WUI (Writing under the influence)

Somebody once said we are all Americans, sometimes born in the wrong places.
On a warm autumn day in 1986, while enjoying beer with my college buddies,
I decided to join my new homeland.

I've come to appreciate the ideals that helped create this great country.
Liberalism, political-correctness, multiculturalism and moral equivalence
are destroying it.

This old house Grovenet Wal*Mart Visiting Poland American wine better than French.

Monday, March 06, 2006

 

Maybe we need our own Katrina

From The Times-Picayune:

When the Orleans Parish School Board gathered last month and voted to fire virtually the entire work force of 7,500 teachers, custodians, bus drivers and kitchen staff, union brass might have been expected to clamor loudly in opposition.

Instead, but for one or two nonunion gadflies who spieled and sat down, you could practically hear the crickets.

Of course, in a fundamental sense, the union position was already a lost cause. Katrina scattered thousands of teachers and school staff workers across the nation, destroying their homes and many of the schools where they spent their careers.

The union's death blow came in November, when the Legislature voted to sweep 87 percent of the system's schools into a state-run recovery district, annulling the collective bargaining agreement that for years had given United Teachers of New Orleans the exclusive right to negotiate most school employees' contracts with the School Board.

The largest union in the city before Katrina, UTNO for years played a major role charting the course of public education and making and breaking political careers, particularly through its endorsements of School Board candidates. Although the union had not called a strike in 16 years, intermittent walkouts during the previous decades had emptied school buildings, sometimes for weeks at a stretch. Critics accused the union of coddling incompetent teachers and stifling moves toward a more innovative curriculum.

Supporters saw the union as a necessary resource for employees of a highly dysfunctional system that routinely lost paychecks and was so cash-strapped it almost failed to make payroll before a private management team was brought in last year. Today, with its Paris Avenue offices gutted, the union that once represented employees at 117 schools has members at only four campuses.


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