Reflections From a Murky Pond

Liberals, Progressives, and the bosses and enforcers of the organized crime syndicates known as labor unions often bemoan and wail about how they seldom achieve victories anymore.

But what would a union victory look like this more austere day and age?

The evidence indicates that it would look like defeat but with wider spread casualties.

The city of New York, faced with ever-increasing and unsustainable costs from its school busing program, made the decision to end its policy of no-bid contracts for school busing and to move to a more normative and open low-bid contract model. This instantly prompted the Amalgamated Transit Union, a cell of the AFL/CIO, to call a strike that crippled NYC’s school busing program for five weeks before the union finally suspended it on Wednesday, February 20, 2013.

More than 100,000 NYC students, including large numbers of special-needs children, were negatively impacted by the union’s strike, the first in the city since 1979.

The Result? The Victory?

When approximately 100 of the bus matrons reported for wJoseph Fazziaork at their Red Hook bus depot around 5:00 AM,  they were informed that they no longer had jobs. Their employer, Canal Escorts, Inc. had folded and gone out of business due to their strike causing  Canal Escorts, Inc. to be unable to meet its contractual requirements with the Department of Education during the month-long strike.

I’ve lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I’m not losing another nickel more. This union thinks they can tell me what to do – they can go fuck themselves!

— Joseph Fazzia
President, Canal Escorts, Inc. (Defunct)

That was the result that Amalgamated Transit Union achieved. That was their victory. They went on strike against NYC’s upcoming shift to open, low-bid contracts and destroyed one – so far – of the private-sector employers that provided wages and benefits to their own constituency.

In some other plane the shade of King Pyrrhus of Epirus is shaking his head in dismay at their ignorance. Still, a few more victories like this and they will be undone, so there’s an upside to this situation.

Tags: America | ATU | Buses | Canal Escorts | Children | Education | Employment | Failure | Fazzia | Labor | Labor Unions | Liberals | New York | NY | NYC | Organized Crime | Politics | Progressives | School | Unemployment | Victory

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2013 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

If America couldn’t have expanded westward, would the Civil War happened? Would it have happened without that opportunity for a massive trade imbalanced based upon the divergent costs of labor under respectively slave-holding and purely freemen societies?

Prima facie, this seems to be useless musing but it truly isn’t. It may be a very important question.

Face facts, the Civil War wasn’t a war to free the Black slaves per se. Nobody of any consequence wanted those slaves freed and even the rank and file Abolitionists favored a fanciful deportation / repatriation strategy.

Both the Civil War and most of the serious problems that led up to it were over allowing slavery to expand westward, either by the Southern states or, after the Secession, by a foreign nation. Business interests in the non-Slave states knew that they couldn’t compete against slave labor.

That was then and this is now, and that now includes America not being able to effectively against China, to lesser extent the rest of Asia, and the Developing World where, once again, what amounts to slave labor is used.

That is certainly worthy of consideration.

Tags: America | Asia | Blacks | China | Civil War | Economics | Free Trade | Globalism | History | Labor | Musings | Politics | Slave Labor | Slavery | Society | Western Terrorities

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2012 at 7:11 am and is filed under Musings, Politics, Society. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

That’s Obama for you. The boy is almost stereotypical in his refusal to accept any responsibility for failure. So he’s continuing his claims that America lacks jobs because we’re lazy.

The Boy Still Says We’re Lazy

This time Obama is up on his soapbox claiming that Americans have been too lazy when it comes to, “Selling America and trying to attract new businesses into America.”

Truth be told, I’m not sure if Obama really believes that or if he’s just mouthing whatever his campaign managers and handlers are feeding him through the teleprompter. In either case though, it’s a ridiculous and irresponsible statement.

It fits his profile though. The Campaigner-in-Chief can hardly be expected to admit that labor unions, corporate taxes, and costly regulations – and the uncertain future costs caused by ObamaCare – have not only priced America workers off the global market but made America a very business unfriendly locale. After all, he got elected by running a high taxes, high regulation, pro-Union, anti-business ticket.

Tags: America | Economics | Economy | Employment | Globalism | Jobs | Labor | Labor Unions | Obama | Politics | Regulation | Unemployment

This entry was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2011 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

American corporations, faced with shifts in paradigm and intensifying competition in the global economy, have been forced to think outside the box and to adopt business practices long since deprecated in the US. New policies have begun to be enacted…

Our New “Work Break” Policy

The SEIU, AFL-CIO, and UAW have vowed to fight this policy shift in the courts and in the streets. They fought for decades to end this practice and protect their members from having to actually work and they’re not about to let Management put an end to that. 😆

Tags: AFL-CIO | America | Corporations | Humor | Labor | Labor Unions | SEIU | Society | UAW

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2011 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Humor, Society. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

The ongoing battle in the Badger State between Wisconsin’s Governor, Scott Walker and the public sector union bosses and their paid lackeys in the Democrat party is very much about jobs. It’s about the jobs of those union bosses and nothing else.

Since these “stalwart defenders” of the workers have already agreed to every fiscal concession in Gov. Walker’s bill, it’s certainly not about the state’s employees.

So 14 Democrat Senators in the pay of the unions fled the state of Wisconsin, shutting down the state’s government, and 1000’s of state employees faked illness in order to protest, shutting down necessary public services, so that their union bosses could keep their well-paid, cushy jobs at the taxpayers’ expense.

Having their membership pay 5.8% of their salary toward their pensions and 12.6% of their health-care premiums as Gov. Walker demanded was deemed appropriate “compromises” by the union bosses. Loosing the privilege of collective bargaining on subjects other than wages and having to undergo periodic re-certification to determine if the state’s workers still wanted such a union wasn’t considered acceptable.

Yes; it’s about jobs – the jobs of a few bloated parasites and those of the Democrats that they bought and paid for.

Tags: America | Employment | Labor | Labor Unions | Politics | Scott Walker | Unemployment | Wisconsin

This entry was posted on Friday, February 25th, 2011 at 10:40 am and is filed under Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.