The pension fund for municipal workers is in trouble. The workers want City Council to pay for a one-time cash infusion, while council wants workers to accept benefit reductions. Qualls has proposed changing the Pension Board so two-thirds of its members would be independent and have no ties to City Hall, unlike now.  

WINNER: The NAACP's Cincinnati chapter and the Baptist Ministers Conference recently called out Cincinnati Public Schools for not hiring enough minority contractors as part of the district's $1.07 billion plan to renovate and rebuild many schools. It's odd the CPS contract errors were found only after the NAACP did the research.  

When attorney G. Robert Blakey drafted the federal RICO Act in 1970, it was designed as a new legal tactic to bring down the Mafia by making it easier to confiscate money and other assets like casinos, mansions and cars.   

There are good reasons that many U.S. manufacturing and service workers are urging President Obama and Congress to pass a new law that would make it easier for employees to join labor unions. One prime case in point is Mason-based Cintas Corp. For the second time since September, the company is facing a legal decision in California that could force it to comply with living wage laws and potentially give workers there millions of dollars in back pay.   

If you're like most people, when you got in trouble as a kid you knew which parent you preferred to find out first. Inevitably, one was more of a pushover and wouldn't punish you as severely as the other. Executives at Cintas Corp. in Mason, it appears, still operate by that philosophy.  

Representatives for the North Carolina Retirement Systems (NCRS), which represents the pension investments of retired North Carolina state employees, said objective oversight is needed at Cintas to represent shareholders and reverse a five-year trend of underperformance.