Well, this is criminal

You'll excuse me if this post takes on a slightly more bitter tone than it otherwise might have--I'm a little tired and angry after sitting through hours of traffic in New York and New Jersey (for an idea, it took 7.5 hours to drive 210 miles from Madison, CT to the Delaware Memorial Bridge), traffic caused in part by negligent plowing on streets throughout the so-called tri-state area. Even three days after the storm, many roads were still unplowed, despite the fact that this wasn't even a particularly aggressive blizzard. What's that, you say? It was done on purpose? Oh, hell no...

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.

This, combined with the nearly 10,000 flight cancellations that the weekend blizzard caused, turned those highways that had in fact been plowed (like I-95) into virtual parking lots. This fact alone falls in the category of "infuriating", but really more inconvenience than anything--a union makes a statement, people suffer, there's pressure on the government/management, etc... But this part makes it criminal:

With the unplowed streets in the outer boroughs, concern is rising over health and emergency response times.

Two New Jersey deaths, a 75-year-old mother in Queens and a newborn baby are among the deaths attributed to severe delays in emergency response time due to piles of snow that have yet to be cleared.

Police tell the Asbury Park Press that a 55-year-old old man was found unresponsive in his home Monday just after he came in from shoveling his sidewalks and others in his neighborhood. The same day, a 59-year-old man was found dead not long after he went to a shed on his property to get a tractor and plow...

Tragedy struck in New York, also with the death of a newborn baby in Brooklyn. The Daily News reports the infant died after the mother was forced to wait nine hours before help could reach her in Crown Heights. The baby was pronounced dead at 6:34 p.m. Monday, and by the time emergency personnel arrived the baby was unconscious and unresponsive.

Killing babies, huh, Sanitation Department? That sounds like a great way to fight for your benefits. If Mayor Bloomberg has a spine, he will fire everyone involved without a second thought, and give those jobs to the thousands of unemployed people begging for jobs (especially the 99ers). I'm certainly not trying to espouse the miserly "be happy you have a job at all" mentality that often becomes pervasive among bad managers in recessions, but a reality check is most definitely in order.

With state and federal budgets strained beyond belief, everyone seems to recognize the fact that we have a problem, but nobody is willing to admit that they are part of the problem. New York's Sanitation Department has shown that it is so unwilling to share in the economic pain that we all feel that it would rather let people die than sacrifice its benefits. That is simply appalling. 

I retain hope that we can in fact address our budgetary crises with some modicum of rational thought and sharing of pain, but instances like this cast serious doubt on the situation (it's been a very similar response in Europe in reaction to their "austerity measures"). For now, this is just another example of a union overstating its own importance and creating a disastrous outcome as a result. But I fear that this type of action could have much more damaging implications down the road.

As a collective, we in America are great at recognizing a problem, but devastatingly weak at sharing in the solution. New York's Sanitation Department has shown just how low some people are willing to stoop in order to avoid sharing in the pain. With unemployment rates continuing to soar, it's a misguided position to say the least. Mayor Bloomberg, it's your move.

[New York Post]
[NBC New York]