While reviewing the SPN Labor Policy Exchange (which is free to anyone who wants to sign up), I found a couple pertinent legislative updates from other states.
 
The California Senate passed the California Employee Free Choice Act for Farm Workers. The bill would allow ag workers to unionize if a simple majority sign cards to form a union. The bill is plagued by the same problem as the federal EFCA. Unless workers are allowed to express their opinion in private via a secret ballot, they are subject to coercion by outside forces, whether a union or employer.
 
The Missouri House held and initial vote on a state constitutional amendment designed to ensure all elections -– including unionization elections -– within the state are held by secret ballot. Union opponents of the measure claim it is a form of union busting. Proponents say the measure is not about being pro-business or anti-labor, just preserving the integrity of uncoerced individual choice. See here for press coverage of the vote and here for more on the multi-state Save Our Secret Ballot campaign.

Today, the Illinois Policy Institute, the state’s leading free market think tank, announced the launch of TweetIllinois.org, a website designed to encourage better communication between legislators and constituents.

Tweet Illinois echoes the format of a successful national site, TweetCongress.org, where national representatives “tweet” real-time updates to their constituents using Twitter, the popular online social networking service. TweetIllinois.org gathers the short, electronic messages (or “tweets”) of Illinois legislators and publishes them in a central location.

TweetIllinois.org offers an exciting new way for citizens to communicate with their representatives in Springfield, and vice versa. Twitter has been used successfully in a number of fields to enhance connectivity and understanding. What better arena to use it than in politics?

“Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.”— Barack Obama, Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies, January 21, 2009
This sort of appreciation for the idea of open and transparent government has been one of the higher points of the new presidency. It’s a [...]

On the heels of my post about the excellent lecture series going on in Kansas City, I would be remiss not to mention the upcoming fourth installment of the Show-Me Institute’s Lecture Series on Economic Policy, which is co-hosted by Saint Louis University’s John Cook School of Business.  On Tuesday, May 5, Dr. Caroline Hoxby [...]

State Rep. Kevin Cameron speaks against forcing prevailing (union) wages laws on enterprise zones. The Chair disagrees and says that companies that do not pay such wages should “go somewhere else”

more Details below: Continue reading “Video: L…

This post is belated, but I feel that people should know about the fantastic message offered last week at an event hosted by the Kansas City Public Library and cosponsored by the Show-Me Institute. Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, was the latest speaker to take part in the library’s series on urban [...]

By State Representative Kim Thatcher: (Salem) “Whereas the Oregon State Treasurer is encouraged to use any means available… to discourage investments with companies doing business with Iran.” That’s the conclusion of House Joint Resolutio…

Oregon volunteer taxpayer advocate Jim Fox, who worked hard to defeat the Lane County Income Tax, is making a run for the Siuslaw School district School Board. The local paper will not print a link to his website, so we will! Go here http://ele…

Read Atlas’s latest issue of Atlas Highlights

Brown University student Kevin Roose has written a largely sympathetic and often amusing outsider’s account on the spiritual lives and struggles of conservative evangelical students at Liberty University. Roose, who took a semester off at Brown, decided to enroll at Liberty posing as an evangelical for his book, The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University. Possibly setting out to write an expose of sorts on Liberty’s quirky Southern Baptist fundamentalism and the students efforts there to gear up for the culture wars, he unsurprisingly finds a much more complex story to tell.
Complex because Liberty students, like most evangelical Christians struggle with temptation, relationships, and the trials that go with being an authentic believer living in a fallen world.

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