I should add that 101 college football coaches make more than President Obama and an untold number make more than all governors (top pay for a Governor is less than $190,00 a year). It is true that President Obama isn’t ‘the boss’ of any state football coaches but the governors are if they are part of a state university system.
I don’t see a huge problem with that in general if they are generating revenue overall. $190,000 isn’t a King’s Ransom. There are probably lots of state employees and especially contractors that make more than that. If you need a top state medical director with an MD, I doubt you will find many candidates if you paid them less than the typical governor salary. The same is true for good engineers and even really good contract programmers.
I would imagine it’s not rare in commercial sales. I used to do compensation for a telecoms firm in the 1990s, when things were booming. Sales reps who brought in a couple of million dollar accounts (new revenue of $1m a year, typically on a 3-5 year contract, would get 5-10% of the annual revenue in commissions and bonuses. I would see checks of $75k to $100k going out quite often in the upper-end sales force (maybe 120 sales reps). Certainly we had W-2s of $250k plus for at least ten sales reps a year for three or four years. Most years it was the same group of guys. These reps nominal managers topped out at $150k or so even with good bonuses. The next level (branch managers) might get salaries and bonuses that exceeded $200k occasionally.
But the really big money was in the stock options the branch managers and up would get. Some of them got options each year that turned out to be worth millions just a couple of years later. Unfortunately for those who didn’t exercise and sell, they were nothing after anothe couple of years when the NASDAQ crashed.
I’m a legal secretary. At my current firm, about 9 or 10 years ago, I was assigned to a junior associate with the directive to “whip her into shape.” This turned out to be a task bigger than Hercules and the Agean Stables, but I did my best. At one point, the office manager let it slip that I was being paid more than the associate. As a senior secretary, I was worth more to the firm than her, which is really sad, as I am overhead and she was, theoretically, bringing in revenue. She was eventually encouraged to leave the firm to “pursue other interests”
Yeah, law firms…I was a paralegal. One year when we were doing a lot of due diligence, one of the junior associates and I were doing essentially the same job, reading contracts (in poorly lit conference rooms) until we both needed reading glasses and then going back to our offices to catch up on our regular stuff (different jobs this time). During the course of that year I out-earned her by virtue of the fact that I got overtime, even though she had a much higher base salary. However, she got that salary whether she worked overtime or not, and I didn’t, and the overtime wasn’t always there. (Although as a junior associate she pretty much put in 90-hour weeks all the time.)
But I think I was worth it because I was the one that wrote the crazy macro so that all we had to do was type minimal info into our laptops, and then my macro put it in a spread sheet so we could manipulate the data, which saved both of us a hell of a lot of tie in those badly lit conference rooms.
In higher ed, there area few positions that might be paid higher than their bosses. The ones that immediately come to mind are all people who are specialists in their fields and could be making a lot more in the private sector, so the university will offer them something marginally on par. Doctors/medical specialists who direct student health centers are one such category, lawyers with private sector expertise in areas such as union negotiation are another. Oh, also schools will often bring someone in from the real world to manage endowments or pension funds.
Obviously this all depends on the type of school, a small college whose health service is a glorified school nurses’s office will probably not have this level of director, but a large university that is essentially running a full service clinic with specialty areas will.
I know you are joking but strippers are usually independent contractors rather than employees. Many of them actually pay the club owner for the right perform there. On any given night, they could suffer a net loss or make a several thousand dollar profit depending on the clientele and what they are willing to do. The club owner has to provide them with security and dressing rooms where they can take a break as part of the deal.
The best ones can make some extremely serious cash especially on hot nights but some shifts may end up with nothing.
High school head football coaches frequently make more than their superiors in Georgia, since assistant principals are considered their superiors. The principal has to make more by law.
I’d guess that head coaches in other states’ high schools may be allowed to make more than the principal.
Last year, for example, all the firm’s partners actually had to contribute money a couple of times to keep the firm afloat. The associates and all staff got paid on time, every month. Luckily for me, that’s rare.
That’s true of any private business. That’s why employees are called employees, and the owner is called the boss.
(And I love the way lawyers don’t use the word employee–apparently, it’s not dignified enough. So instead, they call themselves “associates”–which is the same term Walmart uses for its employees. )
Waiting at the high-end restaurants in NYC is a very much coveted job. It’s a career, and not a job you do until you get your break in show biz, like the people waiting at short order places and coffee shops. The people who have been working there the longest get the choice of shifts, and regular customers who ask to be in their sections. They can clear $500 in tips a night. The have to work either a Friday or a Saturday, but they usually only work two or three other nights (10-12 hr. shifts).
