
San Francisco Troubles – 19,000 Highly Paid City Employees Earned $150k - RestlessMind
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/09/01/why-san-francisco-is-in-trouble--19000-highly-compensated-city-employees-earned-150000-in-pay--perks/#59287f283769
======
RestlessMind
Interesting paragraph:

We found truck drivers loaded up with $262,898; city painters making $270,190;
firefighters earning $316,306; and plumbing supervisors cleaning up $348,291
_every year_. One deputy sheriff earned $574,595 last year – including
$315,896 in _overtime_.

~~~
_delirium
Regarding the example of a cop who made more in overtime than his base salary:
This has gotten very common in the past few decades. Police doing huge amounts
of overtime with almost no approval needed (or even basic oversight that this
is useful/actual work) is a problem in a lot of jurisdictions. The original
idea is that you shouldn't need to get special approval for a public-safety
emergency. But in practice, it's become a norm in many places, with police
resisting any attempt to decrease routine use of overtime and limit it to
emergencies.

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6gvONxR4sf7o
Paying these people a high salary seems fine to me. Good on them for
collective bargaining to not have to commute half their lives. Paying them an
equally high pension just makes me feel sad. Here I am running the rat race to
save enough to retire, but I'm not making much more than they are, and
including retirement, making much less (the retiring fire chief will make more
than $300k/year for the rest of her life?!?). Maybe I should have gone into
public service.

~~~
jMyles
> a high salary seems fine to me...collective bargaining...

Is that what you see in this story? To me, it just seems like overtime abuse.

~~~
thelean12
If a tech worker has half their compensation in bonuses and equity, is that
bonus and equity abuse?

It could just be a different compensation structure to get fair pay.

That being said, I don't want to claim to know what a "fair" compensation is
here. $80k, $100k, $150k, doesn't matter. If $150k is too high, then fix the
compensation structure. Don't blame it on "overtime abuse" or some other
reason that blames the workers for getting as much as they can from their job.

~~~
jMyles
> blames the workers for getting as much as they can from their job.

Is that what you think I'm doing? Is there any evidence that "the workers" are
getting as much as they can? It seems that a small percentage of workers,
mostly in positions of power over other workers, are gaming the system in a
way that does not benefit the public they're supposed to serve.

------
tmpz22
@Mods the actual title is "19,000 Highly Compensated City Employees Earned
$150,000+ In Pay & Perks" and there is a later quote of "18,759 highly
compensated employees from each bringing home pay packages worth $150,000 (or
more) annually."

It seems to me that the current title editorialized the post to seem like its
$150k+ in salary when in fact it seems to be factoring pension and other
elements.

~~~
RestlessMind
It didn't fit in the title length guidelines for HN and I had to shave off a
few characters. Mind suggesting a better paraphrasing of the entire title?

~~~
tmpz22
Perhaps "San Francisco Troubles - 19,000 City Employees earned $150k in Pay &
Perks"? Given that "Highly paid" is subjective and a source of contention even
in this thread.

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havelhovel
I wish the lower and middle classes would stop begrudging each other’s
thousands and start focusing on the millions and billions being raked in by
corporations and the rich.

~~~
refurb
I don't care what corporations pay their people, that's not my money.

I care what the gov't pays people, because that's my money.

~~~
Johnny555
But when the corporations don't pay employees a living wage and they end up on
welfare, that's your money too.

~~~
cscurmudgeon
Is there a scientific study that shows a causation, or at least a correlation,
between X and Y:

X: "start focusing on the millions and billions being raked in by corporations
and the rich"

and

Y: "corporations don't pay employees a living wage and they end up on welfare"

~~~
WalterSear
> Walmart's low-wage workers cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $6.2 billion in
> public assistance including food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing,
> according to a report published by Americans for Tax Fairness, a coalition
> of 400 national and state-level progressive groups.

