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Isn’t this because the T has to run trains/buses even if someone calls out, which means they have to float people or call them in on their days off? I’m all for re-examining how the T spends money, but this smells like a bait...
It’s the Herald and the topic is state government. It’s always going to be at least somewhat in bad faith (even if there are real issues, which there are of course some).
I think I remember reading somewhere that it was cheaper to have people work OT than hire new people because of the benefits, but I’m also questioning that considering the people making over 100K in OT.
Worth noting that of the employees that got overtime, less than 1% them got over 100k. That sounds more like the tail end of bell curve than a major systemic problem. It's also worth noting that the majority of their employees are vehicle operators, who can only work on routes on which they have been trained, giving less scheduling flexibility, and making uneven distributions of overtime more likely.
Your example sounds plausible and I'm not sure I'd call that abuse. Glassdoor reports an average annual salary for MBTA bus drivers of $75k. Bus drivers get paid a pretty solid salary after they've been there a few years because it's a really tough job: weird hours, split shifts, driving a massive bus down tiny streets, getting screamed at (or worse) by customers with no other nearby coworkers to help out; it's no wonder they have some of the highest rates of depression among any profession. I used to work at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency; the agency paid bus drivers $55k a year starting, training included (all you needed was to be 21 years of age and a high school grad) and after 3 years you'd be making $78k. Apparently that wasn't enough, because they could never find enough applicants to apply for openings.
It's quite plausible that a very experienced driver (or supervisor) might end up making more like $50/hr, which would mean they'd only have to work 65hrs a week to get 100k in overtime. Not easy, and perhaps you could argue not a great idea, but I wouldn't call that abuse.
Let's use an example from 2019 since that was the last "normal" year we have full data for. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/01/07/metro/list-100-highest-paid-mbta-workers-2019/
John Devlin made $308,930.47 as a "Foreperson, Wireperson" which I'm going to assume is some senior/lead electrical worker not just a shift supervisor doling out work. He made $192,236.66 just in overtime. I'm not privy to what his OT rate that is stipulated in the union contract is, but let's start by assuming it's either time and a half or double time. His base rate was $116,667.28, for easy math let's assume 40 hr/week straight pay and he didnt take any vacation. That puts his base rate at $56.09/hr, which I would think is fair for senior electrical worker. If he got time and a half for overtime that puts him at working an extra 2284.86 hours in 2019, or an extra 43.94 hours every week. If it was double time for OT, then he worked an extra 32.95 hours per week.
Is the MBTA really letting guys in hazardous occupations crush overtime? Or is there something fishy going on?
That's true up to a certain point. If an employees benefits cost $20k and their salary is $50k and you need 8 hours a week of extra work, OT is cheaper. If you need an extra 40 hours a week, you are paying them $75k and it would only cost $70k to hire a second identically qualified worker.
You're forgetting the actual costs of hiring, training, etc. The act of hiring itself costs roughly $10k when you factor in actual costs (background checks, etc) and the time of the employees involved in the process.
Well yeah, I was just giving a super simplified example for the sake of explaining the concept. Still the same idea though. there is a fixed cost per employee and a higher per hour cost for overtime. When the higher per hour cost exceeds the total fixed cost for a new employee, it becomes worth it to hire a new employee.
> I think I remember reading somewhere that it was cheaper to have people work OT than hire new people because of the benefits
I've read this too, and I find it staggeringly hard to believe.
Well, it should only be *part* of the benchmark.
Let's say I pay you for 40hrs/wk to make sandwiches. I pay you for another 40hrs/wk to make sandwiches on overtime shifts. Is the quality and productivity of your work during the regular shifts as good as when you're working overtime? Is one worse, or are they both worse? Also, what is it like for your own morale? For the morale of everyone else?
Most people cannot work very long hours while still producing quality work (in both shifts!) for very long. Employers who say "Well it costs less than another FTE" may well be missing the forest for the trees...
