The Ups and Downs of the American Elevator

Why does America have a fraction of the number of elevators per capita as the rest of the developed world? And why do their construction and maintenance cost three three times as much as in most other countries?

Baseball's Salary Wars Are About to Go Nuclear

Kyle Tucker

THERE IS A group of fans who are angry at baseball. There are a lot of them, and they do not exist only on social media. They are inside of group chats that talk about how much money the Los Angeles Dodgers are spending after winning the past two World Series, and they are in cities big and small that look at the Dodgers with envy masked by eye rolls and curses, and they might just want to devote more time to the game -- maybe they love the pitch clock or Shohei Ohtani or Aaron Judge or the in-person vibe or any number of things about the game today worth loving -- but they're not sure the whole thing is fair.

Owners are angry, too. Their franchise valuations aren't growing as quickly as their billionaire peers' in other sports, and they blame the system that governs Major League Baseball. They don't like it. Nearly every owner believes MLB needs a salary cap. Its presence, owners say, immediately would juice franchise values, with the labor cost essentially fixed and no more chasing Dodgers teams spending $500 million annually on players. At the same time, they say, it would provide a pathway to competitive balance, which they believe is entirely out of whack. They think a salary cap will fix everything, even if it means jeopardizing the 2027 season. "They are ready to burn the f---ing house down," one high-ranking team official said.

Read the rest here.

HT: BW

The UAW Strike: How wide is the pay gap between the boardroom and the assembly line?

The experts disagree on the bottom-line, but no matter how you do the math, boardroom compensation has exploded in recent decades to the point where the pay gap between top management and the average worker which used to average around 15:1 in the 1960s, is now closer to 300:1. That is not just troubling; it's immoral. And to add the icing to the cake, a lot of these compensation packages are deliberately structured in ways intended to shield their true value from scrutiny and taxes. 

In the history of the world, no economic system has delivered more dramatic improvements in quality of life, to more people, in such a short period of time as capitalism. And I am all for an honest profit in business. But the emphasis needs to be on "honest," not "profit." You can't build a moral system where the guy who turns out the product is being paid less than 1/2 of one cent for every dollar being shelled out to the suits in the boardroom. 

To be clear, I'm not endorsing all of the UAW's demands. But they have grievances, and a lot of them are legitimate.

These are picket lines that I would not cross. 

Illinois facing "fiscal tsunami"

CHICAGO — Illinois is facing one of the worst fiscal crises of any state in recent decades, largely because it has mismanaged its pension system.

The shortfalls could potentially mean sharply higher taxes and cuts in spending. And even though the state’s highest court just this month threw out a landmark plan to cut worker and retiree benefits, some lawmakers say they may have to find another way to make those reductions as well.

Illinois’s problems resonate well beyond its borders. Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Kentucky are among the states confronting similar problems, and to them, Illinois is a model of what can go wrong — with political intransigence, mounting costs and a complicated legal terrain.

Read the rest here.

Illinois: Can the most corrupt and dysfunctional state be fixed?

The most portentous election of 2014, which gave the worst-governed state its first Republican governor in 12 years, has initiated this century’s most intriguing political experiment. Illinois has favored Democratic presidential candidates by an average of 16 points in the past six elections. But by electing businessman Bruce Rauner it initiated a process that might dismantle a form of governance that afflicts many states and municipalities.

Rauner, 58, won his first elective office by promising to change Illinois’s political culture of one-party rule by entrenched politicians subservient to public-sector unions. This culture’s consequences include:

After more than a dozen credit-rating downgrades in five years, Illinois has the lowest rating among the states. Unfunded public employees’ pension liabilities are estimated, perhaps conservatively, at $111 billion, the nation’s largest such deficit as a percentage of state revenue. Currently, public pensions consume nearly 25 percent of general state revenues. The state owes vendors $6.4 billion in unpaid bills, and more than 1 million people have left Illinois for less dysfunctional states in the last 15 years. Debt per resident is about $24,989, compared with $7,094 in neighboring Indiana.

Read the rest here.

Two More Big Wins from the Supreme Court

Unlike the two big ones from last week, today's decisions were not unanimous. But in a pair of 5-4 rulings the court limited the power of public sector unions to force non-members to pay union fees and also ruled in the much anticipated Hobby Lobby case that "closely held" private companies with a strong religious ethos cannot be compelled to pay for employee contraceptives.

Union officials say Obama betrayed them on health-care

Labor leaders who have spent months lobbying unsuccessfully for special protections under the Affordable Care Act warned this week that the White House’s continued refusal to help is dampening union support for Democratic candidates in this year’s midterm elections.

Leaders of two major unions, including the first to endorse Obama in 2008, said they have been betrayed by an administration that wooed their support for the 2009 legislation with promises to later address the peculiar needs of union-negotiated insurance plans that cover millions of workers.

Read the rest here.

Fast Food Workers Strike For Better Pay And Rights

NEW YORK (AP) — Workers at McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's restaurants across New York walked out Monday in a one-day strike to demand better pay and the right to unionize, calling for minimum wage to more than double from $7.25 to $15 an hour and the end to what activists called "abusive labor practices."

