Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Burnin' Down the House
It's a day ending in Y, so that must mean that Menino and the firefighters' union are at it again.
The alleged issue is random drug and alcohol testing, but the real issue is the Quinn Bill, which gave cops instant pay raises for earning college degrees. The region's surplus of higher education institutions smelled gold and programs to earn degrees for "life experience" sprang up like mushrooms on a manure pile after a rainstorm.
I haven't run the numbers but my sense is that in the past decade we've seen a roughly equal number of cops and firefighters killed on the job. True or not, the public's feeling is that both jobs are pretty dangerous, though the latter perhaps not so much as it used to be, and so no one begrudges these noble public servants their turn at the trough. It's not like they work at the IT department in City Hall. Lacking the subtleties of crime-fighting to hang a Quinn-style payday upon, the firefighters have little choice but to go straight for the pocketbook and ask for an across-the-board raise.
Left to their own devices, the police and firefighters' unions would gleefully bankrupt every department in the city but their own. Run the game theory scenarios and it always ends up this way. So, the mayor has to find some lever with which to hold them off, regardless of whether it has anything to do with the real issue. Firefighters drink and do drugs? I'm shocked, shocked! ¶ 8:20 AM
It's a day ending in Y, so that must mean that Menino and the firefighters' union are at it again.
The alleged issue is random drug and alcohol testing, but the real issue is the Quinn Bill, which gave cops instant pay raises for earning college degrees. The region's surplus of higher education institutions smelled gold and programs to earn degrees for "life experience" sprang up like mushrooms on a manure pile after a rainstorm.
I haven't run the numbers but my sense is that in the past decade we've seen a roughly equal number of cops and firefighters killed on the job. True or not, the public's feeling is that both jobs are pretty dangerous, though the latter perhaps not so much as it used to be, and so no one begrudges these noble public servants their turn at the trough. It's not like they work at the IT department in City Hall. Lacking the subtleties of crime-fighting to hang a Quinn-style payday upon, the firefighters have little choice but to go straight for the pocketbook and ask for an across-the-board raise.
Left to their own devices, the police and firefighters' unions would gleefully bankrupt every department in the city but their own. Run the game theory scenarios and it always ends up this way. So, the mayor has to find some lever with which to hold them off, regardless of whether it has anything to do with the real issue. Firefighters drink and do drugs? I'm shocked, shocked! ¶ 8:20 AM
