Small business owners are demanding more regulation in the wake of Hurricane Dorian
In the Public Interest’s weekly analysis of privatization in the news and in communities nationwide. Not a subscriber? Sign up.
This week’s highlights
- As recovery and cleanup proceeds in the wake of Hurricane Dorian, small businesses are demanding tougher government regulations on infrastructure.
- California lawmakers have agreed to charter school reform statewide.
- A city investigation into a New York City shelter operator’s ties to a for-profit security company is expanding.
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Education
1) National: Journalist Sarah Lahm, writer of the Midwest Dispatch column for The Progressive, says 2020 Democrats should target the nonprofit charter school industry. “The singling out of for-profit charter schools is somewhat beside the point as residents of a St. Paul, Minnesota, neighborhood learned this summer when a treasured local landmark was threatened by an expanding charter school. The charter was decidedly nonprofit, but as families and preservation advocates would learn from their tenacious, but ultimately unsuccessful, battle to save a beloved, historic church, charter schools, regardless of their tax status, have become powerful players in a lucrative real estate market in urban areas where land values are high and empty lots or school-ready buildings are hard to find.”
2) National: Do so-called opportunity zones, which overpromise good job creation in exchange for tax breaks to private interests, impact education funding? CBPP Senior Fiscal Analyst Dick Lavine says they do. “Sadly, these policies almost inevitably result in tax giveaways for investment that would have occurred anyway. Article is about opportunity zones,but critique applies to Chapter 313 school property tax abatements too.”
3) Arkansas: The Arkansas Education Association has produced a rigorous analysis of how Arkansas’ “school privatization empire” is acting “to turn public education into a marketplace where private interests can profit off of our students.” The network “uses pass through organizations to fund a swarm of lobbyists and spend dark money on political candidates in our state and across the country. They initiated the recent attack on the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System, and have even co-opted our state’s flagship University to provide cover for the work of partisan think tank alumni who misuse statistics in support of a privatization agenda. They have close ties to members of the Arkansas State Board of Education, and their influence is part of the reason Arkansas’s latest legislative sessions have focused more on privatization schemes like vouchers and charter school expansion rather than the investments we know will actually improve outcomes for Arkansas’s 486,000 public school students.” The Walton Family Foundation is playing a central role.
4) California: Lawmakers have agreed on placing new restrictions on charter schools. “The deal will give public school districts more authority to reject petitions for new charter campuses. It also will phase in stricter credentialing requirements for charter school teachers and places a two-year moratorium on new virtual charter schools. (…) ‘This agreement focuses on the needs of our students,’ [Gov.] Newsom said in a statement. ‘It increases accountability for all charter schools, allows high-quality charter schools to thrive, and ensures that the fiscal and community impacts of charter schools on school districts are carefully considered. We are grateful that leaders on both sides of this conversation worked hard to reach this agreement, as it is foundational to continuing to work in the interests of all California students.’”
The well-heeled charter school lobby is blanketing the media with identical outraged editorials (OC Register, Daily Breeze, LA Daily News). And there’s a threat attached at the end: “Lawmakers could still intervene to give new charters a fighting chance. But if they don’t, expect the battle over board control to get uglier.”
5) District of Columbia: Journalist Rachel M. Cohen has written an in-depth account of howschool privatization interests have stymied the efforts of DC elected officials and citizens to regulate the charter school industry in the district, which is waging a fierce battle to block transparency efforts. “Unlike most other cities and states, D.C.’s charter schools are not subject to public records requests, and a proposed piece of legislation, not due for a hearing until Oct. 2, seeks to change that. Supporters of that bill feared the late date was selected to neutralize their momentum, and so they came out earlier to make their case.”
6) Florida: State auditors have slammed the practices of Step Up For Students, the tax credit-supported scholarship program to promote school vouchers, for shafting disabled students. “The audit found that Step Up For Students has consistently fallen short in distributing Gardiner scholarships. Those vouchers specifically serve students with intellectual disabilities like autism, cerebral palsy and Down syndrome. In the 2018–2019 school year, that meant that while 9,917 students applied for Gardiner scholarships, 583 of those failed to receive the vouchers purely because documents weren’t properly verified.” The auditors also found that “Step Up procedures did not always identify private schools receiving more than $250,000 in scholarship funds in a fiscal year to verify that those schools contract with an independent certified public accountant for an agreed-upon procedures engagement pursuant to State law.”