"It's noisy, it's really hot, fast, they rush you. Sometimes you don't even get breaks. All for $7.25? It's crazy," said Nathalia Sepulveda, who works at a McDonald's opposite Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, where one protest took place.

Outside the McDonald's as well as a Wendy's in lower Manhattan, workers chanted "we can't survive on $7.25" and "supersize our wages." At the Wendy's, the crowd shouted at customers not to go in and two police officers were stationed inside.

Read the rest here.

Not a huge fan of unions here, but this is clearly a case of abusive labor practices. $7.25 an hour in New York City? That's scandalous. I am not sure about a $15 hr wage, but they are absolutely right to call out their greedy employers on this issue. And frankly they are doing it the right way. Instead of asking the government to interfere they are exercising their individual rights to band together and demand better wages and working conditions. This is the libertarian approach.

I wish them luck.

A Bankrupt Greece Does The Unthinkable

Pushed by its European creditors amid its crippling economic crisis, Greece began this week to do something it hasn't done in more than 100 years: fire public-sector workers en masse.

Following weeks of tough negotiations with its lenders – the "troika" of the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and the European Central Bank – the Greek government started laying off public-sector workers in an effort to implement the austerity that the troika has demanded. The first two civil servants were let go on Wednesday under a new law that speeds up the process – one, a policeman, for stealing debit cards, and the other for 110 days of unexcused absence.

Read the rest here.

Dems are bent over Michigan's "right to work" law

Michigan's congressional delegation met Monday with Gov. Rick Snyder, asking him to veto or at least delay a vote on a "right to work" law moving through the state's legislature.

Democrats and organized labor groups have launched an all-out blitz they are hoping might halt legislation that would establish workers' rights to employment in a workplace without having to join a union. The Republican-held state legislature passed versions of the legislation last week, and are set to bring it up for final consideration as soon as Tuesday.

Read the rest here.

Camden NJ Plans To Fire Its Police Force

One of the most dangerous cities in the U.S. is getting rid of its police department.

Amid what they call a “public safety crisis,” officials in Camden, N.J., plan to disband the city's 141-year-old police department and replace it with a non-union division of the Camden County Police.

Camden city officials have touted the move as necessary to combat the city’s growing financial and safety problems. The entire 267-member police department will be laid off and replaced with a newly reformatted metro division, which is projected to have some 400 members. It will serve only the city of Camden starting in early 2013.

Read the rest here.

Emails suggest Obama Administration was behind loss of pensions by non-union workers

Emails obtained by The Daily Caller show that the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 salaried retirees at the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company.

The move, made in 2009 while the Obama administration implemented its auto bailout plan, appears to have been made solely because those retirees were not members of labor unions.

The internal government emails contradict sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures. They also indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts about the sequence of events surrounding the termination of those non-union pensions, and that administration figures violated federal law.

Read the rest here

Note: The Daily Caller is an independent news source that claims ideological neutrality. This however is not universally accepted. In any case they seem to have the emails to back their story up.

What Wisconsin's vote means

The left will make a big mistake if it ignores the lessons of the failed recall in Wisconsin of Gov. Scott Walker (R). The right will make an even bigger error if it allows the Wisconsin results to feed its inclination toward winner-take-all politics.

The danger on the right is greater because winning an epic fight is a heady experience and conservatives can claim a real victory here. Walker didn’t just win. He won decisively. And it turns out that a majority of Wisconsin voters — including many who voted against Walker — simply didn’t like the idea of a recall.

Read the rest here.

A good article from someone I don't generally agree with.

Wisconsin Governor fends off recall attempt

WAUKESHA, Wis. — Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) survived a furious recall campaign on Tuesday, emerging as the victor in a bitter fight over state budgets and collective bargaining rights.

NBC News declared Walker the projected winner over Democratic challenger Tom Barrett, the mayor of Milwaukee, in the closely-watched campaign, an outgrowth of a contentious fight in early 2011 after Walker drove a bill stripping public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights through Wisconsin's legislature.

Walker's victory served as a symbolic victory for a generation of reform-minded conservatives; the crowd at Walker's Waukesha election night party let out a large cheer when a local NBC affiliate showed the projection of Walker's victory.

Read the rest here.

Good. I don't care for the man's politics but this was an abuse of the recall. The appropriate time to fire a politician whose policies you don't like is in regularly scheduled general elections, not through recalls engineered by big money special interest groups who were offended. A recall should be reserved for corruption or a gross abuse of power. This sort of thing is a slippery slope. Once you start down it no one will ever be able to undertake any kind of controversial policy decisions without having to worry about which special interest with deep pockets is going to try to throw him/her out of office early. That threat has become much more acute with the SCOTUS effectively opening the floodgates to unlimited political contributions by entities that can't vote.

Democratic infighting threatens Wisconsin recall effort

MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin Democrats organized the protests that gripped the state. They turned Gov. Scott Walker’s plans to strip public unions of their collective bargaining rights into a national Democratic cause. They got the signatures they needed to force a recall election, and then some.

