Unions would rather have empty hotels than jobs

Is The Bronx making a comeback?

Unemployment in the nation's poorest urban county dropped below 10 percent in August — down from 13.9 percent in 2010, at the depth of the Great Recession.

Hallelujah?

Maybe. But don't pop the corks quite yet.

For while borough joblessness dipped to 9.8 percent, that still contrasts poorly with the city's overall rate — 7.3 percent.

More to the point, The Bronx remains notorious for its hostility to economic opportunity not linked directly to its politicians' own best interests. Indeed, the borough stands out even in a city well known for economic obstructionism.

That is, for its embrace of unionists, dead-ender environmentalists and ideological activists — at the expense of the uncounted thousands who come to the city every year in search of a future.

Consider:

• In Queens, as The Post reported last Sunday, plans to rebuild a 487-room hotel at Kennedy Airport have fallen victim to opposition from a hotel-workers union.
• In Brooklyn, the judge overseeing the endless Long Island College Hospital melodrama last week bought into a nurses-union grievance involving a handful of clinical positions — then all but wrecked an complex deal to ease the shutdown of a bankrupt hospital and clear the way for development of one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the city.
• And, back in The Bronx, the sad saga of the Kingsbridge Armory reclamation project drags on. The armory, a turreted, century-old behemoth, has stood empty and idle since 1996. It's arguably the world's largest armory, active or otherwise, and anywhere else in the world it would long ago have been put to productive use.

Not in The Bronx.

A proposed retail center for the armory that would have created 2,200 permanent jobs was rejected out of hand in 2010 by Borough President Ruben Diaz — who said that the positions weren't good enough for his constituents. That is, they weren't union jobs.

"The notion that any job is better than no job no longer applies," he said, infamously.

Well, no jobs is precisely what he got — or, rather, what The Bronx got — and subsequent development schemes haven't been any more productive.

Most recently, a proposal fronted by retired hockey all-star Mark Messier to convert the armory into an ice-skating emporium, of all things, is sinking into soft ice. Its principals say the deal is on track for 2017 — but they're suing each other at the moment, so who knows?

It's not just The Bronx, of course.

Large retailers who don't embrace the Retail, Wholesale & Department Store Union effectively are banned from the five borough, irrespective of the consequences for low-income shoppers.

Walmart's efforts to enter the city degenerated into low comedy long ago. No surprise, then, that the retailing giant simply quit trying two years ago — after being denied permits for a store in East New York.

The problem is that the city's political establishment invariably elevates labors' interests well above those of the millions of New Yorkers who don't hold a union card — but who ultimately pay the freight.

So now New Yorkers who can afford to travel to Westchester and Nassau counties reap the shopping savings — while those who can't, don't. (They're also losing out on a new, low-cost banking program for Walmart customers announced by the company just this week.)

Meanwhile, efforts by the Port Authority to resurrect the Ramada Plaza Hotel at Kennedy — closed since 2009 — have been equally unsuccessful, thanks to the Hotel Trades Council.

The union position is clear: It wants wages and benefits at Kennedy to mirror those paid at top-of-the-line Midtown hotels — even though the airport is, well, not in Midtown. And even though, as a consequence, the hotel wouldn't remotely be able to charge Midtown rates.

So, no hotel for you, Kennedy Airport.

Meanwhile, a deal to close Cobble Hill's Long Island College Hospital — all but blown up last week by state Supreme Court Justice Johnny Lee Baynes — was put back on track late Friday, at least temporarily.

Baynes, bizarrely, had ordered a major expansion in a nuisance lawsuit brought by the New York State Nurses Association — placing at grave risk an agreement to close LICH and clear the way for development of its Cobble Hill real estate.

But, in the end, he bowed to major pressure from Albany.

Nothing is ever final in this soap opera, of course. But this much is certain: While the (apparently) salvaged deal includes a new health-care facility, new housing, hundreds of jobs and mountains of tax revenue, nothing will fully satisfy the nurses' union and its activist allies.

Which certainly seems to include Baynes.

And Bill de Blasio, who has been in cahoots with New Yorks unions his entire career — and he has also made it clear that loyalty to his old allies will be central to his mayoralty.

Unions exist to protect the interests of their members, of course. And there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that. The problem is that the city's political establishment invariably elevates labors' interests well above those of the millions of New Yorkers who don't hold a union card — but who ultimately pay the freight.

Sometimes the hit comes directly — as with the brutal, economy-depressing tax load needed to fund, for example, New York's breathtakingly lush public-employee contracts.

But secondary consequences — opportunity denied by political favoritism and union obstructionism — are substantial, too. Especially at the entry level of the labor market.

It's terrific that The Bronx seems finally to be making progress. But imagine how far along that battered borough might be absent the malign influence of New York's unions, and the politicians they corrupt.

Much farther, one would guess. The city at large, too.

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