Republicans failed again to break Iowa's largest teachers' union

When Iowa Republicans eviscerated public sector bargaining rights in 2017, they hoped to break the state’s largest labor organizations by creating new barriers to union representation. The law requires public employees to recertify their union in each contract period, which is usually two or three years. To be recertified, the union needs a majority of all employees in the bargaining unit to vote “yes.” Anyone who does not vote in the recertification election is deemed to be a vote against the union.

No members of Congress or statewide officials could be elected in Iowa if candidates needed a majority of all eligible voters to win, and non-voters counted against each candidate.

But for five years in a row, Iowa’s largest public-sector unions have won an overwhelming majority of the recertification votes. The Iowa State Education Association (ISEA) announced on October 26 that recertification passed in all 78 of its bargaining units that held elections this year.

Those associations have more than 11,000 employees combined and include large school districts (Johnston, Linn-Mar, West Des Moines, Southeast Polk) as well as small ones (Hamburg in the state’s southeast corner, with around 150 students enrolled). Educators want union representation not only in blue counties but all over Iowa, even in the most heavily Republican areas (Boyden-Hull in Sioux County).

Read more: https://www.bleedingheartland.com/2021/10/26/republicans-failed-again-to-break-iowas-largest-teachers-union/

Pam Jochum rules out running for governor

Democratic State Senator Pam Jochum will not be a candidate for governor in 2022, she confirmed to Bleeding Heartland on November 1. The longtime senator from Dubuque seriously considered the gubernatorial race in recent months. She could have run for statewide office without giving up her seat in the legislature, because she was re-elected to a four-year term in 2020, and Iowa’s redistricting plan puts her in an even-numbered Senate district, which won’t be on the ballot until 2024.

In a written statement, Jochum said she had been “humbled by the outpouring of support” for a potential candidacy. But after speaking with many activists and much “soul searching and prayers,” she determined, “My place is a strong voice in the legislative branch of government.”

Jochum believes Governor Kim Reynolds is “very vulnerable, but it is not going to be easy” to beat her. It would take “a minimum of $15 million to launch an effective campaign, and to “put all of the pieces together,” she would have needed to make the decision last spring.

As for the key issues for the upcoming campaign, Jochum mentioned the following:

Kim Reynolds owns this pandemic now and all of the illness, death, and economic woes it has brought. She has turned her back on Iowa’s working families and Iowa’s children with her radical right agenda that has shortchanged education, the social and economic safety net, our democracy, human rights, and the list goes on.

She has squandered tremendous opportunities afforded Iowa with unprecedented federal funding to help shore up child care, the public health system, direct care workers who care for Iowa’s most vulnerable citizens, protecting and conserving our natural resources as the world takes on climate change, and repairing the gaping holes in our economic safety net that this pandemic has exposed. I no longer recognize the Iowa I love and admired.

UAW members reject second Deere contract offer

Source: Waterloo Courier

WATERLOO – Union workers returned to the ballot box Tuesday to reject the second contract proposal pieced together by negotiators and Deere & Co. officials.

Company-wide, UAW members voted down the tentative agreement with 45% for and 55% against, according to UAW Local 838’s Facebook page.

Members of the Waterloo–based Local 838 shot down the offer with 71% voting “no” to 29% “yes.”

The Local directed workers to report for strike duty as scheduled.

Read more: https://wcfcourier.com/news/local/uaw-members-reject-second-deere-contract-offer/article_84b5389f-a74e-51e1-81d2-448d8a010f99.html#tracking-source=home-top-story

IDPH worker accused of Facebook privacy violation wins jobless benefits

An Iowa Department of Public Health worker fired for allegedly violating privacy guidelines through a Facebook post is entitled to collect unemployment benefits, a state judge has ruled.

Zhen Rammelsberg worked for IDPH as a full-time COVID-19 contact tracer beginning in September 2020, according to state records. She was fired on April 1 of this year after her direct supervisor, Claudia Becker, alleged she had posted to her Facebook page identifiable, confidential information about someone’s COVID-19 status.

But according to the administrative law judge who later reviewed the case to determine whether Rammelsberg was entitled to state unemployment benefits, the information Rammelsberg publicly posted was not work related.

Administrative Law Judge Jason Dunn found that the information posted to Facebook pertained to someone from out of state who had visited a restaurant after testing positive for COVID-19.

Read more: https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/briefs/idph-worker-accused-of-facebook-privacy-violation-wins-jobless-benefits/

Small Plant, Big Polluter

Billionaire William Koch’s industrial plant in Port Arthur, Texas, is small compared to the three sprawling oil refineries that surround it – just 112 acres compared with the 10,000 acres occupied by Motiva, Valero and Total.

But Koch’s Oxbow facility towers over its neighbors in one respect.

It produces 10 times as much lung-damaging sulfur dioxide, SO2, as the three refineries combined. And it does so legally because of a quirk in the 1970 Clean Air Act, which allowed older facilities to delay complying with the law until they expanded or modernized.

