New York City was hit with an enormous blizzard last week. Now, there’s another storm brewing — but this time it’s political — and for some, it’s personal!
The day after a crippling storm with high winds caused snow drifts upwards of 24 inches, snow plows went into action to begin clean up. Sort of…
For several days, New York City residents complained that the snow wasn’t being plowed quickly enough, and that some plows were repeatedly operating on streets already cleaned while others went totally undone. Mayor Bloomberg responded by telling residents to quit complaining. But now, he may be forced to eat those words.
Word out of New York is that sanitation supervisors deliberately ordered snow plow trucks to slow down as an orchestrated protest. Mayor Bloomberg recently cut around 400 sanitation jobs from the city budget, and as of this Friday, 100 department supervisors will be demoted and have their salaries slashed as a further cost saving measure. So the supervisors allegedly wanted to make a point to the city not to mess with their jobs. The purported plan sent plows for major city streets into action, while plows for the secondary streets were directed to park near their work destinations and wait for orders to proceed. Except after 16 hours of waiting (on the city clock), those orders never came.
New York City Councilman Dan Halloran met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department and two Department of Transportation supervisors at his office recently, following a flood of calls from irate residents. The workers said the work slowdown was pushed by supervisors, not the unions, as the result of growing hostility between Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the workers responsible for clearing the snow.
“They’re saying that the shops that they worked in … basically had the go ahead to take their time, that they wouldn’t be be supervised, that if they missed routes it wasn’t going to be a problem,” Halloran said.
Not only did the lack of plowed streets create an inconvenient nightmare for the city, but some residents actually died when ambulances were unable to get to them due to the enormously snow filled streets. If these slow down charges are found to be true, lawsuits will abound and heads will certainly roll in New York City.