7) Illinois: Negotiations over ending the use of private school nurses and support staff have hit a snag. “Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s negotiating team has offered to end the outsourcing of nursing and other support staff jobs in the Chicago Public Schools in an effort to seal a deal with the Chicago Teachers Union and avert a strike, according to two senior CPS officials. The CTU is unlikely to accept the city’s proposal because it ‘includes huge loopholes that essentially render their proposal meaningless,’ Stacy Davis Gates, the union’s vice president, told the Chicago Sun-Times. The offer is contingent on concessions from the CTU, including withdrawing all proposals for additional social workers, nurses, librarians and other so-called wraparound services, sources close to the negotiations said. The union has been unwilling to drop those issues, and a CTU spokeswoman said the two sides remain ‘worlds apart.’”
8) Louisiana: NPR looks at the confusion and anxiety that the closure of failing charter schools in New Orleans creates. “In exchange for their relative autonomy, charter schools have a mandate: perform or close. According to district officials, Medard H. Nelson Charter School did not uphold its end of the bargain. The school earned an F from the state for the last four years based on standardized test scores. Just 11% of students tested at ‘mastery’ level (which the state considers grade level) in recent years. ‘We have to hold the line somewhere,’ NOLA Public Schools Senior Chief Amanda Aiken said. ‘That is the job that we have. It’s to make those tough decisions, but to take in all of the data we have and say this school is not preparing kids to be successful. What is our next step here?’”
9) Minnesota/National: Writing in The Progressive, the indefatigable Sarah Lahm (see above) takes aim at media coverage of the reason for a shortage of school bus drivers. “But fill-in drivers are temporary workers, and signal an issue deeper than the pull of a strong economy: outsourcing. Although neither Feinberg nor Shulte’s articles mentioned it, the ramping up of privatization schemes, including hiring outside providers, is also a likely factor in the widespread shortage of school bus drivers. This should raise a few red flags, however, as the growing privatization of public goods and services in the United States — a trend we see in both education and the transportation industry — is cause for concern. Privatization tends to put profits before the needs of the public, as seen in the Flint water crisis, for example, or the rise of ride-sharing services such as Uber that some cities are using to replace public transportation options. Workers, too, often don’t fare well under privatization schemes.”
10) Mississippi: The state supreme court has cleared the way for tax dollars to be used to pay for charter schools. At issue was whether local tax dollars could be spent on charter schools that the public doesn’t control. “In a dissent, Justice Leslie King wrote that the authors [of] the state constitution used ‘plain language’ to specify that local property taxes ‘are to be used only to maintain the schools controlled by a school district.’ ‘This Court should not be a rubber stamp for Legislative policies it agrees with when those policies are unconstitutional,’ King wrote.”
11) New Hampshire: Public education supporters are warning about the impact federal grant money for charter schools will have on the public school system. “The state’s plan entails opening 20 new charter schools, opening seven new locations of current charter schools and expanding five existing schools over a five-year time period, according to the project abstract.”
12) New York: As the possibility of outsourcing school bus services to First Student looms over the Pocono Mountain School District, contract negotiations with the district’s own drivers continue. “After voting to outsource school transportation services in April, PMSD continues to negotiate in good faith with the district’s union, according to Pennsylvania State Education Association spokesperson Jessica Sabol.” April’s vote “came after months of public hearings and heartfelt pleas from longtime drivers, parents and students alike.”
13) New York: The State University of New York is suing over what it claims is its right to issue teacher certifications. The NYS Department of Education is resisting the move. “Hank Greenberg, a shareholder at Greenberg Traurig and the current president of the New York State Bar Association, appeared before the panel for the state Department of Education, which has argued that SUNY can not create its own teacher certification rules. “It could not be any clearer that the Legislature, with incredible specificity, said that the commissioner [of education] has the authority to promulgate these regulations,” Greenberg said. “The litigation stems from regulations SUNY adopted nearly two years ago that would allow charter schools to create their own teacher certification programs. Those teachers, unlike others, would not have to earn a graduate degree and could avoid a longer period of practice teaching before certification under the proposal.”
