Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
sxywu.github.io
sxywu.github.io
The lesson is this: the Law of Supply and Demand is not interested in your rationalizations or ad-hoc reasoning about "fair" pricing. In this case, the cost of living for BART employees has nothing to do with what BART should pay the employees, unless those costs cause enough employees and potential employees to quit and reduce the supply of labor.
For those of us in tech, the lesson again is that pricing has nothing to do with your costs in making a good or service. If the return is insufficient, you may either choose not to make the good in the first place, or cease making the good. It has no effect on pricing.
it's written by a collaborator of this project and a transportation PhD student at Cal.
> Suppose there were some technology that rendered BART’s whole workforce unnecessary. Robots maybe. Or some super-efficient private contractor. The public would face a choice: we could lay off all the workers and use the savings to send trains more places, more frequently, and at a higher level of comfort and safety. Or we could carry on.
Sorry but BART does not exist to provide jobs. BART exists to run a public transit. If we don't need those people working in BART, I am sure their hard work will be useful somewhere else.
> For another, what does 80k really mean? Is it the average of their base salaries or their total costs of employment? And who are included in this average? Certainly, if management salaries are included, it'd unreasonably skew the data!
I am concerned why there are 217 people in management. I am sure we can find some other people who will work in management for less. Fire the management!
If it were up to me, I'd stick to the BART compensation for everyone but the utility workers and increase their base by about 1k over current BART proposal. I'd make up for that by cutting down on management costs. I would not necessarily decrease pay outside of those with corporate title but they have to start letting some of the people in management go. My goal would be to reduce the number of management employees from 217 to 150 by the end of 2014. Nobody needs 17% of their workforce to be in management. Trim that fat.
I don't have much confidence in either the unions or the management to do their job. I bet everyone involved is very glad that I don't run BART.
- Why is 217 too much, and 150 is better? Presumably some organizations need lots of management, while others need very little- how do you, as an outside observer, come up with a reasonable number? - Where did you get 17%? According to [0], there are 3430 bart employees. 217/3430 = 6.3%.
0: http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area?Entity=Bay%20Ar...
99.99% of HN readers who work in tech will be considered management/professional grades even if you dont formally "manage" anyone
Now in general, people sell stuff to make money and so there may be a demand for a product below what I sell it for but if the costs of producing it, including some skilled labor, are such that no one can make much money selling the good cheaper, well then the "supply" part of "supply and demand" certainly cares about costs of living too. Sure, some electronic products can have their production automated and be made by anyone in the world and thus their supply can feel infinite. But other things involve multiple monopolistic positions. BART has a natural monopoly on medium-rail in the Bay, the union is aiming to preserve a monopoly on supplying labor to BART. In the real world, there no more reason that the union's monopoly should be broken any more than there's a reason to create companies competing someone competing with BART for riders. There are no lessons here, just who wins.
"All's fair in love and war"
Almost the entirety of the BART management's public argument has been "BART workers get paid so much and get more benefits than you do!" And you've got to equally condemn that, because the level of healthcare you personally receive has no bearing on what BART workers should.
Back in reality, yes, the cost of living in an area does matter, and if BART workers got paid 2x the median salary, they'd be being paid too much.
I don't know enough about BART to have an opinion. I would observe that, given the liberal situation in the BART counties, that employees have probably been treated as well as possible. I also understand that management intends to break that cycle in this round. Right, wrong? That's a lifetime of understanding I lack in order to have an opinion.
This post is comparing the income for one Bart employee to the expenses for a family of four. I'm not sure why child care is included if only one adult is working.
Subtracting those out, I get $54,912. This seems about right for a frugal life in the burbs.
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/BART-workers-pay-plus-...
To account for my uncertainty, I built in a "Custom" option in the dropdowns, so you can play around with what you think is a fair cost of living for a BART employee, and how those numbers compare to their salaries and the proposal figures.
More than these peasants deserve, right? I mean, why should people providing a vital service to a city feel entitled to live amongst the betters they serve?
