For his Eagle Scout badge, Kevin Anderson, a 17-year-old junioar at Southern Lehigh High School, spent 250 hours over several weeks clearing a path at his local park so people could enjoy walking and biking along the river. What did he get for this good deed?
Little did the do-gooder know that his altruistic act would put him in the cross hairs of the city's largest municipal union.
Nick Balzano, president of the local Service Employees International Union, told Allentown City Council Tuesday that the union is considering filing a grievance against the city for allowing Anderson to clear a 1,000-foot walking and biking path at Kimmets Lock Park.
"We'll be looking into the Cub Scout or Boy Scout who did the trails," Balzano told the council.
Balzano said Saturday he isn't targeting Boy Scouts. But given the city's decision in July to lay off 39 SEIU members, Balzano said "there's to be no volunteers." No one except union members may pick up a hoe or shovel, plant a flower or clear a walking path.
"We would hope that the well-intentioned efforts of an Eagle Scout candidate would not be challenged by the union," said Mayor Ed Pawlowski in an e-mail Friday. "This young man is performing a great service to the community. His efforts should be recognized as such."
http://www.mcall.com/news/all-a8_5scout.7084728nov15,0,6238384.story - via Michelle Malkin
My point is that this clearly isn't a case of union "bullying". Unions certainly aren't perfect, they can be very crooked. But too many people these days are reflexively anti-union... Even as we're gradually losing a lot of the employee benefits that the unions fought for.
Not cool.
You want to bring troubled economic times into it? Fine. Not like the city could afford to pay someone to do that. Not like the young man volunteering put people out of jobs. He wanted to help, and these people are kicking him in the face for it. Ridiculous.
In NYC I had to have work done, electrical, in a building, and it was like some lightbulb joke, only it was no joke. You had to have an apprentice (who did all the work), an engineer, and a supervisor, neither of whom did anything but collecting a high hourly rate to stand there and no do anything. And you had to hire union electrical companies/workers at something like $180 an hour, of which the one who did the least made the most.
Most union systems are so power hungry and are so absurd that they border on why many companies are shutting down and/or cant stay competitive. I now work for higher ed, and the unions are just as greedy and insane. Hell, a professor can rape a person, or not show up for work once their tenured, making exorbitant wages, but the college can't fire them. And they don't retire, why would they take the pay cut (which is much more than you and me) when they can't be fired, they simply don't work and keep on collecting salaries, and the students and education suffers.
Unions are too powerful, too delusional, and this story serves to prove this. Because they're fat lazy asses are laid off and they have to maintain some fiefdom BS over what they perceive as their right or no right, the city and it's parks will suffer. Well boo effin' hoo! If cities like many I know, including mine, weren't scammed by 1/4 the union force into disability and retirement packages 90% of Americans will never see that drain coffers left and right most cities and most companies wouldn't be in the state they're in.
Unions started with great noble reasons and to create equity in the workplace and safe environments, but like all systems, they got corrupted, perverted, and are now grossly outdated and outmoded.
And no, I'm not some GOP reupublitard blowhard, I'm a left-leaning liberal who believes we need public healthcare and to get out of the BS lie-created wars and need to start spending here and stop being world cop. I'm just sick of seeing all the BS the unions cause, and it needs to stop.
Just teasing you (but not about MM).
Anyhow, Tony, I can't find anywhere in the article that says there was any formal agreement from the city that there was to be no volunteers doing things like cleaning trails, etc. All Balzano says is that there's to be no volunteers, which to me means it's something he came up with by himself.
And Ursula, you bring up a good point but my impression is that Balzano raised this issue up not because of any concerns about private citizens doing city public work, but simply because he is bitter over the layoffs and picked the most convenient target.
Anyways, Balzano says that he's probably going to let it go.
"Who cares? We are right!"
Who knows? The union labor may get called in to bring that completed project up to code. From what an electrician friend tells me, union code standards are higher than most city/state/federal standards. Want a great job done? Hire a union worker who's laid off and pay him/her under the table.
The unions are choking out employers these days. I agree- what they did at the beginning was desperately needed; the demands they make now are ridiculous. Too bad.
Oh, except professional bodies - things like the British Medical Association - you can't be a doctor without being a member, so arguably it's a kind of union.
