New unions at Amazon and Starbucks could destroy NYC after the pandemic

Just as the city begins to retreat from the pandemic, union agitators — whoops, “organized workers” — arrive to nip the rally in the bud.

Workers at both the big Amazon warehouse in Staten Island and the giant “Roastery Reserve” Starbucks in Chelsea voted to unionize this week — the first two units of the city’s companies to be charged with “collective bargaining”.

The last thing the still-ailing Big Apple needs is more private-sector unions, on top of the ones that are already disempowering our community workers—everyone from accountants to zookeepers, as one boasts District office website 37.

Unions not only punish the companies affected by this, but also their customers.

When The New York Times reported, Amazon’s “ability to get packages to consumers faster relies on a vast chain of manual labor monitored down to the second. Nobody knows what will happen if the reorganized workers try to change this model or disrupt operations.”

If?

Ever wonder why the Plaza Hotel’s Grade II listed Oak Room and Oak Bar are closed except for private functions? Many prohibitive contact conditions imposed by Local 6 of the Hotel and Motel Trades Council.

Why are Broadway tickets so expensive? Musicians Local 802 has a historic stranglehold on orchestral scoring. There’s even a rule that every show must use a minimum number of performers by the size of a theatre, but not by how many performers are actually needed.

Union feather bedding was one of the main reasons the Second Avenue Subway was the “most expensive subway mile in the world– costs $2.5 billion per mile compared to a similar project in Paris that costs just $450 million per mile.

The Newspaper Guild was part of the cabal of print industry unions that put four New York dailies out of business and came down in the 1960s so close Doing the same thing with the New York Post in 1993 – a disaster only averted when union locales representing printers, pressmen, drivers and other tradesmen wisely chose not to join the Guild’s suicidal strike mission.

Unions suck the economy dry under the guise of giving hard-working bunglers a living wage. The union contracts of the public employees guarantee the members pension and health insurance inaccessible to the general public and siphoning off valuable state and city funds for the benefit of a lucky few. Now as a watchdog site Unionfacts.com sums it up, “The American Labor Movement . . . is still plagued by rampant corruption, embezzlement, extortion and the influence of numerous organized crime organizations.”

But my aversion to unions is mostly based on life experience. Time and time again, I’ve seen union colleagues combing through the contract language for any loopholes to do less work than a job requires. A friend once attended a funeral where, when rain delayed the service, the coffin was exposed to the elements while gravediggers took a contractually mandated lunch break.

My father was a shop steward at a Brooklyn factory until he was promoted to management – and quickly learned that the same union labor rules he once enforced made “management” impossible.

When I was a student at a Suffolk County supermarket, union reps did nothing to help workers with real beef, instead pocketing a percentage of our weekly paychecks.

Workers at the Stony Brook College cafeteria where I worked were inexplicably covered by a health union. The shop steward was a Communist Party member with ID who sometimes stopped the kitchen just for fun but did nothing to help employees who were being burned through fat or cheated out of overtime.

Ironically, Starbucks founder Howard Schultz has long embraced pro-work wake-up rhetoric. He treats employees to “partnerships” for stock sharing and other perks rare in fast-food establishments.

It remains to be seen how much more his roastery workers will charge. Maybe a limit on how many Nitro Pepper Jerky Cold Brews they have to serve?

Of course, every revolution eats its own. Let’s just pray that these new “bargaining units” don’t engulf the businesses they hijacked – or what’s left of our economy.