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Comment by Centigonal | Hacker News Reader

One of my relatives worked for the MTA for 20+ years until moving to a new role in 2022.

He's mentioned consultants a lot, and has said the reason they relied heavily on consultants and contractors is because hiring or firing an MTA employee is a complicated and time-consuming process, and it's easier to hire consultants you can decide not to renew instead of risking a bad hire (that said, the way he's described the bidding process for new contracts also sounded extremely complex and time-consuming to me - I'm speculating that getting rid of a bad hire is somehow worse than that).

He's also talked about a different kind of consultant, namely a cadre of management consultants that were brought in under Andrew Cuomo to restructure the agency. He didn't like those folks very much.

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Not to be snippy, but did your relative spend most of those 20+ years in management? I ask because I work for a government agency with civil service rules, unions, etc. that probably make the hiring and firing process similarly onerous as at the MTA, and I hear this sentiment from management but never from an actual worker. I note that the answer Slate comes up with is a management choice to outsource, by the way.

Anyway, your relatives idea sounds like finger pointing to me. Many of the countries that absolutely kick the US' ass in subway and el train construction costs are to be found in Western Europe where labor law is much more employee-sided than even US civil service government jobs. They can do it even with a portion of lazy bums doing nothing all day, so why can't the MTA?

IDK in other countries but in Spain infrastructure is outsourced to a bunch of well known companies. There's engineering and budget oversight, and the state still has engineers and managers inhouse but they are basically "product owners" with very strict rules.

But in the end, 99,9% o the planning is done within such companies.

I hear this sentiment from management but never from an actual worker.

Unfirable people don’t complain about being unfirable. You don’t say!

Let me begin by saying that we're not unfirable. It takes a bit more doing, but you can either be shown the door eventually or reshuffled into a go-nowhere job with no responsibility that'd otherwise be done by a new hire or something.

Don't know if you've experienced this where you work, but we love to complain bout other union employees in other departments. I've done it and heard others do it more times than I can count. "Oh, this work is being sent to so-and-so? Good luck." "You have to get a report from that department?" - that kind of thing. There's not exactly a deep and abiding sense of union solidarity or anything.

Just, most of the credit for broad disfunction, at least where I work, goes to management. Too many of them doing too little. Politics, chasing around every silly idea that pops into upper management's head, working to justify what they already decided, that kind of thing. When a big project here fails, that's the talk around the water cooler, at least. I don't work at MTA but I guess most big organizations would be similar.

The MTA has many many problems.

Perhaps the main root is that the governance structure diffuses responsibility. When the governor is asked about problems at the MTA she points out that she doesn’t have full control of the agency and that’s true. Nor does any other elected politician.

But if we go beyond the root causes and look at the proximate causes—yes, that includes understaffed and incompetent management, too many contractors picked and supervised via a terrible bidding system, lack of cooperation from other government agencies, excessive litigation costs—-but also union/civil service featherbedding.

The people that live here see municipal workers standing around doing nothing. We read about those gaming the overtime system and building secret clubhouses. We know about rubber rooms where teachers sit for years while the process to fire them plays out.

A famous New Yorker once wrote a book titled “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining!” That’s basically how I feel about the unions in NYC.

>The people that live here see municipal workers standing around doing nothing. We read about those gaming the overtime system and building secret clubhouses.

I would argue that in many cases these kinds of things are management choices, too. As an example, I'll use my dad who works in a more traditionally blue-collar local government union job doing construction work. When I was young, he busted his butt building stuff, now near retirement he spends much of his time "standing around doing nothing" - however, this comes down to outsourcing and lack of hiring.

All large projects now are outsourced (this gives the opportunity to graft, and may or may not actually reduce cost). However, they still need a skeleton crew of actual staff for projects that don't make sense to outsource short of contracting the whole construction function: fix a broken window, paint a wall, hang a door, change a broken window AC unit. Now, he may have one or two such hour-long jobs to do in a day, and he is able to spend most of the day "standing around doing nothing" while completing every request on time, and he's not exactly rushing the work.

The other things about standing around is modern machines get so much more done that most of the time it doesn't pay to work. A single scoup of an excavator is more than one person with a shovel can do in the day, so what is the point of even trying. Sometimes someone needs to dig by hand. Now it may seem like get rid of people, but the problem is every 20 minutes you need all those people to do something that must be done by hand, then they all work for 5 minutes and stand around again while the machine works.