14) Pennsylvania: The hard pressed Allentown School District’s demand that charter schools get less money could be spreading across the state. “So far, most of the 23 charters — which are paid based on a state formula — have refused, saying they aren’t the cause of the district’s financial troubles. The situation will likely be closely watched by school districts across the state amid intensifying debate over charters and their mounting costs to districts. And the charter community is wary. Allentown’s request ‘could certainly be replicated’ by other school districts under financial distress, said Ana Meyers, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools.” For more see Valerie Strauss’ Washington Post article “How big a mess is Pennsylvania’s charter school sector? This big.”
15) Rhode Island/National: Writing in Common Dreams, education historian and public education supporter Diane Ravitch looks at how, under the state’s Democratic governor, Providence is planning to defund its public schools to expand a “no excuses” charter. “The evidence is clear,” Ravitch says, “that privately managed charters can get higher test scores by culling, exclusion, and attrition. It’s equally clear that charters drain resources from the public schools that enroll most students. Most public officials seem to understand that it costs more to run parallel systems, one public, one private. But not in Rhode Island, where Governor Gina Raimondo is a big fan of charters (she was a hedge fund manager before running for governor). She is eager to expand Achievement First, a no-excuses charter known for high test scores and harsh discipline.” Ravitch points to an article in the Providence Journal by Linda Borg that “lays out the findings of two independent studies that warned about the negative fiscal impact of charters on public schools.”
Infrastructure
16) National: As recovery and cleanup proceeds in the wake of Hurricane Dorian, small businesses are demanding tougher government regulations on infrastructure (the New Yorker even has a cartoon for that). “Inside Forest Lake Fabrics, a family business founded by owner Michael Marsha’s great-grandfather, floodwaters rose to 6 feet, destroying $1 million worth of product. The storm also inundated surrounding roads and cut the store’s electricity — and Marsha’s access to his business — for days. In rebuilding, Marsha elevated his building by 6 feet and fortified it with flood shields designed to divert floodwaters. But he knows more is needed, including improvements to local infrastructure’s flood resiliency, to help his community withstand the next storm.”
Remember when, not so long ago, the Trump administration advocated weakening the National Environmental Policy Act and canceling a federal standard that protects new infrastructure from flooding and costly repairs? Cathleen Kelly of the Center for American Progress called the order “a gift to developers and big corporations — the ‘private’ half of the public-private partnerships that will implement the president’s infrastructure plan. Communities will suffer the consequences and taxpayers will pick up the tab.” Think efforts to gut NEPA are over because Trump’s infrastructure plan went nowhere? Unfortunately they aren’t.
17) National: A bit of gloom from author William Cohan as municipal bond issuance spikes amid low rates and “a gigantic bubble in the bond market.”
18) Alabama: Opposition to tolls has led Gov. Ivey (R) to kill the $2.1 billion Interstate 10 Mobile River Bridge and Bayway ‘public-private partnership’ project. “A proposed $6 one-way toll to support the plan of finance, along with opposition to placing any toll on the interstate, has long dominated hearings and social media discussions about the 10-mile-long plan that included building a six-lane bridge over the Mobile River, even though a parallel, untolled route would be available for local motorists. The state was in the process of selecting a concessionaire for the P3.” [Sub required]
19) Connecticut: A reality check on “government waste” propaganda being spread by Koched-up think tanks, courtesy of Westport attorney Gail Berritt: “The Reason Foundation’s claim that Connecticut’s Department of Transportation ranks 44th or below in the nation in spending efficiency is bogus and has been widely debunked.”
20) Illinois: A new law has come into effect boosting jobs and wages to repair aging water infrastructure throughout the state. “The law, signed Aug. 23 by Gov. J.B. Pritzker, establishes a new Clean Water Workforce Pipeline program that will train workers for water-related jobs through grants to labor organizations.”