I mean, when we remove scarcity, sure, give all the BART workers mansions. But until then, I think this is a fine wage for doing work that's on the block for being automated in ten or twenty years.
Go get a job as a BART driver. Report back how unskilled and replaceable they are. And report your salary. It'll be lower than you're expecting. All the numbers you're being fed (including the ones on the linked page) are misleading unless you actually consider them from the perspective of a BART employee progressing through his career from the beginning.
It is not exactly a revelation that people just starting out in a career get paid less than experienced folks, especially in labor markets controlled by unions.
Then what makes you think you can argue they're overpaid?
> If you want to explain why you think Bart driving is skilled, hard to replace labor
I know absolutely no one who has not gone through significant training who I would trust at the controls of a huge vehicle like a bus or train. I also don't know many people who want to drive around at night alone picking strangers up.
> I know absolutely no one ...
How many people do you know who only have a high school diploma? Who have no other options that pay more than $60k/year?
> How many people do you know who only have a high school diploma?
My parents, all my grandparents, most of my aunts and uncles, most of my cousins. I would say "me", but that would be a lie, because I don't even have a high school diploma. Not sure about friends and acquaintances. Most of them are tech workers, so formal education rarely comes up.
> Who have no other options that pay more than $60k/year?
Lots of the people I mention, including myself, make or have in the past made more than $60k/year (at least inflation-adjusted).
Pieces of paper from a broken educational system are not determinant of how much someone can or should make.
> Pieces of paper from a broken educational system are not determinant of how much someone can or should make.
Certainly agree with that. The demand for the work you can do and your ability to do the work with quality should be the main determinants. So I guess we'll see how much the city is willing to pay, and how far the BART workers are willing to push them before they just get replaced. Our discussion on the matter is kind of a non-factor.
You're free to stop talking about anything you want at any time.
"Way above average"? "over-market"? Are you adjusting for cost of living in your guess or not?
No kidding, this is highly skilled labor we're talking about. Not to mention the years of schooling and study required to excel at the profession. These jobs aren't easy to fill.
Ps Luton is the Uni that props up the bottom of the university league tables in the UK
You have no idea what "frugal" means.
Should they be able to afford their own Manhattan apartments for a bunch of kids too next? Or should they get cheap shared accommodations and limit their number of kids if they want to live in the super rich city area instead of the burbs like everyone else does who starts a big family? I think it's fine if you have to make sacrifices to live in the city.
Personally, I think BART just needs to automate the trains and fire them all.
I've lived in the bay area longer than BART has been in operation, and I'd rather see my fares raised to pay the BART employees even more so that they can focus on the safety and security of the system instead of having to be worred about being evicted to make room for some virtual good merchant.
BART workers directly help millions of people in the bay area every day and provide far more value to the bay area community and economy relative to what they are paid then do the participants in this forum.
It is unclear what the supply and demand curve is for public transit employees, but it will be skewed by labor contracts. The issue is that a lot of people don't make as much as BART employees (or have nearly as good benefits). If their salaries of BART employees are higher than they could be to keep the BART running, and they can upset the lives of hundreds of thousands by striking to get even more it makes people concerned.
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Few-options-for-BART-r...
Also I think all these analyses that assume a BART employee is going to be a single income-earner for a family are a bit strange - surely there are some BART employees who fall under this but I'd imagine not many? It seems like a luxury in this day and age to have a parent staying at home full time. And honestly I find myself having trouble sympathizing with people who have a lot of kids without secure high-income employment - I don't think it's the employer's responsibility to raise wages for employees that make a very expensive lifestyle choice. I do feel bad for their kids, but I think the responsibility for making sure they're taken care of should be the government's.
In particular, the child care costs are apparently broken down like this: One parent, one child = cost of 4-year-old care One parent, two children = cost of 4-year-old care + cost of one school-age child One parent, three children = cost of 4-year-old care + cost of two school-age children Two parents, one child = cost of 4-year-old care Two parents, two children = cost of 4-year-old care + cost of one school-age child Two parents, three children = cost of 4-year-old care + cost of two school-age children
And they assume the school-age children to require both before-school and after-school care.
