In the original article, when the crane was first used on jobs and word got around about it being less expensive and required fewer operator man hours, his job sites were picketed by unions. There were anonymous calls to 311 reporting violations but when the inspectors got there, they didn't find anything wrong.
In my mind, I'm skeptical and it could have been the cranes or it could have been union influence.
On my way to work, I pass by a giant inflatable rat inflated by a gas motor that's hauled around by a truck. It's rather annoying when its tail gets loose and covers the sidewalk, as can happen on windy days when it's not tied down appropriately. It's probably 10 or 12 feet tall, at least, and the tail is maybe 12 feet long or longer. (3 feet is about one meter for those in metric land).
It's parked there because one of the buildings under construction here didn't use the right amount of union labor, so there's always a rat present. Walk around and you'll see this same rat in different places; they've got a number of them. They've also got some rather impressive pigs and fat cats.
This is the city that couldn't get rid of two operators per train on the L, even though technically they could more or less get by with zero (the trains mostly drive themselves on that line; the operator, to my understanding, just has to keep acknowledging that the train should proceed).
Why?
The unions protested and won, citing hitherto unknown safety reasons that should be plaguing cities like Madrid, Barcelona, London, Paris, Washington D.C., etc. due to their lack of two people. Doubly so for those lines (including the AirTrain to JFK in NYC) that do not have operators at all...
Though it's possible that you're correct on this specific issue, you've offered absolutely no support for your argument.
Consider the possibility that the strong streak of instinctive union bashing that you see in typical professional class culture in the U.S. is very much the creation of decades of aggressive PR effort by those who consider unions threatening.
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.
Comment offers examples (that many people in New York on his site have experienced) and you fire back with some nonsense about some kind of PR campaign? Consider the possibility that people have had awful personal experiences dealing with unions (we hired a part time guy to help out cleaning our office and the office management threatened to shut down our building access because we didn't use approved union labor) that have colored their opinions on them instead of just dismissing them as "instinctive union bashing"
Youre doing exactly what you accused the comment you're responding to of, just on the other side of the coin: instinctively defending unions
In the face of a direct quote from the agency that inspected the crane and deemed it unsafe, the comment cited some unrelated union anecdotes as the reason why this specific guy's crane was considered problematic.
That's about as dispositive as me mentioning a bunch of optimistic inventors of construction equipment who had no regard for the safety of workers and killed people.
Despite that I said he might well be right. He just hasn't cited anything that shows it. I'm a business owner in New York City too, stories are cheap.
The reflexive statement that unions are what's getting in the way of fearless capitalist innovators is, in fact, a well financed argument that is harming our society and increasing inequality and political unrest.
OK, so the comment compares to Paris, Madrid and Barcelona. Consider that in France and Spain, there are labor unions which make even the US' strongest, most ruthless and overbearing unions look like weaklings.
If labor unions are the source of problems, Paris, Madrid and Barcelona would have the same problems but orders of magnitude worse. Yet the comment claims -- and note I'm not passing judgment on whether this is factual or not -- that Paris, Madrid and Barcelona do not have these problems.
And it most certainly is true that labor unions in the US have been targeted by ubiquitous, well-funded, vicious attack propaganda from those who feel that people pooling a resource to wield greater power and reap greater returns than they could individually is the highest, noblest and holiest human endeavor when the resource in question is capital, but is the very worst and lowest sort of corrupt vile leeching parasitism when the resource in question is labor.
Unions have done amazing things to increase worker pay and benefits up from horribly inadequate levels, and to increase safety standards. But they've also don't some pretty bad anti-competitive, rent-seeking, protectionist things as well. Getting rid of them certainly isn't the answer, but letting them do bad things is unacceptable as well.
No one is saying "everything that unions do is bad and they should go away". But it's equally naive to suggest that unions never do bad things at all.
No one is saying "everything that unions do is bad and they should go away". But it's equally naive to suggest that unions never do bad things at all.
So why is it that we get something like a thousand "look at this CORRUPT OVERPAID LAZY RENT-SEEKING UNION" stories for every "this union did something kind of OK, I guess" story?
Consider that [investors|police|politicians|priests|religions|banks|unions|wives|airport taxis|pets|corporations|executives] are great in theory and in many circumstances have proven themselves corrupt to the core in practice.
I mentally swapped "corporations" out for "unions" in your sentence and it reads just as well.
I consider it a credit to the anti-union propagandists that we're all so quick to discard one of the very few tools we laborers have to better our lot in life.
No parent comment criticizing unions does it without the implication that they shouldn't exist. This is most easily seen by the total absence of any mention of a specific union, thus direction the objections towards the concept itself rather than any specific version of it.
All unions, as a general concept, tend toward corruption. Just like corporations do. The concept itself is flawed. But flawed does not mean it shouldn't exist.
Unions are a way of concentrating the power of labor.
All power corrupts. The observation proves nothing about unions specifically. If you take away power from unions it just goes and does its corrupting somewhere else.
