Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

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When even the NYT is willing to implicitly criticize unions, you know it's gotten bad:

Even in the face of the financial crisis and budget shortfalls, the M.T.A. has given concession after concession to its main labor union.

Members of the Transport Workers Union got a total of 19 percent in pay raises between 2009 and 2016, compared with 12 percent for the city’s teachers union over the same period.

The labor contracts also gave members lifetime spousal health benefits and free rides on the Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road. (They already were allowed to ride the subway for free.)

Particularly insane:

Subway workers, including managers and administrative personnel, now make an average of about $155,000 annually in salary, overtime and benefits, according to a Times analysis of data compiled by the federal Department of Transportation. That is far more than in any other American transit system; the average in cities like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington is less than $100,000 in total compensation annually.

The NYC MTA has a lot of workers who do enormous amount of overtime, which explains the high pay. Add that a good percentage of employees will be relatively specialized trades.

A cursory search shows a train driver making $31/hr, which doesn't seem excessive.

I am also wary of the tactic of showing MTA workers as over-paid compared to a notoriously underpaid profession (e.g. teachers, who in this case held barely above inflation).

you mean $31/hr + medical + pension and medical in retirement...

again for teachers you are forgetting the fact that they have similar generous benefits and only work 3/4 of the year...

Everyone should have medical + pension + medical in retirement. How did America get to a place where healthcare and pensions are regarded as perks?

That’s a nice sentiment - in that case we should all work in the public sector and and get those things...oh yeah....

I'm just surprised that people would propose to solve a problem by taking those things away from people.

That’s fair - and again think it’s a laudable goal.

It used to be that if you worked in the public sector you forwent a market rate salary in exchange for job security and a secure pension. Public sector employees are now making market wages + extremely valuable benefits which in turn are bankrupting municipalities.

In this context how do you tell a tax paying private sector mechanic, that his taxes need to go up in order to pay for the extremely generous union benefits of a public sector mechanic (who may make more than him)?

Lastly I would argue that municipalities have something of a fiducuiary duty to tax payers to get value for their tax dollar spent - rather than rewarding a voter block at tax payer expense.

How do you know what is a "market wage" for a NYC subway worker? It's not like you can compare them to someone doing the same job in the private sector.

>how do you tell a tax paying private sector mechanic [...]

How do you tell a tax paying public sector mechanic that they're going to lose their pension and health insurance?

That's not the point - if you are comparing wages you need to take into account benefits. $30/hour might not be great by itself, but $30 + $10/hour in benefits is.

A pension is directly interchangeable with the 15% of wages you would otherwise need to save for retirement. Maybe less, to account for the (very high) risk of governments defaulting on their pension obligations.

I don't have a horse in this race, but remember that what looks "generous" to you in New York City is considered "table stakes for a civilised society" in Europe.

Smells like bullshit to me.

A quick look at glassdoor.com for MTA transit jobs [1], I'm seeing drivers and conductors making ~$22/hour. Presumably this is an entry level rate. Some searching points to a high of ~$30/hour.

Project managers and programmers, of course, are making >$100,000 k. I have doubts that they are represented by the union, though. Of course, quietly lumping their salaries in with the blue-collar folks pushes a particular political narrative.

It seems that if you really want to trim the fat at the MTA, cut wages for the white-collar, un-unionized workers.

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/new-york-city-conductor-s...

Base salaries probably give an especially incomplete picture of total compensation for union workers, where overtime pay can be 4x your base, and benefits are nearly "cop from the 50s" insane.

If you're doing surprise holiday night-shift overtime, you should probably be getting paid 3x your base rate.

Comparing the annual salary of someone who clocks in their 9-5, and goes home on Thanksgiving and Christmas, compared to someone who is doing 60 hours a week, twenty of them from 3 am to 9 am, on Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday... Is comparing apples to oranges. [1] But it sure drives the outrage! Look, and be outraged at the annual take-home of that bus driver! Ignore the part where he worked like a dog, and gave up all life outside work for it!

Rates for hour worked, in equivalent conditions are the only fair comparison. And, unsurprisingly, they aren't high for MTA employees - especially in a city as outrageously expensive as NYC.

If you want to stop paying public servants overtime, then don't expect public servants to work outside of core business hours.

[1] Most salaried employees don't do unpaid overtime, period. Overtime, even paid overtime, is incredibly shitty, doubly so for holiday and night shift work, triply so for holiday night shift work. People should be compensated more for doing the same job at 2 am on Christmas Saturday, then for doing a 9-5 on Tuesday. [2]

[2] If your job expects regular unpaid overtime from you, you should either have an ownership stake in it, or get a new job, or have a really high on-paper salary.

>> [1] Most salaried employees don't do unpaid overtime, period.

At least half of tech workers I know do unpaid overtime. Almost all are on at-will contracts where they can be laid off anytime and I know almost none who have lifetime-final-year salary pension plans.

1. That overtime is usually rare. Half of all tech workers don't have to be at work for every night shift, through holidays, and weekends. The buses, on the other hand, have to keep running, even after 5 PM on a Friday rolls around.

1.1. Even if you're an auxiliary on-call, you only need to work if something comes up. You don't need to be physically working, all through the night.

1.2. If you're constantly crunching, every week, you need to find another job, or demand non-meaningless equity, or higher wages, then your tech-worker peers, who do their 9-5. Most mature tech companies are full of people who do their 9-5. They employ hundreds of thousands of tech workers.

2. Tech workers are a tiny subset of the working population.

2.1. They also have much higher on-paper compensation then their similarly-trained peers in other fields (Bachelor's degree, and 0-5 years work experience), and even despite the occasional overtime, much higher hourly rates.

Thats hardly a gold standard anyone should be aiming for.

The article is 90% on the political mismanagement, but you instead focus on the workers with little influence making $150k in NYC, much of which is from working overtime well past 40 hours in a mostly mindless job.

My favorite line is: "In one particularly egregious example, Mr. Cuomo’s administration forced the M.T.A. to send $5 million to bail out three state-run ski resorts that were struggling after a warm winter."

The MTA spends over $10 billion per year on labor, much of it redundant (e.g. two drivers per car): http://interactive.nydailynews.com/project/mta-spending.

People say "oh, but diverting tax dollars from MTA, etc." The NYT pegs that at about $1.5 billion over two decades (since Pataki). https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-.... That's $75 million per year, a drop in the bucket in comparison. About enough to build a mile of subway line.

While it does not surprise me that compensation is higher for NYC transit workers wrt national average, it is still striking that the difference is so large. I imagine the avg income in NYC is not >55% more than the national average.

That's because the parent poster's numbers are heavily massaged, and include non-union, and executive compensation. Average salaries for people actually operating the trains are ~$22-30/hour.

I'm guessing the pension plan and healthcare inflate the total compensation figure quite a lot.

Basically these guys aren't getting their future screwed so they're an outlier. Same problem the Post Office has. When you aren't allowed to skimp on the perks and pass the buck to the government of the future you don't look very competitive.

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