How much do BART Employees make?
I imagine that somewhere out there on the internet is a Hacker News-equivalent for public transit workers full of outraged comments about 21-year-old tech workers getting $200K to eat free food and move their fingers back and forth over a keyboard.
Full disclosure: I'm a government worker.
I find it funny to read a bunch of outraged reactions from Californians. You guys allow this by voting in the nut cases that you vote in to the legislature.
Why does a customer service rep make over $110k? Because the city/state/agency allowed for work rules that strictly assigns overtime based in seniority and only seniority.
Why is there so much overtime? Because the agency doesn't maintain an adequate staffing level and doesn't improve productivity via technical means, hire more people, or supplement with temps. Probably because somebody in 1990 gave away the store to the union.
In New York, people are always bitching about police OT and loaded pensions. NY made things especially expensive because police and fire unions are entitled to mandatory binding arbitration. So the unions ask for 20%, and the city/town/etc say 5%. The arbitrator says 10% raise with free healthcare forever.
A quick search of their cited source shows this to be incorrect (or misleading, at least). Here's a few corresponding values (Total Cost of Employment = salary + overtime + vacation/sick time value + employer contributions to medical + employer contribution to pension + employer 401k matching + 'misc')(Cash = salary + overtime):
- Customer Service Clerk: 61k cash, 85k TCOE
- A-Line Train operator: Hard to say, because the range goes from 7k cash to 122k (although half of that high number was overtime). It looks like the lowest paid operator that's probably full time is around 40k cash, 74k TCOE
- Elevator worker: I couldn't find this job, but a "maintenance engineer" is 68k Cash, 106 TCOE.
So it is a little bit shocking when you see those numbers. Most of us immediately think of people who work on the subway or in public transit as meaningless low wage jobs. It seems to make sense.
But what if you look at it from a slightly different angle. First, these workers work in one of the highest cost of living areas in the country. Second, they work for a critical piece of infrastructure. You only have to look at the havoc one day of them being off has caused. Third, public transportation is generally valued more highly here than in other places for a variety of reasons.
Oh, and I overheard on KQED this morning that the base pay is $71,000, which is high, but not astronomical.
What I don't get is why they don't try to peg their salaries to something tangible in the local economy. I know that is already done with the pricing of Below Market Rate (BMR) housing."We gave up over $100 million in concessions in our last contract negotiations, and we haven’t had a raise in 5 years, yet the cost of living in the Bay Area has spiked by over 18%."
In exchange for such a concession, the city cannot be blocked from improving cost saving measures associated with automation, including the dismissal of any employer whose job is no longer necessary. Any employee that loses his job due to automation would first consideration first for any new jobs they qualify for that are created as the system progresses."A BMR unit will be resold at a restricted affordable price to a household that meets the first-time homebuyer and income qualifications for the program and for the particular unit. New BMR units will be repriced according to change in the median income from the time of the current owner’s purchase to the time of sale."These two concessions on both sides take care of the employees and let the system progress.
The other concessions the employees are asking for such as increased lighting to improve safety are completely reasonable and shouldn't even require negotiations to implement.
You can make as much doing menial work for BART as you can in engineering. Except that you don't actually have to do anything difficult when you work for BART, it's almost impossible to lose your job, there is no unpaid overtime, and you get more vacation.
The economics of bay-area engineering are broken. Consider this, how many engineers making comparable salary could take over these jobs with minimal training? What about vice-versa?
Its interesting to look at the legal department salaries. Mid-level Alameda county counsel seem to be at $150-160k base + $40k pension contribution, or roughly comparable to a mid-level associate at a private law firm, while working far fewer hours.
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