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Comment by arrowgunz | Hacker News Reader

Wow. BART employees make more than an average Software Developer and yet they want to go on a strike. What a shame.

Actually, the high salaried employees you see are people like the General Manager who refuse to personally come to the bargaining table at all, and probably approve raises for themselves.

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_workers

Try looking at one of the later pages in the document -- average salary is around 30k! I believe your numbers for sure, just wanted to offer a clean example of "no, not everyone gets paid 80k base + 120k overtime."

http://imgur.com/2vfQ1qi, from http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area?Entity=Bay%20Ar...

Ok - for car cleaning you get $55K/year (plus full benefits). Is that a lot or too little? I don't know.. nurses I know don't earn much more in Bay Area but I might be hanging out with wrong people...

Nitpick: That $55k includes benefits, actually. That's $35k base, a little OT, a few weeks of vacation, M/D/V benefits, and pension contributions.

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.

That leave sout some pertinent information. Unlike many other employees in the private and public sector, BART employees make no pension contributions. I think a salary increase identical to a (new) mandatory pension contribution is a substantive increase, just a deferred one. There are also performance-related bonuses on offer.

Average salary does not tell use a whole lot, and omits salient facts like additional earnings from overtime.

The average pay for a Bay Area worker is $65K. That worker is a professional with a college degree. Why does unskilled transit work deserve so much pay?

They provide a great service to people like you and I who use their transport, washrooms etc. If they were not paid well they would not do their jobs and the BART system would be in disarray. They deserve pay increases just like everyone else.

Clearly you have never used a BART washroom, my friend. Though, the confusion is understandable, since BART stations tend to smell like washrooms outside the washrooms too.

Tell me more about what a good job BART employees do.

BART has public washrooms? I thought they were all closed to the public. (I've only been in a handful of stations, and don't usually check out the washrooms, but I believe the montgomery street one has a sign on the door to that effect.)

I was under the impression that many of them were closed after 9-11. I was told by a BART employee that that is why the Berkeley BART bathroom has been closed for years.

There's an open one in Rockridge BART at least. Now that I think of it, that's the only station I've been in that has a bathroom.

*>"Why does unskilled transit work deserve so much pay?"

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.

Are we confusing a college degree with skill?

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?

Did you look at anything beyond the first page?

The top of the list is the executive staff, not the workers.

The top of the list is mostly police, not executives. Go a little further down and it's police and maintenance.

Looked up some of them, and a good number are people who've been working there since the 90s. I know that if I had the same job for 22 years, I'd expect to at LEAST be making 200k...

$200k just by virtue of working 22 years? What's the rational for that?

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.

Shiz, I'll take their job.

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