Now, the cost of living is high in NYC, and it may take a week every month just to earn their rent, and they own their (uniform) clothes, and pay their own dry cleaning. Jobs in these types of restaurants usually have benefits, because they want the workers to stay long-term.
Professors base salaries are not higher than the salary of the university president, but if a teaching professor publishes a lot, and takes a sabbatical, gets a research grant to write something that gets adopted as a textbook by a lot of schools, bringing in revenue, and takes some salary in bonds or other investments (an option some schools have, that allow investment before taxes, a professors total take-home might top anyone in admin, and admins don’t usually have time for anything else. It’s going to take a pretty determined workaholic like my father, who also took other university posts, like curator of the Slavic studies collection, or chair of the Russian & E. European Institute, that had small stipends, though
Well, they are a little different from Walmart employees. For one thing, their schedules are a little more, flexible, and for another, they generate billable hours. Lastly, they may be on a partner track, and few people who stock the shelves at Walmart are going to be CEOs. Being as associate is more like being a medical intern.
They often aren’t employees actually. They are almost never (in my experience) hourly employees. If they’re employees at all, they’re mostly exempt employees to whom overtime regulations (among other things) do not apply. You almost never hear (and to my knowledge most attorneys don’t consider themselves) attorneys referred to as employees. The employees of a firm are typically the non-attorney staff - paralegals, legal secretaries, various other support staff.
Plus, “associate” at a law firm is basically code. It’s code for “this guy has less experience and will be working primarily under the (at least theoretical) supervision of a more senior attorney, therefore we will be billing his time at a reduced rate”. Also, most law firms have three “classes” of attorney - there are “partners” (who are typically owners of the firm in some fashion and are mostly experienced and seasoned professionals in their branch), there are “of counsel” (who are experienced, but are not usually current owners of the firm - they’re often either specialists or retired partners) and there are “associates” (who are all the other attorneys, ranging from “still shiny from law school” to “borderline partner era skill”). Most firms set their hourly rates for each class of attorney.
As Aangelica pointed out, “associate” means something specific in law, accounting, consulting and other professional services firms. Basically a professional employee who is on a track to partner (ownership) or principal (non-ownership senior management). In consulting, there is typically a more junior level called “analyst” as well and sometimes middle manager titles like “Director” or “Managing Consultant”.
Basically they boil down to “finders”, “minders” and “grinders”. Other employees like the admin assistants, office managers, paralegals tend to be considered “support staff”.
I’m still surprised by partners earning less than associates due to profit sharing. I know a lot of their income is tied to profit sharing, but I sort of figured if they weren’t getting a bonus, no one was.
Almost everywhere a Registered Nurse makes more than her direct line supervisor, (used to be Head Nurse, now can be called Nurse Manager, Team Lead, Care Coordinator or some other thing, personally I don’t like it when my boss doesn’t have “Nurse” in the title.) At least here in Canada, Nurses in most hospitals are unionized, and when you add in shift differential, overtime, statuatory holiday pay, etc we out earn our 830-430 supervisors, who are generally on salary, or if on hourly they still do not get things like “double time and a half” for working Christmas. On the other hand, they don’t have kids waiting to open presents until Mommy gets home.
I wasn’t even at the top of my wage grid, but when I left working in a hospital for management in a company (90% paperwork, a very small but critcal part involved me being a nurse) I took over a 20% pay cut. Teaching nursing similarly pays only a percentage of the wages.
One year a particularly driven co worker of mine had a full time job at our hospital and a 40% time job at another hospital. Plus she pulled extra overtime whenever she could get it. She made the so-called “Sunshine List” (published report of public employees making more than 100,000 a year. 114,600. She was also the cheapest woman I ever knew; some of her behavior and “thriftiness” bordered on theft, and because nothing was ever proved and exposed I will leave it at that.
What I was too late to add in an edit… when something mysteriously disappeared from our unit there were people who would call it a “One Fourteen Six” deduction. This by the way was about 8 years ago that she made this much. Nurse’s wages have increased since then.
What’s so surprising?
If there are no profits, of course the partners eat the loss. And the reason there are no profits is that all the money went to pay the salaries of the employees( including “associates”).
The poor bosses and partners only get to keep what’s left over after paying all the usual expenses of a business…and it doesn’t matter if the business is a 100-man law firm or a one-man hot-dog cart.
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