>>Let me begin by saying that we're not unfirable. It takes a bit more doing, but you can either be shown the door eventually or reshuffled into a go-nowhere job with no responsibility that'd otherwise be done by a new hire or something.

The phrase “we’re not unfirable” is incompatible with the statement “you can be shown the door OR reshuffled into a go-nowhere job” in my mind. If your response to “we can’t fire union workers” is “well but you can give us a big paycheck based on our seniority to do a job a new hire could do” then I guess you really can’t be fired.

Even amongst the union it seems like you realize the union is inefficient and staffed with layarounds. But when there’s a problem you blame management? And you think that there’s too much management while this article mentions downsizing of management/engineering by a factor of 10 (1600 -> 124)?

>“well but you can give us a big paycheck based on our seniority to do a job a new hire could do”

That's not really how it works here. Pay band for a given job title is strict and relatively narrow, and the way you substantially increase pay is by moving into management or getting a new title, which are both up to management to decide. So, the hypothetical loafer/shirker long-tenured guy may be getting paid 15%-20% more than the guy in his title who's just out of school, not exactly a big paycheck.

>Even amongst the union it seems like you realize the union is inefficient and staffed with layarounds. But when there’s a problem you blame management?

Funny. Most of the "layarounds" we all know about are heavily protected by their management, either they're on very good personal terms or are very narrowly doing the work they're asked to make the boss happy and don't care much about a request from me. I've seen quite a few people pushed out the door here and it's typically not one of them, usually it's those with personal issues with the boss.

You don’t get it: if you should be fired then you should be getting paid 0%-0% of what a guy just out of school is getting paid, not 15%-20% more. And you sure as shit shouldn’t be getting benefits, accruing years of seniority, and accruing years towards your retirement benefits.

It sounds like one of those situations where workers' rights backfire by making it so onerous to hire and fire them that it's safer not too, just in case you end up with a dud, or a role evaporates. It's a tricky balance and I don't claim to know where the sweet spot is in terms of worker's vs. employer's rights, but we may have overshot.

Similarly, I see a problem wrt tenants' rights where it becomes so difficult to evict a tenant that no landlord will take a risk on someone who appears to be even slightly risky. It ends up with hordes of unhoused people at the bottom of the "desirable tenant" spectrum getting bumped onto the street in affluent cities, because no landlord will take a chance on the middle, let alone the bottom. Again, obviously tenants need rights, but it seems like many jurisdictions have overshot the sweet spot.

These things are so complex and have so many facets. I'm not confident that excessive tenants' rights are truly a problem, but I it's possible.

> Again, obviously tenants need rights, but it seems like many jurisdictions have overshot the sweet spot

Tenants need rights and landlords need tenants. In some cities (SF) the demand outstrips supply sufficiently that you won’t easily find housing but in other cities (NYC) there’s such a diversity in housing options that you’ll always be able to find a closet to rent somewhere.

I think it’s hard to say that tenants have too much rights. There’s no reason to enter the business of land letting unless you are comfortable with the regulations. Laws and their purpose come before profits.

I think you missed OP's point...

There are plenty of landlords right now happy to rent an apartment to a couple each with 6 figure salaries and no debt. But if they can't find such a couple, they'd rather leave their apartment empty.

There are lots of landlords like that, and the end result is there are lots of empty apartments and lots of other people who can't find housing.

> There are lots of landlords like that, and the end result is there are lots of empty apartments and lots of other people who can't find housing.

The solution for that are serious vacancy taxes. If people are unwilling to assume the risk of hitting a "dud", they can always sell their property to some large-scale landlord.

That's why those landlords need to be taxed more : so they lose a great deal of money if they don't rent.

(if they sell up because they can't stomach the taxes, reducing home prices that is also a positive outcome)

Landlords taxed too much for vacant properties would just knock the property down and keep the land. Then later, when they want to recoup their investment, they rebuild.

Most properties it isn't the building that is valuable, but the inner city land where one can build a building.

>Landlords taxed too much for vacant properties would just knock the property down and keep the land.

Unless that was what was taxed.

