Public-sector unions

Monday

Zack Christenson

The two Dearborns that could decide the election

Dearborn, Michigan Leave Detroit and drive down Michigan Avenue, past the liquor stores, abandoned houses and weed-strewn fields; eventually you’ll hit Dearborn. You’ve undoubtedly read a lot about Dearborn these past few months, the Michigan city whose voters could sink Harris’s chances at the White House.   As you’ve been told, around 60 percent of Dearborn’s citizens are of Arab descent — it’s home to the largest mosque in the country and has the largest population of Muslims per capita in the United States. Overall, in Dearborn and in surrounding cities in Metro Detroit, the Arab-American community numbers over 200,000 people.

dearborn

Thursday

Lewis M. Andrews

The secret history of the school choice left

Because teachers’ unions play such an important role in today’s Democratic Party, it is widely assumed that school choice — the policy of letting families use taxpayer dollars to educate their children as they wish — is a Republican or conservative program. And while it's true that teachers’ unions will instantly turn on any Democrat who favors public funding of non-public schools, there is in fact a long history of prominent left-wing thinkers and activists supporting school choice. As far back as 1956, British Labour Party leader Anthony Crosland wrote a controversial book called The Future of Socialism, in which he observed that the bureaucratic management of England’s newly expanded welfare programs was turning out to be almost as bad as having no programs at all.

Thursday

Larry Sand

In LA, unions are winning at the expense of kids

Service Employees International Union Local 99 staged a three-day walkout in Los Angeles last week after negotiations failed. SEIU, which represents about 30,000 cafeteria workers, bus drivers, special education assistants, etc. called for a strike if their demands were not met by the Los Angeles Unified School District. And the United Teachers of Los Angeles decided to ditch school, too, in what was deemed a “sympathy strike.” The unions’ action forced every public school in LA to shut down from March 21 to March 23. It all played out in the usual way.

teachers unions los angeles

Monday

Lewis M. Andrews

Why are government unions never the bad guys?

If there is such a thing as a formula for making a hit film, it has something to do with giving audiences a new and unusual villain. Over the years, screenwriters have thrown their protagonists up against enemies as thuggish as boss Johnny Friendly in 1954’s On the Waterfront and as smooth as Olivier’s Crassus as in 1960’s Spartacus. “The more successful the villain, the more successful the film,” as Hitchcock himself once put it. Which is why Hollywood’s constant search for new and unusual bad guys has explored almost every conceivable milieu: corporate America (The Big Short), street gangs (The Warriors), hospitals (Coma), prisons (Shawshank Redemption), law firms (The Firm), and even the movie studio itself (The Bad and the Beautiful).