As for comparing a cost of living for a two-parent household with the income of a single worker, I could only make that assumption because...how would I be able to extrapolate the household income of a two-parent family from BART salaries? As imperfect a solution as it is, I still hope that it will give insight, since my hope was not to shove any particular opinions on anyone, but rather just a tool for exploration.
[1] http://www.epi.org/publication/wp297-2013-family-budget-calc...
Though I understand figuring out the second parent's income is difficult, I think it's more dangerous to entirely exclude it. To me it comes off as misinformation (especially when combined with the childcare costs).
You can consider a hideable layer that allows the user to put the second parent's income, and default it to the average Bay Area income. I'm guessing that even if you defaulted it to 20-percentile for income, cost of living would no longer exceed household income, which is extremely important information in this discussion.
As for the costs, they're actually customizable - you can choose it from the dropdown. I will also work to make that more explicit.
If you look at the cost breakdown below, it's because rent does not change going from 1 child to 2 children, but it does from 2 children to 3 children, presumably because 3 kids won't share one bedroom. It'd be nice if they gave more info about what type of home is referenced (number of bedrooms and sq. ft).
> Also I think all these analyses that assume a BART employee is going to be a single income-earner for a family are a bit strange
Worse yet, this chart is misleading because it implies a single-income household, but the cost breakdown includes childcare. This is not a real situation for any 2-parent, single-income household: the non-working parent takes care of the kids.
> And honestly I find myself having trouble sympathizing with people who have a lot of kids without secure high-income employment
I do sympathize with these people because the cost of living in the Bay Area is really just unreal and entirely preventable. Having two kids shouldn't break the bank for people. If we raise salaries across the board, the stagnant housing supply will guarantee that prices will go up in accordance with more people affording higher rents. Higher wages for already-high income workers is the wrong political debate: more housing is what we need. The real difficulty here, which sadly seems less politically likely than higher BART wages, is convincing enough Bay Area cities to allow more or taller apartment complexes.
Also if the wife does not work, why do they have childcare expenses from? What is the wife doing then?
And, bus drivers don't need to save for retirement, unlike us coders, so they don't really need to save at all, union cares for them.
And they are not supposed to have transportation costs since they ride for free.
I am starting to think we will get self-driven buses long before we get self-driven cars...
Leaving wife out of work is reserved for the upper class nowadays, even not all of them. Definitely not for the bus drivers.
It used to be that quite normal across all classes for one parent to go out to work and one to look after the family. One wonders what the point is in increasing economic growth if it's to make us less well off than we used to be.
Child care definitely means someone else caring for you child wither it be a nanny, pre-school, day-care, after school care ETC.
I agree with you about the parent staying at home bit. I really think that most people could still do it (like my wife and I do), but they would have to live frugally and not listen to the women's lib Hollywood+Media+peers who are telling them that they are losers if they don't get a career outside of the home and leave the child rearing to a stranger (This sounds so wrong but that is ultimately what they are saying).
Quality of life should not be measured by wealth because wealth will never buy you happiness and never will raise your kids as well as you could have done it.
Unions may be strong but it is very stupid to commit outright suicide.
Also one thing is when say, auto workers are going on strike. They can have a lot of popular support. Not with bus drivers who are going to alienate everyone ever riding a bus, and people will support any solution allowing to get rid of them.
http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_23778144/barts-f...
Theoretically, if BART did not have a union, would we expect it to be filled with minimum wage or $40K type salaries.
Any other thoughts into how much labor costs as a proportion of their total expenditure. Is this where BART needs to decrease spending the most?
A lot of the information on salaries that's published out there include overtime, pension, medical benefits, PTO, etc., but that's the total cost for BART, and not necessarily the annual income that an employee pockets. For me, I wanted to see if a BART employee could make a comfortable living in the bay area, and for that, things like overtime and pension aren't as relevant since you either have to work more to earn them, or you don't really see them until the future. Thus, the much lower 45k to 70k I arrived at.
