Comments on: Hire Some More Freaking People

By: markm

markm — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:38:13 +0000

Ignatius:
“Because of the rapid growth of fringe benefits including retirement and health care filling needed shifts on overtime has become significantly cheaper than hiring new employees; benefits are mostly fixed per employee and are not changed by how much overtime the employee works.”

But that savings will disappear fast when you have to start paying for mistakes made by people after a week of double shifts. Especially older people, and judging by the base salaries, the ones doing the most overtime are probably just about to retire. I strongly suspect that BART pensions do depend on the last year’s pay, *including overtime*, so they aren’t saving that much either – although the pension inflation may come out of someone else’s budget until the public pension fund has to come back on the taxpayers to cover shortages.

By: ParatrooperJJ

ParatrooperJJ — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:04:55 +0000

It is cheaper to pay overtime then to hire a new employee. Keep in mind that once they hire someone that employee will never be fired.

By: Highway

Highway — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:50:55 +0000

They also tend to do things like enact a ‘hiring freeze’. This way they can move covering those hours off of one part of the budget into another. And a lot of the time, the ‘hiring freeze’ is done with the full support of the current workers and their union, because it guarantees them a bunch of overtime.

And I’d bet that being agency workers, they play both sides of the street: First complaining about how overworked they are with all this overtime, then complaining when their overtime shifts might be cut because it’s a loss of income that they’re now used to.

By: RobTzu

RobTzu — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:31:07 +0000

My job is like that. It is Union. It is hard to fire people. So they are loathe to hire them. Unions make companies less nimble in that regard, amongst others.

By: Marla Singer

Marla Singer — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:15:48 +0000

While I understand the inclination to drop “…well, overtime is actually cheaper than deploying the full benefits package we’d otherwise have to,” as an explanation (but I hope not an excuse) all this really translates to is “…well, overtime is actually cheaper than paying the simply obscene long-term agreements successively spineless city and state governments have cut year after year to cash in short-term political gains.”

By: bryan

bryan — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:16:48 +0000

Ignatius, I see your point regarding benefits, but just by looking at the list one thing stands out. The folks with the higher base pay appear to be the ones pulling in the most overtime. When your sr. and most expensive folks are doing the lion’s share of the OT, it is clearly a reward, not a smart business decision.

By: IgotBupkis

IgotBupkis — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:51:52 +0000

> they no longer have foreman positions. Foreworker? Itâ€™s a bit awkward.

Well, you do have a problem when you have up to *7* different common gender-orientations — more if you include bestiality-orientations… LOL.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:43:53 +0000

If your benefits have a value that is more than 50% of your base pay, then it is cheaper to pay you 1-1/2 times your base pay per hour than it is to hire someone else and pickup another full benefits package.

By: Evil Red Scandi

Evil Red Scandi — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:04:45 +0000

I agree with smurfy that overtime can be an effective way to deal with highly variable scheduling concerns, but what could possibly be more scheduled than a train service? I’m being serious here. This has got to be one of the easiest scheduling / staffing management projects possible in a large organization that’s not “9 to 5″

By: smurfy

smurfy — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:46:58 +0000

The other thing I found interesting is that they no longer have foreman positions. Foreworker? It’s a bit awkward.
“I canâ€™t in my wildest dreams imagine such overtime being paid in my company year in and year out.”
I agree, and I’m in utilities. We’ve always got people on call and you have to respond to outages in the middle of the night. Outage work can only be contracted out in the very largest outages. These guys make a high hourly wage and without new construction, they’re sitting on their hands most of the time. It make sense to keep the workforce small and use overtime to cover your highly-variable outage work. Even so, our guys see at best 40-50% of their base pay in OT. When you have people over 100%, you’ve definitely got management issues. But look at the list, senior this senior that, the managers themselves are the worst abusers.