>Construction companies, which have given millions of dollars in campaign donations in recent years, have increased their projected costs by up to 50 percent when bidding for work from the M.T.A., contractors say. ... Consulting firms, which have hired away scores of M.T.A. employees, have persuaded the authority to spend an unusual amount on design and management, statistics indicate.
or this:
>"Worker wages and labor conditions are determined through negotiations between the unions and the companies, none of whom have any incentive to control costs."
All they say is that the reason starts with the number of people employed. If you continued reading past that point, they talk about other non-union incentives that drive up costs, like:
>Critics pointed out that construction companies actually have an incentive to maximize costs — they earn a percentage of the project’s costs as profit, so the higher the cost, the bigger their profit.
They also talk about the "soft costs" of NYC construction, like:
>The project plan called for the hiring of 500 consultants from a dozen different companies
And of course bureaucracy:
>Officials have added to the soft costs by struggling to coordinate between vendors, taking a long time to approve plans, insisting on extravagant station designs and changing their minds midway through projects.
So while we can probably agree that unions are part of the problem, it's disingenuous to act like they are the whole problem.
I wish they had different names because they are quite different.
In the US you are forced into a single union for an employer.
In Europe the union is for the employees, they have lots of employees from a wide variety of places, and they offer them services.
In the US the union is for the employer - they stand in between the employee and the employer and purport to decide what's best for the employee.
Oh, sure, they throw money in the pot for candidates, but in Europe, unions take actual political positions on important matters. They do not often get their way, but they act as an important counterweight in politics to the interests of the rich and powerful.
The answer is corruption. America is horribly corrupt, much like Latin American nations, and unlike western European nations. So unions in Europe actually work the way they're supposed to, whereas in America they're just another corrupt institution, probably much more corrupt in fact than most others, and cause more problems than they solve.
How do you get America to have unions like those in Europe? I have no idea, but I think it's like asking how you can turn Afghanistan into a country similar to Norway.
Easy. Allow the employee to pick the union - you can have more than one union per employer. Or no union at all if that's what the employee wants.
That's the only change needed.
If like, add a second change: It's not longer necessary to make an employer be a "union shop" any employer can have employees represented by unions, if that's what the employee wants.