Meet The 8,074 New York Transit Workers Who Earn More Than $100,000

adehbone:

How many people a day use NYC transit?

NYC is a world famous city, without great transit it would be hell. You people could not get to work without these people.....

Because it takes so much skill to press the throttle on a train? Be serious man - I understand EC101 can be challenging, but the MPL of NYC transit workers is not as high as this pay would imply - their political power is. You know what would make NYC transit more efficient (from an end-user perspective, I don't know about economic)? Higher K investment - I'd rather have clean stations, turnstiles that work, and trains that don't break than overpaid B&T drivers.

barboon:

Here is my Dollar when no one asked me for 2 cents.

America needs to wake up and realize that all this bullshit UNIONS are bankrupting the country. The average NYC "sanitation man" (garbage man) makes $80,000.00 a year and they only work 1/2 day. they retire after 20 yrs. and have a full pay pension, get a job as a train "pilot" and make $75,000.00 on top of the $80,000.

Idiots in goverment keep raising taxes so they can pay this idiots that never graduated highschool and milk the system in whatever way possible.

This are the people hating on Wall street. give me a break! screw them all!

Lloyd Blankfein for president!

Unions generate rents, just like bankers do. They are no different than other special interest groups, whether that is BP, GS or the AFL-CIO. You can not legitimately claim the "UNIONS" are bankrupting the country - the maths simply do not work. If America goes bankrupt, it will be due to demographics - the only reason Europe is faring worse is that immigration gives us a demographic edge (both in terms of age and skill factors, as immigrants tend to be younger and smarter than the median).

My numbers or maths may be off slightly, but the order of magnitude is such that the conclusion is indisputable.

2008 figures, all numbers in millions except per employee

Average Salary per Employee* - $74,403 Total Federal Employees* - 1.909 Total Federal Salary Expenditure - $142,035.5

Cash based Federal Surplus (Deficit) [ex-SS]** - $(454,800) Salaries as percent of Cash-based Federal Deficit - 31.23%

GAAP based Federal Surplus (Deficit) [ex-SS]** - $(1,009,000) Salaries as percent of GAAP-based Federal Deficit [ex-SS]- 14.07%

GAAP based Federal Surplus (Deficit) [w/ SS]** - $(5,100,000) Salaries as percent of GAAP-based Federal Deficit [w/ SS] - 2.78%

Federal salaries in 2008 constituted less than three percent of the Federal deficit - while salaries have increased since then, the deficit has grown faster. While I'm perfectly willing to argue that public sector salaries are significantly higher than they should be, arguing that they are the cause of our fiscal troubles is moronic, at least at the Federal level (which your argument implicitly did). 142bn is not a small amount, but it is not the biggest issue we face - I certainly think it should be addressed before some of what congress deals with, but you're not going to solve the deficit by eliminating it. Of course, 142bn also overstates the issue - you can't exactly pay Federal employees nothing. Even if we assume Federal employees are overpaid by 100%, you still have to cut the potential savings in half, which makes the potential savings all the more insignificant.

The state and local levels are significantly different, due to the nature of their expenditures.

I would also like to highlight that your grammar does your argument no favours.

[ex-SS] exclusive of Social Security accrual [w/ SS] inclusive of Social Security accrual * http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs041.htm ** http://fms.treas.gov/fr/08frusg/08frusg.pdf

barboon:

Here is another dollar! :)

By the way about the grammar deal, I'm sorry it hurts your eyes. I didnt know i was publishing a book here. Ohh and thank you for pulling up the numbers.

The whole union deal was meant to be looked at from a macro standpoint. for example:

While Ford motor co. pays $60.00 per hour to someone who installs door handles, someone in japan is getting paid $40.00 per hour to engineer better fuel efficiency.

It gets better...

While it used to take 5 union steelworkers @ $40.00 an hr back in the 70's to sandblast an overpass in 3 weeks, today it takes those 5 workers @ $60.00 an hr the same 3 weeks with sandblasters that would take a fraction of the time with only 2 men. Who pays for infrastructure? the tax payer! yay

Now its up to you to look this one up to believe me. The harsh truth is unions are for lazy people. The biggest corporations in America are non union and they thrive!

Listen I get what you are saying but please stop drinking the Union Kool-aid.

Nothing in my post implied unions are socially efficient. Unions operate by artificially limiting the labour supply such that the paid wage is above their members' marginal productivity, and thus what they would earn in an efficient market, meaning they lower social welfare a priori. I'm fully aware of the flaws with unions, which are exacerbated in the public sector by the fact that unions are an efficient solution to the collective action problem, and thus have disproportionate political influence. My counterpoints are two-fold. A) While unions are socially inefficient, the effect is not as significant as much rhetoric would imply, especially when you are talking about the Federal government. B) Unions generate economic rents and benefit from excessive political influence, but so do those large American corporations you praise - Wal Mart operates as an effective monopoly at most local levels, and you can not pretend that the political influence of Wall Street is proportional to its influence in a pure democracy (Citizens United notwithstanding).

Now, I fully understand that simply because there is a more egregious offence, it does not mean we should countenance the first instance, but I do think you should at the very least be honest about the issues.

Additionally, your statement that unions are for "lazy people" is patently false. Are you implying it is rational to work an identical job at longer hours and higher effort levels for lower pay, when an alternative path is available (intrinsic satisfaction notwithstanding)? That, Sir, is surely ridiculous - we have only to turn to John Stuart Mills original definition of homo economicus to remember that one of man's two motivations is the avoidance of labour, for otherwise should he not work all the day, and rest not at all?

"It makes entire abstraction of every other human passion or motive; except those which may be regarded as perpetually antagonizing principles to the desire of wealth, namely, aversion to labour, and desire of the present enjoyment of costly indulgences. These it takes, to a certain extent, into its calculations, because these do not merely, like [our] 4 other desires, occasionally conflict with the pursuit of wealth, but accompany it always as a drag, or impediment, and are therefore inseparably mixed up in the consideration of it (Mill, 1836, pp. 321–22, from Morgan, 2006, p. 5)."

barboon:

The idiot that used to throw cheeseburgers at me in the lunch room in highschool

Hahahaha. You put up with that?