[fdschoeneman]

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.

[sxywu]

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

[walshemj]

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.

[ultrasaurus]

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.

[ultrasaurus]

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 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...

[VLM]

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.

[nknighthb]

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?)

[maxerickson]

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

[walshemj]

you might need to cover Sundays public holidays and so on and cover of staff during the flue season

[tsotha]

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

[enjalot]

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.