BART janitor grossed $270K in pay and benefits last year | Hacker News Reader

BART janitor grossed $270K in pay and benefits last year

mercurynews.com

54 pointsprostoalex55 comments

I don't envy him:

"When work crews pulled open a broken BART escalator at San Francisco's Civic Center Station last month, they found so much human excrement in its works they had to call a hazardous-materials team. While the sheer volume of human waste was surprising, its presence was not. Once the stations close, the bottom of BART station stairwells in downtown San Francisco are often a prime location for homeless people to camp for the night or find a private place to relieve themselves..." http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Human-waste-shuts-down...

This is true. A very ugly situation in what used to be a world-class city. I have seen homeless people defecating in the BART / Subway escalators.

Initial anger turned to apathy. Where would they go? There are no public toilets as far as I can tell, in the downtown / tenderloin area. I did volunteer work at San Quentin and Pelican Bay helping non-violent inmates apply for jobs outside, and almost all the ones I helped in San Quentin said they were being paroled into San Francisco. Eventually they all end up in the Tenderloin district, sleeping on the street and relieving themselves at the BART stations.

Here's a full list of SF public toilets: http://sfpublicworks.org/sites/default/files/5196-public_toi...

There are multiple 24 hour facilities in the downtown / tenderloin area (94102).

Even though they want to use this specific person to showcase an example, I think that it's highly inconsiderate to post this fellow's name in the news article. The way the article is written, it just sounds like they're making an example out of him, when in reality, he's literally just doing his job.

The data is available from government agencies and aggregated on transparentcalifornia.com, which the article links to. Even if they omitted his name, the discovery process would take a casual web surfer two minutes at most.

Here are the top Bay Area public sector salaries for anyone whose job title includes "janitor"

http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=Janitor&...

BART custodians are "system service workers" in their nomenclature

http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=System+s...

I'm completely aware of that. My wife is actually a school teacher so her salary is freely available online. I'm only arguing that being called out like this by name in a news article, is pretty...bogus. That's all.

Bart is consistently disgusting and a majority of their janitors make over $100k?

This is what happens in a government subsidized monopoly.

as opposed to everyone on here that's grossly overpaid in the bay area? at least they're providing a tangible service

Thanks for the downvote but I live in the bay area and I've worked maintenance (ie custodial). My pay with this has never broached $20 /h.

I've worked terrible jobs for terrible pay. I can remember being forced to call Uber to get to these terrible jobs when BART decides they want to protest over their pay.

No, this doesn't make me happy and their 'service' is sub par.

Yea, I never understood why that database has names attached to it. What's the point?

It seems unfair to me that teachers, or people who work in education and other, usually low paying, public service jobs gets exposed like this.

If they want to embarrass people for abusing their public sector job, then we have public officials, who head these departments and ultimately responsible for the salaries, to scold. No need to name individual employees.

I like that you can view people's salaries. It gives us a rare look at how much people make. I can only say that I wish all salary data was public, like it is in some European countries.

This is a hit-piece designed to get people to vote against the BART bond measure, nothing more.

As the BART spokesperson pointed out: he is just signing up for shifts no one else wants. Does it matter who works those hours? It costs a bit more due to overtime pay but it doesn't factor into his benefits. The higher pay is also taxed higher so the ultimate cost isn't +50%/+100% for 50/50+ hours worked.

If there are enough empty shifts to let a single employee earn 4X his base pay, then hire more employees and stop paying so much overtime.

The higher pay is also taxed higher so the ultimate cost isn't +50%/+100% for 50/50+ hours worked

What does that mean? It doesn't matter how much an employee is taxed, the employee's tax rate doesn't affect how much BART pays.

It comes back to the state as revenue and to BART and the member cities as sales taxes.

If you hire another employee are they going to want those hours or will they quit? Their benefits must also be factored in.

Given he earned 4X it probably makes sense to hire at least one more full-time employee but you can't find new ones these days; housing is too expensive.

So maybe 10% of his salary goes to the state, and lets say that 1% of the state's budget goes to BART (it doesn't), so that's .1% of his salary. And if he spends 25% of his income on local taxable goods, and .5% of that goes back to bart, that's .125%.

