Job Protection? (Cough cough)

http://news.yahoo.com/school-bus-drivers-strike-york-city-145541174--finance.html

Last stop, nobody off!

     So the School Bus Drivers and Assistants in NYC are striking.  Their actions are forcing thousands of kids, many of them special needs totally dependent on the buses, to find alternate ways to get to school.  This is all happening during the freezing cold and wet of a NYC winter.  Now, one might ask (Or you can just read the article), exactly what reason are these intrepid workers giving for doing this?  Better working conditions?  Shorter working hours?  More pay?  Shiny new leather steering wheel covers?  Nope, they are not doing their jobs in a fight for Job Protection.

I'm sorry but your confusion must be phrased as a question.

     Huh, so these guys are going to strike and refuse to do their jobs putting thousands of kids at risk in an effort to make sure they don't lose their jobs?  Seems a little counter intuitive to me, but hey what do I know.  (Not too much, just ask my friends.)  The heart of the dispute is that NYC is shopping around for a new service provider for their School Bus System in order to cut costs.  The Union wants NYC to provide "Job Protection" or to promise the Union that its members will always and I do mean always have a job no matter what.

Brother can you spare a waffle and some bacon?

     Now, as a man who has been unemployed for nearly 4 years now, I am all for the idea of job protection.  Absolutely!  Give me a job where I am contractually promised to never lose my job no matter how sucky things get or how bad I do my job.  Sign me up right now!  However, in what I so jokingly call the "real world," that sort of thing just doesn't happen.  You take the job and you take your chances.  Simple as that and no force Union or otherwise should be able to say otherwise.  When that is tried, it is the Union's way of saying "Yeah, you pay us and it is your business/service, but you have absolutely no control over us."
    This strike is an excellent example.  IMNSHO (In My Not So Humble Opinion for those who missed previous abbreviations), walking off your job while quite literally leaving 1000s of kids out in the cold is grounds to be fired.  You want to negotiate, negotiate.  You want to bitch and whine?  Do it, but do your damned job.  I promise you that these drivers will find little moral support from the citizens of NYC, especially the poor father who says, ""It means transferring her to the car, breaking down the wheelchair, getting here, setting up the wheelchair, transferring her from the car, when normally she would just wheel right into the school bus," Curry said. "She's on oxygen. There's a lot of equipment that has to be moved and transferred also."
     Here is my final thought.  With so many hundreds of thousands of people currently unemployed, maybe NYC should just allow the striking drivers to continue their strike indefinitely and hire people who will actually do the job?  It is just an idea.

End of Rant