Patrick Wright, director of the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, was a guest on “The Vic McCarty Show” Thursday on WMKT AM1270 in Traverse City. Wright discussed the plight of a group of graduate student research assistants at the University of Michigan whose rights to due process have been denied by the Michigan Employment Relations Commission, which ruled that students opposed to being unionized could not present their side during hearings on the matter.
Portage Public Schools had an odd reaction to some good financial news this week, telling a company that could save it $270,000 a year "no thanks." That offer came from Grand Rapids Building Services, a facilities cleaning contractor that proposed taking over the school district’s first shift custodial duties.
A Saginaw News article posted this afternoon asks in its story headline, “Is Fabiano Bros. a Monopoly?” The story covers a verifiable assertion I laid out in a commentary titled “Eight Ideas for Reforming Alcohol Control in Michigan.”
Unfortunately, the article is comprised largely of a collection of redirections on the part of the Michigan Beer and Wine Wholesalers Association, the Lansing-based trade group that represents state wholesalers. Fabiano Bros. is a beer and wine wholesaler headquartered in mid-Michigan.
An Op-Ed in the Orange County Register about public-sector pension reform in California cites a recent Mackinac Center study that found switching state employees hired after 1997 from a defined-benefit retirement system to a defined-contribution system has saved Michigan taxpayers as much as $4 billion in unfunded liabilities.
Just prior to noon Wednesday, the Indiana Senate passed House Bill 1001 on a 28-22 vote. Gov. Mitch Daniels signed the enrolled bill a few hours later. While the law does not change contracts currently in force, workers in Indiana will no longer have to pay union dues or agency fees as a term of employment when new union contracts are signed.
If there is a challenge in defending the right-to-work concept, it isn't researching or writing, it's boredom. Union officials continue to tell the same stories. After a while the material you have to read through and rebut gets repetitive.
For instance, here's retired AFL-CIO Program Manager John Kreucher in the The Jackson Citizen Patriot:
Jan. 29 through Feb. 5 is Catholic Schools Week 2012. To mark the occasion, you may like to read this 2005 commentary by Andrew J. Coulson, “Catholic Schools and the Common Good.”
Burt Folsom, senior fellow in economic education at the Mackinac Center, and his wife Anita have written a new book about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, according to the Midland Daily News.
The book, "FDR Goes to War: How Expanded Executive Power, Spiraling National Debt and Restricted Civil Liberties Shaped Wartime America," is published by Simon & Schuster.
Note: There will be no roll call report next week. Any noteworthy votes next week will be included in the Feb. 10 roll call report.
Y = Yes, N = No, X = Not Voting
Senate Bill 204, Eliminate county commissioner vacancy special election requirement: Passed 26 to 12 in the Senate
To eliminate a requirement that a special election must be held when a county commissioner vacancy occurs during an odd numbered year. Under current law, special elections already are not required if the vacancy occurs in an even-nubered year (a regular election year, that is).
A recent House Education Committee hearing on repealing an artificial limit on the number of students who can take advantage of online charter public schools featured a full display of the unfounded opposition to allowing parents this choice. The opposition is driven largely by beneficiaries of the public education status quo, and falls into three categories: Fear of competition for school money; lack of trust in parents and potential competitors, and something called the “burden of proof fallacy.”
Labor Policy Director Paul Kersey is cited in today’s Wall Street Journal in an article about the economic prosperity enjoyed by right-to-work states as compared to non-right-to-work states. Kersey found that the economies of right-to-work states between 2001 and 2006 grew an average of 3.4 percent, compared to 2.6 percent for states without such a law, and job growth in right-to-work states grew 1.2 percent, compared to 0.6 percent in non-right-to-work states. For more information about right-to-work laws, please see our resources page.
Legislation been introduced that reportedly would extract more than $1 billion from motorists through a new state fuel tax and a huge increase in the vehicle registration tax. The latter, paid each year on a car owner’s birthday, would increase 67 percent on average according to The Detroit News.
Congressman Dave Camp, R-Midland, told an audience at the Mackinac Center Thursday that 2012 is “critical given the presidential election plus the ongoing effort to grow the still struggling economy,” according to WSGW AM790. Rep. Camp said he favors simplifying individual and business tax codes, including the elimination of most exemptions. He said he believes doing so would create 1 million jobs in the first year.
Graduate student research assistants at the University of Michigan have been denied by the Michigan Court of Appeals a chance to express their opposition to being unionized, according to the Detroit Free Press.
The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, representing the students opposed to the unionization, filed a motion with the CoA earlier this month. The Michigan Employment Relations Commission has assigned the matter to an administrative law judge for a hearing that begins Feb. 1. Only parties that favor unionization will be allowed to testify.
Today marks the 175th anniversary of Michigan’s statehood. To help celebrate, here are some commentaries that give a glimpse into the state’s early days.
Michigan: Privatization Pioneer
Jason Clemens, director of research at the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute and an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center, writes in an Op-Ed in Canada’s Financial Post that “heightened uncertainty imposed on the U.S. economy by Washington is a killer for investment …”
INDIANAPOLIS — Mackinac Center Senior Investigative Analyst Anne Schieber reports that the Indiana House passed House Bill 1001 today by a 54-44 margin. The legislation would make it illegal to force a worker to pay union dues or fees as a condition of employment.
This week is National School Choice Week and to celebrate, LearnLiberty.org has released a video exploring the benefits of giving students and parents more options. Dr. Angela Dills, of Providence College, gives four research-based reasons why school choice should be expanded.
Mackinac Center President Emeritus Lawrence W. Reed is the subject of an in-depth interview at The Daily Bell, the online journal of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking.
Reed in the interview discusses what drew him to the freedom movement, his time with the The Mackinac Center and the goals he hopes to accomplish as president of the Foundation for Economic Education.
According to The Detroit News, former Gov. Jennifer Granholm made a deal with a group of wealthy and politically connected individuals in Oakland County to use state pension funds to guarantee $18 million they borrowed to set up a film studio in Pontiac, essentially making the pension fund the “co-signer” on the loan.
Late last night on a 5-4 vote, Bay City commissioners chose to repeal that city’s prevailing wage ordinance, something no city in Michigan may have ever done, to our knowledge. A prevailing wage law mandates union scale wages on government funded construction projects, regardless of who wins the bid.
This week marks National School Choice Week, a grassroots effort to spread the message about the importance of educational freedom. More than 260 organizations around the country have signed on, and these groups are working with local partners to host about 400 events, including several in Michigan. The week officially kicked off yesterday with a huge event in New Orleans.
Mackinac Center experts were featured in two of the state's largest newspapers Sunday with Op-Eds on two crucial policy issues at the forefront of today's debate.
Michael D. LaFaive, director of the Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative, wrote in the Detroit Free Press about why Michigan should pass a right-to-work law in order to remain competitive.
A Christian Science Monitor story today about how the right-to-work issue is playing out on a national scale cites this recent commentary, “What a Right-to-Work Law Will Mean for Indiana,” by Labor Policy Director Paul Kersey.
Senior Economist David Littmann was the keynote speaker at the Troy Chamber of Commerce’s annual breakfast Thursday, according to the Troy Patch.
“We’ve at least bottomed out and have a chance to be on a growth path,” Littmann said in his economic forecast. “We still have an economy that’s super vulnerable to internal and external shocks, and it’s true that a national election year like 2012 traditionally witnesses literally maniacal efforts at fiscal and monetary policy stimulation.”