So about .225% of his salary makes it back to BART. Not much of a return.

If BART wants to help return money to the community, they can ask for less money (taxes, bonds, fares), not use tax dollars and captive commuter fare money to pay employees 5 times a typical salary and count on some small percentage of that money to trickle down.

A few months back my building hired a new janitor after their old one retired - the building manager literally had a line out of his office of people looking for the job. The Bay Area is expensive for sure, but even jobs like $50K janitorial positions still get filled.

If BART is like other public sector jobs in California, his pension will be based on some percentage of his average pay, including overtime, for his last few years of employment. Say hello to the $200K per year retired janitor.

Yeah, California won't have a pension crisis in the coming years...

Yes, this is a common problem with "final salary" pension schemes that include overtime: coworkers and supervisors are willing to help out folks about to retire.

a.k.a. pension spiking

Does it matter because all pensions are self funded?

It does if they ask the tax payers to bail them out.

Since when? This keeps happening every few years http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-schools-pension...

It is not the last few years. It is whatever the highest average range was over a period of 12-36 months.

Source (look at Final Compensation in the Retirement Calculation Formula subheading): https://www.calpers.ca.gov/page/active-members/retirement-be...

Someone figured out how to optimize their exchange of labor for money. I'm very happy for them, and hope we can all make such great exchanges. This fellow sounds like a real go-getter, and we need more such inspirational people.

The real disappointment here is that more people aren't paid proportionally to the amount of time they put in to their jobs.

People are more or less paid for what they produce, how much time they spend at it is immaterial. (Despite ostensibly being paid by the hour, the rate is based on the expected value they'll produce in that time.) The idea of pay for time is the Labor Theory of Value, and is discredited.

That's hardly a disappointment. A plumber who takes 4 days to fix my problem is a worse plumber than one who takes an hour. I can't imagine paying the first guy more.

If he were working at a private organization, I'd say "good for him" - but since he's working for an essential public agency that receives significant tax funding then it's a little less equitable when the janitor earning $40K/year at a small office in SOMA is paying taxes and BART fares to help pay someone in his same position 5 times higher salary.

That doesn't mean that the employee is to blame, this is purely a problem with BART management -- instead of paying one person 4X normal salary for a job (even if he's working 100 hours/week, that's still "only" 2.5 times a single worker), they should have hired 4 workers for that job, or if it's transient work that doesn't need a full time worker, then hire a contractor(s).

Not sure it's a comparable job. Working at a small office is Soma is a much better gig than Bart. You would definitely have to pay me at least 4x more to work there than a small office job.

Indeed.com says the average janitor earns $28K in SF, I'm sure there are plenty of those janitors that would take a $50K+ job at BART.

http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=janitor&l1=san+francisco&tm=...

This might be both good and bad news, based on how you look.

If one can overtime their way to 2-4x avg salary, so can anybody. The question is do you want to. If the answer is no, blaming the guy working hard to make 4x the base salary is unfair. Plus there is no social contract that if one worker makes less, so should others.

You can't force people to be lazy, you can't force them to be hardworking. A lot of times the world is fair, and you get what you deserve.

Instead of expressing a more appropriate sentiment for members of the lower class--that it's shameful somebody who is highly skilled doesn't earn as much as an unskilled laborer--many people in this thread only express anger at "waste" or "undeserved" remuneration. It's one of the best illustrations of the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" problem in America I've seen in a while.

And make no mistake: almost everybody commenting in this thread is a member of the lower classes, even those of us pulling down six-figure salaries in the high $100k-$200k range. That some of us are relatively higher than others is immaterial to the immense wealth commanded by those in the class above ours. We have far more in common with the "lowly" janitor than these elites have with us.

If you read that a CEO managed to accumulate $220K extra what would you think? Business as usual? Not worth a headline? How about $2.5 million? A $25 million golden parachute?

What about an attorney or a top salesperson pocketing a little extra?

I don't support corruption and it should be put to a stop, but let's focus our attention on the real money and the powerful.

