New York Snow Cleanup: Unions Once Again Prove They Are Un-American

This is just another shocking addendum to my previous article, “Labor Unions: A Century Of Genuine Evil.”

In New York City, people are dead and unknown tens of thousands suffered because union workers were in a snit over reductions in the workforce.

Sanitation Department’s slow snow cleanup was a budget protest
By SALLY GOLDENBERG, LARRY CELONA and JOSH MARGOLIN
Posted: 2:34 AM, December 30, 2010

These garbage men really stink.

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts — a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.

Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.

“They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important,” said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.

Halloran said he met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department — and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan — at his office after he was flooded with irate calls from constituents.

The snitches “didn’t want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation,” Halloran said. “They were told [by supervisors] to take off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file.”

New York’s Strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process — and pad overtime checks — which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes, the sources said.

The snow-removal snitches said they were told to keep their plows off most streets and to wait for orders before attacking the accumulating piles of snow.

They said crews normally would have been more aggressive in combating a fierce, fast-moving blizzard like the one that barreled in on Sunday and blew out the next morning.

The workers said the work slowdown was the result of growing hostility between the mayor and the workers responsible for clearing the snow.

In the last two years, the agency’s workforce has been slashed by 400 trash haulers and supervisors — down from 6,300 — because of the city’s budget crisis. And, effective tomorrow, 100 department supervisors are to be demoted and their salaries slashed as an added cost-saving move.

[Snip]

Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser said only: “We would hope this is not the case.”

But multiple Sanitation Department sources told The Post yesterday that angry plow drivers have only been clearing streets assigned to them even if that means they have to drive through snowed-in roads with their plows raised.

And they are keeping their plow blades unusually high, making it necessary for them to have to run extra passes, adding time and extra pay.

One mechanic said some drivers are purposely smashing plows and salt spreaders to further stall the cleanup effort.

“That is a disgrace. I had to walk three miles because the buses can’t move,” said salesman Yuri Vesslin, 38, of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

The article fails to mention that at least two people are DEAD because of this disgrace.  They were murdered by union greed.  It also fails to mention that in addition to the workers who showed up deliberately sabotaging the cleanup effort, more than 10% of the union employees simply called in sick.

As I point out, it is anything but the first time labor unions have demonstrated that they were despicable, un-American, or murderers.  It isn’t even the first time that top union leaders TODAY have participated in the murder of American citizens.

Now, when I point out the fact that labor unions are fundamentally un-American, I’m not making anything up.

From my aforementioned article about labor unions being genuinely evil:

Let’s also point out that while labor unions were being violent racists in America, they were in the process of being the source of the greatest evil in human history in Europe.  It was the labor unions that formed the core of Lenin’s violent communist movement.  The Marxists started out in 1898 by forming the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.  Just as labor unions formed the core of Hitler’s National Socialist German WORKERS Party.

From a 1935 German magazine:

“A Socialist Workers’ Government has achieved a workers revolution in Germany without resorting to, though in some respects it approximates, Communism.  Adolf Hitler has done it by wiping out all class privileges and class distinction, but the economics foundation of property rights and private capital has been left almost intact – for the present time.”

“The Third Reich, under Hitler, has wiped out corporate trade-unionism by forcing all workers to join one great government union, the National Socialist Union of Employers and Workers…”

While American labor unions were basking in the light of FDR’s pork barrel political favoritism and doing everything they could to keep poor blacks down, their European counterparts were at work preparing to set the world on fire.

So far, I can’t say I’d be proud to be a member of a labor union.

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka recently appeared before an audience of fellow socialist travelers and said:

“…we need to fundamentally restructure our economy and re-establish popular control over the private corporations which have distorted our economy and hijacked our government. That’s a long-term job, but one we should start now.

I Hate the Media points out the scary parallels to the ugly history of the past:

“Re-establish”? Wouldn’t that imply that there had once been popular control over private corporations?

Richard. Mr. Trumka. Sir. Pardon our impertinence, but we believe that what you’re talking about here is National Socialism.

As in Adolf Trumka.

