The Labor War at Hudson Yards

Anyone stumbling across last month’s union protest at the National Football League’s Park Avenue offices might have thought that the target was the league’s much-discussed requirement that players stand during the national anthem.

In fact, the demonstrators were mostly New York construction workers, and they were protesting the inclusion of Miami Dolphin owner Stephen Ross on the league’s new social-justice committee.

A New York real-estate developer, Ross has angered unions by launching a campaign against their extravagant compensation and work practices at his gigantic Hudson Yards project on Manhattan’s West Side. Workers wanted to embarrass Ross after his firm, The Related Cos., filed a lawsuit contending that the unions’ failure to live up to an agreement to curb construction expenses has cost the company an astounding $100 million in overcharges.

Behind the controversy is a larger union struggle to hang onto a deteriorating share of the construction industry in New York City, still the most heavily unionized and expensive building market in the country.

Hudson Yards is a long-running project to create a new commercial district in Manhattan. The plan will eventually encompass some 18 million square feet of office, residential and retail space.

Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post

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Steven Malanga is the George M. Yeager Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a senior editor at City Journal.  This piece was adapted from City Journal.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post