21) Kentucky: From ProPublica, the tale of a ‘public-private partnership’ that went bad. “In the spring of 2015, KentuckyWired, the Bluegrass State’s ambitious plan to bring high-speed internet access into rural areas, had ground to a halt. Officials were in talks with Macquarie Capital, an Australian investment bank known for organizing big infrastructure projects around the globe, to build and manage the new network. But the bank wanted $1.2 billion over three decades — money Kentucky didn’t have on its own. To make the unique public-private partnership work, then-Gov. Steve Beshear and his administration needed to tap into a federal program that awarded money for broadband projects. And it was a long shot; the Federal Communications Commission had already signaled concern over Kentucky’s eligibility. That’s when Macquarie brought in a consultant to help: Frank Lassiter.”
22) Missouri: St. Louis on the Air’s Sarah Fenske recently hosted a discussion of the proposal to privatize St. Louis Lambert International Airport with St. Louis Public Radio reporter Corinne Ruff and Alderwoman Cara Spencer. Spencer “cited the failed privatization of Stewart International Airport in New York as one of the reasons why [she opposes the plan]. When that airport’s private operator, National Express (NEG), pulled out of the contract, it ‘cost taxpayers of New York $75 million to get out of that privatization,’ Spencer said. ‘That is the only airport on mainland United States that has gone private, and I’m very concerned that the city of St. Louis could find itself in a very, very similar situation,’” Spencer said.
Spencer and Ruff were not the only participants, apparently. It seems one of the privatization consultants “‘very likely” called into the show on the air “using a fake name.” Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger reported on suspicions that the caller was Douglass Petty, “one of the many high-priced consultants being paid by local billionaire Rex Sinquefield to push through the privatization process.” That kind of stunt would seem to be rather expensive at $20,000 a month.
23) New Jersey: As Newark faces a serious problem with lead contamination in its water, Food & Water Watch has urged Mayor Ras Baraka to avoid the tragic mistake Flint, Michigan made in turning over control of its water supply to the state. “The very existence of the crisis reveals that privatizing the water supply, which could quickly result from turning it over the state control, would harm residents,’ said Food & Water Watch. ‘One needs only to look at neighboring communities in New Jersey to see that private companies like Suez also struggle with replacing dangerous lead pipes,’ said Grant. ‘And privatization would have the added burden of raising water rates for Newark residents for decades to come. While city and state officials must respond to the current crisis with urgency, they must also protect their water system from predatory corporate operators.’”
24) Puerto Rico: Stakeholders are questioning the impact of a “public-private partnership” concession to cruise ships at the San Juan piers. “This is going to have an [enormous] impact, and no one knows what is in the document,” said Daphne Barbeito. “Barbeito argued that the first problem she sees is a lack of transparency. This includes not being able to see the request for proposals issued by the Public-Private Partnerships Authority (PPPA), and the Tourism Co. (PRTC) not meeting with travel agents, cruise lines, Old San Juan business owners or tour operators.”
Criminal justice and immigration
25) National: The U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general has issued a report finding widespread trauma among migrant children held in HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) facilities. “To address the needs of the children in its custody, ORR enters into grants or contracts with care provider facilities (facilities) to house and care for the children. These facilities provide counseling to children and arrange for more specialized mental health services, as needed. Any significant challenges that facilities face in addressing mental health needs could have serious immediate and long-term ramifications for children’s well-being.”
26) National: Writing in the September issue of The New Republic, Ken Silverstein reports on disturbing conditions in an ICE mental health facility. “ICE’s crown jewel in this initiative is a Miami facility called the Krome Service Processing Center, which is administered in conjunction with a host of private contractors. Krome was founded in the 1960s as a Cold War military base designed to protect the nation against the threat posed by Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Beginning in 1980, the U.S. government began transitioning it to hold immigration detainees. (…) My own trip to Krome came at the behest of Friends of Miami-Dade Detainees (FOMDD), which got me inside the camp as a community member. I thus became the first journalist to get unsupervised interviews with detainees. What emerged from the visit, along with months of additional reporting, was a far darker and more sinister picture than the one painted by the Trump administration, ICE, and the immigration system’s many media enablers.”