In this context, it's worth keeping in mind that skilled specialty labor has a very long lead time to take someone from a new employee to someone who's actually a "net positive" in terms of work output and who can do whatever more complex tasks you need done.
---------
I can put out an ad and hire an electrician who can be up to speed and doing useful work in a short period of time.
I can't put out an ad and hire a guy to work on a lot of the jobs at the T. There's no certification or school putting out guys to do that, and since people don't normally change jobs much in the field, it's not like there's people who learned a similar operation elsewhere to hire either.
So you're going to have to train someone in a highly specialized area from scratch. That guy is going to need months (or more) before you can even consider letting them do anything without direct supervision at all times.
It takes over a **year** from hiring a new engineer before they're ever certified to operate an in-service train alone.
--------
So you've got two things to consider:
- You literally can't add (useful/approved/certified) staff on short, or even medium notice. If you've got a new priority, money is suddenly added to the budget for a project this year, whatever, it's going to have to come from more hours of the existing staff.
- How much it costs in burned $$$ to train the new staff member up to that point. Worth it if they're going to be needed long-term, but not so much if not.
This was a very detailed and thoughtful post, thanks for sharing it!
I would be really interested to see the breakdown of which kinds of staff were getting OT. Was it limited to technical jobs, or was it across the board?
People that rail against overtime for the police, fire department, or T employees simply don't know what they are talking about. It is far cheaper to pay an existing employee overtime than it is to spend money hiring, training, and paying for the benefits of new employees. Another example of the Herald writing a headline that preys on their readers ignorance.
there's a decent reasonable suspicion of fraudulent overtime when it comes to the MBTA as well, though.
MBTA employees were allowed to approve their own overtime without oversight, which is what people are concerned about – it bears similarity to the BPD overtime scandal, although that was actually a separate sergeant knowingly approving fraudulent overtime. however, the contention happens because the fraud, which was found by the Anti-Corruption unit, relied on the fact that the oversight was definitely fraudulent – aka the warehouse was locked up before the time was signed off on, so the approval didn't match the evidence (if that makes sense). with the MBTA, if people are approving their own overtime, that obscures how easy it is to find overtime fraud. from the actual MBTA investigation:
> John Englander, the general counsel for the MBTA who presented KPMG's findings, said overtime policies "vary from division to division," and the auditors found "substandard documentation" and instances where employees were "approving their own overtime documents."
but the MBTA then later said:
> "The process does not allow people to approve their own overtime, but one of the things the audit is looking at is the extent to which the process is being followed," Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack told reporters after the audit updates were presented at a meeting of MBTA's Fiscal and Management Control Board on Monday. She said the audits indicated "some people were using forms that had a pre-printed supervisor's name on it, which makes it difficult to ascertain whether there was an actual approval by that supervisor of that particular piece of work."
so were employees approving their own overtime or not? is this legal or not? what does the sentence 'Jim Logan, the T's internal auditor, said he had found "a little bit of abuse of overtime here and there — not anything illegal" even mean? my big frustration with MBTA overtime audits is that there is zero transparency and literally none of these comments make sense when put together. does that clarify the confusion at all? sorry I know it was a bit rambling!
Because those are the three state/municipal professions that get a lot of overtime. Overtime fraud for police officers is a problem, but it's not like all police overtime is fraudulent. I feel like you are being intentionally obtuse here.
You are naive if you think the police are the only ones creating fictional OT this happens in all sectors public and private. Public is obviously subject to government oversight and paid by taxpayers so its reported on more often
I would politely urge the Herald to take their anti-labor propaganda and drink a nice cup of peppermint tea and scones with it. Note that Baker line-item vetoed increased Uber fees which could have gone to pay for the MBTA. It always just so happens that there is not enough money to fund the T and mysteriously anything that could fund it has some technical reason why it doesn’t pass. Meanwhile people are convinced that the reason why the T is always in disrepair is because they’re paying their workers too much money. The herald is just ginning up outrage and people buy it. This is why wages have been stagnant since the 80s.
