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arnon

Anyone who's ever tried to set up a booth at a trade-show will know exactly what this is like.

$900 for renting a TV for 3 days + $450 fee for installing the bracket + $180 for placing a power-strip at your booth.

You're billed $90 for every hour of work, billed at 30m increments.

Order of business:

1. Person comes to look at where you want the TV. Billed $45.

2. Person comes to drop by an extension cord, $45.

3. Person comes to plug the extension cord in, but sees you're not ready to have the TV mounted yet, $45.

4. Lunch break

5. Person comes to hook up the extension cord, $45.

Total bill: $180, for something a kindergartner can do (literally connecting a power cord to the socket that's already in the floor)

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I think in this case it is more like:

Government: How much for the tunnel?

Company: $5M

Government: Ok, but we need it next year and will fine you $20000 every day too late.

Company: That's ok. But then it will cost you $200M.

Government: OK.

Actually, it's worse than that, if you read the article.

NY Government (Governor Andrew Cuomo): Let's build a new subway station. Hey MTA, why don't you negotiate for us and figure out how much it costs.

MTA: Hey TWU, you can figure this out for us, right?

TWU: Hey contractors and vendors. How much will it cost us to have you supply parts and do some of the work for this project?

Contractors/Vendors: Oh, that'll be $500,000, which allows us to make a healthy profit margin of 20%.

TWU: That's not enough - you should be charging us $800,000, so we can make a healthy margin as well without cutting into yours.

Contractors/Vendors: By golly, you're right!

TWU: Also, add another $200,000, because we need an "operational readiness" consultant to help us when we're ready to finish. The project won't be ready for another ten years, but we should employ them the whole time just in case.

Contractors/Vendors: Sounds good to us. We're not the ones paying.

TWU: Hey MTA, this will cost $1,450,000. We added on an extra $450,000, because they're using a fifty-year-old piece of technology, and our contract stipulates that we get an extra $450,000 every time they do, to offset the job loss from this "technological advancement".

MTA: That sounds like a reasonable price for this. Hey Cuomo, you're the governor of NY. Can you please rubber-stamp this proposal to increase our budget by $1,450,000? Look how strapped for funding we are.

NY Government (Governor Andrew Cuomo): Well, you supported my last election bid, so I don't see why I should start questioning your prices now. Let's go!

...seriously, read the article. This isn't even an exaggeration.

I like reading your comments, thinking to myself, "this is something chimeracoder would write" and then seeing that you did in fact write it.

Remember the part where only two bids were made for the job. It’s the same principle of having Comcast and DirectTV as your ISP choices. They can charge you whatever they want, and what are you going to do?

... or tried to get some software written. The IT department of a BigCo operates in the same way, except that their currency is time rather than money.

But I think the problem is that we have no decent middle ground between "screw the worker" and "screw the employer."

I don't belong to a union, yet I get treated fairly well. But at the same time, my skill set is in short supply and high demand. And I possess a considerable amount of mission critical knowledge that exists nowhere but in my head.

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

― Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

So what happens if you just plug it in yourself?

Trade unions get seriously bunched panties about power to conference booths. Organizers are forced to play along, ostensibly for fire marshal and safety rules but really for union getting its cut.

Think that’s bad — visit a Hollywood film location. I was a camera assistant for a film and I literally couldn’t drive dailies from the airport in my own car — that’s the Teamsters. I couldn’t touch a broom to sweep up our camera loading area — that’s another Union. I couldn’t plug a surge protector into an outlet — that’s the electricians. I couldn’t touch a dolly upon which we were to mount a camera — that’s Grip. I couldn’t move a $500 light five centimeters — That’s Lighting — despite being trusted to load a $100k+ Panavision camera or attach at $85k lens. And god forbid shooting take 30 seconds longer than the schedule — the entire crew on the set gets overtime.. costing thousands of dollars.

However to be fair, Hollywood is a private enterprise so it’s what the market allows — but when it comes to public money, it’s infuriating for such egregious waste and inefficiency.

I don't understand how the union/employer relations in the US seem to always get that crazy. It seems it's either the employer trying to exploit workers to the max or the union demanding terms that clearly impede even legitimate work. I have worked in Germany in a unionized company and it was fine. There was a framework for overtime and other things but we still could do what was needed to get our job done. I really don't get it. It's either one party exploiting the other or the other way around.

I've worked in union and non-union shops, most have been pretty unexceptionable to the point I'd never tell a story about them. You mostly just hear about the edge cases.

I've seen both sides. The town I went to college in was heavily unionized. The majority of them were fine.

We once needed to hang a network rack in our building. It was on the unions work list for 6 months. We finally just did it, a grievance was filed, and the company was fined for having a non-union person do a union job.

This was sadly the norm at that job. But it wasn't anything too exciting - nice guys, too much work to do, company wouldn't get more of them.

America has always been hostile to unions. American business especially, but Americans generally. In America even union workers hate unions. It's baked into our cultural DNA. (This is my takeaway from reading the excellent American history book, There is Power in a Union, by Philip Dray.)

By contrast, European elites settled into a power sharing arrangement with unions long ago, at the end of the 19th century.

Because there's less conflict over power in Europe, there's less tension between unions and business. But because even at the height of their power (circa 1930s) unions were perpetually under siege in the U.S. by business and political interests, American unions are constantly fighting just to exist.

