All day long at the Inner Harbor area of Baltimore you can see groups of 15-20 bums walking in circles and screaming a chant at the top of their lungs. Naturally, this is a union-sponsored event.
It seems that unionized carpenters, who make about $30/hour in wages and fringe benefits, think they are being underpaid by a certain construction company. So their union pays these homeless people (a.k.a., vile bums) minimum wage to do what unionists do best: walk in circles shouting nonsense. In this case, it's "Low Pay, No Way!". (I stood by one of these gangs of rabble long enough to make out what they were actually saying. The stench of alcohol, however, would keep less hardy pedestrians away).
A newspaper reporter asked a carpenters' union spokesman why they were only paying the bums minimum wage, and why there were no real carpenters out there "protesting." His answer was that the home building in the area was booming, and carpenters were making so much money, that they couldn't afford to take time off work to protest. So the union contracts out their protests, something they violently oppose whenever practiced by construction companies seeking lower-cost construction.
--------------------------------- Talk is cheap. Use Yahoo! Messenger to make PC-to-Phone calls. Great rates starting at 1¢/min. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20060425/60f65fd7/attachment.htm>