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Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees

sxywu.github.io

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Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees

#21

Post by lnanek2 »

Looks above the cost of living everywhere except SF. And there you just have to knock it down to one kid and you are fine. I don't think the equivalent of a bus driver should be able to live in a super over priced city like SF and still be able to have a bunch of kids. It's not a big deal to commute in from Oakland and other areas.

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.

Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees

#22

Post by tsotha »

fdschoeneman wrote: post #3

BART 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.

BART picks up more of the healthcare tab than most employers do nowadays.

Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees

#23

Post by nknighthb »

ultrasaurus wrote: post #16
walshemj wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What strategy would you employ to accomplish this? Cut everyone's hours so there are never enough people? Hire extra people, thus incurring additional overhead regardless of hours worked? (And you'd still have to pay them; do you really expect to have people on-call without incurring any costs?)

Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees

#24

Post by maxerickson »

ultrasaurus wrote: post #16
walshemj wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It can easily be more effective to pay for some overtime.

Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees

#25

Post by ceras »

sxywu wrote: post #17
throwaway287391 wrote: post #10

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? 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 + cos…

For two adults, >0 children, I think childcare should really be excluded from costs. It's not accurate for most any family in that position.

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.

Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees

#26

Post by martinshen »

Any ideas as to what the true market rate for these types of jobs is?

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?

Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees

#27

Post by jamesaguilar »

nknighthb wrote: post #18
stevewilber wrote: post #6

Bart 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?

Yeah, unskilled, replaceable labor doesn't get paid much. That is how it always has been, and I don't see it as a huge, immediate problem. These folks are already making way more than people of similar levels of skill in other parts of the country -- in fact, they are double the median income in the US. There are plenty of other essential services, like garbage people, chefs, janitors, cabbies, etc. that get paid less and require similar levels of education.

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.

Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees

#28

Post by dxhdr »

nknighthb wrote: post #18
stevewilber wrote: post #6

Bart 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?

> 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?

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.

Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees

#29

Post by enjalot »

antr wrote: post #11

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?

Tech is a booming industry, and there aren't enough people with the skills to do the work that needs to be done so high salaries are common.

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.

Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees

#30

Post by enjalot »

cjensen wrote: post #15

This 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…

Here's an interesting essay that expands on this exact point: https://medium.com/armchair-economics/ec6139b54795

it's written by a collaborator of this project and a transportation PhD student at Cal.

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