Governor’s Hard Line Not Supported by His Numbers

 

Commentary/Politics - Illinois Politics
ShareThis

Written by Rich Miller

Sunday, 17 January 2016 06:24

A lot of folks have taken to calling Bruce Rauner “Governor 1 Percent” because of his immense personal wealth. Rauner himself told the Chicago Sun-Times during the 2014 campaign that he was in the top one-tenth of 1 percent of income earners.

But, right now anyway, he ought to be referred to as “Governor 1.4 Percent.”

Stay with me a bit and I’ll explain.

I sat down for an interview last week with Rauner. As he does with just about every reporter, the governor blamed House Speaker Michael Madigan for stifling his beloved Turnaround Agenda. Rauner said he was “frustrated” with Madigan for saying that the anti-union, pro-business reforms were “unrelated to the budget.”

“For example,” Rauner said, “if we can get business regulatory change so I can recruit manufacturers here and more transportation companies here, and more businesses here, we can generate billions of new revenue without raising tax rates. That’s directly tied to the budget.”

“Billions?” I asked.

“Billions,” he replied, while promising to send me a detailed analysis.

A few days later, his staff e-mailed me a memo that the governor had sent to lawmakers last fall. You can see it at RCReader.com/y/rauner1 and RCReader.com/y/rauner2.

But the memo didn’t really say much of anything about revenues, other than claiming that if the governor could get Illinois to “average” levels of unemployment and Gross State Product, and if the governor could stop the migration of Illinoisans to other states, his agenda would produce a grand total of $510 million in additional revenues.

That ain’t “billions.”

And while $510 million is nothing to sneeze at, it won’t even cover the interest on the state’s mountain of overdue bills that’s been accruing because the state has no budget and no way to pay them.

Of course, the state has not had a budget since June and has no way to pay those overdue bills because the governor refuses to negotiate a new budget until he gets his Turnaround Agenda passed, which according to his own memo wouldn’t produce enough revenue to pay the juice on money owed to the state’s vendors. That doesn't take into account the money owed to universities that haven’t received any state funding, creating major crises at several of them. Or the money owed to all the social-service groups that make up our safety net, forcing the state’s most vulnerable to go without.

And while $510 million seems like a lot of money, the governor’s projected revenue growth from his Turnaround Agenda would only be a 1.4-percent increase over the last state fiscal year.

Hence, “Governor 1.4 Percent.”

And would it even be that much? Rauner has said he would agree to higher state taxes if legislators agree to his Turnaround Agenda. But as a Republican legislative friend pointed out to me last week, that tax hike would reduce growth, even with all of Rauner’s agenda items.

“The point is that they can’t argue that these anti-labor changes will magically produce $510 million of economic growth/revenue and then discount the negative effect of a tax increase on economic growth,” he wrote me.

True.

But maybe the governor was a little confused and meant to include state governmental savings in that “billions” remark.

So let’s go back to the memo.

The governor claims the state would save $1.75 billion by making his demanded changes to union collective-bargaining laws. Roughly $750 million of that would come from cutting health-care costs for state employees. The rest isn’t explained.

He also claims that workers’ comp reforms would save the state $65 million a year. So we’re looking at about $1.8 billion in savings. That’s far more substantial, but so far he’s getting absolutely nowhere because he’s taken such a hard-line stance against unions.

To be fair, Rauner’s memo also claims that local governments would save billions more with his reforms, but some of his numbers just don’t add up, like overstating the savings on allowing governments to opt out of prevailing-wage requirements on non-federal projects.

I’m not all opposed to doing some pro-business reforms. I think an easy case can be made that workers’ comp costs are far too high, for example.

But I spent part of an afternoon last week listening to an otherwise tough-minded woman cry helplessly on the phone about the literal implosion of the state’s social-service safety net.

And one of the greatest charitable groups in the history of this state, Lutheran Social Services of Illinois, is facing an existential crisis because the government owes it $6 million.

In my opinion, the payoff for continuing this governmental impasse is not worth the price being paid.

Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax (a daily political newsletter)

Above is from:  http://www.rcreader.com/commentary/governors-hard-line-not-supported-by-numbers/

Tom Kacich: Rauner offers glimmer of hope on pension plan

Tom Kacich: Rauner offers glimmer of hope on pension plan share

Tom Kacich: Rauner offers glimmer of hope on pension plan

Sun, 01/17/2016 - 7:00am | Tom Kacich

 

If you're looking for something good amid all the rotten news in Illinois, here's a little something: Gov. Bruce Rauner says there's some agreement on the fundamentals of a pension reform plan.

That's not to say that a deal is imminent, he cautioned.

"The president of the Senate (John Cullerton) and I agree on what it's going to take to have a constitutional pension reform, and the speaker's staff is not disagreeing. I can't say they'll be out there proactively being positive, but they're not really disagreeing. And that's a big deal," Rauner said.

It's a big deal if it gets worked out, resulting in "billions of dollars in pension savings at the universities as well as school districts and state government," the governor said.

But state employee unions already indicated opposition to Cullerton's plan, which is said to include a provision that makes employees choose between retaining cost-of-living increases in retirement or taking pay raises now. That may not be the offer made to employees.

"We have now the agreement of what would be constitutional. Now we just need to work out — and the devil is in the details — which parts of compensation should be used for consideration. We're talking about that right now," Rauner said.

"Will we get a bill done? I've introduced my bill, and I've said to the General Assembly, 'Introduce one. You passed 530 bills last year.'

"I love pumpkin pie, but you know what? They're not doing their job, and we have a crisis in pensions, and they didn't introduce a pension bill. Let's this year do only 50 bills, but let's have them be bills that matter: pensions, schools, local control, term limits."

He makes it sound so simple.

Above is from:  http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2016-01-17/tom-kacich-rauner-offers-glimmer-hope-pension-plan.html

Dark Money review: Nazi oil, the Koch brothers and a rightwing revolution

New Yorker writer Jane Mayer examines the origins, rise and dominance of a billionaire class to whom money is no object when it comes to buying power

Lots of American industrialists have skeletons in the family closet. Charles and David Koch, however, are in a league of their own.

Charles Koch is 'disappointed' in 2016 Republicans – but will still give $900m

The US businessman says he gave presidential candidates a list of issues to address, but hasn’t seen results: ‘You’d think we could have more influence’

<?XML:NAMESPACE PREFIX = "[default] http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" NS = "http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" />

Read more

The father of these famous right-wing billionaires was Fred Koch, who started his fortune with $500,000 received from Stalin for his assistance constructing 15 oil refineries in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. A couple of years later, his company, Winkler-Koch, helped the Nazis complete their third-largest oil refinery. The facility produced hundreds of thousands of gallons of high-octane fuel for the Luftwaffe, until it was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1944.

In 1938, the patriarch wrote that “the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy and Japan”. To make sure his children got the right ideas, he hired a German nanny. The nanny was such a fervent Nazi that when France fell in 1940, she resigned and returned to Germany. After that, Fred became the main disciplinarian, whipping his children with belts and tree branches.

These are just a handful of the many bombshells exploded in the pages of Dark Money, Jane Mayer’s indispensable new history “of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right” in America.

A veteran investigative reporter and a staff writer for the New Yorker, Mayer has combined her own research with the work of scores of other investigators, to describe how the Kochs and fellow billionaires like Richard Scaife have spent hundreds of millions to “move their political ideas from the fringe to the center of American political life”.

Twenty years after collaborating with the Nazis, Fred Koch lost none of his taste for extremism. In 1958 he was one of the 11 original members of the John Birch Society, an organization which accused scores of prominent Americans, including President Dwight Eisenhower, of communist sympathies.

In 1960, Koch wrote that “the colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America”. He strongly supported the movement to impeach chief justice Earl Warren, after the supreme court voted to desegregate public schools in Brown v Board of Education. His sons became Birchers too, although Charles was more enamored of “antigovernment economic writers” than communist conspiracies.

After their father died, Charles and David bought out their brothers’ shares in the family company, then built it into the second largest privately held corporation in America.

“As their fortunes grew, Charles and David Koch became the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America,” Mayer writes. Charles’s goal was to “tear the government out ‘at the root’.”

Rauner must move beyond populist imagery in budget battle

 

Public opinion polls vary widely on who's going to succeed Chicago's Barack Obama as president, but they agree on one thing: Public confidence in government and its ability to get things done is at record low levels.

