department employees have separately told the Free Press that effective Friday, all of the remaining full-time employees are to be laid off except for the three top managers….”

And one employee spoke directly but anonymously: “We’ve been told our department is the heartbeat of City Hall, but we’ve been left in the dark. None of us knows what will happen. Maybe we’ll all get rehired. Even so there will be fewer people left to do the work,” the employee said, as result of the transfers that have already taken place.

“I don’t know how everything we’re involved with will get done,” one of the employees said. “The city is fortunate. Instead of running for the exits, for the most part, everyone has stayed on and kept focused on the work. But it becomes so stressful when the reward for loyalty is uncertainty and worry. This is not what we signed up for.”
Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Efficiency in government, Governance, Government workers and pensions, Public employee unions, Uncategorized, Unions

Tagged