Unions--costly and unnecessary relics

Those of you who may have read previous posts might notice that I tend to be a "free market" guy. Unions, while they purport to be about protecting workers from predatory employment practices, are actually just political action committees that extort money from the very people they claim to protect.

Once again a major public organization of employees that are unionized, the MTA in New York, has decided to strike in an effort to gain "respect." (read "cash and prizes")
Here is how the New York Sun describes it......"a blatantly illegal act of economic sabotage by a union so selfish that it is willing to destroy one of the most important business weeks in the city in a last-ditch attempt to preserve privileges that most private sector employees can only dream of--like the ability to retire at age 55 with a full pension, or the ability to not to contribute at all to health insurance costs."

They may get more than they bargained for--as John Avlon, a New York Sun columnist notes:
Already, trains in Paris, Cairo, and Calcutta operate with computerized or automated systems. In Paris, the Meteor Project was launched in 1998, with an automatic piloting system that controls the train line's traffic, regulates speed, manages alarm devices, and allows for traffic of automatic and traditional conductor trains on the same line. There have been no serious accidents reported since this system deployed in the late 1990s, and more than a billion people have been transported. Computers make the trains run on time and they don't threaten to walk off the job. All of us are replaceable, but some are more quickly replaceable than others.