Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
“A deal with a group of Amish to remove and haul scrap wood from the building had to be changed when a labor complaint revealed that the group was not being paid “prevailing wages” for the job, a violation of labor law.” – A complaint to the Illinois Department of Labor’s Conciliation and Mediation Division was most likely to have been made by a prevailing wage monitor employed by a union “Fair Contracting” organization.