Category Archives: Unions

The Subversive Power of Doughnuts

Posted on May 24, 2023 by | 77 comments

Clever Republicans have found a new tool for destroying our schools.

by Steve Haner

Let me get this straight. An elected member of the General Assembly comes to school buildings to give doughnuts to teachers in honor of Teacher Appreciation Week and the leftist Democrat agitators of the teachers’ union are “triggered”? They whine about her generosity to the gutless school management, which then caves to the weak-minded and bans any future acts of kindness?

In Virginia?

Apparently true, and get this, it wasn’t Fox News telling the story, but Virginia’s new media outlet of record, the lefty online Virginia Mercury. Graham Moomaw reported it, in a fairly straight article yesterday. I waited for someone else to post and comment here, but then recalled our namesake host (this is his kind of story) is otherwise engaged. I won’t mention where but be jealous.

Del. Amanda Batten

Amanda Batten, who worked in the Capitol as a legislative aide before winning the seat when her boss retired, is just nice. I’ve known her for years.  She’s nice. She brought a pile of doughnut boxes to schools in her district, yes with her name on the boxes, and yes, she used campaign dollars to pay for them. Plenty of legislators across the state have made small charitable donations out of those accounts, and that should be allowed. Yes, it is partly a name ID gimmick. So what?

That of course became a focus for Virginia Mercury, what reporters call the hook, the campaign dollar issue. It has to keep up its lefty, Pecksniffian credentials. But the real story is that licensed, educated, professional teachers, presumably adults, actually went into spasms of fear and loathing because a (gasp) Republican legislator entered the building and provided a treat. That is what “triggered” means, right? Perhaps her being a parent made it worse?

From Moomaw’s story: Continue reading →

77 Comments

Posted in Culture wars, Education (K-12), Unions

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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

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The Strike at the AdvanSix Chemical Plant in Hopewell – A Complex Story

Posted on April 17, 2023 by | 16 comments

AdvanSix Chemicals Plant Hopewell Virginia Courtesy AdvanSix

by James C. Sherlock

We don’t see very many industrial strikes in Virginia.

Regular readers know that I have often supported blue collar unions in the private economy.

My family roots are linked to Pennsylvania coal mines. Those miners’ strongest claims were for their own safety. Followed very closely by their demands for living wages.

I started researching the story of the current strike by unions representing some 340 workers at the AdvantSix chemical plant in Hopewell with a bias towards supporting the strike.

Safety. I still do support it to the degree that they are striking for worker and plant safety. They reasonably want the company to prevent excessive overtime of current employees under inherently dangerous conditions that require close attention to detail.

Hopewell employees tell stories of consecutive 18-hour shifts.

They want the company to hire more workers to solve that.

But that workforce is far more skilled — better educated and trained, and higher paid – than I assumed.

AdvanSix has been unable to readily fill the jobs that they already advertise. It is hard to attract skilled workers to Hopewell. The company may need to cut production instead.

Wages. I thought I would also support the union wage increase demands in excess of what the company has offered, but I have found that issue is complicated and the public does not have a clear picture of the differences. Continue reading →

16 Comments

Posted in Business and Economy, Environment, Government Oversight, Inflation, Labor & workforce, Manufacturing, Recession, Regulation, Uncategorized, Unions

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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

What Do We Owe To and Expect from a Special Ed Teacher?

Posted on February 27, 2023 by | 16 comments

Abigail Zwerner
Courtesy AP

by James C. Sherlock

On February 16, USA Today published a story by Jeanine Santucci. That is the latest in an excellent series of reports on the shooting of Newport News first grade teacher Abigail Zwerner.

Her article, “Virginia 6-year-old who shot his teacher exposes flaws in how schools treat students with disabilities.” raises questions that Virginians need to answer.

  • What, exactly, do we expect of special education teachers and what do we owe them?
  • What training and resources must we provide?
  • How do we keep them safe?
  • How do we get enough people to accept the challenges and risks?

