Reports are now coming out that the New York City Sanitation Workers Union conducted a deliberate slow down in clearing city streets during the recent blizzard. A federal investigation is reportedly in the works.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/01/04/new.york.snow/
Here we go again. I bet those sanitation workers have bumper stickers on their cars declaring how proud they are to work for good old union whatever the number is. Just because they were unhappy with the city's cut backs, they (allegedly) show their ire by taking their sweet time in clearing the streets of the massive snowfall. I wonder how many lives were lost during the blizzard because emergency vehicles couldn't get to their destinations. There are certain professions where the very idea of a strike or work slow down is unthinkable. This is one of them.
Out here in California, the public sector unions have a stranglehold on the ruling Democratic politicians. It has brought this state to the edge of bankruptcy. While the public at large is suffering economically, government workers are living high off the hog thanks to their unions and the subservient Democratic politicians in Sacramento.
So for you New Yorkers who are wondering why the performance of the sanitation workers was so poor, just look for the union label.
At least in Los Angeles you don't have any difficulty with slow-downs in clearing massive snowfalls to worry about.
ReplyDeleteIt is "damn the unions" rhetoric like yours which makes it difficult for unions to come to terms with where their methods may be a bit out of date. A good friend of mine who is an international union vice president observed that many unions expend 40 percent of their resources defending people who damn well ought to be fired. They would like to redirect those resources to doing more productive things, like new organizing campaigns signing up people working for minimum wage with employers who exemplify why workers NEED unions.
One reason they can't is legislation like Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin, which gives individual workers who damn well ought to be fired the right to sue their union for non-representation if the union doesn't expend forty percent of its resources backing them up through five levels of appeal.
Individual workers are very much at the mercy of whimsical, arbitrary, capricious behavior by supervisors and employers. In addition, employers have every incentive to squeeze more out of workers, either exhausting or endangering them, without paying them more, cutting their pay, without relaxing the work expected, or raising prices while allowing inflation to eat away at real wages.
It remains true, on the other end of the scale, that if the employer is losing $5 billion a year, it can't indefinitely keep paying employees $40 an hour plus medical benefits, just because workers like to have it.
In the public sector, politicians think they can solve budget crises by simply dumping on public sector employees. As this story shows, uninspired workers really won't work as hard or fast. Politicians need to think twice before boosting their careers with such convenient and cheap sound bytes.
Where is the evidence for your assertion? Yes, it's being investigated that these workers deliberately slowed things down, but this has not been proven.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the cutbacks directly resulted in things slowing down! Perhaps they couldn't do their jobs as efficiently as a result of all those cutbacks. What, you think that they can make cutbacks and not see some sort of consequence?
Of course, I don't know if that's true, but I have as much evidence for that as you do for your assertions.
Lance,
ReplyDeleteI said alleged.
lys,
ReplyDeleteNomne of what you say excuses the actions if true of the Sanitation workers in New York.
That is the most insubstantial splutter I have EVER heard from you Gary. When you have a hard-data answer to Lance's question, then we'll have something to talk about.
ReplyDelete