They are now just a little more than a month away from the big showdown with Walker they have been craving for over a year — but rather than excitement, there is growing fear within the party that they just might blow it.

Read the rest here.

NBA: Impasse deepens, players reject offer, move to dissolve union, season in peril

This is Armageddon. Nuclear winter is upon NBA fans.

The NBA players got together in New York Monday and not only voted to reject the league’s ultimatum offer, but voted to start process to decertify the union.

“We’ve arrived at the conclusion that the collective bargaining process has completely broken down, and as a result in the last hour we have served a notice of disclaimer on (David) Stern and the NBA,” union director Billy Hunter said after the meeting. “We plan to disseminate that to all 30 teams…

“The players are not ready to accept the ultimatum, they thought it was completely unfair on the part of the NBA ownership and management… We have negotiated in good faith for two years, but the players have felt they have given enough.”

That step — a notice of disclaimer that essentially says the union has no interest in representing the players in negotiations any more and is abandoning that right — is the first step in anti-trust lawsuits that will be filed by players in the coming days as this process moves into the courts. This is the step the NFL players union took and something agents have pushed the NBA union to do since July, it’s just that the timing of doing it now essentially blows up the negotiating process when there wasn’t a lot of time left to save the NBA season.

There is little chance of any NBA season right now. The courts are not exactly a fast process but the union has reached its breaking point. It has gone to the one big card it could play.

The reaction of the owners will be to hunker down, really play hardball now and try to force their entire wish list — such as salary rollbacks and a hard salary cap — on the players. The owners are not going to be scared off by this at all.

Read the rest here.

Not a basketball fan at all here.  But I do find this battle, essentially between two groups of millionaires, very amusing.

Elections: A good night for Democrats (not so good for unborn children)

The outcomes Tuesday in balloting from Maine to Mississippi included enough wins for Democrats, abortion rights advocates, and labor unions to give a bit of a lift to President Obama and his allies as they look toward the 2012 elections, 12 months from tonight.

In Ohio, voters overwhelmingly rejected the law enacted last spring by Gov. John Kasich and the Republican-controlled legislature that limited the ability of public employee unions to collectively bargain.

The law also would have required performance-based pay for most public employees and required them to pay 15 percent of the cost of their health care benefits.

Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz cheered the outcome in Ohio calling the law “a blatantly partisan attempt to lay the blame for our economy on middle-class Americans, while letting the wealthiest and special interests off the hook and not asking them to pay their fair share. Voters in Ohio know that targeting public employees for political reasons will do nothing to create jobs or boost Ohio’s economy.”

Yet at the same time that Ohio voters were boosting labor unions, they also delivered at least a symbolic rebuff to Obama’s health care reform law by overwhelmingly approving a ballot measure saying that no federal, state, or local law or rule could compel any person or employer to participate in a health care system. The practical effect of that Ohio measure hinges on the outcome of legal challenges in federal courts to Obama’s health care law.

In Mississippi, abortion rights advocates scored a somewhat surprising victory as voters defeated Initiative 26, a proposed amendment to the state’s constitution that would have defined the word “person” to include every human being “from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof.”

More than 55 percent of voters were voted “no” on the ballot measure, The Associated Press reported, falling far short of the threshold needed for it to be enacted.

Read the rest here.

NBA: Players threaten to "decertify union" if demands not met

In case you thought sanity might encroach on the NBA labor talks, we bring you this report:

A group of hardline NBA players, about 50, participated in a conference call this week behind the back of union leadership, reports both the New York Times and Yahoo. The upshot of the mid-week call is that if the union gives any more on either system issues or percentage of basketball related income, the group will start a drive to decertify the union.

Know that this is as much a negotiating tactic as a real threat, and effort to give the union some leverage. (“You need to get a deal with us now before this renegade group tries to hijack the talks.”) That said, the threat could anger owners and handcuff union leadership — Billy Hunter and Derek Fisher — in those talks.

Here are the highlights from Howard Beck at the Times:

Read the rest here.

Not a basketball fan. But I do find it amusing that the players are threatening to revolt against their union and probably kill the season over 2% in revenue when even poorly paid players are already among the wealthiest Americas. Somehow I don't see this playing well with the fans, many of whom have no job. Score this an 'F' in public relations.

Hertz fires 26 Muslim shuttle drivers who refused to clock out for prayer breaks

After a continued refusal to clock out when taking a break to pray, Hertz axed more than two dozen employees at one of America's busiest airports.

A Hertz spokesman said he was disappointed that 26 Muslim drivers at Sea-Tac Airport chose to be fired rather than clock out for prayer breaks.

One of the fired employees, Ileys Omar, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: 'We feel like we're being punished for what we believe in.'

Read the rest here.

Bureaucracy in Greece Defies Efforts to Cut It

ATHENS — Stories of eye-popping waste and abuse of power among Greece’s bureaucrats are legion, including officials who hire their wives, and managers who submit $38,000 bills for office curtains.

The work force in Greece’s Parliament is so bloated, according to a local press investigation, that some employees do not even bother to come to work because there are not enough places for all of them to sit.

Read the rest here.