But with that said, I wouldn't have a grief with the union bitching in this case if the city hired/payed someone to clear this path since the city is unionized. But this was a volunteer effort (NO $ involved) so shut up and go find some jobs for out of work due paying members and stop wasting money on filing legal cases when there is no real case. The city can't afford your union rates right now. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned here.
Even worse is the cases where the union strikes a deal with a government body to grant the union an artificial monopoly. We might find this idea abhorrent, at yet we can find it practiced all over the U.S., such as the electric unions in NYC mentioned in #6 above, or more abstractly the artificial monopoly over health care services granted to an exclusive cartel, that is one of the fundamental causes of our spiraling health care costs.
I find something really irksome about the implication that the union members have a right to a job. No one has a right to a job. What we have a right to is freedom. With that freedom, if we don't have a job, we can produce our own food, start a small business, or sell our services for anything we're good at freelance. That is the "safety net" of natural law. That's why not man people starved during the depression, because they still knew how to hunt and farm, because people still had a great deal of freedom to do small enterprise. Failing that, they still had communities.
But now, much of this basic freedom has been legislated away, in the name of "consumer protection" and whatnot, so we need to create these false "safety nets" and phony government jobs, which have all sorts of unintended consequences and moral hazards.
And seriously, are there really people on this thread who worry about the "safety" of him clearing a path? Who worry that he didn't follow the "various codes?" I could see some people wanting to maintain the grass without a path. But worrying about "codes" and "safety???"
What have we, as a country (except that this pedantry is true of most of western civilization), come to?
There is a link to the original story, BTW, so you don't have to pollute your soul by reading Malkin directly.
Oh, and SEIU? Way to discourage community service. "Hey, if somebody's going to volunteer to do our work out of civic pride, what happens to our overpaid union jobs?"
She is just a rotten person to the core, period, someone with no conscience or soul. Not to get sidetracked, sorry.
And why did they wait til he was done?
Where was the union, what were they doing?
The union would have had 35 guys out there, 29 of which stand around leaning on a shovel. They would take over 6 months to do "impact studies" and other bureaucratic nonsense, then start the actual work (careful using this word around union employees). After 6 months of work, with little accomplished, they would then go on strike demanding more pay and better equipment. After all is said and done, they would have spent 500K+ (billing @ $30 an hour) and taken 2-3 years to do the job. They would then have the local, liberal enclave declare the section of the trail the "peace trail" and blame something on GW Bush.
This kid did it for free in less than 260 hours and didn't ask for one shred of credit or recognition. Great kid, and the best of what our future can be.
The union? Tired, old, dinosaur still talking about labor like it's the 60's. Do nothing, contribute nothing bums.
Nick Ballsonyou is a coward and a gorilla. What heart full of integrity picking on a kid because your worthless collective didn't get to rip us off of some more tax dollars. Obama's America at its best......
Any fault for skimming over the union would be on the part of the city that O.K'ed this.
I have worked in Union run factories and have not one positive thing to say about them.
Nothing is better than having to risk a grievance because someone spilled 300 gallons of ink outside your office and the only way to exit for the next several hours is to clean yourself a path. Unions rob industry of teamwork and creativity while bolstering a sense of passivity and entitlement in the workforce.
The story must be bad because a bad person presented it.
And the person is bad because...because they're not a liberal, evidently. Notice that nothing has been shown in evidence against Malkin. There's nothing here but personal attacks and speculation about "cherry-picking".
Or maybe you're all racists.
Or sexists.
Or sexo-racists or something.
After all, that's the kind of "thinking" you understand, right?
How do you live with yourselves?
Hypocrisy at its finest!
If there's one thing I learned, it's to be extremely wary of anything a demagogue has to tell me.
Fuck Malkin!
save America , beat up a liberal.
Great choice of story for a site that usually cheers people up and stimulates the imagination.
Maybe Neatorama can start linking directly to Drudge and Huffington stories everyday, that will make this a really fun site to visit.
Hey Ed, let's play the blame game.
I'm sorry you can't just claim an organization deny volunteers. Volunteering by nature is a decision by a 3rd party, the choke hold the union has does not cover every person that comes in contact with the city. Volunteers also work for free which removes any civil suits as no money changed hands. If it were me I would toss the whole union and put the boy scouts to work. It seems they actually want to do it.