The reason is fairly obvious. A weak economy that's creating jobs but not nearly as much wealth for the average person has lots of folks convinced that “they” are eating our bacon. From Donald Trump on the right to Sen. Bernie Sanders on the left, populism is the current rage as pols try to figure out how to make the case that they are on voters' side.

Obama never really has pulled off that trick. Though he's accomplished more than people realize and many in Washington never gave him a fair shot, the former University of Chicago law instructor's wonky side slips out far too much.

Similarly, Mayor Rahm Emanuel never connected with average Chicagoans, even before anyone ever heard of Laquan McDonald. Following Richard M. Daley, who mangled the English language and dressed like 50 bucks, Emanuel comes across as utterly self-contained and concerned about rich people like himself. He has little reservoir of personal goodwill to draw on in this time of crisis.

However, it's Gov. Bruce Rauner whom I find really interesting when it comes to pulling off populism.

Rauner is truly rich compared with Emanuel. He pretty much bought the governor's mansion by himself. He's about as ordinary as a private jet to St. Bart's. Yet he's smart enough to know that instinctively. Ergo, all the Harley riding, “g” dropping and frumpy dressing.

The same is true with Rauner's proposals for change in the ongoing state budget standoff.

He's right that the property tax and corporate income tax in Illinois are well above those of competing states. He's right that the state's job creation machinery has clunked to a near-total stop, except in downtown Chicago. He's right that House Speaker Mike Madigan has been in power a couple of decades too long. And he's right that organized labor has much of the state's politicians by the short hairs and has used that power to get things it shouldn't, like 3 percent annual compounded hikes in pension benefits in an era of 1 to 2 percent inflation.

But many of us suspect that if Rauner were to get his way and curb union influence, all he would be doing is moving money from middle-class union households to upper-income groups.

I mean, isn't that what outsourcing is all about? Firing people who make $12 an hour and replacing them with people who make $8 so that taxes paid by the wealthy can be a little lower? And aren't Madigan and the unions trying to prevent that?

My conservative friends would argue that states with a different economic model, some in the South but also Indiana, are creating jobs faster than we are. A recent study by the Illinois Policy Institute even suggested that statewide, after adjusting for the cost of living, factory jobs in Indiana on average now pay better than in Illinois.

If Rauner really wants to win this war with Madigan, he's going to have to take his inner populist beyond appearances. That means moving away from the mano a mano power struggle. (My suggestion is to concede that each is a beast and get on with it.)

Instead, the governor is going to have to start convincing Illinoisans that it's in their economic interests to side with him. That means more than just opposing higher taxes. It means demonstrating to voters why his policies will put more money in their pockets than Madigan's will.

I can't guarantee that would end this fight. But all Rauner is doing now is wearing out the state's credit card. Time for a new approach, sir?

Above is from:  http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20160116/ISSUE05/301169991/rauner-must-move-beyond-populist-imagery-in-budget-battle

The Destruction of Progressive Wisconsin

SHORTLY after his exit from an abbreviated presidential run last fall, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin returned to a more successful undertaking: dismantling what remains of his state’s century-old progressive legacy.

Last month, Mr. Walker signed a bill that allowed corporations to donate directly to political parties. On the same day, he signed a law that replaced the state’s nonpartisan Government Accountability Board, a body that is responsible for election oversight and enforcing ethics codes, with two commissions made up of partisan appointees. Now a new bill supported by Mr. Walker, which is expected to clear the Republican-dominated Legislature with a Senate vote soon, threatens to corrupt Wisconsin’s Civil Service.

In 1905, Wisconsin became the third state to enact Civil Service reform, helping establish it as a national model for clean government. The reforms were one of the many achievements of Gov. Robert M. La Follette Sr., who later founded the Progressive Party and ran for president on its ticket. But Mr. Walker’s new Civil Service bill replaces anonymous exams with résumés, opening the door to political or racial bias that would prove almost impossible to detect because personnel files are not part of the public record.

The bill lengthens the probationary period for new employees, during which they can be fired for any reason (or no reason). And it centralizes hiring within the Department of Administration, the most politicized agency in the state’s government. Incoming résumés would be judged by one of the governor’s appointees.

