From the Nevada
Assembly, as of April 26, 2005
Assembly Bill 19 places officious
restrictions on businesses' use of gift cards and
certificates. Multiple violations of this bill could result in
a Class D Felony -- a tremendous threat to any business,
employer or employee. The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce has
testified against this bill
In its original form this measure would have removed
the flexibility that Nevada employers have to allocate
employee time. Those provisions have been removed.
Assembly Bill 63 would
require responsible purchasers of insurance to subsidize the
criminal and irresponsible behavior of others. It proposes to
require health insurance providers to cover
injuries sustained while under the influence of drugs or
alcohol. It would also prohibit insurance companies from
canceling policies because of such culpability.
Assembly Bill 69 originally said -- in its own inimitable
Orwellian language, that it "authorizes [an] employer to enter
into [a] fair share agreement with [a] labor organization."
In truth, this was devious
legislation aimed at gutting Nevada's Right to Work law. The
bill would have forced workers to effectively pay dues called
"fees" to the very unions they don't want to support and that
they refuse to join. This is economy-weakening rust-belt-style
legislation that violates employees' rights of freedom of
association. It would also forced good non-union workers out of
companies where unions got collective bargaining agreements --
indeed, under
these kinds of agency shop
rules, employers MUST fire such independent
employees. The initial form of this legislation was also
introduced in the 2003 session, as described in the NPRI issue
report,
Waaay Out of Touch.
On April 26 the bill was heavily amended for the second time. In
its current incarnation, the incredibly bad original
provisions of
AB 69
have been replaced with provisions that are merely
really bad. Now the intent of the bill has been reduced:
its goal now is to write into Nevada statutory law a
particularly dubious and political decision made by the Nevada
Supreme Court five years ago. That decision, Cone v. Nevada
Service Employees Union, was discussed in detail in
"Fleeing the Collective" an
article in Nevada Journal, a magazine published by the
Nevada Policy Research Institute.
Assembly Bill 87 would establish a state minimum
hourly wage that must always be $1 over the national minimum
wage, regardless of the consequences. And those consequences
-- for most marginal workers, for businesses, for the Nevada
economy -- would all be negative. Another provision of the
bill would further
privilege union businesses over non-union businesses by giving
the former the power to ignore the minimum wage standard. This
legislation explicitly attempts to write into Nevada law the
corrupt practices of the Culinary Union's new national
partner, the needletrades union UNITE.
See
Culinary's Sinister New Partner, reported by NPRI last
year.
See also BusinessNevada's
section on the minimum wage issue.
Assembly Bill 195 is a direct attack on the
intellectual property rights of U.S. and Nevada businesses. In
a classic case of short-range thinking, the bill would require
the State of Nevada to facilitate the violation of the U.S.
laws protecting the research patents behind brand-name
prescription drugs -- all for the dubious savings supposedly
available from purchasing drugs that neither the State of
Nevada nor Canada will stand behind. See
Nevada Lawmakers Support Attack on
Scientific Researchers
.
Assembly Bill 228 orders trustees of every Nevada
school district to increase the salaries of all
beginning schoolteachers to $32,500 (an effective
annual salary of $43,333 -- even before Nevada's
extremely over-generous benefit package. In subsequent years,
all teacher would have to be awarded a cost-of-living increase
equal to any increase of the U.S. Department of Labor
Consumer Price Index
-- plus 1 percent.
However, if the
Consumer Price Index decreases for a calendar year, the annual
base salary of a teacher
would not decrease.
See
Review-Journal Capital Bureau report
Assembly Bill 484 would require the State of
Nevada to
legally
extend the budget-busting collective-bargaining
privileges that are responsible for runaway spending at the
local government level in Clark and Washoe counties to our
state government. State employees who do
not want to be represented by union bosses would lose their
right to represent themselves if just 51 percent of the employees
in some arbitrarily, politically selected workplace group
should opt for union
representation. Nevada citizens would lose even more
sovereignty, would experience even more dilution of their control
over their own government. That's because important state policy matters
would -- as now happens at the county level -- become matters
for negotiation in confidential contract bargaining sessions
between union bosses and politicians who depend on on those
same bosses for political
support. This is the pattern that has brought fiscal chaos to
city, county and state
governments throughout
America. It is also the pattern that has produced the
tax-consumer / public sector political machine that has a
stranglehold on the Nevada Assembly. For further reading on
the 1969 legislation that started it all in Nevada, the "Dodge
Act," check out:
Mere Subjects and
Collectivist Bargaining.
From the Nevada Senate, as of
April 26, 2005
Senate Bill 29 would increase everyone's insurance
costs by requiring insurance companies to cover clinical
trials for certain cancer treatments. Politician-inspired
health care mandates are one of the major reasons why health
care costs in America and Nevada continue to rise at
double-digit rates -- and neither the Nevada legislators
backing this legislation nor Nevada health insurers have any
idea of how much
this initiative
would cost. It is this sort of top-down
command-and-control political tinkering that actually
operates to make Nevada's health care problems
worse.
Amendments have reduced the toxicity of the original bill, but
the basic problem remains.
Senate Bill 111 provided that when
the Employment Security Division receives an unemployment
claim,
an employer must submit all 'relevant'
facts regarding the reason for termination. Currently, the law
requires an employer to provide some information on the reason
for termination. The initial form of SB 111 said that any
information an employer does not initially supply cannot be
brought forward later in the claims process. This would have
created two problems: First, employers only have ten days
after the mailing date to respond to the claim with a full
account on why the employee was terminated. Second, compelling
employers to provide 'all' relevant information or not be
allowed to add it later in the case effectively forces
employers to massively over-comply regarding such collection
and delivery of information to the state. The provision in the
original bill which would have prohibited an employer from
bringing additional information forward on appeal has been
removed.
