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Or the city workers are union and they complained about non union work being done.
There was a story from a decade or so ago about a trade show in NYC. All setup of the booths was to be done by union workers. The booths had been constructed, but the union electricians hadn't been through.
A booth worker plugged in an extension cord to test the booth lights. Overnight the union workers trashed the booth because a non union person touched the electrical.
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Could this be a liability thing?
Residents do a bad repair, city gets in trouble?
Residents get hurt performing a repair, city gets in trouble?
When you get down to it, I expect that this is the real issue. Some city attorney made the call.
Or the city workers are union and they complained about non union work being done.
There was a story from a decade or so ago about a trade show in NYC. All setup of the booths was to be done by union workers. The booths had been constructed, but the union electricians hadn't been through.
A booth worker plugged in an extension cord to test the booth lights. Overnight the union workers trashed the booth because a non union person touched the electrical.
Unions in the northeast are famous for that kind of thing. I was IBEW in Boston so saw a lot of it firsthand.
Hooters in the North End was being built by non-union labor (it was a renovation of an old building). The unions kept threatening the owners about using non-union labor but they wouldn’t back down, so the union burnt it down. My father was Boston PD, they knew who did it, but didn’t have enough proof to prosecute (there are two IBEW locals in Boston, it was the other one, not mine). The owners got the message and the rebuild was done with union labor.
New Balance World HQ is in Boston. When they built their new HQ, the GC snuck in a non-union wiring contractor at night to pull wire. They got caught. The iron workers dropped a steel girder through the roof of one of their trucks.
Cider House Rules - MA was offering incentives to get Hollywood to film in MA, so Cider House Rules was filmed there. Hollywood sent trucks full of lighting equipment for the movie, but the local theater unions got mad they weren’t using their equipment so stole the trucks and assaulted the drivers. The equipment was never recovered. They also beat the shit out of some old lady operating a food truck because she wasn’t union. Hollywood said, “Thanks for the lobster, but we’re done here”. The governor and some of his cohorts flew out to California to try to smooth things over and bring the studios back to MA, but were basically told to go f#ck themselves. There’s been a couple of movies filmed in MA since then (i.e. The Town) but not a lot. Hollywood chose Georgia instead.
NYC has some really bizarre rules. I worked for Lucent installing commercial phone systems, voicemail, auto-dialers, IVRs, CMS (tracks call center statistics), paging systems, voice recording, etc. As the lead tech, I was responsible for everything but in NYC, they had a separate tech for each piece of equipment and nobody could touch the other tech’s equipment. So for example, if the integration between the phone system and voicemail went down, they’d have to send a PBX tech and a VM tech to troubleshoot, whereas in Boston I’d do it all myself. Not only could they not work on equipment they were all trained on, but weren’t allowed to plug anything in. There’d be a small army of techs installing a system with 3,000 phones hanging off it, but would have to put an entire system together and leave 30-40 power cords sitting on the floor and pay union electricians to plug them all in. Idiotic.