Monday, July 15, 2013

Major League protest


Hmmm. What's going on here?

Okay, I get it. Scab labor.

But what does Major League Baseball have to do with it? I can't decipher that after reading the colorful flier.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like overpaid Union members upset they were shut out of the project. The rest of us non-union schlubs say "cry me a river".

Anonymous said...

Call Helen Marshall. Her hands are all over this.

Anonymous said...

Sounds like overpaid Union members upset they were shut out of the project. The rest of us non-union schlubs say "cry me a river".
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I agree with you, but give it up... NYC has been a union town for almost a century now, and that isn't going to go away soon.

Anonymous said...

Maybe union labor is overpaid but that doesn't change the fact that the alternate workers are probably underpaid with no benefits or job security.

THAT'S MORE MONEY FOR THE ONE PERCENT!!!

A Better NYC said...

Wow...these union carpenters sure waste a lot of time protesting.

Wouldn't they be better off just moving onto their next project.

Or is it that they don't have any other jobs lined up because their prices are too high?

Someone please explain to me why this union feels like it's entitled to every project in the city?

Anonymous said...

MLB is holding it's All Star Weekend Fan Fest @ the Javits Center

Liman said...

"New York has been a union town for almost a century." The key words there are "has been." The union model of construction is totally inefficient, ridiculously expensive, and is dying - even in NYC where tall buildings are now being erected non-union. If it wasn't for heavy handed (but usually legal) harassment like this and shutting down sites with picketing, they wouldn't even keep what they still have.

And that doesn't mean the non-union workers are characters ina Dickens novel. Companies building major sites usually pay very well.

Today, I had reason to look up Teamster wage and benefit rates in NY. They get $34 an hour in wages and $39 in benefits (much of those benefits go into union funds that the workers never see). $73 an hour sounds great... but who can pay that kind of money? So many if not most union construction workers are employed only sporadically.

Anonymous said...

Its not that unions are inefficient in of themselves. Take a look at the productivity and technology on union staffed projects in Europe and Japan. They run circles around what we have here union or non union. They built subways to the tune of $350 million per mile in Tokyo vs $2.2 billion per mile in NYC.

Anonymous said...

Most of the benefits are for pension and healthcare, they are blue collar and don't have the perk of salaries and benefits like those who work for giant corporations. What makes matters worse is the fact that the poor men and women who work non-union will have nothing once the company disappears. It's a shame how greed is taking advantage of non union workers who are largely undocumented workers. Even worse deaths on non-union jobs spiked exponentially in 2012, mainly because they are too afraid to speak up and OSHA is a joke. Unionize them all, trust me the owners can afford it or they wouldn't still build here.