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Comment by iooi | Hacker News Reader

I've said it before [1] and I'll say it again, even if I get downvoted to hell again: Unions

NYC has some of the strongest unions in the country. Everything from hotels to the MTA are plagued by really, really strong unions that only care about their interests -- leaving the city with a shameful transit system, in this case.

Unions make up nearly 25% of workers in NYC[2], that's more than the double the national average. The corruption is rampant[3] and the city is literally powerless against them[4].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14948921

[2] http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20170910/BLOGS01/170909...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/nyregion/carpenters-nyc-u...

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Saying this is because of unions is like saying America has political problems because it is a democratic nation state. Democracies and unions are modes of people collectively exerting power with inherent.

The actual criticism to be made here is the pathology of all New York institutions and the people entrenched among them - the unions that serve the MTA, the people who own, build and rent the real estate, the politicians who effective rule by plutocracy.

The corruption of New York's unions is simply the end state of a city whose underlying mechanisms have all been captured by a small group of people interested only in enriching themselves. Many of those institutions are unions.

There's a difference, though: democracies (in theory) are designed to allow the majority to exert power, while unions are there to allow minorities to exert power. In this case, assuming the parent's assertion is true, you have a union that is exerting power for its own benefit, at a huge detriment to the majority. We can collectively decide that this is ok, if we want: if we value the continued employment of union members over a more efficient subway system, then that's fine. If not, then we're in trouble.

Hell, I'd be fine paying the unionized subway employees for the rest of their lives to sit at home doing literally nothing if that was the only way to get them to agree to automating their jobs away. At least then we'd have the outcome we want, and not have to pay the next several generations of subway operators to do a job that holds the system back.

Paris has been able to convert an existing line to fully automated (GOA4) and is currently working on a second one.

Unions sound more like your personal bogeyman than an actual cause.

Excellent counterpoint, and deserving of greater visibility. London is another example - the transit workers are heavily unionized and regularly go on strike, and yet there've been massive improvements to the Tube, which predates NYC's subway by 50 some odd years. Ever notice how narrow those tubes are, and how deep down they're dug?

To add insult to injury, construction costs for transit are much lower in Paris and London than NYC.

But let's attack the unions again, because that's less complex (and matches a popular and old political narrative) than pointing to systemic incompetence and short term thinking at the administrative level.

Although some lines are automated in London, they still have a driver to push the button.

The DLR is fully automated, but has a member of staff on board, and the 4 times I used it this year the staff member was always in manual control.

If rail doesn't get automated before cars, I don't see branch lines surviving. But then I don't see them surviving automated cars either. Main lines, sure, but I'll be getting an auto-taxi to the mainline station rather than the hourly connecting train.

> The DLR is fully automated, but has a member of staff on board

I believe the rules require a member of staff to check the doors and permit the train to depart, but that can be done from the platform instead (and is, at peak times).

Full automation will be permitted on lines with platform edge doors; the intention is to do this for the deep tubes at least for the central sections, but it's a 3-step process (replace the trains with ones that work with PEDs, fit the PEDs, then remove the driving cabs) that wasn't expected to be done before the late 2020s, and that was before the severe underfunding of TfL with the loss of central government support and the mayor's fare freeze.

So really the answer isn't unions. It's corruption. Unions work in many places in the world.

Per the linked articles, unions are intertwined with the corruption. This wouldn’t be the case if unions were politically touchable. As long as there enough voters who will always say, “unions aren’t the problem”, they will be part of the problem. They get money for nothing and nobody blames them.

It is curious how unions in America behave so very differently to unions in other places. American unions almost universally seem to be short-sighted and completely protectionist. This isn't the case in western Europe, so it doesn't seem to be inherent to a union.

This creates a communication hurdle between Europe and America. The expectations of what a union does differ so much, you could say Europeans and Americans mean a totally different thing when using the same word.

Unions get money to fund lawyers to protect their members, and to be able to go on strike. This protection and feedback is essential for preventing companies from taking advantage of their employees.

The increasing inequality in the US can in large part be attributed to corporations winning the war against Unions. Corporations have been ruthless towards this end, including funding think-tanks that gaslight Americans.

Massachusetts just eliminated all toll plazas in the state and those workers were highly compensated and unionized. Many of those workers were retrained for other positions.

There are ways to make the union happy and the workers happy it just takes longer term thinking which governments and voters are frightently bad at.

Denmark has one of the highest union participation rates in the world and they were able to a build a fully automated metro system in Copenhagen.

Denmark is also considerably different than the U.S. along many dimensions: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-02-23/you-can-t... and not just this one.

So it's not the unions then. It's how they function in NYC.

Yes, exactly my point. Blaming 'unions' for this is simplistic to the extreme. As oyhers have already mentioned many places around the world with strong unions still maintain far better, more advanced metros at far lower costs.

that's weird, the best subway in america is the most unionized one?

Perhaps in spite of? NYC's subway is the way it is because of many factors unrelated to unionization. And the worse transit systems in the US aren't really worse because of their level of unionization.

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