Any school official or teacher will tell you:

  • That the best-organized parents in K-12 education are special-ed parents;
  • That federal law is very prescriptive and provides little room for error on the part of the schools;
  • That schools’ (meaning taxpayers’) liability for error is open-ended; and
  • That special-ed continues to get more challenging, especially after COVID accelerated the number of emotionally disturbed children and adolescents.

Few school divisions will claim to have any of that under control.

 JLARC in 2020 concurred with that assessment in Virginia.

Longstanding shortage of special education teachers persists, and many school divisions rely on under-prepared teachers to fill gaps.

IEPs are not consistently designed effectively.

School divisions are not consistently preparing students with disabilities for life after high school.

Continue reading →

16 Comments

Posted in Children and families, Crime , corrections and law enforcement, Culture wars, Education - Early Childhood, Education (K-12), General Assembly, Individual liberties, Mental illness and substance abuse, Parental Rights, Psychology, Public employee unions, Unions

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Coal in Virginia

Posted on February 22, 2023 by | 53 comments

From Virginia Coal, An Abridged History.

by James C. Sherlock

When we talk of coal today, which is seldom, it is usually not treated well.

It is easy to forget (if some even know) that coal powered the industrial revolution, made America the richest nation in the world and fueled American war production that supported allied victories in both world wars in the 20th century.

Coal powered nearly everything starting in the early part of the 19th century. Power plants, trains, ships, and virtually anything else powered by steam used coal to boil the water.

The iron and then steel-making process depended then, and still does, on coking coal.

Coal — and the co-dependent railroads — played big roles in Virginia history.

I strongly recommend to you Virginia Coal, An Abridged History. It was published in 1990 by the Virginia Center for Coal & Energy Research at Virginia Tech.

Continue reading →

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Posted in Business and Economy, Energy, Immigration, Labor & workforce, Mining, Transportation, Unions, Virginia history

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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 →

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

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Preparing for the Costs to Government of Virginia’s Generation COVID

Posted on January 4, 2023 by | 90 comments

John Littel, Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Resources

by James C. Sherlock

To justify her insistence on keeping schools closed, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in February of 2021, “kids are resilient and kids will recover.”

She brought that same message to Virginia.

In one of the strangest choices in Virginia political history, Terry McAuliffe brought Weingarten to Virginia to campaign with him on the last weekend of his losing gubernatorial campaign.

Thus sealing his defeat.

It turns out, as it was always going to, that you can’t keep kids out of school for up to a year and a quarter, homebound, and expect all of them to “recover.”

I will call here those in K-12 during COVID school shutdowns Generation COVID (Gen C).

I wrote the other day of an estimate by a renowned educational economist that the 1.2 million Gen C kids in Virginia public schools would lose several hundred billion dollars in lifetime earnings because of un-repaired damages to their learning of all types.

His critics here argued into the night about study methodology, but none denied costs at some level would be there. They did not offer their own estimates.

John Littel, Virginia’s Secretary of Health and Human Resources, has the job of preparing his agencies for the lifetime social costs of those children. Continue reading →

90 Comments

Posted in Budgets, Children and families, Culture wars, Education (K-12), Governance, Health Care, Mental illness and substance abuse, Psychology, Public employee unions, Public safety & health, Resilience, Unions

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Projected $312 Billion Cost of Lost Earnings of Virginia K-12 Students due to Pandemic School Closures

Posted on January 2, 2023 by | 98 comments

Courtesy Eric Hanushek

by James C. Sherlock

Over $312 billion in present value.

That is the estimate published by Stanford’s Eric A. Hanushek of expected economic losses attributable to Virginia’s pandemic school closures.

Virginia students in the COVID cohort can expect on average 5.5 percent lower lifetime earnings.

History indicates that the economic losses will be permanent unless the schools get better. Just returning schools to their pre-pandemic performance levels will not erase the lost learning.

Recovering from the pandemic requires swift and decisive improvements to the schools.

That number is an estimate, but a scientific one. Dr. Hanushek has better credentials with which to make that estimate than perhaps any other economist in the world.

