- I dreamed someone sabotaged the memory care unit by switching Rosa DeLauro’s name tag with Rosa Luxemburg’s [Fox; Raising Hale, Labor Union Report with more on alleged nursing home sabotage and the Connecticut pols that enable it]
- New York’s Scaffold Law will inflate cost of Tappan Zee Bridge rebuild by hundreds of millions, according to Bill Hammond [NYDN]
- “In Michigan, a ballot measure to enshrine union rights” [Reuters, WDIV]
- Massachusetts voters rejected unionizing child care providers, but legislature decided to do it anyway [Boston Herald]
- SEIU flexes muscle: “Surprise strike closes SF courtrooms” [SFGate, NBC Bay Area]
- If it goes to arbitration, forget about disciplining a Portland police officer [Oregonian via PoliceMisconduct.net] Boston police overtime scandal [Reason] Related, San Bernardino [San Diego Union-Tribune]
- Louisiana teacher union furor: “Now There’s A Legal Defense Fund For Schools The LAE Is Threatening To Sue” [Hayride, earlier]
- As unions terrorize a Philadelphia construction project, much of the city looks the other way [Inga Saffron, Philadelphia Inquirer, PhillyBully.com; via Barro]
Filed under: Boston, Connecticut, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Philadelphia, police, police unions
2 Comments
Ahh, don’t we pine for the good old days when Union
thuggary was “Let us organize or I’ll break your kneecaps.”
Now it’s “My lawyer talks meaner than your lawyer and can make your people cry.”
Comments on two posts:
1) On the sabotage of the nursing home: The application of Occam’s razor to the limited facts, despite the Union’s protestations, tends to show that the Union members were the saboteurs and not management. The workers have placed the patients in harm’s way by their misguided antics, and management should tell them not to bother to come back and hire and train non-union workers who would appreciate a good job. This is not unprecedented. At the beginning of August 31 years ago, Reagan fired all the union (PATCO) air traffic controllers that went on strike and refused to return to work. Despite a minor hiccup in the transition by having to replace all the workers at once, air safety did not suffer. I would expect that there would be no safety issues if the nursing home fired everyone and hired non-union.
It is a shame that the pols endorse criminal acts on the elderly and infirm in exchangefor votes, and that the prosecutors are silent as to their investigation, if any.
2) With respect to the Tappan Zee Bridge: Both sides should bone up on New York’s Scaffold Law. To increase the cost of the bridge by “hundreds of millions of dollars” the author must be assuming over 200 compensable falls. If this were true, comstruction safety would have to be so sloppy that work should not be allowed to commence until safety protocols are implemented. Things are not anywhere as bad as portrayed.
The principle behind NY’s scaffold law makes sense. Without it, workers’ injuries are external to the owners’ costs. The law places the costs where they should be. Certainly in the case of a project as large as this, the owner is in a position to proscribe unsafe practices in the construction of the bridge.