As the refineries upgraded over the years, they installed sulfur scrubbers – large tanks that vacuum up most of the SO2. Their emissions dropped by 90 percent or more.

But the 86-year-old Oxbow plant, which manufactures something called calcined coke, hasn’t made any “major modifications” that would require it to fully comply with the federal act. Texas could set its own, tighter standards and require the plant to install scrubbers. But it hasn’t done that.

Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/small-plant-big-polluter/

U.S. Department of Labor issues final rule for restaurant owners on tip credit, server side work

Looks like restaurant front-of-house managers dodged an administrative bullet.

The U.S. Department of Labor last week unveiled long-awaited final version of proposed changes to federal tip credit rules. Under its revamp, restaurant managers could have been required to closely monitor tipped employees’ work and deem whether it's “relevant” server side work.

In short, the final rule won’t require managers to document the minutiae of each server’s shift, which is basically what the proposed changes would have mandated.

Thursday’s rule restores the Obama-era “80/20” rule, which states that an employer can take a tip credit only when the worker is performing tip-producing work.

For those unfamiliar, the “80/20 rule,” or the “dual jobs” portion of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) gives employers the ability to pay a sub-minimum wage for tip-supporting work. However, that's only allowed if the worker spends less than 20% of hours worked during a workweek, or less than 30 minutes continuously, on tip-supporting work.

Read more: https://www.sacurrent.com/sanantonio/us-department-of-labor-issues-final-rule-for-restaurant-owners-on-tip-credit-server-side-work/Content?oid=27471679

QAnuts Gather for JFK Jr's Triumphant Return & Klan Mom Marjorie Taylor Greene Racks Up Mask Fines

Paul Quinn College Makes National News With a Striking, Historical Basketball Court

South Dallas’ Paul Quinn College unveiled a new basketball court on Tuesday, Oct. 19. While the court is striking through its unusual graphics, it holds a deeper historical meaning.

Paul Quinn College is the oldest historically Black college (HBCU) in Texas. The school was founded in 1872 in Austin by an African church as a way to provide education for freed slaves. The college was relocated to Waco in 1881, serving as an academic opportunity for Black Americans when there were few options for higher education.

The post-civil rights movement decades of the 1960s and 1970s were an important period in the school's history, as enrollment increased greatly, new facilities and classrooms were constructed and student scholarship funding increased. When entrepreneur Comer S. Cottrell offered Paul Quinn College a chance to relocate to Dallas in the late 1980s, the university seized the opportunity to begin a new era and made the move north in September 1990.

In 2021, school president Michael Sorrell wanted to shine a light back on Paul Quinn following the darkness of the pandemic. His vision included making the college a place people would want to come to, and a place people would want to invest in.

Read more: https://www.dallasobserver.com/arts/paul-quinn-college-lives-its-hoop-dreams-with-a-strikingly-original-basketball-court-12713108


Dallas' Paul Quinn College has a shiny new basketball court that represents the school's inspiring past. Roberto Hernandez

Felony Haze: Four High Schoolers Forcibly Removed Teammate's Underwear, Authorities Say

Four teenage girls are facing felony charges after they forcibly removed a teammate’s underwear, exposing her genitals, on a bus ride home from a volleyball game.

On Sept. 21, the Caldwell High School students had just played a match and were returning from Bell County, according to documents obtained by KXXV. The 14-year-old victim pleaded with her teammates to stop as they held her down on the school bus.

After removing her socks and shoes, the 17- and 18-year-old teammates pulled her pants and panties down to her mid-shin, the arrest affidavit shows.

Two of the defendants were yanking the victim’s Spandex so hard — at the same time she was struggling to keep them on — that she ended up “being pull [sic] off the seat,” according to an arrest affidavit.

Read more: https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/caldwell-high-school-teenagers-face-felony-charges-after-pulling-down-volleyball-teammates-underwear-12706209

Austin will keep running Fayette coal power plant, missing key climate goal

Austin Energy will not retire its stake in the Fayette coal power plant next year, the publicly owned electric utility announced Monday. Shutting down its portion of the plant by 2022 had been a key part of the city’s climate goals.

Austin Energy said it was unable to reach an agreement on the closure with the Lower Colorado River Authority, which co-owns the plant.

“We’ve been talking to LCRA for a while,” Pat Sweeney, Austin Energy’s vice president for power production, told KUT. “At the end of the day, we just couldn’t come to terms that both parties could agree to, to allow us to exit at an affordable basis and at the timeline that was contemplated.”

Sweeney said he could not discuss details of the negotiations because they were confidential.

Carbon dioxide is the No. 1 contributor to the global climate crisis. Five years ago, Austin’s share of the Fayette coal plant was found to be responsible for “80 percent of the utility’s greenhouse gas emissions and 28 percent of all Austin’s greenhouse gas emissions.”

Read more: https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2021/11/austin-will-keep-running-fayette-coal-power-plant-missing-key-climate-goal/