Picketing at 360 Smith on 2nd Place
All is not well at 360 Smith Street. A tipster snapped this photo of picketers out in front of the controversial development on Second Place in Carroll Gardens. He says he thought it was the Drywall Union, which is problematic unless the developer can assemble a crack team of master plasterers in a hurry. Update:…
All is not well at 360 Smith Street. A tipster snapped this photo of picketers out in front of the controversial development on Second Place in Carroll Gardens. He says he thought it was the Drywall Union, which is problematic unless the developer can assemble a crack team of master plasterers in a hurry. Update: The blog Carroll Gardens Diary just posted that it’s the Carpenters’ Union that’s doing the picketing. Another Update: It turns out that the protest is about drywall workers but it’s about work taking place at a brownstone on 2nd Place and not the large development on the corner.
Development Watch: 360 Smith Street [Brownstoner]
Development Watch: 360 Smith Rising [Brownstoner]
Something’s Afoot With 360 Smith’s Ownership [Brownstoner]
Work Set to Begin Again on 360 Smith [Brownstoner]
BSA Hooks Up 360 Smith [Brownstoner] GMAP
More 360 Smith Action at BSA Today [Brownstoner]
360 Smith Hearing Leads to More Hearings [Brownstoner]
Tax-Weary New Jersey Voters May Reject School Budgets
April 20 (Bloomberg) — New Jersey residents angry over rising property taxes that are the highest in the U.S. may vent their frustrations on school budgets at the ballot box today.
Eighty-three percent of New Jersey’s school districts are seeking to raise local levies to fund spending plans, after Governor Chris Christie slashed their aid. That may result in the largest number of defeated budgets since voters rejected 46 percent of them in 2006, said Frank Belluscio, a spokesman for the New Jersey School Boards Association.
Christie, a Republican who took office Jan. 19, said voters should nix budgets in districts where unionized employees refuse to take pay freezes to help solve the funding crisis. Residents should be outraged that teachers get average raises of 4 percent to 5 percent and free or low-cost health care, he has said.
“The unions have pushed us to the breaking point,†said Bob Bailey, 60, a corporate administrator from Millstone Township who said his annual property-tax bill is $13,000. “The public is paying for all of this stuff.
How many more examples do you want???? How about the runbber rooms here???
Unionization is usually the start of an industry’s death. DIBS is right. The most profitable industries (and the most lucrative for their employees) are non-union. Unions are inherently non-innovative and anti-competitive. They kill good industries.
Unionize silicon valley. Then watch tech innovation go overseas and the American tech industry go into a long slow painful slide into second rate has-been status. Unionize finance and watch global capital markets move elsewhere. There’s a reason services represent such a big portion of the American economy these days — IT’S THE ONLY NON-UNION SECTOR LEFT, SO IT’S THE ONLY THING WE’RE STILL REALLY GOOD AT.
I have no obvious disdain for the average worker’s aspirrations to better himself. What I do have disdain for is all sorts of unions grip on the system that produces uneconomic costs and legacy issues.
MTA
Airlines
Autos
Steel
Amtrak
Post Offiec
There are far more firms run profitably by private equity than the 1 or 2 examples you can come up with so get off it.
I’m pretty pro-union, myself, but a that kind of turn out to picket work on a brownstone? There has to be more to it.
i think dave’s thesis has converted me into a union supporter.
daveindedstuy: “companies are not willfully run into the ground just because some private equity firm owns them”
Oh no? Ever hear of Simmons?
http://bk.ly/rnO
Your repeated denials of the immorality of the financial industry of late, taken together with your obvious disdain for the average worker’s aspirations to better himself, are sickening.
“companies are not willfully run into the ground just because some private equity firm owns them”
Really? Perhaps not JUST because of private equity ownership.
“That’s just stupid thinking and economically illogical” THERE’S something we DO agree on.
Dave are you saying that developers should give their construction workers a share of building profits?
ok, stella doro still makes cookies but is much much smaller than before. so call it failing.
And as I recall, your vacation figure was exactly what writer of article wanted people/pulbic to start saying/believing….when (whatever the figure was -not sure) what really was said was time off —including vacation, sick, holidays,etc. Just sayin’ got to read articles very carefully for wording whatever the subject.