27) National: Human rights and legal organizations have filed suit on behalf of plaintiffs against ICE for ignoring the medical, mental health, and disability needs of detained immigrants. “At least half of ICE’s detention bed capacity is at facilities operated by for-profit prison companies, including CoreCivic or GEO Group. Both companies have a long history of refusing to provide adequate medical care to prisoners in their facilities. ‘However, despite knowing the inherent risks of contracting with private prison corporations, ICE continues to entrust them with the care of an ever-growing number of detained individuals,’ the lawsuit states.”
The complaint also notes that “ICE’s choice of medical service contractors is similarly disturbing. For example, ICE frequently contracts with private medical provider Correct Care Solutions (“CCS”), now rebranded as Wellpath, even though the company has been sued at least 1,395 times over the last decade. Upon information and belief, individuals in ICE custody also receive medical care from Corizon, another private prison healthcare provider. Corizon has been sued over 1,000 times in the past five years.”
28) National: The Los Angeles Times reports that Tom Gores, an LA billionaire and owner of the Detroit Pistons, has purchased Securus Technologies, “a leading provider of telephone services to inmates — and a poster child for an industry widely condemned as a racket, given rates that can top a dollar a minute.” LAT reporter Laurence Darmiento says “Gores is being targeted by activists who are demanding reforms at Securus and have even pressed pension funds to stop investing in his Platinum Equity buyout firm. And although the activists haven’t been able to starve Gores of capital, they are not letting up, threatening to make their campaign more personal by taking it to criminal justice advocates in Detroit and athletes in the NFL and NBA, whose players are known for being outspoken.” Bianca Tylek, a Harvard Law School graduate and founder of Worth Rises, a New York nonprofit campaigning against Platinum and other private equity firms, says “there is a difference between businesses that have a few ethical, questionable deviations and a business that at the root, at the core, is unethical, where there is not a redeemable piece of the business left when you fix it.”
While all of this price gouging of prisoners and their families and friends is going on, the real situation of inmate access to technology for rehabilitation in prisons is appalling.
28) National: CoreCivic has lost its effort to block class certification in a lawsuit against it for securities fraud. “The class includes at least 783 major institutions that owned over 110 million shares of CoreCivic stock traded during the class period. The trial court properly applied the framework that provides investors with a presumption of reliance on the alleged misstatements, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit said in an order denying immediate review.”
29) National: George Zoley, the founder and CEO of GEO Group, has been called out by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) for naming her in an internal email denouncing anti-ICE protestors. “Ocasio-Cortez responded on Twitter, saying she’d be ‘honored to go toe to toe’ with Zoley, adding that ‘your entire business — the caging of humans for profit — is immoral & should be outlawed.’” Never Again Action, a mobilization of different affiliated Jewish organizers whose goal is to shut down ICE, was also criticized by Zoley. [Read Zoley’s memo]. For the dark and spooky story of GEO Group’s origins and Zoley’s role in the company, see the Palm Beach Post’s 2014 report, GEO: Gardens Security Firm Started by FBI Agent Went Global.
30) National: House Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings (D-MD) has blasted the Department of Homeland Security in a six-page letter for cancelling the committee’s scheduled tours at 11 migrant detention facilities. “It appears that the Administration expects Congress to be satisfied with receiving agency tours of facilities–in some cases without the ability to photograph conditions or interview detainees–and not to question the policies or decisions that agency officials make,” Cummings wrote. “That is not the way effective oversight works.”
Cummings also wrote “Committee staff visits to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, many of them run by for-profit contractors, also raised troubling questions. For example, detainees expressed concern about rotten food and inadequate access to medical care. Others raised concerns about their treatment in the ‘voluntary work program,’ in which hundreds of detainees provide up to eight hours of work per day doing cleaning, kitchen, laundry and gardening services, but are paid only $1.00 to $1.50 per day.”
31) National: A junk bond analyst sees an investment opportunity in private, for profit prison bonds. “The U.S. has the highest incarceration rates of any developed nation,” he gushes.
