Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

Click here to read:

1) Coverage of NEA Representative Assembly Begins July 1

2) Hire More or Fire More? A 50-50 Choice for School Districts Last Year

3) Last Week’s Intercepts

4) Quote of the Week

Maybe Target’s anti-union video wasn’t so cheesy after all.

A union representation election at a New York Target store ended in defeat for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, 137-85. The union claims the election was unfair.

“Target did everything they could to deny these workers a chance at the American dream,” said UFCW local president Bruce Both.

I don’t subscribe to Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, so I don’t know how this story ends, but the beginning is interesting:

Where the Boston Teachers Union has violated state labor law by unilaterally imposing pre-conditions before implementing a collectively bargained waiver voting provision and by failing to abide by a secret ballot vote by JFK School bargaining unit members to convert to a pilot school, the BTU must be ordered to cease and desist from any…

That’s where the free excerpt leaves off, and I can’t find any other reference to this on the intertubes, so if there are any Massachusetts lawyers out there, fill in the blanks for us, would you?

Left-leaning blogs are having a field day poking fun at Target’s anti-organizing video from 2003, apparently public for the first time. Crooks & Liars links to a transcript, while Salon went out and found one of the actors, who’s a member of AFTRA and the Screen Actors Guild.

Sounds like Target’s free ride from the broader union movement is about over. I’ve wondered about it since 2006. And let’s not forget these Neanderthals paid for NEA’s “150th Birthday Bash” back in 2007 (scroll down to item #3 – “Bullseye the Target Dog Buys Off Union“).

A couple of weeks ago EIA posted the K-12 enrollment, spending and staffing numbers for 2008-09, noting an additional 81,000 teachers were hired despite an enrollment drop of 157,000 students. This occurred while the nation was in the midst of a recession, though some argued that public education would also feel the pain after a short lag.

The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics has updated its Common Core of Data to include last year’s workforce numbers, and they show – for the first time in ages – a decline in the number of K-12 full-time equivalent classroom teachers. But it’s difficult to connect these modest figures with the stories of overcrowded classrooms, devastated schools, and other tales of woe that accompanied the edujobs debate last summer.

I’ll post the full details in Monday’s communiqué, but the broad picture is this:

* 30,500 fewer teachers due to all causes – layoffs, retirements and resignations – a reduction of 0.95%

* More than half of these were in one state – California

* 23 states plus the District of Columbia actually hired more teachers – in places like Illinois, Texas and Utah significantly more

Reasonable people can disagree about the necessity of creating or saving jobs in public education, but hiring 81,000 people one year and laying off 31,000 the next is the hallmark of a system in which there is no direct relationship between the size of the workforce and the mission it undertakes. This is a disservice not only to parents, taxpayers and students, but to the teachers themselves.

From the Associated Press:

The 50 states have a combined $689.5 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and $418 billion in retiree health care obligations. Five states have unfunded public employee pension liabilities of $50 billion or more.

David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s in New York, called the pension debt “the biggest headwind that the states will be fighting against” as they try to climb out of budget holes.

Click here to read:

1) Why NEA Supports AT&T Merger With T-Mobile

2) Last Week’s Intercepts

3) Quote of the Week