>Most properties it isn't the building that is valuable, but the inner city land

Precisely my point. If you slap taxes on land you increase the available supply.

The vacancy rate in the US is not high, at least according to statistics. I don’t know where this “lots of vacant apartments” narrative is coming from.

It most definitely backfires in SF.

When i gave up my rent controlled apartment my landlady said she was leaving it empty.

Why?

Because she was retiring soon and in a 4-unit building the value of it goes up by $100,000 - $250,000 for each unit that is empty.

Why?

Because rent control locks in rent and this future income. Evictions can takes up to a year or more and mandatory payouts are often in the tens of thousands if you do evict without cause (say owner wants to move into a unit).

If the unit is empty someone can move in right away or rent for market rent.

The units were renting for ~$3,000 per month, so as long as she sold it within 9 years she wad ahead of renting the unit out.

I agree that landlords need to go in eyes wide open, but the challenge is rules can change after you get tenants.

And the big lesson here is landlords respond to incentives too. If regulations make it cheaper to do something negative, they’ll do it. Most people would.

That has nothing to do with workers' rights. Firing with notice is how the problem is solved in Germany. When your boss fires you, you don't get chased out of the building, no, your employment contract transforms from indefinite to definite and you just wait until the contract runs out. Gross misbehaviour like theft allows immediate firing. Also new hires have a probatory period (several months) during which firing works exactly the same way it does in the USA e.g. you can fire immediately for any reason.

Americans will tell me how onerous this is and yet they somehow managed to screw it up anyway because I constantly read on the internet about "unfireable" employees which is a ridiculous concept. Even hiring quotas for large corporation's and government funded institutions (universities for example) don't matter when making firing decisions, the point is to let people with other backgrounds into the door, not keep them locked in.

Gov’t jobs often require due process to dismiss. This can involve steps that are almost impossible to fail. They also often have a probationary period. It’s cool that Germany does things differently.

I don't believe that the US Federal government can't lay people off.

Quite. What they generally mean is they have managers that are too incompetent or too temporary to do the work to get rid of people.

> That has nothing to do with workers' rights

A french court would disagree with you - the German process you described is impossible in france. once an employee has finished their trial period, only gross misbehaviour or an official economic redundancy plan can get rid of them...

You're saying that in France it's against the law to fire someone for performance related reasons?

Employers in France need valid grounds, which may be personal or economic. Personal grounds includes poor performance. Easier said than done though, it requires a lot of documentation proving that the employer provided sufficient training/retraining to improve performance, regular documented meetings to discuss performance problems, etc. If the worker stops showing up to work at all it becomes easier, but if the worker wants to drag out the process they can.

That sounds perfectly reasonable to me, and is a far cry from the OP's assertion.

only if the employee plays ball. all they need to do is go to the doctor, say that they're burned out, and no amount of poor performance reviews will be enough. the next step will be a negotiation between employer and employee

You can fire someone in France for poor performance.

But it's not like in the US where you just declare this, and then fire them. It works like in many union shops in the US. You need to document that poor performance, show missed deadlines, show that you attempted to train and accommodate them, give them a few months of heads up to adjust, and then you can proceed with dismissal.

Just think of France as an all-hands union shop.

> I constantly read on the internet about "unfireable" employees which is a ridiculous concept.

Anecdotally, I've heard about companies with these, which got that way by getting sued over and over again for wrongful termination. Now they are scared to even discipline employees engaged in sub-extremely-egregious behavior.

Like one story I heard was, "As long as they spend more time working than looking at porn, let's just let it be."

My 2 cents on this: Your company gets this way with poor leadership. Terminations without your i's dotted and t's crossed, and also an unwillingness to take some things on the chin for a broader view of how things are going to go.

Quite the opposite. In many ways employers are like tenants - they rent out the position to you and in return cash in a certain part of the value you produce. Just like with landlords in a properly just society you do not need that middleman ... The hordes of unhoused people are there not because of desirable or undesirable tenants, but because of landlords gatekeeping the access to homes.

I have a rental house next to me. They got raided by SWAT a few years ago for using it as a selling house for fent.

I'm ok with some gatekeeping. There are some undesirable tenants.

I don’t think this is as big of a problem as it is made out to be.

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