3 ms·

If you read the article you would see that the unions are the ones demanding a much larger than necessary number of employees. The unions are the political road

• bumby 4y ago
  You mean the same article that said this: >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.