There are 61,000 structurally deficient bridges in the United States, and this is what congressional Republicans want to do to transportation funding:
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' Robert Greenstein has
more:
The House and Senate budgets cut highway and mass transit funding by an average of about 28 and 22 percent, respectively, over the next decade.[4] To be sure, gas tax revenues for the Highway Trust Fund have fallen as fuel efficiency has risen, leaving a shortfall in the financing of highways and mass transit. But rather than finding new financing to avoid cuts in this funding -- as Congress has routinely done over the past decade -- the House and Senate budgets both chose to reduce needed investment in transportation infrastructure. Notably the House proposes to cut funding dramatically in 2016, by roughly 90 percent, as a way to address the shortfall in the trust fund. While the House funding reductions would be less severe in future years, funding would still remain significantly below the current level for the entire decade.
That means weakened infrastructure—roads, bridges, and trains that people rely on to get to work and businesses rely on to ship goods—and lost jobs. But hey, it also means rich people not paying taxes, so Republicans are all for it.
Continue reading below the fold for more of the week's labor and education news.
A fair day's wage
- The presidents of the United Steelworkers, Communications Workers of America, and American Federation of Government Employees came to Daily Kos this week to make the case against fast track and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Leo Gerard wrote:
As usual, the free traders say, don’t worry, the TPP is gonna be great, just great! Trust us, they say.
For opponents of the deal – unions, environmentalists, human rights groups and Congressional progressives – there’s no trusting free traders. That’s because they’ve proven to be nothing but flimflam men. Deals they’ve peddled previously, like NAFTA, CAFTA and KORUS, have not, in fact, been great. They’ve dramatically increased the nation’s trade deficit, prompted corporations to ship manufacturing offshore, cost millions of American workers their jobs and suppressed wages.
Larry Cohen wrote:
Of the 12 nations in the TPP only the US will use Fast Track, that is, if Congress caves and passes it. Eight of those nations are democracies, yet their parliament or congress will debate the deal itself, not Fast Track. From Canada to Chile, New Zealand to Japan, elected officials will read and debate the actual Trans-Pacific Partnership and any other deals for the next five years, not sign a blank check to pass something they never read.
J. David Cox described the fate of his hometown, writing:
After the textile mills closed, so did the clothing factories, then the lunch counters and convenience stores. Soon there was nothing left but low-paying, no-benefit service jobs, forcing many to supplement their meager earnings with government assistance just to get by. It was like we were trapped in quicksand, and every time we tried to pull ourselves out, we sank further and further into the darkness.
I was proud to work with the brave men and women in this community as they organized a last-ditch effort to maintain their livelihoods by forming a union. But in the end, the multinational outsourcers were stronger and more powerful than the opposition of a loose group of small-town citizens. Once the unemployment checks ran out, Kannapolis fell into the all-too-familiar path of American post-industrial decline, and has struggled to recover since.
- San Jose, California, is considering an ordinance to fix the fact that 66 percent of confirmed wage theft money doesn't get to the workers who deserve it.
- Workers at the Washington Post are fighting for a new contract, and their unions says that the newspaper's owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is sending the message that they're expendable.
- Some union pension cuts likely as new federal rules take shape. Elder poverty for all!
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- Pennsylvania's Republican-controlled legislature is trying to pass a law that would block Philadelphia's paid sick leave law retroactively and prevent other cities and towns in the state from passing sick leave laws.
- Workers are not happy with the ubiquitous Driscoll's berries.
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Education
- Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, argues we need to get rid of 'test, blame, punish':
The consequences of high-stakes testing have been devastating for struggling schools in high-poverty areas, where teachers and students spent a scandalous amount of time preparing for and taking bubble tests, where teaching and learning were reduced to skills that can only be measured with these multiple-choice questions and which faced crushing consequences if they failed.
- In Los Angeles, charter teachers take on the whole chain:
Instead of unionizing school by school, they’re pushing Alliance College-Ready Charter Schools to agree to ground rules for organizing, without boss interference, at all 26 schools in the chain.
The teachers want a say on such questions as class size and incorporating technology. They want to be able to speak up without fear of retaliation from management.
- Educators are alarmed by some questions on New York Common Core tests. And thanks to people who refused to be intimidated by Pearson's gag order, we know what some of those questions are.