With the Denver Public Schools board's unanimous approval last night of the Bruce Randolph School's request for autonomy from district red tape and union work rules, we may see a crack opening in the floodgates of education reform. Word is that a dozen other DPS schools are ready to follow in Randolph's footsteps. But everyone is awaiting the union's official response:The autonomy agreement must still be approved by the 22-member governing board of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, expected to vote Jan. 8. DCTA President Kim Ursetta did not mention the proposal in brief remarks to the board. She has repeatedly said the union has some questions about the plan and is working with Bruce Randolph staff to get answers."Working with … [Read more...]
Not-so-shocking News: Union Lawyers Caught Lying
Update: More on this story in today's Rocky Mountain News ... Here's the "dog bites man" story of the day: lawyers for the Colorado Education Association are caught telling a series of lies to stop teachers and leaders at Denver's Bruce Randolph School from obtaining autonomy from restrictive district red tape and union-negotiated work rules. Still, unsurprising as the news may be, it can be thoroughly instructive to read the actual memos and see just how far the union's legal team will go to mislead its own members. … [Read more...]
“So What” Report Confirms Ritter’s Solution in Search of Problem
Doing its duty in support of the Left-liberal Colorado coalition, the Bell Policy Center released a report today that expends a lot of megabytes (and ink?) to say almost nothing relevant. The Rocky Mountain News first picked up on the story:Labor-management partnerships such as the one Gov. Bill Ritter ordered for state government are positive on balance, according to a report by the Bell Policy Center — a group that consulted with Ritter's staff as he launched his partnership plan. However, such agreements mostly have been used to turn around adversarial labor-management relations in already unionized workplaces with collective bargaining, the report points out. [emphasis added]The report presents zero evidence of so-called … [Read more...]
More Unions Jockeying to Get a Piece of State Employee Action
From this week's edition of the always insightful & entertaining Education Intelligence Agency Communique:2) Colorado Public Employees Union Hooks Up with CWA. Organized labor in Colorado is about to become very volatile. The dust has yet to settle from Gov. Bill Ritter's executive order establishing "partnerships" between state agencies and labor unions, which is clearly the prelude to public sector collective bargaining. The plans of Colorado WINS, a coalition of SEIU, AFSCME and AFT, are in evidence in the new organization's founding documents, first released exclusively by EIA on November 19. But Colorado WINS will have some competition. The formerly AFT-affiliated Colorado Federation of Public Employees has dissolved and … [Read more...]
Ouch! More Pain in Ritter’s Behind-the-Scenes Union Revelations
The Rocky Mountain News today published an article which may qualify as one of the richest, most revealing local political stories of the year. It begins: On the day he issued his executive order making unions a bigger player in state government, Gov. Bill Ritter and union representatives assured Coloradans they weren't going to rock the boat. But behind the scenes, the waters were anything but calm, e-mails and other documents provided by Ritter's office in response to a Rocky Mountain News open records request show. Ritter's senior staff scrambled in the hours leading up to his announcement to deal with what they accurately predicted would be "a good deal of backlash." And a group representing seven Colorado unions rushed … [Read more...]
Chieftain: Ritter’s Order Unnecessary, Counterproductive, and Harmful
The Pueblo Chieftain joins other Colorado newspaper editorial voices in rejecting the arguments made for Gov. Ritter's executive order unionizing state employees:While he hopes his partnership arrangements will lead to new efficiencies, just the opposite could result. Unions are notorious for demanding - and receiving - work rules that often run counter to efficient operations. In addition to high medical insurance costs, old-line industries such as steel and autos had work rules that made them less competitive than those plants which operate without unions. The governor maintains that the restrictions on the state budget ensconced in TABOR would limit the amount the state could meet in future union pay demands. But there’s always the … [Read more...]
Gazette: Ritter Throws Tasty Raw “Sirloin Steak” to Labor Leaders
The Colorado Springs Gazette's editors decry Gov. "Back Room" Bill "Bag Man" Ritter for his executive order unionizing state employees: For the second time in less than a year, Gov. Bill Ritter has gotten into political trouble by throwing a bone to his labor union friends. In this case, however, he didn’t just throw them a bone, but a sirloin steak, by granting state employees de facto collective bargaining powers in an executive order issued late in the afternoon of Nov. 2. Contributing to the backlash this time around is the secretive, unilateral way the political payoff was orchestrated, and the slick, Clintonesque way the governor has tried to spin the issue by playing semantics. Ouch - it's worth reading the whole thing. … [Read more...]
Ritter Unionization Order to Cost Taxpayers
With input yesterday from Colorado Attorney General John Suthers comes the first evidence that Ritter's union executive order will cost taxpayers money after all - despite the protests of the governor's office: Suthers told the committee Wednesday that he expects leaders of other state agencies to seek out legal advice on how to handle labor-relation issues in light of the new bargaining power of state workers. That, in turn, will probably require his office to either contract with or hire lawyers with labor-law experience, he said. "There is no question in our mind that there is going to be an increase in demand for legal services in our office," Suthers said after the meeting. Suthers, a Republican, said he cannot yet put a … [Read more...]
CDOT “Partnership” Success Begs Questions about Ritter Order
The Pueblo Chieftain's Charles Ashby reports (H/T Mike Saccone) that Gov. Bill Ritter and the Democrats are trotting out a Republican state department chief as safe cover for his executive order: A Republican Cabinet member in Gov. Bill Ritter's administration already has found the governor's plan to "partner" with state workers beneficial to running his de- partment. But Russell George, executive director of the Colorado Department of Transportation, would have done that anyway, the former GOP House speaker said. "It's very much in my nature to want to know the people I work with," said George, who previously was head of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources under former Gov. Bill Owens. "So, as I got here, I would have … [Read more...]
More Sirota Selective Deception
Repeating himself at the Dead Governors site and at the Denver Post blog, Lefty political hit man David Sirota plies his latest act of deception with the headline: "Business to CO GOP: 'Where's The Evidence' To Back Up Attacks On Ritter?" Sirota links to a Denver Business Journal piece titled "Mixed reaction to union order" to make his point. The problem? First, Sirota willfully ignores the obvious split in the business community between the self-interested and conflict-averse Chamber of Commerce sector and the more entrepreneurial, independent-minded small business sector. Sirota cherry-picks the apathetic responses of the former (you can read his posts for the excerpts) and disregards the strong anger from the latter: One of the … [Read more...]