Governor Lamont’s expensive accounting gimmick to buy a little more breathing room in the upcoming biennial budget reveals more than just bad fiscal instincts. It demonstrates once again and beyond any doubt that this government is in large part an agent of the state’s government-employee unions, with all of us ...
In response to Senate Republicans’ criticism that the 2019 budget assumes $450 million in pension and health care savings from state employees that have not yet been negotiated, Gov. Ned Lamont and his budget chief Melissa McCaw admitted that talks with labor leaders are just beginning. “That process is just ...
The Connecticut Communist Party gave out awards on Saturday, December 8 to Eva Bermudez Zimmerman, SEIU organizer and former Lt. Governor primary candidate, and Shellye Davis, president of the Greater Hartford Labor Council.
Leaders of Connecticut’s public sector unions took a decidedly harsh tone in their critique of the Commission on Fiscal Stability and Economic Growth’s findings and recommendations, calling the panel of business executives “arrogant college freshmen who come home after a semester and think they have all the answers to the world's problems.”
A public hearing before the powerful state appropriations committee on Friday became a referendum on state employee pension benefits and the collective bargaining process that ran almost ten hours. Several speakers warned that changes to Connecticut’s collective bargaining practices and retirement benefits would cause the state to become a southern backwater.
Gov. Dannel Malloy's budget chief told the appropriations committee Tuesday that, despite a pension agreement between the governor’s office and a group of state employee unions, Connecticut will face “a relatively brutal” increase in pension costs equal to 10 percent of the budget by 2023. The pension deal would essentially refinance the existing pension payments by extending them through 2046 to make up for a $16.5 billion funding shortfall.