[https://www.worldhunger.org/report-walmart-workers-cost-
taxp...](https://www.worldhunger.org/report-walmart-workers-cost-
taxpayers-6-2-billion-public-assistance)

~~~
refurb
A progressive group blames Walmart? No surprise there.

I guess the alternative is what? Get rid of Walmart jobs? Will people be
better off then?

~~~
oarsinsync
> I don't care what corporations pay their people, that's not my money. I care
> what the gov't pays people, because that's my money.

You’ve just been given an example that demonstrates the two are linked, with
corporations underpaying their staff, subsidised by the government.

Do you have the same opposition to govt subsidies on underpaid private workers
as to do for what you presumably consider to be overpaid public workers?

Note that Walmart is posting billions in net (not gross) profits, while the
employees are using food stamps.

~~~
rtx
Isn't there a minimum wage law in USA, I doubt corporation of this size will
be so balant.

~~~
WalterSear
Hasn't increased to keep up with the cost of living in 50 years.

[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-
finance/022615/can-family-survive-us-minimum-
wage.aspEwjDkK6Z-cnrAhXIup4KHXsGDSMQFjABegQIDRAG&usg=AOvVaw00UFpgEXOpyxzhx5CW1MZg)

~~~
rtx
Shouldn't the voters be responsible for that instead of Walmart. This looks
like a way to blame Walmart for ignoring your democratic duties.

~~~
pas
Blaming Walmart while lamenting the shortcomings of the system can be done at
the same time.

Usually blaming big corps is a bit more effective than trying to untangle US
democracy/politics (first past the post, healthcare/education costs
skyrocketing, employment and health insurance too strongly entwined, race,
religion and ideology takes the center stage not poverty, because path
dependence of the affected groups).

------
jake_morrison
The biggest problem here is the overtime. Instead of employing full time
people, they milk the system to generate more overtime hours.

~~~
pas
What's the total cost of an employee that earns 150K or 200K in CA?

Usually the argument is that hiring one more employee would be more costly,
but I'm not familiar with the exact numbers.

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spectramax
As someone who moved into this city, after a year I see nothing good about San
Francisco. It’s a shithole with every well off person in their little castles
of crumbling houses that are worth $2.5M.

As a staunch democrat, I always wonder - why are cities in Red states such as
Austin, Houston, Phoenix, Raleigh, Dallas have so much better infrastructure
than Portland, Seattle, LA and San Francisco? Pot holes everywhere and
homelessness out of control.

~~~
mikeyouse
The original sin in California is Prop 13. Nearly all of our budget and
housing issues can be traced back to that god awful ballot proposition. With
high housing costs comes increased homelessness, higher wages for public
employees, larger pension liabilities, and on and on.

~~~
centimeter
There is zero evidence that homelessness is caused to any substantial degree
by high housing costs. The kind of people who are chronically homeless at
$3000/mo/1br are also chronically homeless at $1000/mo/1br. They usually have
some kind of mental problem or drug addiction, not just “they can’t afford
rent”. The people at the margins of being able to afford housing usually just
move elsewhere, rather than end up on the streets.

~~~
cheriot
High housing costs make people financially vulnerable. Then all it takes is
illness or an unexpected bill to miss rent and get evicted.

High housing costs mean housing vouchers cover fewer people with its budget.

> They usually have some kind of mental problem or drug addiction, not just
> “they can’t afford rent”.

I suspect you're making assumptions based on the more visible homeless people
you see, but if there's any data to back that up I'd love to see it.

calmatters.org does some of the best reporting on housing and homelessness
topics. For example [https://calmatters.org/explainers/californias-
homelessness-c...](https://calmatters.org/explainers/californias-homelessness-
crisis-explained/)

~~~
refurb
SFgov 2019 survey on homelessness (page 70) [1]

 _" Do you have any of the following health conditions?"_

Drug or alcohol abuse - 37%

Any psychiatric or emotional condition - 35%

Those are the top two health conditions identified. There is obviously overlap
since the total of all of the answers is >100%.

[1][https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-
content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep...](https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-
content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDReport_SanFrancisco_FinalDraft-1.pdf)

~~~
DanBC
If the argument is how people become homeless, rather than why they stay
homeless, we need to be a little bit careful with causal direction.

