A Democrat who's pushing to outlaw transit strikes

[tularetom]

60. Apples and oranges

You can't compare individual salaries with median family costs of living. If you want to do that you have to add the overtime earned by the average BART employee to the published salaries to determine what they are actually earning per year. I've seen articles that estimate the average overtime paid to a BART worker at $15k annually. You also have to add in any income earned by spouses or other family members. Also BART employees pay less than $100 monthly for health insurance premiums for their family, which means that the employer (the taxpayer) is ponying up maybe another $500-$1000 per month. Add it all up and it's entirely possible that BART line employees are pulling down over $80k per year.

I'm not some management stooge. I was a public employee for more than 30 years from entry level gofer to department head. When I first started, back in the 60's there was kind of an unspoken agreement between "civil servants" and their employers. We all knew we were getting paid less than we could have made in the private sector, but we were compensated with job security, excellent vacation and sick leave benefits and a liberal retirement plan. Over the years I watched all that change as the unions pushed and pushed for salary parity without giving back any of the benefits. Pretty soon, park and street workers were making more than the median household income for the area, and could retire at age 60 at 90% of their salaries with a 2 to 5% COLA every year. In fact a lot of municipalities are in dire financial straits today partially due to unfunded pension liabilities (as well as loss of tax base due to the bursting of the real estate bubble of course).

The public is not stupid, particularly in a highly educated, tech heavy region like the Bay Area. Don't forget the 9 county area went for Obama by huge margins in 2012. But they aren't going to have much sympathy for transit workers making close to 6 figures and then striking because they want even more.