It's interesting that the Times identified three culprits (unions, construction companies, and consulting firms) but you only focused on one.

If you read the article you would see that the unions are the ones demanding a much larger than necessary number of employees. The unions are the political road block to change.

You mean the same article that said this:

>Construction companies, which have given millions of dollars in campaign donations in recent years, have increased their projected costs by up to 50 percent when bidding for work from the M.T.A., contractors say. ... Consulting firms, which have hired away scores of M.T.A. employees, have persuaded the authority to spend an unusual amount on design and management, statistics indicate.

or this:

>"Worker wages and labor conditions are determined through negotiations between the unions and the companies, none of whom have any incentive to control costs."

All they say is that the reason starts with the number of people employed. If you continued reading past that point, they talk about other non-union incentives that drive up costs, like:

>Critics pointed out that construction companies actually have an incentive to maximize costs — they earn a percentage of the project’s costs as profit, so the higher the cost, the bigger their profit.

They also talk about the "soft costs" of NYC construction, like:

>The project plan called for the hiring of 500 consultants from a dozen different companies

And of course bureaucracy:

>Officials have added to the soft costs by struggling to coordinate between vendors, taking a long time to approve plans, insisting on extravagant station designs and changing their minds midway through projects.

So while we can probably agree that unions are part of the problem, it's disingenuous to act like they are the whole problem.

France has unions out the wazoo, yet you don’t see nearly the level of cost increases.

European style unions are not the same thing as American style ones, despite both being called unions.

I wish they had different names because they are quite different.

And what would you say makes them different?

In Europe you have multiple unions for an employer, and employees pick between them - so they compete on price and what they offer.

In the US you are forced into a single union for an employer.

In Europe the union is for the employees, they have lots of employees from a wide variety of places, and they offer them services.

In the US the union is for the employer - they stand in between the employee and the employer and purport to decide what's best for the employee.

France has real unions. The US has graft disguised as organized labor, and New York has some of the worst.

Graft, maybe, maybe not, but the real hallmark of US unions is their general refusal to be political organizations, unlike their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere.

Oh, sure, they throw money in the pot for candidates, but in Europe, unions take actual political positions on important matters. They do not often get their way, but they act as an important counterweight in politics to the interests of the rich and powerful.

Not select public sector unions in New York. PBA and NYUST get whatever they want.

This always comes up when unions in America are blamed for these problems. Unions are strong in both France and Germany and they don't have most of these problems.

The answer is corruption. America is horribly corrupt, much like Latin American nations, and unlike western European nations. So unions in Europe actually work the way they're supposed to, whereas in America they're just another corrupt institution, probably much more corrupt in fact than most others, and cause more problems than they solve.

How do you get America to have unions like those in Europe? I have no idea, but I think it's like asking how you can turn Afghanistan into a country similar to Norway.

> How do you get America to have unions like those in Europe?

Easy. Allow the employee to pick the union - you can have more than one union per employer. Or no union at all if that's what the employee wants.

That's the only change needed.

If like, add a second change: It's not longer necessary to make an employer be a "union shop" any employer can have employees represented by unions, if that's what the employee wants.

France has French unions, America has American unions. Each are run according to different sets of rules and in different social contexts.

The major point is ultimately that the organization of labor does not inherently lead to higher project costs. You may be right that the peculiarities of American labor are one potential cause of higher costs.