By David Giuliani
02/09/2015
In 2013, SEIU Healthcare Illinois-Indiana spent a total of $1.5 million on such things as hotels, air travel, rental cars, and restaurants and catering. These “extras” represent the money of 3,092 members and nonmembers, or 3.3 percent of the union’s total membership.
TAGS: labor
By Paul Kersey
10/10/2014
The Illinois Education Association, or IEA, has gotten even more wasteful, according to new LM-2 spending reports filed with the U.S. Department of Labor. IEA has a history of being a very wasteful union. In my review of union spending, I went through IEA operations spending – money that went into representation, politics and lobbying,...
TAGS: labor, unions
By Paul Kersey
08/20/2014
Nearly all government employees are forced to pay money to a union as a condition of keeping their jobs. And it’s not cheap. The forced dues can reach as high as $1,000 per year in the case of Chicago public school teachers. Union officials can count on hundreds of millions of dollars a year in...
TAGS: labor, membership, unions, waste
By Benjamin VanMetre
07/30/2014
401(k)-style retirement plans have become America’s primary retirement vehicle. In 1985, only one in 10 Fortune 100 companies offered 401(k)-style retirement plans to their employees. Today, seven in 10 Fortune 100 companies provide only defined-contribution, 401(k)-style retirement plans to new employees. This trend is in line with the private sector overall, where nearly 85 percent of...
By Naomi Lopez Bauman
05/15/2014
Link to tweet. If you are an employer or are in charge of human resources for your organization, you might soon be on the receiving end of the U.S. Department of Labor’s social media campaign to increase the minimum wage. Unlike the job-creators in the economy, federal bureaucrats don’t seem to fully-grasp how employers determine...
By Brian Costin
01/14/2014
Earlier this week in a televised White House address President Barack Obama said, “I can’t name a time where I met an American who would rather have an unemployment check than the pride of having a job.” But Obama’s statement is contrary to recent statistics released by the U.S. Department of Labor, which show many...
TAGS: unemployment
By Chris Andriesen
03/31/2013
The Illinois Department of Employment Security announced today that the Illinois unemployment rate remained at 9.5 percent in March. Three months ago it was 8.6 percent.
According to union financial reports filed with the U.S. Department of Labor, there are more than 120 employees of the Illinois Education Association, or IEA, and the Illinois Federation of Teachers, or IFT, earning more than $100,000.
TAGS: unions, Uniserv
By Paul Kersey
08/21/2012
A coalition of progressive groups is beginning to coalesce around a proposal to create a progressive income tax in Illinois. Under their plan state income tax rates will increase as one reaches higher incomes, up to a top rate of 11 percent for incomes over $1 million. This plan would leave Illinois with one of...
by Emily Dietrich Illinois’ economy added 30,000 jobs in the month of October. However, the state’s unemployment rate ticked up to 10.1 percent. This contradiction leaves many wondering: did the Illinois jobs market improve or not? To evaluate the jobs market, economists rely on two surveys produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS. The...