32) Alabama: Five companies have expressed an interest in building prisons in Alabama. “Gov. Kay Ivey’s office said five firms responded to a “request for qualifications” to build the three proposed prisons that would house 3,000 or more inmates each. Ivey’s press office said the firms are The GEO Group, Corvias, Corrections Consultants, CoreCivic and Alabama Prison Transformation Partners.” Alabama Political Reporter says, “Alabama Prison Transformation Partners is a public mystery with no records of its existence beyond the governor’s announcement. APR has confirmed that B.L. Harbert International and Star America Infrastructures are two of the entities behind the venture.”
33) Colorado/National: In a letter to the Daily Camera, Boulder resident Katie Farnan says, “I was disappointed to hear that Boulder City Council reversed its decision to provide policing services to BI Inc. (subsidiary of GEO Group). I’m asking Council for its plan to protect our neighbors who are under BI monitoring, experiencing mistreatment and abuse. No Boulder business should be complicit in the dehumanizing treatment of people for corporate profit. Is the city prepared to make a resolution to that effect? This is a nightmare, and we need leadership from our city representatives.”
Public services
34) National: Alexander Nazaryan of Yahoo News reports that Trump wants the national parks to generate cash and critics fear privatization. “If [Interior Secretary] David Bernhardt gets his way, American families will pay more to access their birthright, because Trump’s billionaire buddies and the special interests that made them rich will always come first in this administration,” says Chris Saeger, executive director of the Western Values Project, a not-for-profit organization that opposes the Trump administration.
Jim Hightower homes in on “the predator of our public lands.” He writes, “Meet William Perry Pendley. For more than 40 years, he’s been a fringe political operative and lawyer for a network of loopy, anti-environmental extremists intent on helping corporate predators grab and plunder our national assets for their private profit. And now — Holy Teddy Roosevelt! — developer-in-chief Donald Trump has named Pendley to be acting head of the Bureau of Land Management. Yes, a guy who favors the wholesale privatization of your and my public lands is to oversee the future of America’s public lands. Indeed, Pendley has been lost in the ultra-right-wing weeds for years, screeching that the ‘Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold.’ (…) Don’t just keep an eye on this corporate extremist — don’t even blink! For updates, contact Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility at peer.org.”
35) California: The Labor Video Project reports that dozens of San Francisco SEIU 1021 and IFPTE 21 SFGH ARF workers, patients, family members rallied recently at SFGH Assisted Residential. “SF Mayor London Breed with the support of Supervisor Madelman want the center turned into a temporary space at Navigation centers with non-profit workers doing public worker jobs at $17.50 an hour. These two tier wages pit public workers against non-profit workers. The mayor and Human Resources director Micki Callahan are outsourcing hundreds of millions of dollars to non-profits that pay the workers substandard wages for public work.”
36) Iowa: Jenn Wolf of UpgradeMedicaid reports that “thousands of disabled Iowans rely on Long Term Support Services (LTSS) through Medicaid. These services were designed to provide daily living assistance for individuals to maintain normal lives in their homes. Since Medicaid’s privatization, individuals are being forced to consider nursing home placement, which is typically more expensive than community living.”
37) Nebraska: Nebraska Appleseed has filed suit to end the privatization of Omaha’s child welfare services. “The lawsuit, filed in Lancaster County District Court, claims that allowing privatization in Douglas and Sarpy Counties violates a clause in the Nebraska Constitution barring “special legislation” by allowing the state to manage child welfare cases in 91 counties in Nebraska, but not in the two eastern Nebraska counties.”
38) New York: A city investigation into a shelter operator’s ties is expanding, the Wall Street Journal reports. “Last month, the city’s Department of Investigation launched a probe into Acacia Network Housing Inc., a Bronx-based nonprofit, over its executives’ alleged undisclosed connection to a for-profit security company. Since 2010 the nonprofit has received more than $1 billion in contracts from the city’s Department of Homeless Services to run shelters, including $50 million in contracts so far this year. (…) The city expanded its probe earlier this month after learning of Acacia’s ties to Distinctive Maintenance, a for-profit company and an affiliate of the nonprofit.” [Sub required]
39) Wisconsin: Door County EMS crews are concerned their public service will be privatized. “The Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin wrote on its Facebook page recently Door County wants ‘to disrupt the county EMS system that currently exists’ by bringing in a national emergency medical services company.”
