I left my office building at lunch the other day and was confronted by an enormous inflatable rat directly across the street. What's that? Well, the old office building there, now called The Alexa, is being converted into upscale apartments, like every other old building downtown, it seems. (Better than destroying them.) The man with the sign is a member of the Operating Engineers union, which represents a variety of workers in the construction and building maintenance trades. His sign indicates that Horizon, apparently one of the contractors, is paying its workers less than union scale wages.
This is called informational picketing. The picket is giving information to the public. He is not asking other workers to stay off the job. The sign is very polite and he makes much of his point non-verbally with a huge red-eyed, fang-toothed...rat.
4 comments:
That is a big rat.
Yup, sure is. Mean, too.
I walked by a restaurant in the Village recently with a bunch of people picketing outside. Apparently, they were upset over the poor wages that delivery boys are paid there.
I'm torn about the whole thing. I realized that things are cheap in this country because a lot of illegal immigrants are being paid way below minimum wages for the labor, like a $1.99 box of strawberries at the grocery store. I feel bad for the poor wage but I don't want to pay more for my food. Does that make sense?
And don't even get me started on the health insurance situation.
*step off the soap box*
To respond to your question, before I got huffy over the picketing situation, I wanted to say all the buildings in the old neighborhood in Sunnyside still have the fire escapes. I haven't really sat outside the fire escape before but I did have to use it once, when I locked myself out of my apartment in Astoria. I went downstairs and knocked on the door of the lady who lived directly below me and asked if I could climb out of her bedroom window, up the fire escape and into my bedroom window, which was open at the time. :-)
I saved a few hundred dollars that weekend because I didn't have to call the locksmith.
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