THE TYGRRRR EXPRESS

Ok, back to politics.

(Gleefully rubbing hands together.)

A few months ago French workers threatened to go on strike. I turned to my dad and asked him a simple question.

If French workers were to go on strike…how could you tell?

This brings me to my love-hate relationship with New York. I am proud of my Brooklyn heritage, but would never live in New York. You can keep Manhattan. Animals live like that, packed on top of each other in sardine cans, with cars trapped under several feet of snow.

As Bill O’Reilly pointed out, Moscow gets more snow, and Moscow gets the streets cleaned.

(Although in all fairness, if I knew that the penalty for not getting my work done was being shot to death by Vladimir Putin, I would work faster as well. Michael Bloomberg can’t execute people for inefficiency. Heck, even Rudy Giuliani couldn’t get that into law.)

Snowstorms recently belted much of the East Coast, including New York. The response was slow, inefficient, bureaucratic, and failed. Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who is more concerned with keeping the streets free of tobacco, failed to follow the Howard Stern and Al D’Amato method of governance. Fix the potholes and kill the criminals. At least fix the potholes.

Allegations have swirled that union thugs deliberately failed to do their jobs in a timely manner to inflict as much pain as possible on New Yorkers in order to get more concessions.

This allegation does make sense. After all, I still maintain that the real plan was to avoid plowing the New Meadowlands where the Giants and Jets play. Jimmy Hoffa is buried under the 5 yard line, and the only way to keep this secret is to avoid being obvious by refusing to plow the entire city of New York.

(For those claiming the Jets and Giants play in New Jersey and not New York, tell that to FDNY and NYPD and see how that conversation ends. You will need first responders such as EMTs, and they will also beat you up when they arrive.)

Yet as badly as I want to rip into the unions, I need to show some self-restraint and hold off. Don’t get me wrong. I hate unions. I despise them. Yet right now all we have are allegations. The allegations should be investigated, but until we have all the facts, we should proceed with caution.

Yet one train of thought has not been offered outside of this blog.

Maybe the union workers did not deliberately slow down at all. Maybe they are totally innocent of the accusations for one simple reason.

If union workers were to slow down their work…how could you tell?

“Union workers” is the biggest oxymoron since liberal compassion.

I normally don’t defend union workers, but once one reaches a certain level of uselessness and inertia, it is wrong to feign surprise when those same turtles refuse to become jackrabbits.

Let’s be honest. People do not join unions to become rich. Union bosses become union bosses to get rich, but average everyday union workers do not join a union to get rich.

They join a union so they can become useless.

They get to take breaks from breaktime while on break. Then they take a break. When productivity does not matter, and it costs billions of dollars to fire people who deserve to be fired, the result is sloth.

I lived every day knowing I could be fired for any reason at any time. Because of that, I worked hard.

For those who don’t believe me, try driving in New York City and look for the orange cones. Does it really take 20 years to pave a street?

Absolutely, if union labor can slow down the process. Concepts such as on time and under budget take a back seat to diversity, multiculturalism, and doughnut breaks.

So don’t blame unions for the mess in New York. Blame New York voters. They got the government they deserved.

California is the same. When the 1994 Northridge Earthquake rocked Los Angeles, Republican Governor Pete Wilson found a capable contractor with a great reputation for getting the job done. What complaints did the left scream about?

Horror of horrors, the guy was a white male. Governor Wilson was called a racist (This was before Proposition 187, for those who think illegal immigration had anything to do with this.), and he refused to back down. The contractor got the job done on time and under budget, without the regulatory constraints that should be relaxed during serious emergencies.

30 years from now people will not care if Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour may have cut corners. He got the job done during Katrina while Kathleen Blanco became a role model for bureaucratic screwups everywhere.

There are leaders, and there are bureaucrats. Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie are leaders. Michael Bloomberg is a talentless technocrat. He got elected by pretending to be a Rudy Giuliani Republican who could get things done. He turned into a leftist regulator able to take away cigarettes but not get streets plowed.

Not a single union head will roll over this failure because unions own the government of New York. When every business leaves, unions will find new hosts to leech off of somewhere else.

So no, do not blame the unions for this failure. Their performance was every bit as awful as every other day. On these recent days people just noticed.

Like French people, it is unfair to blame unions for striking. It is in their contracts and their DNA. That is why they are what they are.

New Yorkers never minded when other people were the victims of unions. They only started caring when their own lives were affected. What did they expect from the unions, production?

Children who kill their parents do not get to cry that they are orphans.

Voters who elect progressive leaders beholden to unaccountable unions do not get to cry that people who spend most of their lives doing nothing…shockingly enough…did nothing.

eric

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 4th, 2011 at 4:46 am and is filed under POLITICS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.