Bay Area BART Salaries
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
The difference between "workers" and manager salaries is about 4x, pretty low compared to the private sector.
I find the salaries to be outrageously high, even factoring in that we are talking about the Bay Area & San Francisco. Considering that the average age of BART's cars is 30 years [1], the money seems better spend on updating the equipment.
[1] http://www.ktvu.com/news/news/local/bart-moved-update-rapidl...
If people (riders) realize what the salaries are and compare that to the service they get in return, they should ask for BaRT employees to become more efficient, given their salaries, else BaRT emps will price themselves out and automation will become more and more viable option, despite the political obstacle.
So, yeah, I agree, they should use this money toward upgrades and or service expansion, maybe invest in an additional track smoother[1]. And, as someone said below, they need to realize that they are a service organization and act like one.
[1]http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/BAY-AREA-Softening-the...
I hit the emergency call button and demand they clean the elevators. I get a god damned attitude from the station agents as though its not their problem.
Then who the fark's problem is it. The cost of BART and the service on gets - particularly the hygienic risk - is unacceptable.
CLEAN THE DAMN ELEVATORS!
The state of San Francisco's transportation system, whether it's BART or MUNI, is a reflection of the city and its problems, not just of the transit system itself. I sincerely hope you noticed the homeless and mentally-ill that are everywhere in the city before you noticed the elevators they shit in.
Just like human shit clogging up and breaking down escalators (true story, I wish I jest), it is BART's problem, but BART and its employees are more or less powerless against it. When you have a veritable army of homeless and addicts inhabiting your city, there is not much you can do besides stay in that booth.
If you would like functional elevators that aren't biohazard zones, I'd suggest becoming involved locally and solving the problem at its root. I am confident you will get nowhere with clean elevators until you get somewhere with reducing the homeless and mentally-ill population.
"If you want clean elevators, just solve homelessness!" Reminds me of "if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must first invent the universe." It's cute... but if you actually want to know how to make an apple pie from scratch that answer is just obnoxious.
Your prescription for how to clean an elevator is absurd.
Alternatively, is there a way to detect when poop or piss touches a service and trigger an automatic lockdown of the elevator until an officer has come to inspect it and release it? Once someone has been trapped and fined once, they are more likely to avoid doing anything that triggers them getting caught in the elevator.
I don't much like BART police, and in fact I think the decision to have a private police force for BART should be revisited. These officers are often rejected based on psychological exams from departments like SFPD, OPD, and UCPD. They have higher entry salaries than workers who aren't armed, and while people on Facebook groups seem constantly to want them around with greater presence to admonish cyclists breaking silly rules or chasing naked acrobats, in fact the only thing they seem capable of doing is accidentally murdering people.
You want upgrades? The maintenance team at BART wants safer working conditions to install the equipment you propose to purchase. With no raise during a period with 18% average cost of living increase - a low average all of us on HN know - I'm sure many of these hard working folks are concerned about having to move their families to neighborhoods with worse schools and crime while being asked to work longer hours, and called greedy for clocking overtime.
Just to be clear I have no affiliation except that I have had some drinking buddies who are SEIU organizers. They're serious people who are very good at taking care of the lower wage employees around the world, and esp in places like the bay area with huge income disparity.
http://www.keepbartrunning.com/an_open_letter_to_the_communi...
I think if rapid transit is to take off and replace car culture (as a viable alternative), it needs to be affordable and has to go where people want to go. That means make BaRT more affordable and make it go more places --Van Ness, Geary corridors, go down to San Jose via El Camino develop el Camino down the peninsula for dense housing.
For instance, the lighting situation in the tunnels is unacceptable and has likely been involved in at least one worker death.
BART workers have important jobs, evidenced by the pain we're experiencing as a region without them. That's what strikes are about.
Would you appreciate your salary negotiation going something like this:
"Hey, four years ago when the company and our customers were struggling, I accepted a pay freeze to cover essential costs to keep us afloat."