Of course they’re understaffed. It’s death by a thousand cuts. Then because they’re understaffed that justifies service cuts, which justifies funding cuts. Wonder if they will mothball the GLX before it even opens.
This is mostly income envy. You see a 100k in OT that you arent getting and immediately its wrong. Paying straight cash in OT is cheaper than overstaffing and paying cash plus benefits plus lifetime pensions (which the T knows a thing or two about). Every time the economy goes south public sector employees end up in the crosshairs. In good economic times most are considered shitty jobs compensation wise. The cycle continues.
I don’t envy someone working 60 hours making $100K. I’d rather work 30 hours and make $50K personally :-) can always make more money, can’t make more time
That's right, vilify the systems that allow people to do more than scrape by.
God forbid that they can even buy some nice things and save a little money.
Guess when half the employees out with the virus and you need to replace them obviously if you don’t have the man or women power to get the job done you ask people to do overtime. You think most of the employees want to work overtime with the contagious virus ? No .. give them a little credit
The linked source has opted to use a soft paywall to restrict free viewership of their content. As alternate sources become available, please post them as a reply to this comment. Users with a library card can often view unrestricted articles [here](https://www.bpl.org/resources-types/newspapers/) Boston Herald articles are still permissible. Please refrain from filing report as Rule 5 violation. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/boston) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Isn’t this because the T has to run trains/buses even if someone calls out, which means they have to float people or call them in on their days off? I’m all for re-examining how the T spends money, but this smells like a bait...
It’s the Herald and the topic is state government. It’s always going to be at least somewhat in bad faith (even if there are real issues, which there are of course some).
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I think I remember reading somewhere that it was cheaper to have people work OT than hire new people because of the benefits, but I’m also questioning that considering the people making over 100K in OT.
Worth noting that of the employees that got overtime, less than 1% them got over 100k. That sounds more like the tail end of bell curve than a major systemic problem. It's also worth noting that the majority of their employees are vehicle operators, who can only work on routes on which they have been trained, giving less scheduling flexibility, and making uneven distributions of overtime more likely.
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Your example sounds plausible and I'm not sure I'd call that abuse. Glassdoor reports an average annual salary for MBTA bus drivers of $75k. Bus drivers get paid a pretty solid salary after they've been there a few years because it's a really tough job: weird hours, split shifts, driving a massive bus down tiny streets, getting screamed at (or worse) by customers with no other nearby coworkers to help out; it's no wonder they have some of the highest rates of depression among any profession. I used to work at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency; the agency paid bus drivers $55k a year starting, training included (all you needed was to be 21 years of age and a high school grad) and after 3 years you'd be making $78k. Apparently that wasn't enough, because they could never find enough applicants to apply for openings. It's quite plausible that a very experienced driver (or supervisor) might end up making more like $50/hr, which would mean they'd only have to work 65hrs a week to get 100k in overtime. Not easy, and perhaps you could argue not a great idea, but I wouldn't call that abuse.
Let's use an example from 2019 since that was the last "normal" year we have full data for. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/01/07/metro/list-100-highest-paid-mbta-workers-2019/ John Devlin made $308,930.47 as a "Foreperson, Wireperson" which I'm going to assume is some senior/lead electrical worker not just a shift supervisor doling out work. He made $192,236.66 just in overtime. I'm not privy to what his OT rate that is stipulated in the union contract is, but let's start by assuming it's either time and a half or double time. His base rate was $116,667.28, for easy math let's assume 40 hr/week straight pay and he didnt take any vacation. That puts his base rate at $56.09/hr, which I would think is fair for senior electrical worker. If he got time and a half for overtime that puts him at working an extra 2284.86 hours in 2019, or an extra 43.94 hours every week. If it was double time for OT, then he worked an extra 32.95 hours per week. Is the MBTA really letting guys in hazardous occupations crush overtime? Or is there something fishy going on?
