east village idiot

Another year, another strike in New York City. Thanks to the greed of organized labor, several major construction projects - the Second Avenue Subway, for one - are stalled because of a drivers’ strike.

I rarely delve into politics on my blog, and I will spare you the rhetoric, but you can probably safely assume that I typically vote with the party that calls itself “the party of organized labor.” Well, my position on organized labor dovetails with that of my political party… strongly. It dates back to my childhood, which proved to me very early that organized labor is unhelpful and unnecessary.

It started in 1992, when the teachers in my hometown spent over a month on the picket lines (those missed days translated to not a single week-long school vacation week during the year) to lobby for higher wages. This sounds very noble, except that they were already some of the highest-paid public school teachers in the nation, and my town just simply did not have the budget to meet their demand for a higher pay increase than the one already offered to them. For the rest of the year, the teachers union declared ”work-to-rule,” meaning that teachers were free to leave as soon as the school day was over. The good ones stayed late to run extra-curricular activities and help students who struggled with their work, but the ones loyal to the union left their students in the lurch. The same thing happened ten years later when their contract ran out again. (That time, the dispute was over paying 5% of their healthcare costs instead of getting them for free. Oh, the horror!)

In 1997, I got my first job, working as a bagger at a local supermarket. It paid a nice, solid minimum wage of $4.75 an hour, and I was lucky if I got more than 12 hours of work each week on the schedule. That work, of course, would include going out into the asphalt parking lot on 100-degree days to gather shopping carts. It was, without a doubt, the most backbreaking labor in the supermarket, but I was getting a weekly paycheck for the first time in my life, and I was proud of my income of about $48 a week after taxes. After a two-month “grace period,” I was informed that weekly UFCW dues would be deducted from my paycheck. Those weekly union dues would cost me more than an hour’s worth of work. What would I get from that union? Absolutely nothing. I was making minimum wage, I was working a few hours a week, and I wasn’t asking for (or being offered) any benefits. Two weeks later, my co-workers and thousands of others across New England went on strike for three days, despite the fact that I never heard a single one complain about their compensation in my two months working there.

Fast forward to today. The Teamsters-backed Construction Drivers are striking over low pay. ANd just how low is that pay?

Mr. Greco, who is also the secretary-treasurer of the Greco Brothers Concrete Corporation, said that under the expired contract, drivers earned $33.11 an hour, rising to $59.01 when health insurance, pension contributions and other benefits are included.

For those as lazy as unionized construction workers who don’t feel like doing the math on this, that’s about $70,000 a year before benefits. With benefits, these guys take in $125,000 a year.

Oh, the horror!

Oh, and that’s before overtime. And since these guys are unionized, you know they’re getting overtime for every second they work beyond 40 hours a week. They’ll get overtime for the time they spend walking to the timeclock from their truck. 

But they’re asking for a raise. Fair enough. Everyone’s entitled to a cost of living adjustment. 3% or so is pretty standard.

He said the union earlier this week demanded raises of $5 an hour in the overall compensation package each year for three years, although the union did not specify how much would go to wages and how much to benefits.

Mr. Greco said that during Monday’s bargaining, Gary La Barbera, Local 282’s president, reduced that demand to $3.50 an hour.

If you’re keeping score at home, they were asking for a $10,000-a-year raise, but now they’ve whittled it down to $7,280-a-year, or six percent.

If I walked into my boss’ office and asked for a $10,000-a-year-raise, he’d laugh in my face. He wouldn’t do that because I’m not a member of a union, though. He’d do that because it’s absurd. These guys should be lucky that they have these jobs. There are thousands of able-bodied people in New York City who would be willing to do this work for half of what these guys make.

Many decades ago, unions were meant to account for slacking labor laws. Now (mandatory vacation time aside), we have some of the best labor laws in the world. Unions were meant to stick up for those downtrodden workers without a voice. Now, those still struggling to get by are bowled over by the hurdles they have to clear to finding good-paying union work. Unions were meant to work for fair wages for underpaid workers. Now, Union workers don’t get fair wages - they get bloated wages that force taxes and consumer prices up.

But in the end, I love a good strike, because it reminds us all why unions are a dying breed in this country: they don’t fight for what’s right anymore.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 10:03 am and is filed under Getting Serious. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.