And a Happy International Labor Day from New York City, where our Second-International Center-Deviationist mayor Bill de Blasio is
putting a wrap on negotiations (which had been stalled for FIVE YEARS under the Bloomberg administration) with the United Federation of Teachers, which will restore some of that retroactive 8% raise to put them on par with bus and subway workers, spread out over the nine years of the new contract;
The officials said the teachers’ union had agreed to significant savings on health coverage that would not be made with cuts in programs or offerings and would not require an increase in premiums paid by city workers.
They're to use fewer emergency room visits and more health clinics, apparently, which is a good thing (my family uses one of those and we like the way the network is really a network), and more "prescriptions by mail", meaning email? If this really saves the city billion dollars (for all municipal workers, not just teachers), wow.
Also, more and more research demonstrates that
a raise in minimum wage has no net effect on unemployment (the job losses it causes are canceled out pretty exactly by the new jobs it creates, except everybody's at a higher standard of living). It's getting to be like climate change, denial is no longer quite respectable, in addition to being wrong.
