Today's News and Commentary – February 25

President Obama announced that his administration’s proposed budget will include a 1% pay raise for federal workers, the Washington Post reports. Union leaders and some Democrats have decried this raise as unfair and unreasonable, given the three-year pay freeze and 2013 furloughs federal workers have faced. Administration officials defended the raise, noting “the tight budget constraints” the administration continues to face.

Boston.com reports that adjunct professors at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts voted 359 to 67 to join the Adjunct Action union. The vote comes after adjuncts at another Boston-area school, Tufts, voted to unionize in September last year.

President Obama will announce today the creation of “two Pentagon-led institutes that will combine public and private resources to foster manufacturing innovation” and bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., the Washington Post reports. The centers will be located in Chicago and outside Detroit.

Contract negotiations will soon begin between Kelloggs and the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union in Omaha, KETV Omaha reports. Workers expressed fear that Kelloggs would give them the type of ultimatum it gave workers at its Memphis plant in October, when it told the Union it could either accept a pay cut of $6 an hour for new employees and agree that new employees would not receive benefits or full-time positions, or face a lockout. Kelloggs has defended its actions, saying that demand for cereal is down.

The Washington Post reports that more than 200 people rallied outside the statehouse in Annapolis last night in support of bills to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, stop foreclosure for six months, prohibit police from turning people over to immigration authorities, and increase funding to four historically black colleges and universities.