Content about Labor

XENIA, OH -- The City of Xenia has decided to appeal to the Court of Common Pleas a recent arbitration decision which awarded its Fire Division Lieutenants and Captains more than $82,000 for overtime they did not work. In a decision dated January 27, 2011, arbitrator Cynthia Stanley, an attorney from Indianapolis, Indiana, found the City violated the labor agreement by temporarily assigning on-duty personnel to meet staffing needs instead of calling in off-duty officers. The situation arose during the recent financial crises when the City was only operating one fire station. 

They were once called "peace officers" because their job was to keep and encourage peace in the community; they are now called "law enforcement officers" and expect citizens to look upon them with respect, and tremble in fear when encountering them.  These are today's Police Officers here in the United States, and while they also claim to be "public servants," that seems to hardly be the case as average citizens like you and I are unable to fire them from their servant role, nor are we able to tell them to leave us alone when they intrude into our lives, or when they blatantly violate our civil rights or even State laws.  This was the case in a recent encounter I had with several Beavercreek City Police Officers.

Thank you for the invitation to comment on subject memo, “Better Buying Power: Mandate for Restoring Affordability and Productivity in Defense Spending.”  Except for a less-than-ambitious 2-3% expectation for reducing funding for unneeded or low priority overhead (read fraud, waste, abuse, corruption) in the way the Pentagon does business, I couldn’t agree more with your latest initiative to “support our forces at war on an urgent basis” and advance Secretary Gate’s mandate to be “respectful of the American taxpayer at a time of economic and fiscal distress.”  Right or wrong, the U.S. has committed its citizens to finance an expensive interventionist foreign policy which cannot be sustained without (1) bankrupting the U.S. economy or (2) drastically reducing wasteful, unneeded, and at times corrupt defense spending.  

On July 29, 2010, Xenia City Council met in a special session. The posted agenda was for this meeting to be only an “Executive Session to discuss Potential Litigation”. However they actually done a lot more!

The Greene County Commissioners and Sheriff Gene Fischer have had a rough relationship for the last several years, as the Sheriff's budget is often the target of cuts and debates among the Commission members.  Having the largest share of the County expenditures, the Sheriff and the Commission ends up being at odds over expenditures and especially over cuts proposed to his budget in the last two years.

The Christmas holiday of 2009 was also the 20 years anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, a spectacular and epic struggle by millions of people for freedom, individual liberty and justice.  It coincided with the fall of Communist regimes across Europe, and the symbolic end of Soviet domination of a good portion of the world.  These events prompted me to take a fresh look at what I believe the future holds for the United States of America.

Propaganda artists Jack Torry and John Nolan couldn’t have written a more one-sided piece on the recent Pentagon announcement that the MQ-1 Predator aircraft is on its way to the Springfield Air National Guard.  This article is nothing more than stroking whiny politicians from both parties looking for top cover as the November election approaches.

In a recent announcement, the City of Xenia outlined the steps management is planning to take in order to meet budgetary shortfalls and lower revenues.  A city prelease release referenced “prolonged economic recession, diminishing revenues, and a close defeat of a proposed .5% income tax increase” as the main reasons for the staff cuts and the planned expense cutbacks.

Less than an hour away from Dayton there is a jungle of food goodness, international rarities and fresh produce that makes the thriftiest shopper surrender in awe.  Jungle Jim’s International Market is located in Fairfield, OH and could easily be one of the few wonders left in our area.  It’s a place where you would have to work very hard in order to not be able to find something to buy.