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Comment by btipling | Hacker News Reader

Comments here are disappointing. Pay is what employers are willing or need to pay to maintain skilled expertise. There's absolutely nothing wrong with collective bargaining driving up the price of the cost of employees. These salaries are middle class salaries in the Bay Area and barely enough to buy a house in some of the poorer areas. If you are unhappy with your own pay, work hard to improve your station in life. It is tax payer money, but it's paying what is needed in order to keep BART moving. BART provides an immense service to the bay area, and it can't happen without the drivers and staff. They provide a valuable service, and I support their strike.

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"These salaries are middle class salaries in the Bay Area and barely enough to buy a house in some of the poorer areas."

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

The mental gymnastics between perceived value of what these individuals do and the actual value (and damage the strike is doing to the local economy) do not match. It doesn't matter if you think these people are just pushing buttons. BART isn't running, and that immense value is not being provided. It also doesn't matter what people think these people should earn. It's what BART is willing to pay, and what employees are willing to accept to work there.

When a service is both essential and a natural monopoly, employees extracting all of the "immense value being provided" is very, very bad. Suppose the employees of SF's water company were allowed to charge the full value provided by delivering water to San Francisco. People can't do without water, and so everyone's water bill would now be thousands of dollars a month, since they have no alternative but to pay it. And the next week, everyone would realize this sucked and anyone who was able to would leave.

While there's not much wrong with collective bargaining, there's nothing wrong with people wanting a more efficient system which delivers better service more effectively with less waste.

"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.

>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.

I've worked in a large, unionized IT department and find your comment to be hilariously accurate.

> 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.

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.

Personally, I would rather us automate away all the jobs, including all the BART ones. The sooner society eliminates as many jobs as possible, the sooner we'll get to a impasse where a minimum guaranteed salary is the only way for society to move forward. The longer the transition takes, the more painful it will be.

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.

    "Automation will not decrease the value that BART brings 
    to the bay area..."

But it may increase the value by being more efficient/effective.

    "and it will not eliminate all positions,"

Nothing wrong with that. I would imagine that we'd at least try to do the best we can.

    "it will simply concentrate that value in fewer 
    individuals who could also demand high pay."

I don't see why that is a problem that is any worse than the status quo. People in the BART are not paid according to the value BART brings, they are paid what the market will bear, with one side of that market bargaining collectively as a union.

The same value divided by half as many employees should have no bearing on the salaries plus benefits paid out to employees.

/s? Maybe you've never taken public transportation in a major city. Riding the BART can be sketchy enough as it is - I've witnessed muggings in broad daylight. I don't think many people would feel safe enough to take the BART if there weren't drivers and attendants around to dissuade the worst of it.

I take it all the time. Never seen a mugging on public transit, not even in São Paulo, where more of the people I know have been mugged at some point.

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.

After step 5, I was sure you were about to say that a remote operator could then activate the nearest turret and shoot the mugger.

I was just describing what could already be done mostly via software, and that would be easily transferrable (read: sellable) to other subway systems and places with mugging problems.

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.

If the life of a BART employee were as hard as you describe, there would be all sorts of stories about a BART worker shortage, stories about the state bending over backwards to find new hires, like you always hear about tech employers.

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.

Except that collective bargaining distorts our perception of their value by allowing them to hold the entire system hostage. If my job was to press a button once a day that kept the electricity on in San Francisco, I could go on strike and negotiate a salary of millions of dollars. That doesn't mean that I would be providing millions of dollars worth of value (since I could be replaced by a trained monkey or robot).

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