"Thanks for that. We'd like you to start covering some of the costs of your benefits, though we're actually doing a good bit better. We're going to give you a raise that amounts to half of inflation in the most optimistic of light, and that will cover the new costs we're asking you to cover. We're going to do this so that we can go to the press and say that we offered you a raise, you're a bunch of ungrateful fucks, and look at how you've fucked all of the poor riders. Also, on top of that, all of the things you've asked us to purchase for the system that would increase worker safety are rejected or deferred - we don't think that should be a part of your negotiation, even if you're saying that you might be willing to accept the pay we're offering if we budged a bit more on these costs. Do you accept?"
Oh, by the way, Fox News' coverage of the strike is also poor. News at 11!
It's classic divide and conquer class stratification, and you don't even have to do the agitating yourself.
Yep.
I can personally confirm that things of this sort play out precisely the same way among east coast equivalents.
If you want the upside of big jumps in salary, you should have to take on some of the risks (like losing your job and medical insurance, or your business).
Do you ever wonder if there's someone else who would be willing to do the job you are doing for less?
Would you appreciate your salary negotiation going like this:
"I want 20% increase over four years."
"No. We're laying off 20% of the staff because revenue is down. We might hire you back as a part-timer later, without health insurance or benefits."
http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/BARTsalaries/BARTsal...
Tableau Rocks!
http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/BARTsalaries_0/Dashb...
Interesting to see the 60k 70k hump, though. Thanks for the visuals.
The average salary of striking workers is about $61k, and management has accepted that their current offer only results in a substantive increase of $1 over four years, after BART workers accepted a freeze four years ago to inject $100M into the system.
More info:
http://www.keepbartrunning.com/an_open_letter_to_the_community_from_the_bart_workershttp://imgur.com/2vfQ1qi, from http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area?Entity=Bay%20Ar...
I'd call that "$35k plus full benefits" if I was summarizing. Maybe "plus great benefits" if you wanted to slant it (I dunno if those MDV costs are high or low, though).
Betcha the nurses you know are making more than that.
Average salary does not tell use a whole lot, and omits salient facts like additional earnings from overtime.
Tell me more about what a good job BART employees do.
You can certainly argue about the overall cost and efficiency of the system and specific rates, but it's pretty silly to suggest that a 104 mile rail system which moves 370,000 passengers per day is entirely operated and maintained by "unskilled" workers.
I can't speak to what all of BART's employees do - but electricians, mechanics, machinists, etc, all do not require a college degree, but are all very much skilled work. Hell, as a bit of a transit nut I also know that driving a train is way more complicated than pushing the throttle up.
Again, what does a college degree have to do with anything?
If you do skilled labor, where you are constantly improving your skillset and becoming more productive or valuable (e.g. programming, law, custom carpentry, custom welding, nurse etc,), there is an argument for making a little to a lot more money after 22 years, but for all jobs where a novice and an experienced employee add approximately the same value there is no case for raising salary except to account for inflation.
Whether someone can afford a house or not has nothing to do with what market rate for work should be.
"One of the biggest divergences between the Daddy Model and reality is the valuation of hard work. In the Daddy Model, hard work is in itself deserving. In reality, wealth is measured by what one delivers, not how much effort it costs. If I paint someone's house, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush.
It will seem to someone still implicitly operating on the Daddy Model that it is unfair when someone works hard and doesn't get paid much. To help clarify the matter, get rid of everyone else and put our worker on a desert island, hunting and gathering fruit. If he's bad at it he'll work very hard and not end up with much food. Is this unfair? Who is being unfair to him?" - http://paulgraham.com/gap.html
"Automation will not decrease the value that BART brings
to the bay area..."
"and it will not eliminate all positions,"
"it will simply concentrate that value in fewer
individuals who could also demand high pay."
The same value divided by half as many employees should have no bearing on the salaries plus benefits paid out to employees.
Anyways, automation would free up more budget for people and automated solutions focused solely on safety. I can't imagine it'd be that hard to devise a solution that lets few employees observe most of the stations and then trigger some sort of lockdown where a mugging occurs. The computer vision heuristics for focusing the attention of a CCTV monitoring station could probably consider things like:
(1) Show locations with a sparse number of people occupying the space.