Besides rewriting the hiring process for new employees and the work rules that govern some 30,000 current state workers, the bill highlights Wisconsin’s role as a laboratory for a national conservative strategy to destroy the labor movement. That experiment began in 2011 with the passage of Act 10, which all but ended collective bargaining for the state’s public employees and helped inspire more than a hundred bills across the country attacking public-sector unions.

Last year, Mr. Walker signed a “right-to-work” law that weakened private-sector unions and also marked a significant national turning point: Half of the 50 states are now right-to-work. A national right-to-work bill, which already has 18 co-sponsors in the Senate, including Senator Ted Cruz, appears increasingly possible under a Republican president.

By adding the Civil Service bill, Mr. Walker brings Wisconsin closer to the achievement of a long-sought goal of the libertarian right: universal “at-will employment.” Unlike union workers or state employees, whose collective bargaining agreements or Civil Service rules generally require employers to demonstrate “just cause” for them to be fired, at-will employees can be terminated at any time for any reason. At-will employment is promoted by the Heritage Foundation and American Legislative Exchange Council, which disseminates model bills to state legislators benefiting its corporate members and conservative private backers.

When Scott Walker was an assemblyman and ALEC member in the 1990s, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a Madison-based watchdog group focused on corporate influence in government, ALEC adopted a bill called the At-Will Employment Act for state legislators to use as a template. In the past 20 years, many states, including Tennessee, Indiana, Florida, Georgia, Texas and Kansas have eroded job-security protections for Civil Service workers, mirroring key aspects of ALEC’s model.

ALEC’s role was more explicit in 2011, when Jan Brewer, the former governor of Arizona, gave a keynote address at an ALEC conference indicating she would “reform” her state’s Civil Service. Several months later, she signed a bill (introduced in the Legislature by an ALEC member) that closely tracked with ALEC’s model and stripped Arizona’s state workers of virtually all Civil Service protections.

The Civil Service bill Mr. Walker supports also undermines protections against unfair termination. Under its rules, supervisors could fire workers for “personal conduct” they find “inadequate, unsuitable or inferior.” Like many of the bill’s opponents, Jim Thiel, a retired chief attorney for the state’s Department of Transportation, fears such vague language invites partisan retaliation and favoritism. “These words — ‘inadequate,’ ‘inferior’ — are empty vessels into which you can pour many things,” Mr. Thiel told me. “ ‘Personal conduct’ sounds like something outside the work environment.”

The Walker administration’s record of retribution gives credence to Mr. Thiel’s fears. In 2013, Mr. Walker abruptly withdrew the nomination of a student representative to the University of Wisconsin System’s Board of Regents after discovering that the nominee had signed a petition calling for the governor’s recall. (Two local Tea Party groups have created a searchable database of the one million recall signatures.) In July, Mr. Walker eliminated a third of the Department of Natural Resources’ staff scientists, whose research on climate change, wildlife management and pollution from a proposed iron ore mine offered a compelling rebuke to his industry-driven environmental agenda.

Many public policy experts believe that Wisconsin’s Civil Service system would benefit from modernizing reforms, as it did in the 1990s under Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson. Mr. Thompson enacted changes recommended by a bipartisan commission of legislators that held public hearings across the state and also included representatives of employee unions. But like Act 10 and the right-to-work law, the new Civil Service bill was drawn up in secret, announced with little warning, and contained no meaningful input from affected parties. The Senate and Assembly granted a single day each of perfunctory hearings.

During the protests over Act 10, as Mr. Walker demonized public employee unions, he praised private sector ones, only to betray them later by enacting right-to-work. The Civil Service bill uses a similar tactic. In 2011, Mr. Walker assured state workers that they did not need their unions because of Wisconsin’s Civil Service rules. “In Wisconsin, the rights that most workers have have been set through the Civil Service system, which predates collective bargaining by several generations,” he said. “That doesn’t change. All the Civil Service protections — the strongest Civil Service system in the country — still strongly remains intact.”

Mr. Walker’s reversal, coupled with other divisive new measures like undermining tenure in the University of Wisconsin System, have contributed to his 38 percent approval rating in the state. They also suggest that his ambition may still be to win national office. In an October interview with a conservative Milwaukee talk radio host, he did not rule out another run. “I’m hopeful we have a Republican president for the next eight years after this election, but after that we’ll have to see what the future holds,” Mr. Walker said. In December, Senator Cruz encouraged his supporters to relieve Mr. Walker of his campaign debt, generating speculation that he might become the vice-presidential choice for the like-minded Mr. Cruz.

