Mafia-like unions are pummeling New York — and the political elites are in league with them.
The obscene new contract for 22,000 unionized city hotel workers will give housekeepers a $77,113 starting salary, higher than cops or teachers.
The Hotel Association deal with the powerful Hotel and Gaming Trades Council averted a strike threat that had already spooked visitors who were thinking of coming here for America 250 celebrations and the FIFA World Cup.
The hotel owners could afford it because they’ve worked with the unions to get politicians like City Council Speaker Julie Menin to hamstring any competition from new hotels, non-union ones and Airbnb — all of which reduces tourism, undercutting the rest of the city economy.
Last month, 3,500 unionized Long Island Rail Road employees held an entire region hostage with a three-day strike that ended with some of the nation’s highest-paid public employees winning even higher pay without any reform of the obscenely generous work rules that rob the public blind.
On the state level, Gov. Kathy Hochul caved to unions by rolling back Tier 6 reforms that had reduced taxpayer pension-funding costs for public employees hired after 2012, a multibillion-dollar giveaway to well-paid workers who’d happily taken jobs with less-generous benefits.
Time and again, regular folks lose as these labor mobs feast, because elected “public servants” work against the public interest.
Forget about Hochul’s claim that she stood up against the LIRR unions’ blackmail — in the end they got most of what they wanted.
And in an indictment of the state of the Republican Party, only Long island Assemblyman Michael Fitzpatrick voiced opposition to the Tier 6 pension giveaway.
Hochul’s GOP challenger, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, was largely silent — that is, when he wasn’t shilling for the LIRR union goons.
And Menin and the rest of the council leap to please the hotel workers union.
The unions offer campaign cash, endorsements and well-paid volunteers to canvass for the politicians who carry their water.
Once a drive for social justice, the labor movement has become a corrupt special interest that drives ever-growing injustice — a cancer on society.
