| What's up with the Globe and the unions, anyway? They're really unhappy that Governor named well-known union organizer Janice Loux to the new MassDOT board. I don't actually know that much about Loux, so I'm not taking a position on whether she should or should not have been named.
But this line of reasoning is really weird:
Loux's union connection is also a problem. While one seat on the MBTA board was reserved for organized labor, the law creating the MassDOT board makes no such provision. The omission was deliberate. The state officials who created the agency believed it should be managed for the benefit of the public - not its employees, whose interests are protected through collective-bargaining. A key challenge for the new board will be to bring health and pension benefits for some transportation workers in line with similar public- and private-sector jobs. Although Loux's supporters insist she won't be an automatic vote for unions, Patrick easily could have quelled such doubts by choosing someone else.
Whoa. Did it occur to the Globe that having a union organizer on the board might be useful because a lot of working folks ride the T? The assumption that she's on there just to represent the interests of unionized T employees seems very strange, and entirely unjustified, to me. The rest of the new board consists of a guy who runs an insurance agency, an engineer, a management consultant, and a business lawyer. Seems to me that it might actually be useful to have, in addition to those four no doubt very highly-qualified individuals, someone who has spent her working life with people who aren't rich and who depend on the T for their livelihoods.
This is not the only really peculiar Globe editorial lately. Who's running the show there, now that Renee Loth is gone? |
