Illinois public school teachers are required to financially support unions whether they want to or not. They don’t have much of a choice – it’s either pay up, or give up teaching. Union bosses claim to have teachers’ best interests in mind, but despite this they sometimes make outrageous demands that cost teachers their jobs....

by Paul Kersey How did Detroit get to be the urban disaster area it is today? One tipping point come in 1978, when a union got a “win” that cost the city, and eventually its own members, dearly. This “win” came in the form of a raise concession granted to a powerful police union, which...

by Paul Kersey Barring a dramatic shift, more than 800 Chicago Public Schools employees, many of them dues-paying Chicago Teachers Union members, will be without jobs when schools open in the fall. But CTU, having collected more than $1,000 in dues per year from these people before pricing them out of their jobs, has made plans to help...

by Paul Kersey Possible gubernatorial candidate Bill Daley said something interesting at his “pension plan” news conference Monday morning. It just wasn’t really what he wanted to emphasize. Though he summoned the media for the occasion, the former White House Chief of Staff had little to say about why pensions in Illinois are in the...

by Paul Kersey Last year the Illinois General Assembly decided that up to 3,580 supervisors in state government would not be subject to unionization. Passing this legislation, dubbed the “management bill,” meant that Illinois would restore a well-established principle of labor law – that supervisors need to be strictly accountable to policymakers and the people...

by Paul Kersey In the wake of the end of spring legislative session, it has become clear that the General Assembly left itself a lot of unfinished business for next year. Aside from failing to act on pensions and passing another budget with numbers that don’t add up, Illinois lawmakers also failed to make the...

by Paul Kersey The 10-year strike by housekeepers at the Congress Hotel was not actually the longest in U.S. history. Teamsters at Diamond Walnuts in California staged a walkout that lasted 14 years before agreeing to a contract. But the length of the strike and the sad way the Congress Hotel strike ended demolishes a fond...