These comments...they are completely awful.
Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
61–70 of 82 posts
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#62> This causes a slight discrepancy in the bar graph, as the cost of living figures assume all parents to be working, but the income assumes only one working parent. 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 ot…
I am going to implement a simple toggle option to include a second income (which I will research into what the median/average/reasonable salary in the Bay Area to be) on the bar graph - hopefully that solves the discrepancy!
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
I love it. I was just wondering how I could possibly include a second income in the graph, and your suggestion is just perfect - thank you! As for the costs, they're actually customizable - you can choose it from the dropdown. I will also work to make that more explicit.
Glad I could help -- I look forward to the change!
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I hadn't realized how easy the data was to get[1]. The 300 Station agents make an average of 57.6k/year in salary, 10.5k/year in overtime and 7.4k in bonuses (includes vacation, unused sick days etc). 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…
Especially when I was younger I worked a lot of hourly student-type jobs and since I've had a "real job" I've never been too far away from 24x7x365 ops.
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.
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#65For me the breakdown was great. 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…
Thanks darklajid! The health care costs is total insurance premiums and total out-of-pocket costs[1]. For a BART worker, it may only be upwards of $92, as they have a fixed health care contribution. For that reason, I have made the costs customizable, so you can edit and input any number you feel reasonable (I didn't want to make any personal assumptions with the numbers).
[1]http://www.epi.org/publication/wp297-2013-family-budget-calc...
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#66The cost of living analysis represents pampered first-world luxury living. Bare necessities are $5000/year per person. I live on 15k/year myself in the bay area, and I consider myself to be a big spender. I share a 1200 sq foot house with one other person, I drive a 2008 prius, and i have all the modern amenities in plentiful amounts. People like Jacob from ERE (http://earlyretirementextreme.com/) are real world examples of living well below the poverty line.
Regardless, the only legitimate concern over how much we pay BART employees is supply and demand of their skills which the market will handle on its own. Unions are horrible for society
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Probably thinking of 20-somethings who have no copays or medical deductibles or chronic medical conditions or require medicines. That was my experience in my 20s. I worked at a place for 3 years, people asked me what the insurance was like, told them I never used it, so had no idea. Its a bit different of course, once you have a spouse and a couple kids on the policy, and start getting old, etc.
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...
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#68If you want to play with the raw data[1] I've uploaded it to Google[2]. Treating Base+OverTime+Other as someone's take home pay:
* the mean across all employees is $88.8k
* the median is a "Contract Specialist II" taking home 84.8k
* the most common job, a train operator takes home 80.8k
[1] https://github.com/enjalot/bart/tree/master/data
[2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Av3e0siMRvildEl...
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#69This somehow misses out the fact that in a married couple having 'childcare' expenses, there are supposed to be 2 earners. With a gender gap of about 30% for married women that leaves about 60k a year of wife's income or about $3500 after taxes per month which should leave no problem making ends meet. Leaving wife out of work is reserved for the upper class nowadays, even not all of them. Definitely not for the bus d…
Childcare != daycare. Even if one parent stays at home, you still have buy special clothing, children need more medical attention, school supplies etc. etc. 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…
"Schools Supplies" and "Special clothing" are most definitely NOT child care. Medical attention already has it's own category.
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.
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#70Earlier 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…
you might need to cover Sundays public holidays and so on and cover of staff during the flue season