Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
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Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
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Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#2The fade-oriented segmentation is ridiculously useless and reader-hostile.
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#3BART 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.
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#4BART 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.
I think "average cost including benefits" is the important part. For me, I was concerned with finding out what the average base salary was for a union employee - and not just any union employee, but those that are affiliated with SEIU and ATU, since those are the ones in negotiation. What I found was that the average base salaries were between 45k to 70k for these SEIU and ATU workers.
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
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#5the 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
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#6Bart 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-...
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#7The 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.
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#8BART 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.
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#9Bart 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-...
Ah yes, the cost of living figures I have gathered from http://www.epi.org/resources/budget/. In my footnotes I address that for BART employees health insurance is $92/mo, but because I wasn't so sure what their co-pays and other expenses may be, I left in the health insurance figures from EPI's budget calculator.
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.
Re: Annual Income and Cost of Living for BART Employees
#10Why 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 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.