Meanwhile, while AFL-CIO head Trumka was flirting with National Socialism, recently retired SEIU president Andy Stern was kissing up to socialism’s more famous sister, communism, saying:

“Workers of the world unite – it’s not just a slogan anymore.  It’s the way we’re gonna have to do our work.”

Whose slogan was that “workers of the world unite” thing, Andy Stern?

The political slogan Workers of the world, unite!, is one of the most famous rallying cries of communism, found in The Communist Manifesto (1848), by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A variation (“Workers of all lands, unite”) is also inscribed on Marx’s tombstone.

Ah, yes, the vile, vindictive, vicious and vehemently anti-American Marxists.  And labor unions, which are nothing more than the Communist Party in America today.

Labor unions were spawned by evil and continue to have a history of evil.

But don’t ask me about the particular evil of public unions; ask a former hero of the Democrat Party (which proves that Democrats are far more despicable today than they even were before), Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

February 10, 2010
Even FDR Was Wary of Public Employee Unions
Marc Comtois

This article by Rich Lowry and this piece in the Wall Street Journal both alluded to Franklin Roosevelt’s wariness towards public employee unions. I was surprised. So I dug around and found one source that supports this claim. In a letter to a public employee union, Roosevelt explains that, yes, they do have a right to organize, but there are some restrictions:

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.

Well, that hasn’t really come to pass now, has it?

Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that “under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government.”

Interesting that he viewed strikes by Federal employees in such a way.

Not just “Federal employees.”  “All government employees.”  Public-sector unions in general.

Labor unions are un-American in every way, as are the Democrat-passed laws that make it impossible for private businesses to resist their impossible demands that are now breaking the back of our economy and our society; and public labor unions are even more so.

FDR’s argument was that public-sector labor unions would entail government workers literally organizing AGAINST AMERICA and AGAINST AMERICANS.

And in that one thing, FDR was entirely right.

Meanwhile, such flagrantly un-American organizations own the Democrat Party, and own President Barack Obama.

SEIU boss Any Stern, “Mister Marxist” himself, was the number one visitor at the White House.  And Mister Marxist bragged that “we spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama — $60.7 million, to be exact — and we’re proud of it.”  You know, when he wasn’t saying stuff like, “We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn’t work, we try the persuasion of power.”

And, of course, letting American citizens suffer and even die while unions refused to do the jobs they were hired to do was most certainly “the persuasion of power.”

And the very same public sector unions that FDR condemned as profoundly anti-American blatantly OWN Barack Obama, who once famously said:

“Your agenda has been my agenda in the United States Senate.  Before debating health care, I talked to Andy Stern and SEIU members.”

“We are going to paint the nation purple with SEIU.”

For the record, SEIU is the very sort of public labor union FDR never wanted to see.  It was a giant step downward into the death-spiral of the American eagle-as-Dodo-bird.

Obama swore that he was a loyal minion of the union agenda.  He also swore he was a loyal minion of the despicable anti-American treason organization aka ACORN.

And just what is that agenda that Obama shares with unions?  How about – in addition to “the persuasion of power” – passing on $3 TRILLION in unfunded pension liabilities onto the American people???

If you’re for public union workers literally allowing you to freeze to death as a means of forcing local governments to continue to impose the union agenda – which includes destroying American families to pad their pensions – then by all means, just keep voting for Obama and the Democrat Party.

But I hope you don’t mind if people who know the truth call you out for what you are: as un-American as Marxist pie (which taste just like a shit sandwich, for what it’s worth).

Tags: $3 trillion, Andy Stern, budget cuts, called in sick, collective bargaining, Democrat Party, FDR, government employees, labor unions, Marxist, militant tactics, national socialism, New York, overtime, pensions, persuasion of power, public employees, public sector unions, public service, Queens, Richard Trumka, Roosevelt, Sanitation Department, SEIU, slowdown, snow cleanup, snow removal, snowplow, socialist, Staten Island, supervisors, the employer is the whole people, unfunded liabilities, Whitestone, with their plows raised, workers of the world unite