I live in NY and have lived here my entire life. I am very pro union but not pro NYC construction unions. If you have ever been on a job site, there are arcane rules that pad their pockets. Want to plug in a computer in a finished room? Sorry you are going to need an electrician for that. If you do it anyway they will bill you for the electrician coming over anyway.
Need to get in the building? Well the elevator operator that gets paid $40 hr is off for an hour for lunch. He sits on a cooler and eats and drinks all day and occasionally there is an elevator operator apprentice with him. These are elevators that are not construction elevators, but ones that work just fine automatically once the construction guys are out.
The teamster guys sit at the loading dock on lawn chairs also getting paid huge rates for doing absolutely nothing. They will not help you unload anything. They sit there hanging out.
Sounds like a racket? Well it is. And for a really long time it was a racket with the Mafia enforcing using union labor. If you didn't go union they would hurt you or somehow sabotage you, and conversely the union would walk off the job if you didn't take care of the Mafia.
Now the modern racket is with very low level politicians and regulatory boards. The only way you get in these unions too is by knowing someone.
These people make a bad name for unions, and drive costs way up for anything in NYC area.
The same goes for a Hollywood movie set. I worked on a film in the late 1990s as the film runner and and God forbid that I went into the truck to get an extension cord (I wasn't a "qualified" gaffer.) "Hey can you grab me a [light] gel from that box right next to your foot?" "No sorry, I am part of Camera, I can't touch that, the gaffers have to do that."
And this set was in Texas..
I got paid $200 per day to literally sit on set, take the film canister from the loader, walk it out to the gate (this set was in rural Texas on a ranch,) hand it to a driver for him to take it to the airport, grab the dailies from him and walk that back to the director's trailer.
Best two months of my life (got to meet Spielberg on set and got to work with an Oscar nominated cinematographer.)
Still my point is that union rules add significant costs and generally border on absurd.
Let me correct that slightly: some unions have rules that add significant cost. It's unfair to blame the entire concept of unions for a small number of dysfunctional unions.
Wrong. This is completely normal in America, and it's entirely fair to blame all unions for it. The catch is, it's an American phenomenon; it doesn't apply to unions in other, better-run countries like Germany.
I live in America. I work in NYC. The unions here are a significant problem.
Unions in NYC are a protection racket. They don't do crap for worker safety or fair workplace rules. They are a front for legal extortion and add complexity and cost to nearly everything they touch.
Story time: Going in and out of telecommunications buildings there were scales by the doors to the rooms with equipment. If a bag, device, or piece of equipment weighed over 35 pounds, you needed to have a union member carry that piece of gear for you into the facility.
Forget the nature of the equipment, the fact that the equipment might have wheels in a case. The NEED for a worker wasn't something that could be discussed. The rule was: if it was over 35#, you needed to make sure that a union worker carried it in.
Troubleshooting a problem with a circuit and it's 12:00? Lunchtime! If you're a union worker, you just drop the phone where it is and walk away to go have lunch. Everything stops because the union rules specify that no work can be done during specified break times.
Please note that unions once served a vital and important purpose in this country: they protected workers against horrific abuses by management. The problem is that those abuses are now largely confined to industries where there has never been a solid union presence OR they've gone overseas to escape the unions.
In the meantime, unions here have hurt worker mobility, frustrated workplaces, and generally made everything worse for all parties by sheer incompetence.
Remember when Twinkies disappeared from the markets? Unions. Remember when US Airways nearly ran itself into the ground? Unions.
Unions need to adapt or die. My personal experience with unions is that they have hurt my career (when I was represented by a union) more than they've protected me.
And NYC is a special case of all of the above stupidity.
Let me tell you something you might be unfamiliar with: companies that cannot manage their affairs properly will end up in bankruptcy. They will owe more to those who provide it with goods and services than they can collect. This happens when companies cannot (or will not) adjust their operations to accommodate changes in market conditions or regulatory environments.
The cost structure of Hostess made them uncompetitive. And unions are a big part of the reason why they could no longer compete effectively.
You're free to disagree with my analysis but you're not entitled to your own facts. A company that goes bankrupt several times is prima facie evidence of poor management. And by poor management, I mean management that could not or would not deal with a major cost of their operations: labor.
If Hostess hadn't gone into bankruptcy, we wouldn't be having the argument at all. Private equity would have never swooped in to buy up the distressed assets, free itself of the onerous union contracts and poorly negotiated supplier agreements to rise from the ashes.
I can still buy Twinkies and I have private equity firms to thank for it. Not unions.
So when it's labor's fault it's labor's fault. Also when it's bad management then it's labor's fault. And when it goes bankrupt it's because labor is greedy and wants too much money. And later when management siphons hundreds of millions of dollars out of the company that's not because they are greedy and want too much money.
Uh, no. I think I was very clear that I blame management for incompetence. They didn't manage their way out of it and cut REALLY BAD DEALS with the unions.
And believe me, I think the unions share some of the blame here. They negotiated terms for their members that included overly generous pension terms because one of the things that unions like to do now is control member pensions. And when they control member pensions, they have a nice pot of money to invest for their members behalf (har har har) until they do such a bad job of it that they need someone to blame (that greedy company).