In the past few decades, as American unions face extinction in the private labor market, they're literally left fighting for survival. This manifests in a lot of defensiveness--i.e. the conference workers, Hollywood workers. Even in places where they're seemingly secure, they don't feel secure, and in truth aren't actually very secure. Even the most liberal, union friendly corporation or municipality has trouble resisting the pursuit of cost savings through automation and out-sourcing.

In some places unions have literally pivoted to selling themselves as jobs programs. Some government worker unions and contractor unions are in many respects a tool for wealth redistribution. In some cities and states politicians and policy makers will openly tell you that, e.g., the point of having so many unionized workers manage a conference hall is simply to provide stable jobs--jobs to gainfully employ people that might otherwise stand on the corner all day, jobs that pay enough to support a solidly working- or middle-class family.

In other words, these unions are doing precisely what so many conservatives claim the country should be doing with entitlement reform--predicate it on working. But assuming it's not just an insincere excuse, the reality is that you literally need to manufacture and distribute work in ways that are at odds with a meritocratic and especially market-driven model. Unions are literally structured to distribute work and maximize employment, which means they're a better mechanism to distribute social payments in exchange for nominal labor. Even back in the days when corrupt union leadership siphoned wealth, the disparity between leadership and wage workers wasn't nearly as great as in private business. That's especially the case today, as union financing is much more heavily regulated while, conversely, in the private labor market shareholders and managers have substantially increased their share of the profits.

Of course, these social arrangements create weird incentives for inefficiency and corruption, especially when they're as informal and ad hoc as in the U.S.

> America has always been hostile to unions

Not the idea of unions, just how the US ones turn out: a mountain of political corruption, inefficiency, and organized crime motivating an entrenched and self-perpetuating attitude. Big unions are more about their benefit than about their members, here.

One neighbouring booth had a 'forklift malfunction', in which a forklift 'accidentally' destroyed their booth.

In other cases, they just kick your company out.

Oh, and you can't bring anything in during setup, if it can't be carried under your arm. Seriously. For "safety reasons".

They probably got sued by a hapless white collar lawyer that spilled his Starbucks and got shocked when he tripped over a power cable laid by someone that didn't care that the cord was over the main walking path.

Hah, once we needed some extra wiring for some lights at our booth, the electrician came to have a look and said “sorry I’m not insured to add wires” and just left. And nobody wanted to do the job on such a short notice. Luckily no one said anyting when we just plugged the cables ourselves

While I agree that the $450 bracket installation is crazy, $900 for the TV is not bad at all. Say the TV is $500 retail. If it breaks you are out $1000, and you have to scramble to buy a new one. When you rent, the spare is in a road box behind the curtain, and a professional shop would not charge you for damages unless something smelled really funny.

Source: used to work in corporate event technology

If the TV is $500 retail, why are you out $1,000 if it breaks?

Because you had to buy another one for another $500.

grivescorbett assumes you buy one and discard it after the trade show. If that one breaks, you have to buy a second one and discard it, too. Total cost: $1,000.

Of course, at a (US) trade show, if your rented $900 tv breaks, even if they have a spare one, they will take a day to find a cart (for which you have to pay rent) to ride it to your booth (which has to be done by two union members, can’t be done while the trade show is open, so has to be done after 5 PM, doubling labor costs and requiring you to pay for keeping the floor open, too (even though they can charge that to almost all exhibitors)), and you have to pay for union members to plug in that new tv. All that hopefully after other union members unplugged the old tv, or you will be charged for using two power plugs.

(I have limited experience with this, but from that experience, the above seems only slightly exaggerated. On the trade shows I worked on, you weren’t allowed to carry the booth material you carried all the way from the airport to your booth)

Again, I'm right there with you on the labor issue :).

Sure and this is also the reason renting cars costs tens of thousands of... oh... wait.

What are the chances that a new tv will break during a 3-day trade show? I'm going to be generous and guess it's less than 10%. If the conference bought TVs for everyone, plus an extra 20% to cover the ones that break with extra breathing room, it would cost $600 to get a TV.

This assumes the conference throws out the TVs at the end. The rental company is supposed to be able to amortize these costs over years of renting the same TV. Even at the 10% breakage rate, you'd expect to rent a TV 9 times before it breaks on the 10th rental. This should allow you to rent a TV for closer to $50 plus labor and a little margin for profit. That's why renting is usually much cheaper than buying and not slightly cheaper than buying 2.

You never produce a live event like that without spares, everything can and will break.

Your idea about the conference buying spares for everyone is interesting. Unfortunately for one, the financial incentives are just not setup in that way. Generally each booth is responsible for its own gear. Second, everyone needs different sizes, resolutions, mounts, color profiles, refresh rates, input types, network control options, blackout behavior, etc, etc.

Also, the discount vs extra expense of the gear is correlated to the cost of the gear. A $100,000 projector (mid-range) will obviously costly less to rent for three days, and is well worth it. With a TV though, they rental company is able to charge a premium because their customers simply will not purchase that type of equipment for all of the reasons above.

If we're just saying that the rental companies can charge $900 for the TV because that's what people are willing to pay, the same applies to paying $450 for bracket installation. In a competitive environment, you should expect the price to be close to the marginal cost of providing the service.

The marginal equipment cost for providing a TV is the cost of the TV divided the number of events you expect it to last through. This doesn't change if you have spares. To get close to $900 for a $500 TV, you either need extremely high overhead and labor costs or TVs that break a little more than halfway through the rental. If a TV can generally survive 30 days of use, equipment costs only justify $50 of the bill for a 3-day rental. I don't see how you would get anywhere near $900 from there.

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