Here's one possible way: by exploiting their negotiating position to act as a check against management's impulses to sell cathedrals of journalism for spare parts on the promise that maybe the resulting third-tier incarnation of Buzzfeed that will result might temporarily juice returns to owners. Maybe it's possible that the people actually doing the work know better about how to run a successful media company than the Troncs do?
> Maybe it's possible that the people actually doing the work know better about how to run a successful media company than the Troncs do?
Why don't they start their own media company then rather than resort to short-term value extraction tactics which will likely drive said "cathedral of journalism" into the ground?
It wasn't the reporters that Tronc'd The Tribune Corporation; it was owners that did that. Why am I required to accept the premise that it's labor that's pathologically short-termist, and not management? I reject that premise.
Who are you going to persuade with rhetoric like that? I don't even disagree with the point you're making about public-sector unions, which I too have misgivings about, but I feel repulsed by the way you've chosen to make that point --- which has little to do with what I'm saying.
> or the fact that there are bus/train drivers in SF that make $100k+/year.
This is only maybe true in the sense that there probably are some senior-level transit operators who make that much, but the median BART train operator gets $30.58/hr. SF MTA bus drivers are somewhere around $23/hr.
That BART figure ignores very generous benefits[0]. I'd like to see your source for calling that the "median" wage (as opposed to the starting wage).
Santa Clara County VTA benefits are even more generous. "Just down the road, Amalgamated Transit Union employees of the Santa Clara Valley Transit Authority pay a flat $35 a month for health care and nothing toward their pension."[0]
What you're describing is the fault of those managing the pensions, specifically that they continually underfunded them while expecting unrealistically high returns.
Detroit? You mean when the city that was in bankruptcy due to a multitude of reasons (decades of mismanagement at both the local and state level, decline of auto sector, white flight, etc.)[0], and the "parasites" as you call them that agreed to a cut in their benefits that was pivotal to the bankruptcy going through?[1] I'd say that example (along with your language) makes it clear there's more ideology than fact involved in your argument...