The people least surprised by Mr. Walker’s reversal were the state’s beleaguered workers. A longtime Wisconsin civil servant told me that she worries about the security of her job if the bill becomes law. “If you’re an at-will employer, you can just tell someone goodbye,” she said, noting that 72 state employees in Arizona had recently been fired indiscriminately.

Despite the long odds of stopping the measure after the failure of large protests against Act 10 and the right-to-work law, the woman quietly helped organize a teach-in last week to raise awareness about the bill. As she talked about her efforts, however, it became clear that a culture of fear had taken root in the Wisconsin workplace. Though she describes herself as a “labor activist,” when I asked if I could use her name she declined. She was too afraid.

Dan Kaufman is a writer and musician.

Above is from:  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/opinion/campaign-stops/the-destruction-of-progressive-wisconsin.html?_r=0

Quinn Slams Rauner Over Ongoing Budget Impasse

Former Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn went on the attack against Gov. Bruce Rauner Thursday night, slamming him over the six-month-old budget impasse and his "anti-worker" turnaround agenda. 

Former Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn came out swinging Thursday night against Gov. Bruce Rauner, saying in an interview with Progress Illinois that the Republican is "failing" at governing the state, which has been without a budget for more than six months. 

Quinn called the ongoing budget impasse "very disappointing."  

"I think it all begins and ends with arithmetic," he said following an Equality Illinois PAC event in Chicago celebrating the group's mission of electing pro-LGBT equality candidates to state and local offices. "You've got to have enough revenue to equal your expenditures. And I think that's the first job of the governor is to propose a budget that has adequate revenue to pay for the important expenditures of, not only education, but health care and housing and public safety and social services. So that's, you know, a real failing of Bruce Rauner."

Quinn, a Democrat, said it has been "hard to watch" what has "happened to the state budget" since Rauner took office exactly one year ago this past Tuesday. The former governor expressed concern over the budget impasse's impact on services, including the Monetary Award Program (MAP), which helps low-income Illinois students pay for tuition at state colleges and universities.

"Millionaires in Illinois in this past year got three-quarters of a billion dollars in tax cuts," Quinn said. "Meanwhile, 130,000 students got cuts in their ... scholarship for tuition, so it seems very unjust to me that the state is not acting on behalf of people who are trying to get a good education. ... The biggest cost right now in America is not credit card debt. It's college loan debt. So if we can help somebody with a scholarship, it seems to me that we ought to do that, and for the governor to stand in the way is shameful."

Rauner and Democratic lawmakers remain at odds over a budget for the 2016 fiscal year, which began July 1. Rauner is trying to use the budgeting process to win items on his pro-business "turnaround agenda," which, among other things, seeks to curb the power of unions.

Quinn said Rauner's turnaround agenda is "anti-worker."

"People should have the right to have collective bargaining and to have a union. It's been the key to having a middle class in America and in Illinois," Quinn said. "To try to take a sledgehammer to the right to organize and have a union, it causes great harm to everyday people. And I think that it's not a turnaround agenda. It's an agenda to harm the middle class in our state."

The Democrat also accused Rauner of being dishonest with voters about his budget plans when he was a gubernatorial candidate.

"From the day he announced [his run] for governor, he wasn't honest about the budget and because of that ... people have been put in a bad situation by a governor who won't lead," Quinn said.

Asked whether he has any plans to run in the next Illinois gubernatorial election, Quinn said he's currently interested in grassroots organizing.

"I'm not too interested in candidacy campaigns and [all] that. I'm interested in petitions and referendums. That's what I got started on when I started in Illinois politics 40 years ago. We did the petition drive that set up the Citizens Utility Board. So I'd like to do a referendum in Illinois this year, at least in the Chicago area. That gives people a chance to open up the government to more citizen participation."

"There's a lot of work to be done. This is the year to get it done," he added. "We can't let someone who stands in the way of progress, Bruce Rauner, stop the people of Illinois from getting progressive, fair government. And I want to say to the 130,000 students who are looking for their scholarship that they were promised, but it's being denied by the governor, that we're not gonna take that sitting down. We've gotta organize."

