port authority employee > $273,000

Wow, the highest paid employee at the Port Authority makes $273K after working a ton of extra hours? ZOMG, that's like almost as much as a junior banker or a senior associate at a big law firm. How will the world ever survive with normal people start to approach the $400K salaries that others on this board have described as "barely middle class?" Next thing you know this guy is going to want to live in one of our fancy co-ops.

Which is not to say there isn't a problem here since clearly the PA could save a ton of money by getting its act together on scheduling and maybe by negotiating more reasonable salaries and work rules with its employees. But it's hilarious every time someone complains that the highest paid person out of thousands in a blue collar role earns less than what's necessary to purchase most of the properties discussed on this board.

The PA chooses to pay overtime rather than hire enough cops to cover the work. If they hired more, they'd take heat for that, too.

This guy works so much overtime because other sergeants choose not to. Makes sense to me.

Not to quibble, but more MetroCard revenue to the MTA wouldn't help the PA.

The NY Post story has more details:

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/pa_police_ot_sarge_livin_large_RjaEvsSKBB7VhOrlH0E8dI

The guy worked 2134 hours of overtime, paid "only" at 1.5x. Assuming a 47-week year (5 weeks for holiday/vacation/sickness), that works out to an extra 45 hours a week on top of a normal 40 hours. You know what 85 hours a week means? It means 12-hour shifts all 7 days of the week, or 17-hour shifts 5 days a week. Altogether, got paid $60-70 per hour depending on how one counts holidays / vacations / sick days.

Working on a holiday etc. probably pays 2.0 or something like that, rather than 1.5.

Still a lot of hours, but it's his life. Probably lots of boring down-time, with the occasional incident to liven things up and cause the Post to gush about "our heroes".

Good for him, make that paper.

That's fine if he wasn't doing it to pad his pension.

The scam is you jack up the overtime at the end of your career, then get credit for it as if you worked that way the entire time. Should his pension be $200k?

"That's fine if he wasn't doing it to pad his pension.

The scam is you jack up the overtime at the end of your career, then get credit for it as if you worked that way the entire time. Should his pension be $200k?"

Precisely, I have no problem with the OT as long as it doesn't end up padding their pensions for life. THAT is f'ing BS and frankly, a legal form of fraud.

he works around the clock, so get's paid for his time. what's the problem?

Anyone here could have played by the same set of rules.
What's the problem? Jealousy that he knows how to play the game?
He should work for Goldman Sachs next.

jordyn said right

Jordyn is absolutely right. Its perfectly okay for a lawyer or Wall Street type to work round the clock to earn $273K (or much, much more) but if a blue collar individual has an opportunity to earn that kind of money...OMG its the end of the civilized world and most certainly fraud. Padding their pension? Think about it as the options and deferred compensation at PA employee will never get. I don't want to occupy Wall Street but income inequality and cultural elitism need to be examined.

aren't public benefits public info? why arent' those MTA jobs and police jobs really coveted?

oh, right. those are jobs that don't look "snob" nor "fancy" enough for people that own property and will pay those pensions through their property taxes. oh well... same old, same old. if you like those benefits a lot, then go and work for them and don't teach your kids they should try to do better than being a public employee.

All the liberal intellectuals come to the rescue of this man, but your average commuter will be furious next time tolls on PA bridges go up.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/election/joe-lhota-apologizes-mall-cops-remark-port-authority-article-1.1338833

"your average commuter" can take the bus and be less furious.

It amazes me that, no matter how high the tolls go, the AM/PM rush hour traffic on the West Side Highway (most of it NJ-bound, I assume) remains snarled.

I wonder if the number of tolls collected decrements at all when the toll rises . . . ? Maybe it needs to $25-40 per round trip. Yes.

The guy is a sergeant for what are essentially mall cops. THis is why unions look terrible, but also the management who authorizes garbage like this. You should be outraged that your tax dollars go to this. How hard would it have been to promote someone else to Sgt, which would have cost maybe $10,000 a year more.

these mall cops earn a lot more than ordinary people

caonima, do you go to the mall?

Thirty seven of those "mall cops" died on 9/11.

more muslims died on 9/11

Articles about govt. employees making huge salaries right before retiring are almost always deceptive since they usually include money that the worker got for cashing in unused sick and vacation time, which is not pensionable.

There are many ill-informed postings on internet forums from people who are too lazy to read the thread.

Native, that is of course tragic, but also completely irrelevant to this issue.

Ottawanyc, why do you hate America so much?

"Anyone here could have played by the same set of rules.
What's the problem? Jealousy that he knows how to play the game? "

Indeed.

Of course it's absurd.

But he DID play by the rules.

At least he didn't do it a la Wall Street by ripping people off.

The blame here does not belong on the shoulders of the worker or the union, but the MANAGEMENT who signed off on it.

tolls and parking should be free for local tax-paying nyc residents--those who live outside of the city and choose to drive in should be taxed aggressively

of course, given bberg's concept of the city as a commerce zone for the wealthy, and his lack of concern for mid and lower income resiidents' qol, this will never happen.

>The blame here does not belong on the shoulders of the worker or the union, but the MANAGEMENT who signed off on it.

Whoever is to blame ... the cost is mine.

>tolls and parking should be free for local tax-paying nyc residents--those who live outside of the city and choose to drive in should be taxed aggressively

Mass transit should be subsidized, maybe free.
The City is too crowded to encourage car ownership. Free parking would increase other RE prices. Tolls - I think it is free to leave the City.

Question to people who don't like this. What do you see as the problem?

