Last time I read on HN about the Bay Area developer salary, it seemed to me that consensus was that a $100-120k salary in the Bay Area is considered bang-on middle-income. BART technical jobs are well below that, and one can argue these are low-income. If $100-120k/year salary is middle income what's the exact issue with BART salaries?
Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
11–20 of 82 posts
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#12BART PR person says that the average cost per year of a union, non management employee, is closer to $134k per year, including benefits. I'm not sure which side to believe. In any case I appreciate your work but would love to see a closer examination of the $134k figure.
you can see the "Total Cost of Employment" for every employee here:
http://enjalot.github.io/bart/#chapter-03
or a aggregated view here:
http://enjalot.github.io/bart/#chapter-035
As sxywu mentions, this is relevant to managements perspective not necessarily the employee.
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#13the bonuses look lower than the last time i looked at the sheet. the salary diff between management and regular workers is pretty high too. 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
They are spending $26,982,431 in base salary to management. Almost $27M for 2013 and that is base salary alone. I can't find it acceptable either. They need to start letting people go in the management.
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#14The fade-oriented segmentation is ridiculously useless and reader-hostile.
Ah, but the fade is on purpose, because I wanted to show that while they do have a high "cost of employment", what they truly pocket annually isn't as much. For that, the most important figure is the base salary, which is a solid block. The other things like pension and medical are either money they don't see until the future, or money they don't use unless they have a medical emergency.
I don't have to pay for medical insurance until I have an emergency?
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#15This is a good lesson for those of us making programs who "need" to charge a certain price in order to make a living. There is something in the human psyche that really wants to make a connection between the price of an item and the living conditions of the seller or the buyer.
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.
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#16BART PR person says that the average cost per year of a union, non management employee, is closer to $134k per year, including benefits. I'm not sure which side to believe. In any case I appreciate your work but would love to see a closer examination of the $134k figure.
yes so what all employees cost about 2.5 3.0 times the headline salary rate. 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.
I understand why maintenance staff might have surprise OT, but isn't a station agent or a conductor the very model of a job with predictable hours? It seems like BART should have no trouble correctly lining up workers and work without needing to resort to overtime.
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.
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#17Why is it that when you go from 2 parents + 1 child -> 2 parents + 2 children, the cost goes up 6K, but when you go from 2 children -> 3 children, the cost goes up 18K? If anything it seems like per-child costs should diminish as you have more children? 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 employee…
I took the cost of living from Economic Policy Institute's Family Budget Calculator, and their documentation [1] is particularly interesting to sift through.
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...
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#18Bart workers pay $92/mo for health insurance. [1] 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-...
> This seems about right for a frugal life in the burbs.
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?
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#19The fade-oriented segmentation is ridiculously useless and reader-hostile.
it's actually an efficient way to communicate the nuances going on with the issue. "Reader friendly" would be the quote that the average BART employee makes 80k in pay and benefits. This chart shows you what those figures break down to, emphasizing the base salary while still making you aware of benefits (which are less concrete and uniform in meaning).
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#20Why is it that when you go from 2 parents + 1 child -> 2 parents + 2 children, the cost goes up 6K, but when you go from 2 children -> 3 children, the cost goes up 18K? If anything it seems like per-child costs should diminish as you have more children? 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 employee…
> Why is it that when you go from 2 parents + 1 child -> 2 parents + 2 children, the cost goes up 6K, but when you go from 2 children -> 3 children, the cost goes up 18K? If anything it seems like per-child costs should diminish as you have more children?
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.