Saying "the problem is not the unions" is as wide-brush as saying they are the problem; unions have some good causes but the core of their existence is to keep employees employed, sometimes that means important jobs that should exist and sometimes its a cancer that stops a business from profiting or stopping the creation of new ones or the advance of technology (think taxi drivers vs self-driving cars)
Waymo is still developing the technology, they can only go 5000 miles on average without the need for human intervention. They're getting close, but they don't exist yet.
Here's an example from my world: IT technicians were kicked out of their office building when the electrical contractors saw them crimping cat 5 for a network closet. That's how bonkers unions are.
At Equinix, and other datacenters, you can't plug in certain electrical equipment without a Union worker. Often times this can be done significantly cheaper by an independent electrician (or an intern with a little bit of courage).
I've been an Equinix customer (50 racks for 4 years.) I'm OK with Equinix having to plug in my PDUs for me. That wiring is their responsibility. All I care about is how much it costs, and I really don't care about that either because I only pay it once. That makes the cost about zero relative to what I pay for space and power.
So, the reason I should care if their worker is union or not is... ?
That's nothing. Try setting up a booth at a union staffed convention center. You can pay for electricity, but there is a separate fee for "plugging in" your device. It must be done by a licensed union electrician.
No, I don't mean some special equipment with some wiring involved.
I mean if you plug in your phone charger with a union electrician, he will still come out, unplug, replug it in, then charge you $65. Gotta round up to the nearest hour of course.
I've also set up booths at several union-staffed convention centers. In all cases I got a power strip that I could plug stuff into myself. Yes, the fees for everything sucked. The fees at non-union convention centers suck a little less, but they still suck. I'm not sure what you point is?
That's because you or whoever setup your contract prepaid for the electrical plug in. A union electrician came and plugged in that power strip before you got there and added the $65 to your overall bill.
> Consider the possibility that the strong streak of instinctive union bashing that you see in typical professional class culture in the U.S. is very much the creation of decades of aggressive PR effort by those who consider unions threatening.
This is a perfect example of the genetic fallacy. How or why a person came to hold a view tells us nothing about the truth of the view. Even if it did, possibility shouldn't be taken as (or a as defeater for) plausibility. It's possible that unknown to you, your parents are aliens and you were hatched on another planet. It's plausible that you're a human and so are your parents. Similarly, even if it's possible we're all duped by aggressive PR, until I see a very compelling plausibility argument my current experience of observing unreasonable union interference grounds my belief that unions often engage in crude, counterproductive behavior.
> unreasonable union interference grounds my belief that unions often engage in crude, counterproductive behavior.
They definitely do.
It's like what attorneys do with their clients. They try to sweep their clients' faults under the run and play to their strengths. "Unions are great! They empower and protect the common workers against greedy selfish corporations seeking to exploit them!"
Yet a lot of people on HN are business owners, and they see the other side of the coin - that unions are not always cooperative and sometimes can have a parasitic relationship with the business that borderlines and indeed passes the "unreasonable" threshold.
My cousins have run a successful commercial roofing business in a Mid Western state for decades. It is common that on any public building they work on to have an OSHA inspector come out on day if not each day, to have a local sheriff be called, and even once INS. All because this family owned business is non union and has always been. the sad part, this is a business which has never had more than two dozen employees.
It isn't just them. If non union electricians are on site for isolating air conditioning systems if not building main power they too are subject to the same.
The joke is, that for much of the state they know every OSHA inspector and even the inspectors joke about it. Still they have to stop work and dance the dance. and this is only for the legal means to intimidate.
unions aren't just about protecting employees, they are big money for both those who run them and the politicians they support.
But in this case the union's job is specifically to make your cousins' life more difficult. If you don't want pressure from the unions... unionize your shop.
"If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly, writes Peter Thiel"
But when unions do it, that's bad.
Try to convince someone to intervene in abuse of monopoly by Microsoft, and you'll hear arguments that any kind of intervention would be worse that just leaving them to do what they will. Some more efficient competitor will take care of the problem for you eventually.
Here's a fun story about union influence in NYC (with a little twist I hope you'll indulge[1]):
In 2005, I moved into a 19th-floor apartment in lower Manhattan. My girlfriend and I spent about 12 hours at IKEA getting everything needed to furnish the place. By the time we finished taking (2!) taxies back from Jersey with all my stuff, it was about midnight on a Friday night. It took another hour or so to schlep everything up in the elevator - everything, that is, except for a sofa, which we'd tied to the roof of one of the taxis and which was now the last thing between us and sleep.
We were just about to load it into the elevator for the last run of the night, but _not so fast!_, said the doorman: that's the passenger elevator, and you aren't allowed to use it for furniture.
We pointed out that the sofa, at about 80-100 lbs, weighed quite a bit less than the full elevator cars-worth of stuff we'd already brought up, but he was undeterred. He could lose his job, he explained, because the building's contract with the labor union prohibited use of the passenger elevator for "furniture".