Quinn also weighed in on the growing controversy over police misconduct in Chicago that has Mayor Rahm Emanuel facing calls for his resignation. 

"I think there needs to be a comprehensive overhaul of the whole Chicago government so that everyone in Chicago is treated with dignity and justice, and there's a ways to go before that's done," Quinn said.

Asked whether he thinks that overhaul should include the mayor's office, Quinn stopped short of saying Emanuel should resign. The former governor said he supports giving voters the ability to recall elected officials across Illinois, including Chicago's mayor. Illinois currently has a mechanism for recalling governors, which is a measure that was approved during the Quinn administration.

"I believe more in the power of having a recall," Quinn said. "I think that's the democratic way to do it, at the ballot box. That's what I got done for governor. I think we ought to do it for every office."

Above is from:  http://www.progressillinois.com/posts/content/2016/01/14/quinn-slams-rauner-over-ongoing-budget-impasse

Gov. Rauner seeks labor board ruling on impasse in talks with AFSCME

 

 

• By Doug Finke
  State Capitol Bureau

  Posted Jan. 15, 2016 at 10:49 AM
  Updated Jan 15, 2016 at 5:37 PM

  A week after denying it had declared negotiations at an impasse, the Rauner administration Friday asked the state labor relations board to determine if contract talks with the largest state employee union have stalled.

  If the Illinois Labor Relations Board rules in favor of the administration, it could open the door to the administration imposing its contract terms on the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31 that represents about 38,000 state employees.

  The union would then have to decide whether to accept the terms, go on strike or challenge the labor board’s ruling in court.

  AFSCME executive director Roberta Lynch said Friday, "It’s regrettable and damaging to the public interest that the governor has chosen a confrontational path.”

  In a letter to state employees Friday, though, Gov. Bruce Rauner said AFSCME is demanding a contract the state cannot afford and is not bargaining in good faith.

  “AFSCME has no intention of ever reaching a deal at the table,” Rauner wrote. “Our efforts at responding to AFSCME’s concerns and producing thoughtful proposals were rejected. We are no closer today than we were 12 months ago. Taxpayers will not be served by further discussions.”

  Friday’s action by the Rauner administration is the latest escalation in the increasingly contentious talks with AFSCME. A week ago, the union said administration negotiators had declared talks were at an impasse and rejected AFSCME’s offer for additional negotiating sessions. The administration denied it had declared an impasse and said it was AFSCME that had canceled previously scheduled negotiating sessions, something denied by the union.

  'Extreme demands'

  In documents released Friday, the administration said AFSCME wants raises, improvements to health insurance and other proposals that would cost the state more than $3 billion over the four-year term of the contract.

  “While everyone would like to be paid more, our average state worker salaries have gone up twice as fast as inflation over the last 10 years,” Rauner wrote. “Nor could any employer, public or private, afford to continue our current practice of providing the platinum health plans at the price of silver plans. I reached the conclusion early on that leaner contracts for four years were far better than the massive layoffs our state government faces on its current trajectory.”

  Lynch said Rauner is demanding that workers pay double to keep their health insurance plan, forego pay raises for four years and create a bonus plan based on “unknown criteria open to political favoritism.”

• …..

  There is no firm timetable for the ILRB to issue its ruling. The Rauner administration said the process could take several months if the board decides evidentiary hearings should be held.

  The decision would come from the five-member state panel of the ILRB. Rauner has appointed two members and reappointed two who were previously chosen by former Gov. Pat Quinn.

  If the board rules in Rauner’s favor, it would allow the administration to impose its contract terms on the union. The ILRB ruling could also be challenged in court. AFSCME spokesman Anders Lindall said the union is exploring all of its options.

  If the board rules against the administration, negotiations would continue.

  In 40 years that AFSCME has negotiated labor contracts with the state, this is believed to be the first time one side has attempted to declare an impasse. There has also never been a strike by AFSCME members during that time.

• ….

• Read more by clicking on the following:  http://www.sj-r.com/news/20160115/gov-rauner-seeks-labor-board-ruling-on-impasse-in-talks-with-afscme?rssfeed=true