Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the leader of the New York City council have agreed to ban horse-drawn carriages from the city, a popular tourist attraction that has faced widespread scrutiny.
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Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the leader of the New York City council have agreed to ban horse-drawn carriages from the city, a popular tourist attraction that has faced widespread scrutiny.
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Apparently there are 200 or so drivers and horses. I think we should definitely do better about animal welfare, but it’s strange that the city can prohibit them from selling their horses to other carriage companies. I also think it’s strange that the city is not required to really do anything for the workers. Basically they just have to offer bare minimum career counseling which most cities offer to anyone anyway.
I support getting rid of the practice, but this does feel a little one sided. 200 people will have to find new jobs after potentially having owned and run their own business for years and have to sell their horses with additional restrictions imposed by the city. The city is giving them some time, but I’m sure it’s still impacting everyone. Hopefully this leads to better long term outcomes for both the horses and the workers.
200 people is a rounding error in NYC. Making sure a piece of legislation has literally zero negative impact is the same as making sure no legislation is ever passed.
I’m not asking for no negative impact. I was just suggesting that it’d be nice if they offered maybe some dedicated upskilling or something. A lot of these people might not have other references or directly translatable skills. They I guess worked in customer service, but how many were regularly using computers? I was just bringing this up elsewhere but there is a huge overestimation of tech literacy people assume of others and it just makes me concerned. I don’t know the industry, maybe it’s tech heavy and full of tech savvy people, but I am used to interfecing with tech noobs a lot and it can be an uphill battle. I don’t know that they’ll be as easily absorbed into other customer service or hospitality careers. A lot may not need or take advantage of dedicated upskilling offers, but it’d be nice if it was there. Mind you, I’d like to see those things offered for free to everyone, but if you’re telling someone their entire career is illegal now, I’d hope we could compensate them with at least something like a free skills class.
Would you imagine that when they abolished slavery, the poor slave owners were also prohibited from selling their slaves to other plantations! Also all the slave traffickers loosing their careers like that with no counselling. I think we should do better on human walfare, but that certainly was strange.
Comparing this to slavery is certainly a take, but yes, some slave owners were compensated: https://aas.princeton.edu/news/when-slaveowners-got-reparations
I just think we can do more to help everyone, and that includes people who do this work.
What was normal 200 years ago, we now see as disgusting. If the civilization progresses, I’m sure in 200 years they will also find disgusting how we treated those horses.
Losing*