Some people become homeless because they are mentally ill and can't maintain a
tenancy.

Some people develop a mental illness after becoming homeless because it's
living on the street is pretty stressful.

------
gerbler
> On average, the city’s 44,526 employees received pay and perks costing
> taxpayers $131,335 apiece. Four out of ten – 18,749 city workers – received
> a compensation package exceeding $150,000 per year.

The style of summarizing this data is not good. Taking some arbitrary high-bar
and then averaging it, is twisting the data to their purpose. There clearly
are high salaries in there, but saying X truck-drivers earned an average of Y,
when you exclude all of the low-paid ones is just misrepresentation of the
data.

------
tehwebguy
I’m sure there is plenty of waste but also maybe the city doesn’t want every
single one of their employees to have a multi-hour commute each way?

------
mixologic
Maybe take every number in this article and divide it by 2.7 Cost of living in
San Francisco is roughly 270% of the national average.

~~~
centimeter
Most people don’t spend 100% of their income on CoL. If you make $150k in SF,
you have more surplus than if you make $50k in Madison (unless you really suck
at budgeting).

~~~
cameldrv
The starting salary for a Madison cop is $52k. SF is $89k. That's $3k more per
month, before tax. The mortgage on a 3 bedroom house in Madison is $1400. In
San Francisco, it's $7500. You'd be spending more on a mortgage payment than
your take home pay.

~~~
dionidium
The problem with this kind of comparison is that it attempts to compare like-
for-like housing (and transportation) arrangements, when obviously people in
San Francisco have different living arrangements than people in Madison. When
I moved from St. Louis to NYC I didn't expect to live in exactly the same kind
of arrangements and it would have been absurd to calculate my cost of living
based on the assumption that I would. And, yet, that's what most COL
calculators try to do, rendering them practically useless.

~~~
cameldrv
But why do they have different living arrangements? Because SF/NYC is more
expensive, i.e. the cost of living is higher.

Perhaps you value other things like having access to cultural activities, etc,
but if you want the same material standard of living, it's much more expensive
in these cities.

~~~
dionidium
One does not have the "same material standard of living" in identical houses
independent of where the houses are located. That's why the costs are
different in the first place. You're imagining that the real estate can be
valued in the abstract, independent of its location. But it can't. If you have
two identical houses, one in Manhattan and one in suburban Arizona, the one in
Manhattan represents a _vastly_ higher material standard of living.

------
shubhamjain
That's one reason I advocate better accountability before shouting "raise
taxes on rich." Want to see another example? Number of fires being reported is
nearly 1/3rd of what was in 1970s. And yet the number of firefighters on
payroll has only gone up [1]. Yes, firefighters do respond to medical
emergencies but most of the times it's redundant.

"Some people — including Tabarrok and other libertarian economists — think
that dispatching huge trucks loaded with firefighters to respond to every
medical call made to 911 is not an ideal situation.

'Typically, they'll get there a minute or two before an ambulance does, and in
some cases they start treatment,' Tabarrok says. 'In my view, it's mostly
redundant. Other people will say that getting there earlier can save a life,
but most of the time it has no bearing whatsoever.'"

[1]: [https://www.vox.com/2014/10/30/7079547/fire-firefighter-
decl...](https://www.vox.com/2014/10/30/7079547/fire-firefighter-decline-
medical)

~~~
rightbyte
Why not? Otherwise the firefighters would just play landhockey and BBC in the
wait for fires like where I live.

~~~
refurb
They are paying them anyways, so I see your point. But I believe they bill for
each response as well.

~~~
rightbyte
Ye obviously it is possible to screw up even a good idea with billing for
redundant communal emergency resources.

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_jn
Hate when people earn enough to live in the city they work in.

~~~
cscurmudgeon
You should rather hate when NIMBYism increases prices to benefit the
generationally rich.

------
hackeraccount
Public sector unions are toxic.

