[judemelancon]

Why exactly should construction workers clean up, change, and get briefed for free? How are those not work? Do you attend work meetings for free? Why don't construction workers deserve breaks? Do you ever take breaks at work? If so, why do you deserve to be paid for these things when construction workers don't? Be explicit.

The idea that US politicians never cross the public sector unions isn't compatible with the facts. The Taft-Hartley Act is law, and PATCO was destroyed.

[steveBK123]

Everyone deserves breaks and for some level of setup/cleanup to be on the clock. Some amount of what is enshrined in the work rules is just excessively cushy. However there is a big difference between stuff built into these work rules vs what happens in private industry.

The basic question is - do the work rules restrict employers from adapting to productivity enhancing technology changes over time? The goods&services in the US which go up in cost much faster than inflation are the areas where we are unable to harness labor saving productivity - education, medicine, and it would seem municipal capital construction projects.

Does your employer retain Fortran programmers on-staff in the break room because they signed a contract when Fortran was important? If your employer moved all your compute to the cloud, would you keep 100% of your now redundant datacenter staff onboard? Does your employer keep the underperforming 25% of the team perpetually and just grant paid overtime in the $100k+ to the superstars to cover the gap? Does your office building maintain an elevator operator in each cab despite having automated the elevator 50 years ago?

This is the difference between private firms and the public sector union stuff you deal with in places like NYC.

I mean yeah, it sounds like a pretty nice work environment and I'd love if my (easier/safer) office job had all that paid time, rules and work limits built in. However.. I get why it seems nothing gets done in NYC construction because of it?

A fun example - there was a 6 month project to replace a set of 2-story staircase at my subway station. The demolition work was rather swift. I assumed they were building on-site if it was going to take 6 months. Lo and behold, it was actually a pre-fab staircase they trucked in. However not only did it take 6 months to simply install that pre-fab staircase, but they ran over by a few months! They actually had to come back and re-close it and do some repairs afterwards too. Meanwhile at the corner below that train station there was a McDonalds. I laughed as I watched them gut renovate it over the course of a weekend so they could be back in business by Monday selling food to riders.

If you haven't seen NYC municipal construction up close, its hard to fathom just how screwed up it is.

[judemelancon]

I'm glad you admit everyone deserves breaks; it seems to have been remarkably easy to convince you. I'm also glad to see your position on paying for the rest shift from outright opposition to unspecified contracts being excessive.

None of the rest of your reply is actually a response to what I said, though some of it is interesting. You also notably didn't respond to what I said about politicians.

Regarding Fortran programmers' contracts being honored, I would certainly hope any business would meet its contractual obligations (when they are moral and legal). Surely you aren't actually suggesting they shouldn't? Whether signing such a contract was a good idea or not, the very concept of a contract is founded on actually executing the terms of the agreement afterward.

I have never encountered a business that consistently swiftly dropped the underperforming parts of the team. I know that stack ranking firms supposedly exist, but they are far from typical. Even if your employment history is atypical, surely you've encountered less than efficient employees at clients, at vendors, and just out in the world in retail or restaurants; have you never happened to observe some of them staying in those positions at length? If you have seen private enterprise up close, it's hard to fathom the idea that it runs lean operations without waste.

Furthermore, many businesses have employees, sometimes many of them, who don't have the kind of clear work products that would make "the underperforming 25% of the team" potentially conceptually coherent. Plenty have employees with as little to do as a TBM oiler or an elevator operator. The market isn't just taking its time in pushing them to be more efficient, either. Actual markets and actual managers don't work like in an entry-level economics class.