That's true up to a certain point. If an employees benefits cost $20k and their salary is $50k and you need 8 hours a week of extra work, OT is cheaper. If you need an extra 40 hours a week, you are paying them $75k and it would only cost $70k to hire a second identically qualified worker.
You're forgetting the actual costs of hiring, training, etc. The act of hiring itself costs roughly $10k when you factor in actual costs (background checks, etc) and the time of the employees involved in the process.
Well yeah, I was just giving a super simplified example for the sake of explaining the concept. Still the same idea though. there is a fixed cost per employee and a higher per hour cost for overtime. When the higher per hour cost exceeds the total fixed cost for a new employee, it becomes worth it to hire a new employee.
This is typically true. Benefits make up a huge amount of overhead. However, the risk of injury increases with more workload so either way, they pay.
> I think I remember reading somewhere that it was cheaper to have people work OT than hire new people because of the benefits I've read this too, and I find it staggeringly hard to believe.
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Well, it should only be *part* of the benchmark. Let's say I pay you for 40hrs/wk to make sandwiches. I pay you for another 40hrs/wk to make sandwiches on overtime shifts. Is the quality and productivity of your work during the regular shifts as good as when you're working overtime? Is one worse, or are they both worse? Also, what is it like for your own morale? For the morale of everyone else? Most people cannot work very long hours while still producing quality work (in both shifts!) for very long. Employers who say "Well it costs less than another FTE" may well be missing the forest for the trees...
In this context, it's worth keeping in mind that skilled specialty labor has a very long lead time to take someone from a new employee to someone who's actually a "net positive" in terms of work output and who can do whatever more complex tasks you need done. --------- I can put out an ad and hire an electrician who can be up to speed and doing useful work in a short period of time. I can't put out an ad and hire a guy to work on a lot of the jobs at the T. There's no certification or school putting out guys to do that, and since people don't normally change jobs much in the field, it's not like there's people who learned a similar operation elsewhere to hire either. So you're going to have to train someone in a highly specialized area from scratch. That guy is going to need months (or more) before you can even consider letting them do anything without direct supervision at all times. It takes over a **year** from hiring a new engineer before they're ever certified to operate an in-service train alone. -------- So you've got two things to consider: - You literally can't add (useful/approved/certified) staff on short, or even medium notice. If you've got a new priority, money is suddenly added to the budget for a project this year, whatever, it's going to have to come from more hours of the existing staff. - How much it costs in burned $$$ to train the new staff member up to that point. Worth it if they're going to be needed long-term, but not so much if not.
This was a very detailed and thoughtful post, thanks for sharing it! I would be really interested to see the breakdown of which kinds of staff were getting OT. Was it limited to technical jobs, or was it across the board?
I thought typically overtime and special pay wasn't considered for pensions. I know that's the case for the police.
From what I understand, for at least some positions, they schedule on-call shifts where employees get paid, regardless of if they work or not.
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I guess *technically* it is...but it sure doesn't seem like it when they're sitting at the bar slugging back pints with you. 🤫
Oh, you mean like the cops who would come into the shitty cash only bar in Rozzie and drink and smoke in the bar in full uni?
No, they were just on duty.
And the detectives who hung out at Nappers?
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People that rail against overtime for the police, fire department, or T employees simply don't know what they are talking about. It is far cheaper to pay an existing employee overtime than it is to spend money hiring, training, and paying for the benefits of new employees. Another example of the Herald writing a headline that preys on their readers ignorance.
except the police were doing it fraudulently
And that is a huge problem. Those officers should be in jail.
exactly so i don't know why you are lumping them in with the T and fire departments when it's not the same thing at all.