40) Think tanks: Writing in the most recent issue of the American Review of Public Administration, Gyeo Reh Lee , Shinwoo Lee, Deanna Malatesta and Sergio Fernandez analyze Outsourcing and Organizational Performance: The Employee Perspective. “Our findings do not support the traditional narrative that market-oriented practices improve organizational performance in the public sector,” they write. “We rather report evidence of the negative impact of outsourcing on perceived performance and a viable causal mechanism linking outsourcing to organizational performance.” Among other things, the authors find that “an increase in outsourcing can harm public employees’ job satisfaction, and thus organizational performance (see Judge et al., 2001). These findings highlight critical roles of managers in designing and implementing internal managerial practices to instill positive outcomes of government outsourcing in employees’ job satisfaction.” [Sub required]
A significant weakness of the study is that although it is framed as an analysis of “the employee perspective,” the authors do not consider the role of unions, collective bargaining and related grievance procedures in empowering workers, informing managers, and improving job satisfaction and organizational performance in privately contracted public services.
Odds and ends
41) National: CBS reports that Trump wants to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. “The new plan would make the companies privately owned yet government “sponsored” companies again. Their profits would no longer go to the Treasury but would be used to build up their capital bases as a cushion against possible future losses.” Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren calls the scheme “shameful,” saying it would make the affordable housing crisis worse. “In the middle of a housing affordability crisis, when the gap between the black and white homeownership rates is as big as it was when housing discrimination was legal, the Trump administration wants to make it harder for creditworthy working families — especially families of color — to buy a home and build wealth.”
42) Indiana: The Hoosier Lottery, which is privatized, has sent 2 percent more profits to the state over the past year. “Lottery officials said a record amount is being transferred to the state, but it remains below the original goal of $410 million by 2018 set when the commission hired a private company in 2012 to run most of Indiana’s lottery operations.”
43) Wisconsin: The MacIver Institute, an affiliate of the right wing Koch-funded State Policy Network, is complaining about a Milwaukee “community benefits agreement with a labor union that all service sector workers would be represented by a union and make $15 an hour and come from specific zip codes in the city.” According to its 2014 federal tax form, MacIver’s president made $131,109 that year.
44) International: The consulting firm KPMG charges the Australian federal government up to four times as much as it charges the New South Wales state government for services. “The new outsourcing inquiry, which will look at visa and citizenship programs, the robo-debt welfare system, the National Disability Insurance Scheme roll-out and other private sector contracts, coincides with a second review by the Auditor-General into outsourcing. The big four consulting firms Deloitte, EY (the former Ernst & Young), KPMG and PwC earned $1.7 billion from the federal government between 2012–13 and 2016–17. During this time, the firms have also emerged as major political donors. In the six years to 2018, they gave more than $4 million to the major political parties.”
Governing for the common good
45) Georgia: Cobb County is celebrating the opening of a new library that will benefit underserved communities. “‘I firmly believe that libraries remain the focal point of an educated and cultured society,’ said Mike Boyce, chairman of the Cobb County Board of Commissioners. ‘I believe (North Cobb Regional Library) will be a cornerstone for a remarkable place that our children and our grandchildren will benefit from.’ Kennesaw Mayor Derek Easterling echoed the chairman. The new library, he said, is a bright light in the community and for future generations. ‘That’s our future, ladies and gentlemen,’ Easterling said, pointing from the podium at the crowd of middle schoolers. ‘That’s what this library is for.’” The library is funded through a Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax that was passed in 2016.
46) New Jersey: The state and Unite Here are cooperating for workforce development in Atlantic City. “Nearly 100 people will receive workforce training in the hospitality industry because of a state grant awarded to the local casino workers’ union. Unite Here Local 54, the labor union that represents nearly 10,000 employees in the casino industry, was awarded $280,000 from the inaugural Pre-Apprenticeship in Career Education program. The state Department of Labor and Workforce Development launched the PACE program in January and awarded more than $1.8 million to nine organizations.”
