QUOTE OF THE DAY
Crain’s: Illinois employers warn of nearly 800 job cuts
Five companies may shed a combined 776 jobs in Illinois in coming months, according to state filings.
A portion of the losses are at OfficeMax Inc., which is laying off 137 people in Ottawa, about 84 miles southwest of downtown Chicago, according to the state’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, or WARN, report for April.
OfficeMax, formerly based in Naperville, merged with Boca Raton, Fla.-based Office Depot Inc. last year. The combined company, called Office Depot, is now headquartered in Florida. Officials previously said they would start moving 1,600 jobs out of Illinois last month.
The Hill: Report finds one federal layoff from sequester
A new government report has found that last year’s sequester led to only one federal layoff, a conclusion that Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said Wednesday was an outrage.
Coburn said the finding from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is more proof that the Obama administration and its allies overhyped the effects of the automatic budget cuts, and in a letter to Obama budget director Sylvia Burwell, he demanded an official report on the government’s sequestration response.
“The Budget Control Act is the law of the land until Fiscal Year 2021, so it is essential to have a complete understanding of how agencies manage their workforces and operations in this constrained fiscal environment,” Coburn wrote.
Daily Herald: Chicago teachers vote to oppose Common Core
The Chicago Teachers Union has voted to oppose a set of educational benchmarks implemented by law in Illinois and many other states.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports the union’s House of Delegates voted Wednesday to urge the city’s teachers to join the “growing national opposition” to the Common Core State Standards.
Common Core standards lay out specific skills in reading and math that students should master by the end of each grade level. How the teacher pursues the goal is up to each school’s curriculum.
Sun-Times: An architect of Quinn’s troubled crime program now running Rahm’s
The head of a new city alliance with business titans to reduce gun violence in Chicago was one of the architects of the governor’s scandal-plagued Neighborhood Recovery Initiative.
Toni Irving, the head of Get In Chicago, was a deputy chief of staff for Gov. Pat Quinn when the Neighborhood Recovery Initiative was formed in 2010.
Irving acknowledged in an interview she helped come up with the ideas for the program, which is now under investigation by federal and Cook County prosecutors. An audit by the state’s auditor general slammed the program earlier this year, concluding Quinn’s administration didn’t “adequately monitor” how state grant dollars were spent; community organizations that hired people with those grants weren’t maintaining time sheets, and city aldermen dictated where the money was to be steered.
Daily Herald: Hearing on athletes union worries activist
A former linebacker leading the drive to form the nation’s first union for college athletes said Wednesday he fears a congressional hearing could be a step toward legislative barriers that would thwart unionization.
The hearing is scheduled for Thursday in Washington, D.C., before the House Education and the Workforce Committee. It comes in the wake of a landmark ruling by a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board that football players at Northwestern University are employees under U.S. law and can therefore unionize.
The Evanston, Illinois, school has appealed the ruling, saying college athletes are not employees and such a change would transform the very landscape of amateur athletics in the United States.
AP: Illinois college retirement board OKs pension fix
The board of the State Universities Retirement System has voted to accept an interpretation of last year’s Illinois pension reform law that says it won’t inadvertently cut university
retirees’ pension.
According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the board’s executive committee voted unanimously on Thursday in Chicago to follow other state pension systems and accept the interpretation of the 2013 law.
The State Universities Retirement System and Illinois’ public universities had recently argued that language mistakenly written into the law would sharply reduce many university employees’ pensions
CARTOON OF THE DAY