It's fun to explore this if you can: https://github.com/enjalot/bart/blob/master/data/bart-comp-a... It's a list of BART employees' total cost of employment, scraped from http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area
And what a lot of HN news readers probably dont realise (unless your in production engineering) is that for lower level blue collar jobs Bonus and OT are major parts of those workers pay packets.
Clarification: I'm surprised that overtime would be a "major" part of the average station agent's salary. Obviously there's going to be some mismatch, but (assuming there isn't crazy turnover or long training required) it should be fairly easy to predict the number of hours required and hire hours/2000 employees. The schedule is decided months in advance.
So for a station agent, they do make very close to 80k, and (assuming that overtime is 2x their normal rate) the 18% on top of their salary means they likely put in ~10% overtime. If my manager underestimated how long a station was open by 4 hours every week, I'd be annoyed, but 10% doesn't seem shocking.
[1] https://github.com/enjalot/bart/blob/master/data/bart-comp-a...
The primary source of OT is stuff like "my kid's sick so I'm not coming in" and suddenly two guys work an extra half shift, one is staying in late the next coming in early, or at least as many hours as they can to help out. The next one is medical and training appointments and any non-nose to the grindstone official activity. So if mandatory 2-hour diversity class is today, "someone" is covering for 2 hours via OT, and/or the class attender is coming in on her day off for 2 paid overtime hours.
A big problem I can imagine with BART is the busy customer times are two big humps in morning and evening rush hour.
Most people can't/won't work split shifts, which adds to the excitement.
Depending how your departmental SLAs are financially structured, you may come out far ahead by spending an extra $100K/yr on overtime than by toughing it out and letting things fall apart.
Not to mention the effect on personnel. I suppose it varies by location, but usually a group of workers will always have some subgroup unable or unwilling to work overtime, but Usually the subgroup willing to soak up any hours will adsorb the slack before people start burning out.
This is also complicated by things like holiday policies. Some places I've worked paid overtime for 40+ in addition to double time for holidays providing a net pay rate of 2.5 your current rate and informally your holiday bonus is either getting the day off, or coming into the 24x365 operations dept for 2.5x pay. Many years (decades) ago, I was in operations and one of my last days of work before starting a promoted job was earning something like $60/hr on the 4th of July (back when gas was under a buck, to provide some inflation scale)
There are quite a few holidays... Just working every other one I could see someone accumulating quite a bit of OT, before unscheduled overtime like coverage for sick people begins.
As sxywu mentions, this is relevant to managements perspective not necessarily the employee.
[1] https://github.com/enjalot/bart/tree/master/data
[2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Av3e0siMRvildEl...
I can understand numbers like housing and expected them to be a bit higher (frankly? $1795 in EUR is roundabout 1300. My current budget for a new home - I'm actively looking - is 1200 EUR for my family of 3.5). Food obviously varies. I never thought about child care before I became a dad, but I understand that number quite well now.
What totally blew me away was healthcare. Wow. How is that worth another rent, a second apartment?
(I won't talk about absolutes too much - they obviously are local. In absolute terms nearly every salary on that page is _big_ in DE and IT might pay less than a BART mechanic gets. But again - local, really different situations etc.)
[1]http://www.epi.org/publication/wp297-2013-family-budget-calc...
That seems like a pretty big discrepancy, and makes the cost-of-living vs pay comparison meaningless. If you assume each parent contributes equally to their cost of living, you would pretty much halve the 'cost-of-living' line on the chart.
Even if the other parent only makes 50% of what the bart employee parent makes, it would pretty easily close the gap between pay and COL for most of these positions.
Also, more explicit "Customize" buttons to encourage people to play around with and edit the data :D
pretty sure many senior IT engineers (who probably work 2x longer) would like to do 124K a year in the SF area.. then the proposal is to give them 150K by 2015.
in a simple world i'd use that money to give 25% more to all other workers
A properly implemented stealth agism policy (we only employ recent college grads because we're "hi tech", you know how it all goes) could save quite a bit. If you fire everyone once they have kids...