OK, I said, not really understanding what that had to do with unions, where's the freight elevator?
It's locked, he said, because you aren't allowed to use it.
Why not?
Because the building maintenance union regs say nobody who isn't in the union can touch that elevator, and require the use of union labor to move anything in or out via that elevator. (At something like $160/hr, iirc.)
And since it was a Friday, the sofa would have to sit in the building lobby until 10am on Monday, at which point we could get in touch with the labor union to get the Appropriately Licensed and Bonded Personnel to load the sofa into the freight elevator. (Assuming the members of the sanitation engineers' union hadn't already decided it was trash and carted it away -- and yes, he did warn us about this.)
Counting PATH train and taxi rides etc, we're now about 14 hours into the furnishing-my-apartment project. We haven't eaten in about 10 hours, it's the middle of the night, and I am beyond frustrated at this point.
I don't want to get arrested though and the guy is clearly not going to give in, so I'm not really sure what to do. I half jokingly ask the guy: well, what about the stairs? Do the union regs prohibit the stairs too?
He laughs. No, do whatever you want in the stairs, he says.
I look at my gf. She looks at me. _Well? You want to?_, she says. Remember: 19 floors. I think: I can't believe we're going to do this.
But we do. ~40 flights of stairs later, we both look like we just climbed out of a lake, and are breathing like horses. And though I'd already had a pretty strong suspicion in this direction, at this point I was certain: I had to marry this girl.
I still don't think much of unions, but 11 years and 2 kids later, I'm grateful every day that I ended up with such a strong and capable partner. <3
[1](Sorry for the autobiography but I thought folks might appreciate the story. And it really is on-topic... sortof.)
I remember a long time ago there was a team that needed some very expensive hardware from sun (think several 100k).
The manager of the group could NOT get approval for the equipment. It was a massive technicality as another department was supposed to buy setup and "run" the equipment and they refused for a number of reasons.
The manager in question figured out that he could sign a PO up to $7000. A large number of PO's later the server was to be delivered.
This, to say the least, was going to be a bigger problem. Though a space had been secured for it (in a server room no less) getting it into the building was going to be an issue.
They ended up bringing it in on a weekend, only to find the freight elevator locked, and the rack it came in unable to fit in the normal elevator for people.
The manager, his team, the sun sales man and the delivery driver took the whole thing to bits in the lobby. There were parts EVERYWHERE and a rather bemused security guard who was baffled as to why this was happening this way.
It all turned out fine in the end, the manager wasn't fired (promoted in fact), the salesman got his commission, and the team got the equipment they needed.
If I were a betting man that driver was a union guy and ended up with time and 1/2 for the insanity on a saturday!
I tried this on my first trip to 60 Hudson (a "famous" carrier hotel in Manhattan). We needed to remove a Cisco 2600 router. It's smaller than a pizza box. It fits in a backpack. I carried it under my arm.
As I step out of the elevator and into the lobby, the front desk person goes "you can't remove that equipment".
No worries, I anticipated this and have all the relevant removal paperwork. He is uninterested.
"you can't remove equipment using the passenger elevators"
But, I am in the lobby. The door is less than 20 steps. I already rode the elevator down.
"you must use the freight elevator. that is the law."
OK, I'll go back upstairs and use the freight elevator. Where is it?
"you can't operate it. you need an elevator operator"
OK, where should I wait for them? can you call one for me?
At this point, let me tell you it is Easter weekend.
"they do not work weekends, and it is a holiday weekend. they are $160/hr, minimum 4 hours, and it is double time on the weekend, plus time and a half for holidays"
OK, I'll just put it back. This piece of equipment is barely worth $400. Then I proceeded to go up the elevator, back to the datacenter, go inside, put the router in my backpack, and go back out.
And at the lobby was one of NYC finest, with one of the security people, who kindly asked me what was in my backpack. Then asked to search it. Do you have a warrant?
"I don't need a warrant. I'll just take you down to the precinct and open it there. You sure you don't have any weed in there, Mr. California?"
I went back up, put the router in the cage, went back downstairs, and used every ounce in my body not to flip the building security and his cop buddy the bird, akimbo style.
Man, every time I get annoyed by something in Chicago, New York steps in to make me feel better.
What does the guy at the front care anyways? Do the union guys pass him a $50 every time they cajole somebody in to using the freight elevator for something stupid?
I probably would have just waited till the cop left, went to the nearest shipping store, bought a box, put 5 bucks in postage on it, and addressed it to myself. Now they can't open it without exigent circumstances or a warrant.
I'm not a lawyer, so don't take this as legal advice or anything, but it's probably the next best thing to giving them the finger.
In the original article, when the crane was first used on jobs and word got around about it being less expensive and required fewer operator man hours, his job sites were picketed by unions. There were anonymous calls to 311 reporting violations but when the inspectors got there, they didn't find anything wrong.
In my mind, I'm skeptical and it could have been the cranes or it could have been union influence.