[wjnc]

Astonishing for me from a cross cultural perspective.

-Here in the Netherlands mechanics would never come as close to senior management as at BART. The highest ranking mechanics / technical staff are in the $/2 range of senior management? I would venture the same ratio would be >10 here.

-You can actually get 100K$ in overtime! Too bad their hours aren't included.

-And: all salaries are public including names. No privacy there.

-I don't see much evidence of explicit union favouratism? Much of the management is non-represented, but white collar versus blue collar could account for that?

[icambron]

I have no real editorial opinions to add, but some cultural context might be useful:

- Management is not supposed to be represented by unions, because, in part, their jobs are to oppose the union's demands. They sit (or are generally expected to sit) on the opposite side of the negotiating table.

- Overtime for public workers in the US is the subject of a lot of grumbling, because the perception is that a lot of it is unnecessary and really just the result of poor policy and management practices.

- That the salaries are public is part of American expectations about transparency, and probably a result of the common American feeling that the unions and leadership are fleecing them. Put another way, we're the ones paying them and we should get to know how much.

[nawitus]

>-And: all salaries are public including names. No privacy there.

This is actually true for all Finnish citizens. It's a bit weird since privacy is (supposed) to be respected here.

[jsnk]

I don't see anything unreasonable here as they are public workers. They are paid for by taxpayers and taxpayers should damn well be able to see how much public workers get paid. Besides, the public workers all agreed to this when they enter into the contract.

[asveikau]

Why do their names have to be listed if they're just a mechanic or whatever? Why not strip the names unless they are in some kind of leadership role?

[speeder]

I think you never met Brazil, where once the government even found government paid cooks earning 50k BRL month (the Brazil President wage is 19k BRL month, that is about 10k usd month)

[asveikau]

As I said, I am not even saying remove the "Profession, Salary" fields. Just the names for most people.

When someone digs through the data and sees the cook being paid that much, perhaps they start to ask their government some questions.

Or come up with any other criteria for whose name gets released. Just don't make everybody's name visible by default because you're fearful of the nepotistic chef scenario...