(2) Based on walking gait over time, cluster humans together as related (Two people walking together side by side are probably together)
(3) Place importance on humans walking alone
(4) Place importance on humans walking alone that are about to "intercept" another human walking alone.
(5) Use head and eye position and gait speed changes to determine intent to intercept by assuming a gaze heuristic is being used by the mugger.
An operating watching the live videos with focus would then make a call of whether of not a mugging has occurred or probably has occurred. They would then dispatch an image of the mugger and muggee directly to the phones of a the nearest officer or two that can investigate. The system would tracker the mugger and muggee across several video feeds.
These are just a few ideas on how greater safety can be fully automated.
The LAPD has a system that triangulates bullet shot sounds and dispatches police officers to the approximate location of the shot. This isn't that different.
"Pay is what employers are willing or need to pay to maintain skilled expertise."
People with said expertise would work for less than current rates but cannot work for BaRT due to the protectionism offered by the unions.
Also, the reason BaRT can "afford" ('willing to pay') this added cost, is that BaRT service is somewhat economically inelastic so they can pass on the cost to the end user --who has to swallow that pill, like it or not.
BaRT fares account only account for a percentage of operating revenue, albeit comparatively high compared to other systems.
As an aside, I think If IT workers had become unionized, I think I'm not far off in thinking that we'd still be using DOS and system7 or System V. Good/bad, debatable, I suppose, but certainly some progress would have been stifled.
I've worked in a large, unionized IT department and find your comment to be hilariously accurate.
If IT workers were unionized, as in other industries, this would only matter in large shops where non-unionized IT managers were making the substantive decisions about what got done, and the unionization would affect working conditions, not strategic direction. To the extent that this influence on working conditions somehow made things less attractive for innovative workers (IME -- having worked in large organizations both in union and non-union IT shops -- its more likely that most large organizations would do that than that unions particulary would, but lets not worry about that for the moment), that would just mean an even stronger trend for innovative workers to move to small shops like startups.
Is there any evidence of that?
If there's no evidence of chronic BART worker shortages, of employees quitting and going to work for some other municipal transit agency, that would suggest that BART employees actually have it pretty good.
When I see those salaries, I think the following:
* I'm glad to see that there's people at BART making a decent wage.
* There are certainly other groups not making as much money.
* What are the forces keeping other groups from making as much money, and how can we get them more?
* San Francisco is in one of the richest regions on the planet. Why shouldn't its public employees make a good livable wage?
* As a public transit user, I like knowing that the person I'm trusting my life with has enough money to keep their blood sugar up and their cortisol levels down.
There's a bunch of people who I assume retired, with low base pay but a high "Other" (which includes vacation day payouts).
Of course near the top there's a ton of overtime, lots of police, which is "normal" (no idea if it's actually legitimate), but lots of other jobs too, including some that I'd expect to be salary, like "Moore, Timothy (Principal Marketing Rep, Communications): Base $100,595, Overtime $40,165"
However you interpret the numbers and whatever you post about them, you're shifting the conversation from union concerns and talking points to management's.
How can we really intelligently discuss the issue without knowing it?
@cjc: Average BART employee salary is $83K/yr. A teacher with 10 years of experience in San Francisco makes $50K/yr. Who's striking again?
Interestingly, where did this person get this data? Is it publicly available?
http://www.ktvu.com/news/news/local/talks-between-bart-union...
Since she's an ex-googler, I would hope it wasn't broad speculation, those are her sources.
My stand on BART though is that they provide a very critical service to the Bay Area. So they have a lot leverage in their hands since the strike is being felt throughout the entire bay and all professional classes. I disagree that it should be happening if their pay is that high.
Don't come crying to me because in your mind you value a BART employees contribution more or less than a teachers or your own contribution to society and you don't think it's fair. It's not about your subjective value of x or y or anyone's idea of fairness. It's about each parties leverage and negating position and nothing else.