For perspective, the $312 billion present value of projected losses to the Virginia economy due to COVID school shutdowns represents about seven years of state revenue realized from Virginia sources in the 2021 and 2022 biennium.

Even the money pales by comparison to the developmental and emotional damage done to the children.

But feel better.

His estimate of similar losses to California exceeds $1.2 trillion. Continue reading →

98 Comments

Posted in Business and Economy, Economic development, Education (K-12), Public employee unions, Unions

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Virginia’s Northam Learning Gap

Posted on December 4, 2022 by | 38 comments

by L. Scott Ligamfelter

It should surprise no one. After the ill-conceived March 2020 closing of Virginia’s public schools by former Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam, it should have been evident that children would suffer academically.

We now know the extent of that damage to fourth and eighth grade students. Virginia’s Secretary of Education, Aimee Rogstad Guidera, put it aptly. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results, she said, offer a “clear and heart-wrenching” statement on the “catastrophic decline” and a “predictable outcome of the decade-long systemic dismantling of a foundational commitment to excellence in education.” It didn’t have to be. What followed was a complete failure in virtual education. In the process, children fell victim to the self-absorbed politics of teachers’ unions and a complete disregard of the medical evidence from European countries that school-aged children were not at increased threat to contract COVID-19.

Moreover, the teachers’ unions saw the COVID-19 closing as an opportunity to keep schools shuttered while they lobbied for more pay and fatter school budgets once the pandemic crisis passed. A cynical assessment? Yes. But even when high schoolers in my county of Prince William returned to classrooms in 2021, teachers remained out, preferring to instruct kids virtually even as their students sat in segmented classroom space watching their teacher on a computer screen. It was farcical, and Virginia’s parents knew it.

Enter Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, who correctly characterized parental outrage in Virginia, not only for the elongated closure of public schools, but also for the “woke pandemic” spread by liberal school boards bent on indoctrinating children to be social justice warriors. Of almost no concern to these latter-day commissars was the performance of our kids and grandkids in reading, math, genuine history, and critical thinking skills. Mr. Youngkin listened to parents. In turn, they elected Mr. Youngkin because he pledged to realign educational priorities to those of parents, not woke administrators.

The governor is rightly indignant over the recent NAEP results and has committed to ensuring that Virginia children “have the tools and support structure to get back on track.” Tutors, particularly in math and reading, are needed for our fourth graders. Reading scores for this segment were dismal, tumbling from seventh to 33rd place among all states. In math, fourth grade students barely reached the national average.

Continue reading →

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Posted in Attendance, Education (K-12), Parental Rights, Unions

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School Discipline Issues Meet Unshakeable Progressive Dogma

Posted on August 7, 2022 by | 44 comments

by James C. Sherlock

Moral panic has been defined as a:

…widespread feeling of fear, often an irrational one, that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society.

Virginia’s progressive community is in moral panic over the refusal of school discipline outcomes to bend to their prescriptions for “equity.” Scientific surveys conducted by the state show teachers are scared of their students. In Virginia Beach.

To see that panic in action, read the comments on my article, “Why are Teachers Quitting? In Virginia Beach, It May Not Be “Mean Parents.”

Combative progressive comments offer a clinic on the subject.

Let’s look deeper to see sources of the progressive concerns. Continue reading →

44 Comments

Posted in Discipline and disorder, Education (K-12), Media, Unions

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Unionize Virginia’s Worst Nursing Home Chains

Posted on April 25, 2022 by | 8 comments

by James C. Sherlock

If you go back to the series of articles I published here in October of 2021, you can refresh your memory on the dangers represented by Virginia’s worst nursing home chains.

If you look at the complete spreadsheet of every Virginia nursing home from that data sorted by ownership, the bad actors jump off the page. Their business models treat understaffing as a feature, not a problem. The fact that it endangers their employees and kills their patients seems not to matter.

