The discussion that accompanied this photo in reddit’s business section was interesting. Some immediately recognized this as exploitative by the workers earning the money, evidence that government, unlike private enterprise is rife with inefficiency. Others rushed to the defense of labor – so what if workers are taking advantage of overtime pay to earn more money.
Even if the workers are merely “taking advantage of overtime pay,” this is still an indictment of government. There’s no reason a manager should allow so much time-and-a-half pay that workers get $100k for cleaning transit cars. It’d be more efficient to hire more people. Of course, government isn’t bound by market forces which demand efficiency. When a company is inefficient is loses profit or goes out of business. When a government is inefficient, taxes are increased and its budget goes up.
this is in no way a defense of these salaries, (wtf? i am in the wrong field, i need to start cleaning subways), but… technically, if you have strict hiring/firing rules in place that you cant get around, overtime pay like this could actually be more efficent for dealing with temporary spikes in workload because you dont have to pay overhead/pension/etc to another employee that you might not be able to get rid of.
There is no way a private company providing the same service would have these expenses. You’re taking overhead/pensions for granted. A private company would find a way around these costs, or perish.
of course Im taking overhead/pensions for granted, I dont live in unicornfairyland, these are real costs that private companies face – any company that deals with a union or has existing contracts with workers ensuring pensions, healthcare, etc is going to have the same problem. Hiring/firing is actually a fairly costly process for any organization, and thats why its often more efficient to pay overtime rather than hire more people during temp spikes in workload.
Now, does this explain 100k+ salaries for subway cleaners? Probably not, but I think that just dismissing any other alternative explanation than “100k is too much for santitation, therefore the problem is government sucks” is pretty lazy. You are taking a couple of pieces of totally noncontextual data and jumping right into the same old conclusion as always. Not that I think the conclusion is wrong, I just think that without knowing anything about how much private companies pay in overtime, etc, you have no basis to say that this would never happen in a private company.
that said, on a related note: www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/22/new-york-teachers-paid-to_n_219336.html …. this def doesnt happen in the private sector (except in japan).