Did you guys see this guy on the loader in NYC?

CompactTractorFan · Dec 31, 2010

He is also a bus driver:

You will want to see this: FDNY Engine 276 versus MTA Bus 5004. | STATter911.com

Mace Canute · Dec 31, 2010

waltsp said:
As is usually the case, most city workers are also union members.

I will not say always, but in most cases government/union workers a promoted on the basis of the "Peter Principle", Promoted to the highest level of their incompetence!

I believe you will find "the Peter Principle" applies to non unionized workers such as management. Unionized workers bid on positions. They have to either have the qualifications for the position or there is a training period stated in the bid to give the successful bidder time to come up to speed. Seniority gives those with the most time the first crack at the job....you have to have some way to sort out successful applicants and seniority is a good non subjective way to do it.
BTW, studies done a long time ago addressing the idea that better qualified people are put into a job position if they are hand picked versus seniority chosen have shown that it pretty well equaled out regardless of which method was used. In theory, hand picking would work best, but it was found that enough favoritism granted to relatives or friends negated the benefits it should have had. This didn't apply to small businesses but to ones large enough that the immediate supervisor was the arbiter of who was promoted. However, nepotism is often found in small businesses.

I spent several decades as a military contractor at a Major Command Headquarters. The harder a civil servant worked, the longer it took to get promoted. While the incompetent/lazy ones played the political game and made rapid promotions while not producing any real work.

So very true! Sometimes so true the saying "All hard gets you is more hard work" is aptly applied to the situation. It ties in quite well with what I said above. It's why using seniority to give a worker a crack at the job works well.

When you add that to the protected status of a union member, he can make horrendous mistakes and blunders and yet only receive verbal reprimands (ie. a slap on the wrist)

This would be the fault of management not implementing a proper disciplinary procedure to cover just such circumstances. Unions are by Law required to defend all the dues paying members equally when any disciplinary action is taken and do it to their fullest ability...just like a good lawyer will defend his client in court. The company I worked at (retired now) had such a policy in place and if a unionized worker was subjected to any disciplinary action, a meeting was held with management, the worker and union reps present and the facts of the situation were sorted out and if the company's position was found to have merit, disciplinary action appropriate to the transgression was handed out. The worker had to "keep his nose clean" for a certain time or else next time he faced a higher disciplinary action if he had another transgression. Depending on what it was, he could end up being fired after the first time he screwed up, or get up to three (here at least) chances to mend his "errant ways". I personally know of a case where a unionized worker was fired for theft of a Honda generator (and rightly so) but I also personally know of a case where management bent over backwards to keep a proven thief/druggie (stole to support his drug habit) on the property, even though he stole many times more than the value of the generator. You could easily put two and two together and figure out why if you saw who druggie socialized with. "Birds of a feather flock together", eh?

Mace Canute · Dec 31, 2010

CompactTractorFan said:
He is also a bus driver:

You will want to see this: FDNY Engine 276 versus MTA Bus 5004. | STATter911.com

Hopefully the bus driver was charged with several violations for that if he was doing it deliberately. There is the possibility he was having mechanical trouble with the bus, (maybe transmission trouble) and couldn't get it moving any faster. From the reactions of the firemen, it doesn't appear they thought that though!