Our mole inside the New York real estate industry told us about a newly available career path: toilet flusher. “The office towers are empty and if you don’t have someone go in and flush toilets and run sinks, you’ll get Legionnaires’ disease. Even when the sinks and toilets are electronically controlled, nobody ever envisioned a time when buildings would be vacant for months or years. So there is no way to program them to run themselves automatically every few days. We’re paying people $60 per hour to go in and flush toilets.”
Why isn’t it $20 per hour? “There’s government funding for this so it has to be prevailing wage,” he replied. “Union wages start at $60 per hour.”
Sounds like it’ll all go down the drain, as it were, unless they bring people back. How long can they go on flushing toilets at $60/hour with nobody paying rent? Eventually they’ll have to shut the water off in those buildings and that always brings problems of its own when it’s turned back on. Then they have to hire the union plumbers!
> Our mole instead the New York real estate industry
Do you mean “inside”?