The line …to $6.25 an hour on January 1, 2007, $7.25 an hour on January 1, 2008, and $7.75 by January 1, 2009. That’s a total 126 percent over the course of the contract.

That doesn’t compute for me. If they are getting $5.30 now, by the end of the contract they will be getting an additional 46%.

I tried various permutations and do not see where the 126% comes from. Would you please help me understand this calculation? Thanks.

Jay @ 14

OK I get it that manangement doesn’t want to pay, but why are the cops assholes? What’s in it for them?

Stability. Status quo perhaps.

Know what’s really disgusting?

The cops themselves are in a union. They should know better. Write to them at info@hpou.org and tell them so.

I love Jordan’s posts. It is so strange, reading good news again. I would love to see see check card union elections and better enforcement of labor laws.

If the Repubs filibuster, I say we go nuclear. Either it works and we get our stuff through, or it doesn’t, and that threat is gone when they take the Senate again (I know the nuclear option was for judges, but I don’t see why it isn’t the same argument for legislation).

And hooray for the brave janitors, run down by horses and frozen in their cells. It’s like Matewon returns or something.

You are talking my language. Amen!

BTW. Doing a little casual google research, I am confused by all the contradictions on Angola State prison. I see the state’s official site is actually touting the field work as “good” for the prisoners, even though the fieldwork including cotton crops is a clear reference to a gruesome past and the prisoners are paid 4 cents an hour for their work. And yet various people have written about it as a model reform prison; witness the entry on Wikipedia. But still it remains on human rights groups lists, especially since some folks were summarily sentenced during Katrina and piled up in a puddle of piss there. And then there are rodeos there?
I am disgusted.

“That’s a total 126 percent over the course of the contract,” fasley inflates the increase. The actual increase in constant-dollars is 124%, unless you’re doing some inflation-prediction voodoo. And most would say, “wages will increase (by) 24%”

Even in a place like Houston, some cops are going to lose their jobs on that one. I suspect some enterprising lawyer will be glad to take that one on.