Once again, a national headline reads like it was intended to appear in a satirical rag like The Onion. From the New York Times: “When Passengers Spit, Bus Drivers Take Months Off.”
“Of all the assaults that prompted a bus operator to take paid leave in 2009, a third of them, 51 in total, “involved a spat upon,” according to statistics the Metropolitan Transportation Authority released on Monday.
No weapon was involved in these episodes. “Strictly spitting,” said Charles Seaton, a New York City Transit spokesman.
And the encounters, while distressing, appeared to take a surprisingly severe toll: the 51 drivers who went on paid leave after a spitting incident took, on average, 64 days off work — the equivalent of three months with pay. One driver, who was not identified by the authority, spent 191 days on paid leave.”
What really gets me, and what really reveals the culture of corruption in so many government unions today, is the response of the union’s president to the Times’s findings
“Being spat upon — having a passenger spit in your face, spit in your mouth, spit in your eye — is a physically and psychologically traumatic experience,” said John Samuelsen, the union’s president. “If transit workers are assaulted, they are going to take off whatever amount of time they are going to take off to recuperate.”
What is an appropriate amount of time to recover from the trauma of being (allegedly) spat upon, according to Samuelsen? On average, about three months. The depressing thing is that the union culture is so used to getting away with shenanigans like this that the union bosses really think this policy is defensible and reasonable. Notice Samuelsen doesn’t say “We’ll look into this,” let alone apologize. No: “We ain’t changing” is the official response.
Can you imagine the outcry if a top earner at Goldman Sachs had taken three months off to recover from the trauma of spilling his morning Macchiato on his lap?
– Thomas Peters is the Communications Director at the American Principles Project, where he also runs a blog.