March 5, 2025

Now, on to the news…

Last month, corrections officers (COs) at most of New York’s 42 prisons walked off the job in protest of working conditions.

The strike was years in the making, writes Ken Girardin, director of research at the Empire Center. The Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) has slowed hiring over the years, and “average employee overtime nearly doubled from its pre-Covid level, fueled in part by COs working mandatory double shifts,” Girardin writes. “Turnover surged, with COs quitting or retiring at twice the rate in 2022 (11 percent) as they did in 2011 (5.5 percent). The work-injury rate for COs ballooned, from 24 percent in the years before Covid to 43 percent last year.”

Governor Kathy Hochul has bungled efforts to end the strike and desperately needs a new playbook, Girardin argues. Read what he thinks Hochul should do to stop the walkout.

Declining birthrates aren’t just about delayed motherhood or economic hardship—they’re about marriage. As Rob Henderson explains, fertility among married couples hasn’t dropped, but fewer young people are getting married in the first place. Meantime, affluent elites who champion sexual freedom and dismiss marriage as outdated—an example of what Henderson calls a luxury belief—still get married before having kids of their own. If policymakers want to reverse the fertility crisis, they should focus on promoting marriage, not just subsidizing parenthood. Read more here.

Most of us toss our junk mail, but take a closer look, and you’ll notice an interesting development: American institutions are changing their messaging. Companies are abandoning DEI promotion, universities have stopped touting race and gender activism, and school districts have eliminated political statements. This is welcome news, writes Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher F. Rufo. “Many organizations appear to recognize—at least in their public communications—that they had strayed from their core missions. Their new messaging signals a return to fundamentals: companies focusing on profit, universities on knowledge, and schools on education,” he writes.

The American Bar Association has evaluated judicial nominees for over 70 years. It’s about time that changes, argues Michael A. Fragoso, a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center. “The ABA has always leaned left, but under the Biden administration, it completely abandoned its standards,” he writes. “If the ABA wants a Republican administration to cooperate, it needs formally and publicly to renounce its left-wing turn. Until then, the Trump administration—and Senate Republicans—should treat it like the political foe that it is.”

“There isn’t a more entitled, self-important group of employees than federal workers. How dare anyone ask them what they did last week. How dare anyone say they have to be in the office.

In the private sector, these employees would be fired in a heartbeat. Of course the executive (the president) has the right to fire them.”

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Tom W, commenting on the president’s executive power

Photo credits: Albany Times Union/Hearst Newspapers / Contributor / Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images