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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, unio

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.
  - bradleyjg 4y ago
    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.
    - cool_dude85 4y ago
      >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.
      - bluGill 4y ago
        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.

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.
- bradleyjg 4y ago
  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.
  - cool_dude85 4y ago
    >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.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      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.