Big Labor`s Snowmageddon Snit Fit

Diligent

English farmers of old once shared a motto about the
blessings of work:

"Industry produces wealth, God speed the plow."
Indolent New York City union officials who oversee snow
removal apparently live by a different creed: Sloth
enhances political power, Da Boss slow the plow.

Come rain or shine, wind, sleet or
blizzard,
Big Labor leaders always demonstrate perfect
power-grabby timing when it comes to shafting taxpayers.

Public-sector unions are all-weather vultures ready,
willing and able to put special interest politics

above the citizenry`s health, wealth and safety.
Confirming rumors that have fired up the frozen
metropolis, the
New York Post reported Thursday that government
sanitation and transportation workers were ordered by
union supervisors to oversee a deliberate slowdown of
its cleanup program—and to boost their overtime
paychecks.

Why such vindictiveness? It`s a
cold-blooded temper tantrum against the city`s
long-overdue efforts to trim layers of union fat and
move toward a more efficient, cost-effective privatized
workforce.

Welcome to the Great Snowmageddon
Snit Fit of 2010.

New York City Councilman
Dan Halloran, R-Queens,

told the Post
that several brave whistleblowers confessed to him
that they "were
told (by supervisors) to take off routes (and) not do
the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely
manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the
layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors,
shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file."

Denials and recriminations are
flying like snowballs. But even as they scoff at reports
of this outrageous organized job action, the city
sanitation managers` unions openly acknowledge their
grievances and
"resentment" over job cuts. Stunningly, sanitation
workers spilled the beans on how city plowers raised
blades "unusually
high" (which requires extra passes to get their work
done) and refused to plow anything other than assigned
streets (even if it meant leaving behind clogged routes
to get to their blocks).

When they weren`t sitting on their
backsides, city plowers were

caught on videotape maniacally

destroying parked vehicles in a futile display of
Kabuki Emergency Theater. It would be laugh-out-loud
comedy if not for the

death of at least one newborn whose parents waited
for an ambulance that never came because of snowed-in
streets.

This isn`t a triumphant victory for
social justice and workers` dignity. This is terrifying
criminal negligence.

And it isn`t the first time New
York City sanitation workers have endangered residents`
well-being. In the

1960s, a Teamsters-affiliated sanitation workers`
strike

led to trash fires, typhoid warnings and rat
infestations, as 100,000 tons of rotting garbage piled
up. Three decades later, a coordinated job action by
city building-service workers and sanitation workers
caused another public trash nuisance declared
"dangerous to
life and health" in the Big Apple.

New Yorkers could learn a thing or
two from those of us who call Colorado Springs, Colo.,
home. We have no fear of being held hostage to a
politically driven sanitation department—because we have
no sanitation department. We have no sanitation
department because enlightened advocates of limited
government in our town realized that competitive bidders
in the private sector could provide better service at
lower cost.

And we`re not alone. As the
Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan reported:

"The largest study ever conducted on outsourced garbage collection,
conducted by the federal government in the 1970s,
reported 29 to 37 percent savings in cities with
populations over 50,000. A 1994 study by the Reason
Foundation discovered that the city of Los Angeles was
paying about 30 percent more for garbage collection than
its surrounding suburbs, in which private waste haulers
were employed. A 1982 study of city garbage collection
in Canada discovered an astonishing 50 percent average
savings as a result of privatization."[Detroit
Could Collect Savings from Privatized Garbage Pickup,
By Steven Thomas, December 1, 2000]

Completely privatized trash
collection means city residents don`t get socked with
the bill for fraudulently engineered overtime pay,
inflated pensions and gold-plated health benefits in
perpetuity—not to mention the capital and operating
costs of vehicles and equipment. The

Colorado Springs model, as city councilman Sean
Paige calls it, is a blueprint for how every city can
cope with budget adversity while freeing itself from
thuggish union threats when contracts expire or cuts are
made. Those who dawdled on privatization efforts in
better times are suffering dire, deadly consequences
now.

Let the snow-choked streets of New
York be a lesson for the rest of the nation: It`s time
to put the Big Chill on Big Labor-run municipal
services.

COPYRIGHT

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Michelle Malkin

[email
her]
is the author of


Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists,
Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our
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