The Commonwealth’s executive and legislative branches have for a very long time absolutely ignored their responsibilities as the state legislature and as the state executive regulator, federal and state inspector and state licensor of nursing homes, respectively. There is as yet no sign that will improve. I have hopes the new administration will step up to those responsibilities, but we’ll have to wait and see.

For now, the only fix that appears viable is unionization of the work forces of the bad actors. I encourage their employees to do it for themselves and their patients. Continue reading →

8 Comments

Posted in General Assembly, Governance, Government Oversight, Health Care, Labor & workforce, Long Term Care and Nursing Homes, Political Influence, Unions

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Richmond Starbucks Employees Vote to Unionize

Posted on April 20, 2022 by | 51 comments

Photo credit: Tag24

by James A. Bacon

Employees at five Starbucks coffee stores in the Richmond area have voted for union representation — and I’m just fine with that. I oppose public-sector unions for reasons frequently enumerated on this blog. But if private-sector employees want to band together to increase their bargaining power with management, that’s their right in a free society. I wish them all the luck in the world. With paychecks shredded by an 8.5% surge in the cost of living in the past year, they need all the help they can get.

Employees voted for the union by a wide margin, reports The Richmond Times-Dispatch. The vote followed a union loss in a representation election in Springfield last week, according to Tag24, These votes were part of a larger organizing campaign conducted by the Northern Virginia Labor Federation and Workers United. Twenty Starbucks stores have now unionized nationally, and 220 others have sought elections.

WUSF Public Media delves into the issues at Virginia Starbucks stores. Continue reading →

51 Comments

Posted in Labor & workforce, Unions

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Richmond Parents and Taxpayers, Welcome to Chicago Public Schools

Posted on March 16, 2022 by | 20 comments

by James C. Sherlock

The gulf between what the City of Richmond School Board (RSB) and the Richmond City Council (RCC) on what will be negotiated with their public unions is actually an ocean.

The RSB has authorized the negotiation of virtually everything about how the schools are run. It leaves nothing off the table except the right to strike and the right to negotiate a closed shop (Virginia is still a right to work state), both of which state law still prohibits. But the unions can negotiate what are essentially the work rules of a closed shop.

In contrast, the City Council is poised to pass an ordinance on May 5th from two candidate drafts, one from Mayor Stoney and the other from three Council members. The Mayor’s version states what will be negotiated — pay and benefits. The other states what will not be negotiated with an eleven-point description of the City’s Rights and Authorities.

The City Council drafts, especially the Mayor’s, have it right. They note the City Council’s duties under the laws of Virginia and to the citizens of their city.

Not so the school board. The RSB resolution acknowledges only one stakeholder: its unions.

Unmentioned in the RSB resolution is exactly who is going to represent the city in its negotiations with its unions. Ideally it will be a team composed of City Council (finance) and School Board subject-matter experts. If so the city reps will be operating under two sets of negotiating rules in direct opposition to one another.

I’d buy a ticket, but maybe under the sunshine laws negotiations will be on TV. Continue reading →

20 Comments

Posted in Budgets, Children and families, Education (K-12), Finance (government), Governance, Government workers and pensions, Labor & workforce, Public employee unions, Unions, Virginia Law

Know the Terms of Surrender in Negotiating With Teachers Unions

Posted on March 15, 2022 by | 14 comments

Courtesy of Show Me Institute

by James C. Sherlock

Franklin Roosevelt thought collective bargaining agreements incompatible with public sector work.

Today’s left, unburdened by the public interest, finds FDR’s principles at best quaint.

Since May of last year collective bargaining is legal in Virginia for local government employees by local option, but for not state employees.

The issues most people think of being negotiated by unions are pay and benefits and, in blue collar unions, on-the-job safety. For teachers unions, we need to be sure negotiations are limited to pay and benefits, or they will take over the running of the schools.

Such a takeover is now policy in Richmond Public Schools. Continue reading →

14 Comments

Posted in Education (K-12), Governance, Government workers and pensions, Labor & workforce, Media, Political Influence, Public employee unions, Taxes, Unions

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