Why Is New York Paying Amazon More Than Virginia?

Every once in a while, over the past two years, I’ve exited the subway on my way to work to the sight of an enormous inflatable rat, as big as a float in the Thanksgiving Day parade. The rat stands in front of a 35-story apartment building under construction across the street from Bloomberg’s New York headquarters. It even has a name: “Scabby the Rat.”

A “scab,” of course, is pejorative term used by unions to describe people who cross picket lines to take jobs from union members. When you see the rat in front of a construction site, it means that the real estate developer has decided to go “open shop.” That is to say, he or she is not using New York’s once powerful construction trades, but is using non-union labor instead.