Tag Archives: Union

News

How do secular leftist professors feel about Christian students?

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From the Alliance Defense Fund.

Excerpt:

The late American philosopher Richard Rorty (d. 2007) in describing his assessment of the role of university professor wrote:  “When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures.  Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization.”  The re-education imperative is one that he, “like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.”  Rorty explains to the “fundamentalist” parents of his students:  “we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable.”  He helpfully explains that “I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.”

The sociologist Alvin Gouldner in his book The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class set forth a number of the historical developments that were decisive in the formation of the revolutionary intellectual class.  Among the factors is the process of secularization which de-sacralizes authority and enables challenges to theological traditions.  Another factor was the extension of non-church public schooling.  The colleges and universities in particular generate “dissent, deviance, and the cultivation of an authority-subverting culture of critical discourse.”  And the school teachers at all levels conceive and fulfill their tasks as representatives of (the abstract) society as a whole (whatever that is), thus distanced from and with no allegiance or obligation to the values of the parents of their students.  A related factor is the structure of the new educational system:  “increasingly insulated from the family system,” thereby situated to serve as “an important source of values among students divergent from those of their families.”  In both form and content (which are not so neatly divisible, by the way) the state educational enterprise has been leveraged to missionary ends, further undermining parental authority and replacing its formative function.

Law Professor Samuel Levinson has with welcome candor revealed that it is not due to his sympathy for certain religious students that he prefers that public grade schools grant limited exemptions to those students with conscientious objections to portions of the curriculum.  Rather, such measures are calculated to mollify those religious students, thereby keeping them in the secularizing environment of the government school where they are likely to have their views transformed.  With just enough solicitude for such students’ interests, they may be convinced to stay put, and thus be “lured away from the views—some of them only foolish, others, alas, quite pernicious—of their parents.”

To push these [Christian] students from the public schools . . . will assure that they will in fact be educated within institutions that are, from my perspective at least, far more limited, and indeed, “totalitarian” than anything likely to be found within a decent public school.  My desire to “lure” religious parents back to the public schools thus has at least a trace of the spider’s web about it.

And there’s more than a trace of irony in his assigning “totalitarian” levels as he plots means to manipulate the worldviews of children by coaxing them to remain in institutions designed for that very purpose.  Spider’s web, indeed.

I was just having a conversation with a couple of left-wing Christians on Facebook who were telling me how Christianity was compatible with left-wing politics. They have no idea what they are talking about – they just don’t know what they are up against. They are the ones who vote for more funding for public schools, thinking they are innocuous.

One of the reasons that kept me from marrying is that I didn’t meet anyone in university who took this threat as seriously as I do. If you believe that children should be influential for the Christ, then reading that excerpt should scare you. But if babies are just for baby pictures, then it’s not really a big deal. But it’s a big deal to me.

News

Sodexo files lawsuit against SEIU union for racketeering

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Great news from Big Government.

Excerpt:

One of the largest food services and facilities management companies in the world, Sodexo is the provider of choice for most schools, universities, companies, hotels, prisons and other facilities that outsource their cafeteria and food catering operations, and for those that outsource industrial cleaning services.  SEIU has been incessantly battering Sodexo since 2007, in its desire to unionize some of its nearly 400,000 employees, many of them hotel and food service workers.  Exacerbating the tensions was a longstanding turf war between SEIU and UNITE HERE over hotel and casino workers, which often spilled over into SEIU’s antics prior to the settlement the warring unions reached this past summer.

Sodexo USA has filed the lawsuit in an attempt to halt the over-the-top harassment from SEIU, alleging that many of the acts are very serious and outside of the normal realm of union tactics, including acts of ” SEIU blackmail, vandalism, trespass, harassment, and lobbying law violations designed to steer business away from Sodexo USA and harm the company.” [emphasis added]

Aside from some of its usual corporate smear campaign tactics, certain organizers in the SEIU subscribed to some especially nasty, and frankly repulsive, tactics:

The complaint alleges that the SEIU, in face to face meetings, threatened Sodexo USA’s executives that it would harm Sodexo USA’s business unless they gave in to the union, and then carried out its threats through egregious behavior, including:

  • throwing plastic roaches onto food being served by Sodexo USA at a high profile event;
  • scaring hospital patients by insinuating that Sodexo USA food contained bugs, rat droppings, mold and flies;
  • lying to interfere with Sodexo USA business and sneaking into elementary schools to avoid security;
  • violating lobbying laws to steer business away from Sodexo USA, even at the risk of costing Sodexo USA employees their jobs; and
  • harassing Sodexo USA employees by threatening to accuse them of wrongdoing.

This country will be better off if we can stop thugs from extorting money from the productive sector of the economy. And that goes for ACORN and Planned Parenthood, too.

News

NYT investigation finds widespread corruption in state-run care system

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A pretty disturbing story the leftist New York Times.

Excerpt:

Nearly 40 years after New York emptied its scandal-ridden warehouses for the developmentally disabled, the far-flung network of small group homes that replaced them operates with scant oversight and few consequences for employees who abuse the vulnerable population.

A New York Times investigation over the past year has found widespread problems in the more than 2,000 state-run homes. In hundreds of cases reviewed by The Times, employees who sexually abused, beat or taunted residents were rarely fired, even after repeated offenses, and in many cases, were simply transferred to other group homes run by the state.

And, despite a state law requiring that incidents in which a crime may have been committed be reported to law enforcement, such referrals are rare: State records show that of some 13,000 allegations of abuse in 2009 within state-operated and licensed homes, fewer than 5 percent were referred to law enforcement. The hundreds of files examined by The Times contained shocking examples of abuse of residents with conditions like Down syndrome, autism and cerebral palsy.

[…]The Times reviewed 399 disciplinary cases involving 233 state workers who were accused of one of seven serious offenses, including physical abuse and neglect, since 2008. In each of the cases examined, the agency had substantiated the charges, and the worker had been previously disciplined at least once.

In 25 percent of the cases involving physical, sexual or psychological abuse, the state employees were transferred to other homes.

The state initiated termination proceedings in 129 of the cases reviewed but succeeded in just 30 of them, in large part because the workers’ union, the Civil Service Employees Association, aggressively resisted firings in almost every case. A few employees resigned, even though the state sought only suspensions.

In the remainder of the cases, employees accused of abuse — whether beating the disabled, using racial slurs or neglecting their care — either were suspended, were fined or had their vacation time reduced.

[…]In some cases, not even criminal convictions are disqualifying. Henry Marrero, an employee at a group home in Utica, was convicted of beating a 99-year-old man while moonlighting at a nursing home — slapping the man three times in the face and once on the stomach. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was barred from participating in federally financed health care programs. But he kept his state job working with the developmentally disabled.

[…]The Civil Service Employees Association, one of the most powerful unions in Albany, makes no apologies for its vigorous defense of the group-home workers it represents.

But the union’s approach — contesting just about every charge leveled at a worker — has contributed to a system in which firings of even the most abusive employees are rare. Most disciplinary measures represent a compromise between management and the union, often reached at the urging of an arbitrator chosen by both sides.

This article really has to be read in full to be understood. Solid investigative work by the New York Times.