Word: unionizing
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Lingle's two-year contract with the teachers union and its 13,000 members amounts to a 7.9% pay cut. The bulk of the union's teachers will have 17 furlough days a year, giving Hawaii the shortest school year in the nation. "It's completely Draconian," says Vernadette Gonzalez, whose 5-year-old daughter, Inez Anderson, is a kindergartner at Noelani. "People are shocked when they hear that this was allowed, or even considered as a sane solution to the budget crisis." Gonzalez fears that students will not be able to make up for the lost school time, noting...
Earlier in the festivities, a few people had made speeches. One of the presenters, a retired professor of economics from Duke University named Thomas Naylor, 73, who heads up a secessionist movement in Vermont, suggested that Maine secede from the union. I asked Naylor, who doesn't own or particularly like guns, what he thought of the Second Maine Militia. "It's a variation on the Swiss shooting club, with social and political overlays," he explained. "It's a fairly benign way of confronting one's powerlessness...
...many working parents, the immediate problem was what to do with their children when their schools were shuttered. At the time the furloughs were announced, on Sept. 21, as part of a contract settlement between the state and its public teachers union, the Hawaii State Teachers Association, community day-care providers scrambled to create space for an expected onslaught. But on the eve of the first furlough, day-care enrollment was lower than anticipated. At $25 to $50 a day, providers speculated that the cost for families, especially those with more than one child, might be too great. Some working...
Furloughs were the budget-gap solution of choice for Lingle, a tough-talking Republican. Her administration also hopes to narrow the deficit with a similar furlough program agreed to this week with the state's largest public worker union, the Hawaii Government Employees Association. On the same day as the schools were closed, government offices, including the state's unemployment office, were shuttered. A complicated schedule closes numerous state offices two Fridays a month...
State Rep. Lyla Berg, a former public school principal in Hawaii, said union, state education officials and the governor do not appear motivated to find another solution to the furloughs. At a recent briefing on the subject with the state lawmakers, it seemed that education and union officials were not interested in "assessing and correcting inefficiencies, waste, duplication and misuse of existing monies," said Berg, a Democrat and vice-chair of the Education Committee. "As a former teacher and middle school principal, I personally find the furlough alternative completely unacceptable," Berg said. "I hold all three parties responsible...