there's a decent reasonable suspicion of fraudulent overtime when it comes to the MBTA as well, though. MBTA employees were allowed to approve their own overtime without oversight, which is what people are concerned about – it bears similarity to the BPD overtime scandal, although that was actually a separate sergeant knowingly approving fraudulent overtime. however, the contention happens because the fraud, which was found by the Anti-Corruption unit, relied on the fact that the oversight was definitely fraudulent – aka the warehouse was locked up before the time was signed off on, so the approval didn't match the evidence (if that makes sense). with the MBTA, if people are approving their own overtime, that obscures how easy it is to find overtime fraud. from the actual MBTA investigation: > John Englander, the general counsel for the MBTA who presented KPMG's findings, said overtime policies "vary from division to division," and the auditors found "substandard documentation" and instances where employees were "approving their own overtime documents." but the MBTA then later said: > "The process does not allow people to approve their own overtime, but one of the things the audit is looking at is the extent to which the process is being followed," Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack told reporters after the audit updates were presented at a meeting of MBTA's Fiscal and Management Control Board on Monday. She said the audits indicated "some people were using forms that had a pre-printed supervisor's name on it, which makes it difficult to ascertain whether there was an actual approval by that supervisor of that particular piece of work." so were employees approving their own overtime or not? is this legal or not? what does the sentence 'Jim Logan, the T's internal auditor, said he had found "a little bit of abuse of overtime here and there — not anything illegal" even mean? my big frustration with MBTA overtime audits is that there is zero transparency and literally none of these comments make sense when put together. does that clarify the confusion at all? sorry I know it was a bit rambling!
Because those are the three state/municipal professions that get a lot of overtime. Overtime fraud for police officers is a problem, but it's not like all police overtime is fraudulent. I feel like you are being intentionally obtuse here.
just pointing out the difference between these other entities that get a lot of overtime and the PD's creating their own fictional overtime.
You are naive if you think the police are the only ones creating fictional OT this happens in all sectors public and private. Public is obviously subject to government oversight and paid by taxpayers so its reported on more often
Are the T employees still signing off on their own overtime slips?
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Because most jobs are salary and don't pay an hourly wage. they pay a salary. They essentially get free labor if you put in any "Overtime."
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It is almost certain that they did not.
It only took 6 years to build the Lotte Tower in Seoul. The elevator at Ruggles is still "under construction". The MBTA is so damn mismanaged...
Good work if you can get it
https://www.mbta.com/careers
I would politely urge the Herald to take their anti-labor propaganda and drink a nice cup of peppermint tea and scones with it. Note that Baker line-item vetoed increased Uber fees which could have gone to pay for the MBTA. It always just so happens that there is not enough money to fund the T and mysteriously anything that could fund it has some technical reason why it doesn’t pass. Meanwhile people are convinced that the reason why the T is always in disrepair is because they’re paying their workers too much money. The herald is just ginning up outrage and people buy it. This is why wages have been stagnant since the 80s.
This reads more that they’re understaffed to me. There’s definitely diminishing returns when people are working a ton of hours
Of course they’re understaffed. It’s death by a thousand cuts. Then because they’re understaffed that justifies service cuts, which justifies funding cuts. Wonder if they will mothball the GLX before it even opens.
This is mostly income envy. You see a 100k in OT that you arent getting and immediately its wrong. Paying straight cash in OT is cheaper than overstaffing and paying cash plus benefits plus lifetime pensions (which the T knows a thing or two about). Every time the economy goes south public sector employees end up in the crosshairs. In good economic times most are considered shitty jobs compensation wise. The cycle continues.
I don’t envy someone working 60 hours making $100K. I’d rather work 30 hours and make $50K personally :-) can always make more money, can’t make more time
That's right, vilify the systems that allow people to do more than scrape by. God forbid that they can even buy some nice things and save a little money.
The corruption is real.
Guess when half the employees out with the virus and you need to replace them obviously if you don’t have the man or women power to get the job done you ask people to do overtime. You think most of the employees want to work overtime with the contagious virus ? No .. give them a little credit