To understand more of the human toll of the Detroit bankruptcy, check out
Stand with Detroit. It's not just the
stories of retired city workers like Juanita Scott, who:
... worked in the City of Detroit Health Department for 19 years. Her pension is $754 per month, but by the time she pays for her car insurance, health insurance, and her house payment, she has just $300 left.
“I don’t understand it. I can’t see how the governor is going to allow this to happen. We worked hard. I came to work every day.”
It's also people like Hector Smith, general manager of Steve's Soul Food, who says “If they take away their pensions, if they start cutting jobs, it’s gonna cut into a large percentage of not only our business, but other business that are in the city of Detroit.”
Continue reading below the fold for more of the week's labor and education news.
A fair day's wage
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- Ugh. Scott Walker is getting his wish.
- Apple will increase its American manufacturing, opening an Arizona plant that will employ 2,000 workers.
- As signs that so-called right to work is unpopular in Ohio go, this is a good one:
Ohioans for Workplace Freedom, supporters of a so-called “right to work” law in Ohio reached a major milestone in October: they have collected 100,000 signatures to get the measure on the November 2014 ballot.
Here’s the thing: they need at least 385,000 signatures to get on the ballot, and they’ll also want to far exceed that number to account for duplicates or invalid signatures
Click for a reminder of how long it's taken them to collect those 100,000 signatures.
- Go Guitar Center workers:
Following in the footsteps of colleagues in New York and Chicago, employees at a Guitar Center store in Las Vegas voted on Friday to unionize. If the federal labor board ratifies the election, the store will be the third location in the Bain Capital-owned music equipment chain to go union this year.
- Damn union thugs.
- A community union for Pittsburgh?
Education
- Ohio charter horror story:
A new Columbus charter school failed to pay its employees last week, leading some educators to walk off the job, its founder said yesterday. [...]
Ward and former teacher Tina Geygan also said the school has struggled with a bedbug problem, and the food vendor had quit providing student lunches because it hadn’t been paid.
- Chicago teachers are fabulous:
- Long Island education superintendent says no to student data-harvesting.