Dispicable
Thursday 6 September 2012 - Filed under Uncategorized
But more inmates means more jobs for prison guards. Hence, she says, Democrats opposed many sentencing and rehabilitation reforms because they would reduce the prison population. When she held oversight hearings on warden contracts, her brethren didn’t blush at the state paying guards $1,500 extra for getting annual physicals, regardless of what shape they were in. Seriously, she asks, “should you get over-pay just because you breathe?”
[. . .]
“I remember sitting in Democratic caucus” and hearing lawmakers call the unions “our allies, our friends and allies,” she says. “And I thought, the NAACP is never included.” Grass-roots school-reform groups were also “never included. Our ‘allies’ are SEIU, CTA, the California school employees.”
[. . .]
This year the unions torpedoed a bill (introduced by Democratic State Sen. Alex Padilla) that would have made it easier for districts to fire teachers who molest students. Same for legislation to strip pensions from teachers who have sexual relationships with students. The unions claimed the bills infringe on due process and First Amendment rights.
[. . .]
Such blunt-force tactics are no worse than those Ms. Romero saw in the legislature. When she ran bills on law enforcement and prisons that dealt with officers’ disciplinary records and falsification of evidence, the unions “would stack the rooms with officers in full uniform. It’s all part of the intimidation. They’re all looking at you.”
As for the nurses union, well,”everybody loves nurses. But if you go to Sacramento, you see a whole different side.” Ms. Romero recalls partnering with Mr. Huff on a bill to let non-nurses administer the drug Diastat to epileptic children experiencing seizures. The nurses tried to euthanize the bill, she says, because they “wanted to insist that every school have a nurse.”
“They’d rather see a little kid go into a coma possibly, wriggle on the floor,” she says. “Nobody can help. Just call 911. It’s heartless.” Fundamentally, “it was a jobs issue” to the nurses union. “Everything is a jobs issue, and more than that, it is a membership issue, and more than that it is a dues issue. Pure and simple. How do you grow dues?”
Unions pretend to be about “the working man”, but really all they want is more power and influence.
2012-09-06 » madlibertarianguy