1. Salary for position should not be $108K.

2. Salary is OK, but working 2x the time to be paid 2x the money is not OK.

3. Being paid 2x the money for 2x the time is OK, but the extra 0.5x paid for overtime is wasteful, even after accounting for reduced benefits paid per overtime hour.

4. A blue-collar public employee should not be making more money than me. I think my semi-accomplished college education and white-collar career should grant me a right to earn more than every last one of the 7300 Port Authority employees, no matter how good they may be or how hard they might work.

"To put Rivera's salary in context, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo earns a salary of $179,000. The Post pointed out a few other ironically comparable salaries, including that of a Senior NASA rocket scientist assigned to the New York area ($155,000) and the pay for a New York State Supreme Court justice ($160,000). While they all technically are paid a higher salary than Rivera, their actual pay doesn't come close to his when all the overtime wages are factored in.

And it's far from the only lucrative year in overtime pay that Rivera has earned. According to government-transparency site SeeThroughNY, he earned more than $200,000 each year for the last three years, including a high of $259,304 in 2010."

Ottawa, I was not referring or commenting on the legitimacy of a PA Police Officer making $273K per year. I was merely showing my disgust that that PA police officers are being disparaged as "mall cops" when indeed they perform very real and vital police functions. Yes, my comment was irrelevant to the thread but that rarely stops people on StreetEasy and I was deeply offended by the "mall cop" reference. (And no I don't work for PAPD).

What other American jobs are dangerous and potentially deadly, and how does the pay compare?

NR: One thing to call them mall cops on here and another for a public official to do it. Would it be more appropriate to equate them to tourist police? Point though is more to Nada's point: why are guys with grade 12 education making $100,000+ a year and then a nice pension and to whoever said the piece about management. I don't have a problem with people getting overtime, but if you can work that many hours it likely points to a very slack job.

Lhota is not just a politician. He headed an agency with a significant police presence (transit police used to be their own force before Rudy)

Got it, you don't like the idea of a $108K plus pension for that type of job.

FWIW, it isn't my point. I just wasn't sure where the dislike was coming from.

Also, not sure why you see a correlation between 80 hours and a slack job. Places where 80 hours is standard are typically not considered slack -- medical residency, investment banking, etc.

Nada: I have worked a lot with police and military. It is very difficult to do a physical job for 80 hours a week effectively. It is also difficult to be able to do an intellectual job effectively for 80 hours, which is why bankers, lawyers etc get paid big bucks. Ask any med resident and they will tell you that working those type of hours are not effective and scary for those they treat.

We should be focusing our anger on university presidents, peoples. They're the real welfare queens.

You don't pay for jobs based on how hard they are to do over a given length of time, but based on whether there are other people willing to do the job for that money who are as qualified (and assuming those are the necessary qualifications). There is a huge waiting list of people who would like the job of PA police. That is because it is overpaid and pretty darned easy relative to normal NYPD police work.

And please do not talk of the dead on 9/11. They were police. They signed on for the job because they wanted to do that work. There are, and always will be, those whose instinct is to run towards danger. They are heroic. But they are not demigods nor above reproach in all other matters. There are many volunteers who do the same tasks throughtout the country and in this area for free. And if you are going to bring them up, remember that your chances of dying as a PA Officer were a lot less than were you an employee of Cantor Fitzgerald.

I will argue that overpaid public employees risk the well being of the public. The more you over pay them the less you can buy some other service (including more police) the public may want or need. There are no unlimited sources of tax revenue.

inonada
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Also, not sure why you see a correlation between 80 hours and a slack job. Places where 80 hours is standard are typically not considered slack -- medical residency, investment banking, etc.

The 80 hours is not "standard".
The jobs you are comparing to are exempt jobs - they don't pay OT.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/nyregion/cuomo-and-canadians-in-verbal-war-over-peace-bridge.html?hp&_r=0

Son of the NY Vice Chairman of the Peace Bridge gets role as toll collector. Son of Canadian GM gets role as charter pilot.

greensdale,

The 80 hours comparison was not made for OT or not OT. It is meant to show that working 80 hours a week does not make the nature of the work a "slack". You can argue that at the tail of the all these 80 hour week professions the productivity would go down, but the nature of those professions were not close to slack.

I don't see how you draw that conclusion.
I'm not saying I draw the opposite conclusion.

I drew that conclusion because inonada has explained his position on what he said on this already. I think he was making some sense this time.

Perhaps the hours don't correlate to easy vs difficult, but PA Police doesn't correlate to doctor or investment banker in too many other ways.

No one profession can be correlated with another one easily. It was the generalization that one poster made to say anyone can work 80 hr/wk must be in a slack type of work that brought up the doctors, lawyers and investment banker into the picture. Sometimes people really need to read thru these posts to understand the background of some posts.

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Media/Slideshow/2011/07/13/10-Insanely-Overpaid-Public-Employees.aspx

What about Jamie Dimon--a very well-paid public employee?

he gets 10's of millions a year and helped blow up the entire economy--and we taxpayers own his company--at least we own any catastrophioc losses, and we fund all operations at too big to fail zero interest rates?

cool with him?

How much would you pay Jamie?

Pensions and healthcare costs for city employees consume nearly 1/3 of the city's budget. A good first step would be for city employees to have money deducted from their paycheck to pay for part of their health insurance, like most private-sector employees.

http://politicker.com/2013/10/joe-lhota-releases-scariest-ad-yet/

http://politicker.com/2013/10/de-blasio-responds-to-lhotas-doomsday-ad-with-a-cheery-one/