As Black Friday shoppers crammed into the King of Prussia mall, a pro-union Santa stood vigil with striking Pennsylvania Turnpike toll collectors nearby on day three of their first-ever strike.
At 380 pounds, the bearded, 60-year-old retiree and friend of striking workers was the picture of Santa, albeit with a Teamsters shirt beneath his red coat and a picket sign shoved under his wide black belt.
"My deer will not cross a picket line," Drexel Hill resident Tom Anthony warned as he waved to motorists at the Valley Forge interchange. "It will be a sad Christmas if Santa cannot come to the Northeast."
Motorists will first have to get through tomorrow, when the Turnpike Commission will use managers and temporary workers to collect $2 for cars journeying home from Thanksgiving celebrations and $15 for commercial freight. The commission decided against waiving tolls all day tomorrow, one of the busiest days of the year.
The problem with this strike is twofold:
1. No one wants these damned tolls in the first place. To sit in line for twenty minutes just to fork over $2.00 which goes not to the roads but into general revenue, is so artificial as to be medieval. Hell, as Dennis made clear, the Romans wouldn't have tolerated it.
2. Adding insult to injury, human beings are paid $18.69 an hour to do something which could be done much more easily by machines.
It's a disgrace all the way around, and the public is more than unsympathetic. Truly, the world would be a better place without tolls or toll takers.
Notice that the best they can come up with is support from imaginary animals -- Santa's reindeer!
Ungrateful ungulates! How dare they approve of harrassing the Christmas shoppers!
posted by Eric on 11.27.04 at 11:54 AM
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Comments
From government-employee labor unions to Trajan to Santa's reindeer. Interesting. Only here in Classical Values can we find such tie-ins.
All I will say is:
1) A convicted murderer of the 1960s named Charles ______
2) A rich man's _______
3) A conservative writer of the 1950s named Clarence E. ______, author of "The Key to Peace: A Formula for the Perpetuation of Real Americanism"
4) A labor _____
5) French _____ soup
I think the strike was a great idea. It has allowed the workers to go directly to the public with their grievances. The mind boggles to think that one could believe that $18 an hour is a decent wage in the Northeastern U.S. Putting the toll system in the hands of a private contracting business that aimed to operate the thing by computers ... Would the cost savings be that great? Doubtful. Between installation, maintenance, repairs, technical support, upgrades, hardware purchase and license fees for the software, you are talking about a huge package of money for relatively dumb tools.
bink · November 28, 2004 11:09 AM
Hardship is in the eye of the beholder. If almsot $19 aren't good enough for mindless work in the NE, perhaps one should consider moving elsewhere?
A friend who was laid off from computers a couple of years ago found work as a grocery clerk. He had trouble sympathizing with his fellow workers intention to strike over the fact that they were being asked to pay $12 a month towards their insurance. Everywhere in non-unionized land people pay quite a lot more.
So, are the unions right to be fighting for goodies for their people? In a way, I suppose. But they're also killing the goose and its fabled egg laying capacities. Because while they're piddling about this, there's non-unionized Walmart eating their lunch. Much as we hate it, (and we do. Just parking is a chore) even we have resorted to walmart for the big once-a-month shop. Their groceries are on average 1/3 cheaper than normal stores and when you're feeding a teen and a pre-teen that stuff adds up. Meanwhile, the unions are demanding unrealistic goodies for everyone in the store, and jacking up the prices in their store. Giving the advantage to non-unionized shops.
Waaayyyyy to shoot self in foot.
The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Don?t bang your head!
From government-employee labor unions to Trajan to Santa's reindeer. Interesting. Only here in Classical Values can we find such tie-ins.
All I will say is:
1) A convicted murderer of the 1960s named Charles ______
2) A rich man's _______
3) A conservative writer of the 1950s named Clarence E. ______, author of "The Key to Peace: A Formula for the Perpetuation of Real Americanism"
4) A labor _____
5) French _____ soup