6 ms·

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

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.

elevaet 4y ago
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.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > 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.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    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.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      > 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.
    - pydry 4y ago
      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)
      - londons_explore 4y ago
        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.
        pydry 4y ago
        >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.
- imtringued 4y ago
  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.
  - chitowneats 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - KptMarchewa 4y ago
      Yeah, no.
      - chitowneats 4y ago
        [flagged]
        KptMarchewa 4y ago
        You just pretend you did and invent fake arguments in support of it too
        smcl 4y ago
        There's really no need to shoehorn Nordstream explosions into a discussion about transport infrastructure
  - junofan 4y ago
- penguinvondoom 4y ago
  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.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    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.
theGnuMe 4y ago
I don’t think this is as big of a problem as it is made out to be.
cool_dude85 4y ago
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?
- spaniard89277 4y ago
  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.
- bradleyjg 4y ago
  I hear this sentiment from management but never from an actual worker. Unfirable people don’t complain about being unfirable. You don’t say!
  - cool_dude85 4y ago
    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.

elevaet 4y ago

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.

vineyardmike 4y ago
> 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.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  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.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > 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.
  - pydry 4y ago
    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)
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      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.
      - pydry 4y ago
        >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.
imtringued 4y ago
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.
- chitowneats 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - KptMarchewa 4y ago
    Yeah, no.
    - chitowneats 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - KptMarchewa 4y ago
        You just pretend you did and invent fake arguments in support of it too
      - smcl 4y ago
        There's really no need to shoehorn Nordstream explosions into a discussion about transport infrastructure
- junofan 4y ago
penguinvondoom 4y ago
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.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  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.

theGnuMe 4y ago

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

cool_dude85 4y ago

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?

spaniard89277 4y ago
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.
bradleyjg 4y ago
I hear this sentiment from management but never from an actual worker. Unfirable people don’t complain about being unfirable. You don’t say!
- cool_dude85 4y ago
  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.