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TV station, state transportation czar shocked, shocked to discover collective bargaining going on
By adamg on Tue, 03/24/2009 - 12:00am
Like, oh my God, Massport is paying for dry cleaning for employees! Channel 4 breathlessly reports the story and Jim Aloisi pretends to be absolutely shocked at the outrage.
Of course, as Channel 4 does acknowledge, the dry cleaning is for the uniforms that employees wear as part of their jobs, because God forbid a state authority want its workers to look decent as they deal with the public or that employees negotiate something like this as part of their contracts because they don't want to pay for something their employer forces them to wear. And Jim Aloisi used to be the head lawyer at the turnpike authority, so you'd think he'd know more about how collective bargaining works than to fulminate that "the next time we negotiate with these folks, dry cleaning will be off the table."
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Comments
I know people who have
I know people who have worked in the back offices of Massport and they did not recieve this perk, it seems to be only for those people who have to be out with the public 100 percent of the time or guys who roll around in oil and gas all day.
If you want your employees to look their absolute best you need to take care of it yourself. Many companies do not even allow you take the uniforms home, they keep them in shop and clean them at least once a week.
We are on a witch hunt right now trying to find every little problem in the system. While their is obvious excess in the Massport system ensuring that employees look clean and fresh is not one of them.
Worker Safety
Of course they are cleaning for the employees - do you know how many women have died over the years from laundering work clothing contaminated with lead, asbestos, and other toxics???
It isn't just a good idea - in many cases, it is REQUIRED.
Who is this Alosi idiot and where did he come from and WHY IS HE IN CHARGE OF ANYTHING???
He is obviously throwing the
He is obviously throwing the Massport mechanics under the bus because he has had his own problems as of late, and family related work problems as well. So he did what any other slimy political type would, find someone else to pass the buck onto someone else.
Im getting sick of these outsider type politicians coming into our state telling us how corrupt and backwards we are only to find once elected their administrations are actually worse then the ones they were railing against. If you promise change you have to deliver change. I think its time for Alosi to take a long walk off of a short pier, that is if he could find the piers he is in charge of...
I'm not so sure that's what happened
If you look at the text version of the story, the very first person quoted is some Republican legislator. I bet he's the one who somehow convinced Channel 4 to do the story, and the reporter just got Aloisi in another one of those deer-in-headlights moments he seems to have, in which he starts talking/writing without engaging that alleged keen legal mind he has.
"It's the kind of excess
Thats a direct quote from the story from Alosi. Your right he was caught in the headlights, the headlights of the bus that he threw his mechanics under. I would assume that a Secretary of Transportation who spent anytime around the workers, of which our transportation network under his guidance has hundreds of, he would know that their uniforms get dirty fast and that it is best practice in many businesses to take care of the cleaning themselves. The officers are a harder story to sell of course, but I could make a case for the customer service agents too.
If he doesnt want to be called out on it, he should think before he speaks.
The real answer
Drastically cut down the number and type of appointments a governor can make, and the number and type of appointments that those appointees can make.
In other words, the governor picks the heads of the major departments, but those departments should be staffed all the way up and down by people who know what they are doing and are subject to civil service regulations, not put there by their friends and buddies.
When I last did a job search, I applied for state positions in California, Washington, Oregon, and Massachusetts. California and Oregon demanded a lot of paperwork to ensure that I wasn't related to anybody (I did have to declare my father, even though he was retired from a different department), had education that could be traced, and met the qualifications for the job. I knew what they were planning to do with the info - use it to rank and score so they would have paper trail. The nice thing was that I only had to fill it all out once - it went into the system after that and all I had to do for other jobs is put down a reference number. MA didn't demand anything like this - they left a whole lot up to the departments to check and verify.
No, no, Swirly
See, you can save money in your budget by making the mechanics throw their uniforms in the wash with their kids' clothes. That's a win!
When the kids come down with cancer, that's somebody else's problems, and then you can rail about how the mechanics don't deserve their cushy pensions.
You just don't understand conservatism. Aloisi is running transportation like a business -- you make your numbers for the quarter and hope for a promotion or a transfer before the house of cards comes down.
When the kids come down with
Then channel 4 will wonder why we are paying for health insurance for these sick children, what a rip off!
Its let hate on the working class day! Of course things like collective bargaining and unions are baaaaaaaddd because they do terrible things like ensure workers are not fired for silly reasons and that workers get wacky things like health insurance.
Hey
Don't you know the collapse of General Motors is the fault of the workers? You obviously haven't been watching your required TV. Bad citizen!
You don't hear those autoworkers in Ontario asking for cushy healthcare pensions like our spoiled American workers! No wonder Detroit moved across the river. Bad worker. No pension.
Aloisi
Is the brilliant man who long served as chief legal counsel at the turnpike authority, like during the early 1990s when the authority's bonds were about to be paid off and he helped come up with a magnificent scheme to ensure the authority's continued survival:
Float something like $200 million in bonds to pay for widening the turnpike from six to eight lanes between Natick and Weston and then, once the bonds were all sold, announce you were canceling the project, but, of course, not immediately repaying those long-term obligations, thus ensuring another couple of decades of life, since, of course, contracts are inviolable, or at least, were thought so at the time.
iteam helps sell ads with yellow journalism
Shame on iteam crack reporter Kathy Curran for presenting a story largely based upon innuendo. Perhaps Ms. Curran might have investigated other states to see if Massport or the MA State Police were indeed handing out "excessive" perks. Had she bothered to dig a little, she'd have discovered that the practice of RENTING UNIFORMS (with laundering service) is a standard industry practice and the fact that the union negotiated it as a benefit does not detract from that. Also, no mention of how many employees were outfitted, nor a relative comparison of rates with other businesses or agencies who also rent uniforms..... So how does the iteam conclude that the spending was excessive?
What's next o' fearless iteam and Ms. Curran? Heading over to one of our fine Boston area hospitals and 'exposing' the "excessive" perk of providing surgeons with clean masks, gowns & scrubs? How about 'exposing' the "excessive" perk of personal protective equipment for firefighters? Or smocks to butchers? or firearms to policemen?
Franky I'd rather watch jello-wrestling-as-news than read this "investigative" rubbish meant only to create buzz and get eyeballs on ads.....
Maybe the iteam should mop
Maybe the iteam should mop their own floor in the studio, and take out their own garbage. How about maitnence on those vans, does someone else do all that for them too? You know all those "perks".