It doesn't really sound like corruption so much as mis-management that means they don't have enough janitorial staff or just need to manage how many hours people can work better.

It's a pretty standard tactic within municipal workforces to intentionally under-hire full time employees to "force" overtime among the remaining ones. Low level corruption.

And to rotate who gets to take advantage of the forced overtime to allow those about to retire to clock in a few years of inflated pay to boost their pension payouts.

Interesting, is the incentive here to undermine wage limits in place to give their employees a better living?

Notice how the last name of the janitor is the same as his supervisor's name.

That's the nature of government jobs. Certain groups (families, friends, ...) "conquer" them. They only hire from the group and do whatever you can to make the group as a whole earn as much as possible, and "re-divide" the results (e.g. in order to get overtime you have to pay 50% of it to the supervisor).

I didn't see mention of the supervisor's name anywhere in the article. Did I just miss it? Where did you find it?

Well the CEO isn't being paid with public funds, first of all.

Some are, and some are paid with government contracts.

Not directly paid, but certainly indirectly paid using billions of dollars of tax-payers money in the form of corporate welfare payments and fiscal policies designed to boost profits. Tax breaks and various direct and indirect subsidies by government allow his company to make the profits that allow him to be paid as much as he is.

This means that anyone who believes there is a free market economy operating anywhere in the world is gravely mistaken. Arguably, the case of this janitor making lots of money is really not about public ownership at all. The public (via the government) effectively support both private and public sectors almost equally in a lot of cases.

Here's the situation in the UK at least:

http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/SPER...

Don't hate the player, hate the game. I hope Zhang gets to keep every penny and I hope SF comes up with a way better manage their expenditures.

BART is not owned or managed by the city of San Francisco, it's managed by a 9 member elected board - SF holds 2 seats (plus one seat covers some SF and some East Bay areas)

While SF may have a lot of faults, SF can't be blamed for BART's problems.

Yeah, not information in the article about his hours. I'm assuming he just worked every overtime hour possible, which is some crazy sacrifice. When I lived in Oregon I remember reading about a 911 dispatcher who was one of the highest paid public employees, but he also was regularly working 80+hr weeks--7 days a week for months at a time. If there's a problem its a management issue.

Does management decide who gets the overtime at BART? Or is the union packing the end of his career with overtime so he walks away with a massive pension?

This article doesn't give us enough information. How many hours overtime did he work? How many hours a week? How much pay gets doled out to janitors? Etc.

Working 100 hours week mean that he's earning at the same rate of someone working 40 hours/week for 100k. Realistically unless the job is dangerous (which it could very well be, I don't know), I think it works out to be a good deal.

The exact numbers are found at: http://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2015/san-francisco...

If he's making four times his base pay as a janitor, 1x of that is base pay, and 3x is overtime. If that 3x is time and a half, he's working 2x his normal hours on top of his normal hours.

Is this guy working 120 hours a week? Has to be more that time and a half overtime, 120 hours is not doable over a year.

The first article I read made it clear he was doing 114 hours a week: http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/BART-Janitor-Made-270K-...

The headline figure includes his benefits in order to seem worse in some way. Wages were around $230K.

Reality is 114 hours of work every week makes for a dismal sort of life for most people. Perhaps this is a case of Chinese work ethic plus pension spiking?

>>120 hours is not doable over a year.

Why do you think so?

Just because some of us can't others can't?

This is a bit like expressing surprise over people running miles everyday. It looks impossible until you actually start doing it.

That's 17 hours a day, every day without breaks. If he took a day off or worked only 14 hours he's got to make that up. It's more than two-thirds of the time in a year on the job. Not conscious time, total time.

Looks like he did do it, but it's at the edge of physical possibility. As you get up there every hour is a much larger chunk of your available time. 114-120 is a lot more than 100.

Incredible mismanagement on the side of BART for allowing this to happen. I'm certain they could find all the funding they need for upgrades by cutting the waste.

> worked an average of 114 hours a week

lol, I'm not even awake 114h a week.

And Bart is still pretty dirty.

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