That particular story has played out over and over again because union management swings investment funds to "favored" firms which court pension funds aggressively (read: kickbacks).
Think I'm making this stuff up?
Do your own research and tell me if you can find any examples of union-run pension funds exceeding the market performance of something like an index fund. Do pension funds even have to meet the disclosure and transparency requirements of your garden-variety mutual fund?
The first part of the 2nd Ave subway line to 96th St in NYC was completed a couple of months ago. The cost of the extension was prohibitively expensive because of unions. Europe is able to build subways with much less cost per mile than NYC.
> The cost of the extension was prohibitively expensive because of unions. Europe is able to build subways with much less cost per mile than NYC
You mean the same Europe that has incredibly powerful public sector unions?
Maybe a thing they don't have is a political system run by a group of mindless plutocratic politicians that shout "free markets" as the solution to social problems while practicing crony capitalism. They also don't have the Cuomo family.
Yes, the same Europe. I don't know about the French, but the unions in Germany and Scandinavia are quite a bit more pro-business than their American counterparts.
Hong Kong and Singapore build infrastructure for quite cheap. And there they don't need to shout about `free markets': the government mostly allows them already.
I'm totally with you on the crony-capitalism bashing.
> Yes, the same Europe. I don't know about the French, but the unions in Germany and Scandinavia are quite a bit more pro-business than their American counterparts.
Why wouldn't German unions be pro-business when labor is represented at board level with full voting rights? German corporations do not consider themselves "job creators" or see workers as resources to be exploited, unlike their American counterparts.
The mobs are not affiliated with New York unions anymore. Yes--for a time it was a big embarrassment.
There are some arcane rules. The nepotism in getting into these unions has been greatly reduced.
(This guys crane looks like it needs more development time. On any big job site, you get to know your Crance Operator. They are lifting huge loads right over you heads. They take their jobs seriously. If this guys crane is better; it will eventually see job sites. Maybe--if it's safe. Yes--unions are slow to move, but for good reason on many cases. People get killed. I don't know all the ins-outs of this guy's crane. I would rather have a trained Crane Operator operating loads over my head. That just might change, but regulatory agencies/unions are not going to run to one guy's contraption.)
Back to union membership. The test is very important. The union test is not usually a hard test, but you need to get every question right. Usually, the other 1/2 of getting into the union is the oral exam. On those boards are union delegates, contractors(many whom would run to non-union labor if feasible.), and in many unions, members of the community. They are trying to make getting into a union fair.
There are many unions in NYC. There are many unions in SF.
Both are union towns. I have not crossed picket lines because maids/painters were on strike. I have drove to San Francisco and drove right home. Those old unions do pay their members a very fair wage.
Such a wage that brings a blue collar worker into the middle class.
There's police unions all the way to Window Washer unions.
The average owner/contractor/city would love to get rid of unions. They hate paying those wages.
They would happily hire minimum wage workers.
I have worked a few blue collar jobs that didn't gave unions. It's basically comes down to minimum wage, or a bit above, and at the end of the week; you wonder why you even show up.
It all seems crazy until you're in a union.
There's a reason most developers are very rich. They like to pay the least amount they can legally get away with.
Tech is still relatively new. Wait until the barriers to enter become easier than they are today. Watch what happens to those generous pay packages.
I think we all agree that unions are good for the people in them, but how do workers who aren't lucky enough to be in a union feel about being shut out of those jobs?
> you have ever been on a job site, there are arcane rules that pad their pockets. Want to plug in a computer in a finished room? Sorry you are going to need an electrician for that. If you do it anyway they will bill you for the electrician coming over anyway.
If you've ever worked in construction you'd know these "arcane" rules are there because someone died before they existed. Construction is one of the most dangerous professions around. Unions are the only thing standing between companies trying to cut costs and shorten builders life expediencies.
"Somebody died once" is not a valid reason for everyone thereafter to have to pay $80 (an hour of electrician's time) to plug in their computer to the outlet that comes as part of their trade show booth... or the same to have someone come vacuum their 10 sq ft piece of carpet before the show opens. Both of these are things someone could easily do on their own, but aren't allowed to because someone died once.
Need to get in the building? Well the elevator operator that gets paid $40 hr is off for an hour for lunch. He sits on a cooler and eats and drinks all day and occasionally there is an elevator operator apprentice with him. These are elevators that are not construction elevators, but ones that work just fine automatically once the construction guys are out.
The teamster guys sit at the loading dock on lawn chairs also getting paid huge rates for doing absolutely nothing. They will not help you unload anything. They sit there hanging out.
Sounds like a racket? Well it is. And for a really long time it was a racket with the Mafia enforcing using union labor. If you didn't go union they would hurt you or somehow sabotage you, and conversely the union would walk off the job if you didn't take care of the Mafia.
Now the modern racket is with very low level politicians and regulatory boards. The only way you get in these unions too is by knowing someone.
These people make a bad name for unions, and drive costs way up for anything in NYC area.