Posted on 11/02/2016 5:53:32 AM PDT by artichokegrower
Liang Zhao Zhang’s job is to clean up BART stations in downtown San Francisco and clean up he does: He swept in $162,000 in overtime pay last year, records show.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
Zhang's supervisor should be terminated for poor use of manpower resources but that will never happen as it is a government job.
-PJ
Not a low pressure gig with all those bums in BART stations.
Also, he does work as a janitor cleaning public toilets in San Fransicko, god only knows the disgusting mess this man has to deal with on a daily basis: He may be underpaid.
Dome folks immigrateto the US and sign up for every taxpayer-funded freebie they can find; others work theit *sses off.
I say good for Zhang.
It comes down to being a manager and managing your resources. With his overtime compensation BART could have hired 1.5 additional workers including the benefit load to do the work on regular time. How efficient is a worker doing manual labor after 40 hours, 60 hours, 80 hours?
Is there any — any — question that the government workers are the ruling class who maintain their position by leeching off of productive taxpayers? Taxpayers who, incidentally, make much, much less than the government workers in terms of pay and benefits. We are moving back to a feudal nobility system where certain people make a fortune that isn’t remotely tied to their productivity or value. It happens over and over again.
Remember when Chris Christie was holding those town halls 4 or 5 years ago when he was trying to cut NJ state worker benefits by a slight amount? Remember the sanctimonious teacher who said she should make $100K a year with full benefits because she taught kids and had an education master’s degree? Government workers think they should be paid an absolute fortune even though the private market wouldn’t remotely bear their cost. But, like this guy and the NJ teacher, they can force the market to bear their cost because they get it through taxes.
If there is one reason why I’m enthusiastic about voting for Trump, its because I think he’ll start digging into the government bureaucracy and firing government workers. People like this, at the federal level at least, will start to go.
Father “How do you propose to support my daughter? Are you employed?”
Fiance: “Yes...I clean public lavatories!”
Father: “Is there a promotion involved?”
Fiance: “Yeah Squire,After a year they give me a brush!”
Monty Python.
As for the overtime: an open question is whether overtime is justified. I have no idea about BART's staffing and work culture. In theory, janitorial services in a transit system should be a relatively steady state operation. If employees are doing their jobs in regular hours, overtime calls should be rare.
But put that aside: if there is a legitimate need for overtime, someone needs to do it, and I wouldn't fault an ambitious employee for taking all he can get. Other employees, however, presumably want to pick up some extra cash as well. The fact that this one fellow is able to get so much overtime suggests that he is a high seniority employee and is exercising his union rights. That would lend credence to the pension spiking question.
In other words, this may be primarily a pension reform story. That's just speculation, but I'd be interested in the answer.
He’s really looking forward to the bump to $15 an hour. He won’t buy the BART. He’ll buy a south seas island.
red
That is a fair statement.
This official cashed out from BART with $410,000
When BART’s longtime chief transportation officer retired in early 2014, he did so in style.
Rodolfo “Rudy” Crespo cashed out with $410,945 worth of unused sick, holiday and vacation time, according to data newly compiled by the watchdog nonprofit group behind the website Transparent California.
It was the largest such payout for a public employee in the state in 2014, the nonprofit found, and more than double the $171,000 annual salary that Crespo earned at the end of his 40-year career with BART.
But that wasn’t all. Between his vacation, holiday and sick time payout, along with $148,000 in compensation — most of it from his pension — Crespo collected more than $559,000 the year he retired, according to figures provided to us by BART and the state’s public employee retirement system, CalPERS.
BART records show that Crespo got $232,439 for banked vacation leave. Another $125,307 was for unused sick days (paid at 50 cents on the dollar), and $52,949 was for accrued holiday pay. The agency couldn’t translate those dollar figures to Crespo’s total number of banked days, and Crespo didn’t return our calls.
BART spokeswoman Alica Trost said the transit agency has tightened holiday and sick-time banking rules — at least in one respect. Workers can no longer take “terminal leave,” in which they exit their jobs but stay on the books as paid employees while they burn up their vacation and holiday pay.
That practice allowed them to rack up additional raises, vacation and sick pay long after they were actually gone — and boost their pensions in the process.
Although Crespo’s cash-out topped the state for 2014, his case still pales compared with that of BART’s former $298,700-a-year general manager, Dorothy Dugger, who amassed 80 weeks of unused vacation and sick time in her 20 years at the agency.
To pay it off, BART allowed Dugger to take terminal leave, which kept her on the books as an employee for more than 19 months while paying her a total of $431,199.
This on top of $920,000 that BART had to pay Dugger after its Board of Directors botched an attempt to fire her in 2011
Fiance: (Cough-cough) “Sorry Squire, I gobbed on your carpet.”
I don’t know why people bitch about terminal leave and untaken sick, and vacation, it’s earned and accrued time and as long as they pay it at straight time based on the period (year) accrued it’s fair...
For cleaning up in San Francisco ? That’s not enough.
I think most private employers have a max vacation accrual, after which you need to “use it or lose it”. These government agencies allow unlimited accrual. The second problem is when they retire and “cash in” the unused time, that amount is included in the pension calculation, which is absurd. I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing the hours are all valued at their current salary rate. Seems likely since they use every scheme imaginable to spike their payouts.
It really depends on the individual. Some people are willing to work like dogs for 12 hours 7 days a week, while others just mail it in for their 40 hours/week. We really don't have any way of knowing whether this guy earned the money or not.
I don't like the tone of the article that implies this guy is doing something wrong.
The big deal is if there’s so much need for overtime, then there’s a greater need to hire more janitors. At time and a half pay, they could have hired another janitor and saved the budget that extra .5. Poor management. Imagine how messed up the rest of the budget is.
That said, Zang is one smart guy. Nowhere else could he bring in that kind of money for that skill level.
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