Posts Tagged ‘collective bargaining’
Congressional clowns pass FAA funding bill – after 23 tries!
The U.S. Senate approved a $63 billion bill on Monday that funds U.S. aviation programs for four years and authorizes new steps for the government to modernize the air traffic system.
Senate lawmakers cleared the measure by a 75-to-20 vote, sending it to the White House for President Barack Obama’s signature. The House of Representatives approved it last week.
The compromise legislation sets out a blueprint for predictable funding of the Federal Aviation Administration, which receives about $15 billion annually to operate air traffic control centers at more than 400 airports. The agency also inspects commercial aircraft and oversees airline safety operations and airport improvement projects.
The agency has operated under 23 straight temporary spending bills since the previous long-term law authorizing its budget expired in 2007. The current stop-gap spending measure expires Feb. 17. A fight over federal spending prompted a partial shutdown of the FAA last summer for two weeks.
Congress has fought for the past four years over federal spending levels, fees, limits on airport uses and government subsidies for service to rural communities. Passage was assured, however, when House and Senate negotiators struck a surprise compromise last month on a provision affecting union elections at commercial carriers.
IMHO that’s what it all was about. Perish the thought our elected officials should make it easy for Americans who work at the politicized stockyards our airports have become – to exercise any right to organize for purposes of collective bargaining for wages and working conditions.
Not that Congressional Republicans or Blue Dog Democrats have a whole boatload of experience with an honest day’s work.
So, 23 tries over 4 years before our airports could count on stable funding.
Republican hatred of organized workers – shuts down the FAA
Think these people are freer without a Federal Aviation Administration?
Thousands of employees have been furloughed and dozens of major projects put on hold after Congress failed to reauthorize funding for the Federal Aviation Administration.
Air traffic controllers will remain on the job, but the furloughs have hit many engineers, scientists, computer specialists, community planners and others. Nearly 4,000 employees in 35 states, Washington and Puerto Rico have been told to stop work, according to the FAA.
Efforts to continue funding hit a stumbling block over House Republican efforts to make it harder for airline and rail workers to unionize and over a move to cut subsidies for air service to rural airports.
Congress adjourned Friday without passing legislation, causing funding to end at midnight that night…
The FAA said contractors have been told to stop work on dozens of projects across the country, including a $43 million project in Las Vegas and a $31 million project in Oakland, California, to build air traffic control towers.
Without new legislation, the government will also not be able to collect about $200 million a week in airline taxes that normally go to the Airport and Airway Trust Fund. A $2.5 billion program providing grants for airport construction projects was similarly forced to shut down.
Ideological elitists are going to have to climb down from their ivory towers sooner or later and understand that people outside of Congress need work, need jobs, need dignity and the right to organize and govern their own lives. Making collective political activity illegal does nothing for liberty. Even if it may optimize profits for corporations, enforcing limits on the lives and livelihoods of ordinary Americans will only fill a reservoir of discontent and ill will – that will eventually spill over onto the political landscape.
American voters are too easy at forgetting who screwed them from election to election. But, it’s easier to remind people nowadays. Cripes, all you need to do is crank up a press conference filled with Republican promises of jobs and match it side-by-side with the ZERO quantity of jobs/infrastructure legislation they have offered up since the last election.
Republicans hate choosy women, birth control, the right to have a union and now – they would get rid of public schools!
Three potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates expressed hostility toward the public school system at a home schooling rally on Wednesday in the early presidential caucus state of Iowa.
Texas Congressman Ron Paul told the crowd government wants “absolute control” of the “indoctrination” of children. Paul spoke along with Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and Georgia businessman Herman Cain.
“The public school system now is a propaganda machine,” Paul said, prompting applause from the crowd of hundreds of home schooling families. “They start with our kids even in kindergarten, teaching them about family values, sexual education, gun rights, environmentalism – and they condition them to believe in so much which is totally un-American.”
Bachmann said home schooling is the “essence” of freedom and liberty. “It’s about knowing our children better than the state knows our children,” she said.
“It is not up to a bureaucrat to decide what is best for your children,” Bachmann said, drawing cheers from the crowd. “I am so tired of the establishment telling us that they know best. We know best…”
Cain, former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza and another prospective Republican candidate, denounced government involvement in education at all levels.
“That’s all we want is for government to get out of the way so we can educate ourselves and our children the old-fashioned way,” Cain said.
Justin LaVan of the Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators said it was encouraging to see potential presidential candidates talking about the home-schooling movement.
“More importantly, talking about our Creator – our rights that came from our Creator, acknowledging that and giving him the glory, folks,” said LaVan, who served as master of ceremonies at the rally.
Hallelujah – have a snake!
I should say “seriously – something or other” right now; but, these retrograde demagogues can’t be taken seriously except as a threat to the Bill of Rights and the American Constitution.
We are a nation that has grown on the ethic of individual freedoms. Something these jokers include in every speech – while they advocate government control to prevent choice, government control to halt negotiated contracts between workers and employers, government control to monitor individuals who feel they have the freedom to choose family planning over mindless procreation – and if the government won’t step in and mandate allegiance to whichever religion is in favor this week among bible-thumping Republicans – well, then, they advocate crushing what opportunity there is in this land to provide free public education.
By the way, our rights came from the struggles of ordinary people who fought against reactionaries like this for decades to achieve what we have. Not from Charlton Heston marching down a movie mountainside. Even the freedom to be a religious nutcase came from political battles against oppressors ranging from Kings to Klan members.
Disclaimer: it makes me a bit sad even to call these fools Republicans. I grew up with traditional North American conservatives. People who cared for the dignity of those they disagreed with as strongly as their arguments. People who cared for the land and nature and the freedom of the ocean and prairie – as much as their pride in invention.
These people calling themselves Republicans, today, are less Republican than George Wallace, David Duke, Father Coughlin and all the bigots who tried previously to take over that once-principled party.
Judge rules that Mounties have right to unionize
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s 22,000 members have the right to unionize, an Ontario Superior Court judge ruled in Toronto.
In a 25-page ruling, Justice Ian McDonnell struck down the more than century-old policy of disallowing union activity among the Mounties, The Globe and Mail reported.
The suit against the force was filed by the Mounted Police Association of Ontario, one of the RCMP’s various associations that straddle the country, with officers who serve as municipal, provincial and federal police.
“Why does the wider jurisdiction of the RCMP or its status as a unique Canadian institution make the labor relations modes in place for other police forces inappropriate?” MacDonnell said in his ruling, referring to the RCMP’s status as the only non-unionized force in Canada.
The right to strike isn’t part of the suit’s goal, as all Canadian police associations give up the right to do so, the Globe said.
The ruling gave the federal government 18 months to have a unionization mechanism established for the force.
Overdue.
