Tag "union power"

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CTA expects to lose landmark Supreme Court case

The most recent State Worker column by Jon Ortiz in the Sacramento Bee said 2016 was “perhaps the most significant year for government workers in decades” because of the Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association case, which the U.S. Supreme Court

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Unlike Brown, Hawaii gov took on teachers — and paid

As someone who went to college in Hawaii and spent eight years there as a journalist, I know the state’s politics pretty well. It is so solidly Democrat that it only has one Republican in its state senate. This monolithic

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CA mayor’s car vandalized; all assume it was a cop or firefighter

On its surface a Tuesday story in the San Luis Obispo Tribune is a funny, mordant comment on small-town politics in California. But if you dig a little, it turns out to be related to yet another pathetic, union-favoring power

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Attorney for plaintiffs in bullet-train lawsuit suggests way out

Michael J. Brady, the Redwood City attorney for Kings County and other parties suing the California High-Speed Rail Authority, offers his theory on the easiest, cleanest way for Gov. Jerry Brown to abandon the bullet-train fiasco. This is from an

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Will GOP learn from Faulconer’s win in San Diego?

San Diego voters elected affable, seemingly moderate Republican Councilman Kevin Faulconer as mayor in a special election Tuesday night, making him the biggest large-city GOP mayor in the United States. But before Republicans tout Faulconer’s unexpectedly decisive 9 percentage point

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Will Kamala Harris monkey-wrench CA pension reform — again?

I’ve been following California politics obsessively since 1990, and I simply have never seen an editorial like the Los Angeles Times’ piece Friday exhorting Attorney General Kamala Harris to do an ethical and honest job in preparing a ballot statement for

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Michal Bloomberg’s candor beats Jerry Brown’s candor — by a mile

Jack Dean of the invaluable pensiontsunami.com website sent me a Politicker story about departing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s exit speech that Bloomberg plainly intended to be a historic demarcation of sorts. Bloomberg hammered home the theme that what

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‘Paycheck protection’: CA shouldn’t give up hope on checking unions yet

After the failure of three ballot attempts in the past 15 years to require unions to give their members veto power over the use of their dues for political purposes, Californians hoping for a better balance of power in local

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BART strike would provide needed clarity on compensation, union power

If I was an advisor to Gov. Jerry Brown, I’d recommend he let the BART strike play out without government intervention. California would be much more governable if voters understood that collective bargaining is holding taxpayers hostage, and more exposure

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BART fight spurs anti-union backlash — from Democrats

The prospect that well-paid Bay Area Rapid Transit system workers with lavish benefits and little-known perks might inconvenience rich white-collar liberals in the San Francisco area has finally triggered an intraparty battle of the kind that California Democrats have somehow

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