It’s called “official time” and it is a joke.
It’s time, paid for by the taxpayer for government workers to do union business instead of their job. What’s more, for some government employees taxpayer funded “official time” is the only work they do. We are paying these people, in some cases 6 figures, to organize their unions so that they can call for higher taxes and increase their salaries and benefits which are disproportionately higher than the private sector.
If I bought Hostess I would want absolutely nothing to do with the myriad of unions which took the original company down. The AFL-CIO has threatened any new owners of Hostess with a boycott if the new company goes union free.
Let them do it. My bet is that when Twinkies find their way back onto supermarket shelves people will buy them by the case.
That’s actually not true. The Millennium Falcon can land without air traffic controllers, as anyone who has seen The Empire Strikes Back knows.
I think Ford is actually more worried about his turbo prop, but even that can be landed without air traffic controllers. So what gives?
In Michigan where “right to work” laws are about to go into effect, union big shots have been busy negotiating contracts before the change. No longer will unions be able to deduct dues directly from workers’ paychecks. No longer will powerful politicians be able to count on the steady flow of union dues into their coffers either. But if the unions renegotiated contracts before the official change on March 28th, they could lock in automatic payment of dues. In order to make sure the money from workers keeps flowing some bosses have agreed to no wage increases for their rank and file for the next 10 years!
The California high-speed rail project is full of waste, money grabs, and makes non-union construction workers pay for the pensions of of their unioned brethren.
Time is money and money is also time. A lot of taxpayer “time” is spent doing union work unrelated to the mission of a particular federal employee. This is one of the reasons public employee unions are the only unions with any growth. You pay for their work.
47% of property owners in Detroit didn’t pay their property taxes last year. Honestly who can blame them?
Bloomberg reports that after the teachers unions the postal unions, give more to congressional Dems than any other group of unions, $9.6 million over the past 5 years. There’s a post office in each congressional district after all.
In this country we want everyone to prosper. This is the land of opportunity and seeing people succeed, especially people who may have come from modest means, is deeply gratifying to Americans. We like success. We like hard work. We like overcoming adversity. In contrast to many societies which do everything they can to restrict class mobility, we celebrate it.
