I find this whole thread hilarious on a board that most of us are reading from work.
What would the rate of pay for the average office worker be if you factored out the time spent getting coffee, chatting on IM, surfing the dope, taking slow bathroom breaks, etc? What percent of our time is, in all honesty, spent doing stuff that a bright high school kid couldn’t do? What would our pay be if we only got our full salary when we were crunching numbers and producing technical documents, and if we got minimum wage for the hours we spend spacing out at meetings, composing routine emails and making copies?
As for “nepotism,” hahahah. How the hell did you guys get your private sector jobs? I just went to a job fair where I knew people at a third of the represented companies. Tomorrow I have a dinner with an important career contact and a friend I’m hoping can hook me up with an internship. Another friend of mine is on a business trip, and he agreed to carry along a stack of my resumes to give to companies I’m interested in that he is working with. A friend recently offered me his job since he is moving. I couldn’t take it, but the top candidates are people he knows. I, meanwhile, just offered another friend of mine my job when I leave in the summer.
Do you really think the private sector hires off Monster.com?
You’re forgetting ‘open to the weather in all conditions’, including blizzard and driving rain. (Many being near bridges. Weather’s worse there.)
And, of course, the ability to identify money shoved in your face and make accurate change in seconds, reliably, mechanically, faster than McDonalds. Without stopping.
Basically, it’s the same as working on an assembly line semi-unprotected from the weather, in a coastal northeastern state. Except sometimes you get customer service morons too.
Oh, yeah- years ago. But oddly, they still haven’t developed the technology to allow vehicles to drive through walls without at least one of the involved elements being rendered useless for their purpose.
Human beings have a rich genius for asshole behavior (flashing, masturbating in public, throwing diapers and feces, armed robbery attempts, etc. and the bar lows every year on just how disgusting we can sink) ask anyone working public service. The toll collector has to deal with that 8hrs a day. At least these toll collectors have managed to organize and get decent wages for doing their jobs for which I applaud them.
I work for one of the largest tech firms in the world. The large majority of our hires come from two places: People walking in off the street who saw a job posting notice somewhere (including Monster.com or some other online service), or people referred to us by headhunter agencies. In fact, that’s how I got my job with them: I registered with a job placement agency, and within a few days I got a call for an interview, and I was hired. I actually got interviews at three different places, and got job offers from two of them. I never knew a soul at any of these places, or at the placement agency.
Of the hires we get through connections, it’s never about nepotism. The company offers bonuses to people who recommend someone who ultimately gets hired. But that person gets no favoritism at any point in the process - it’s just a finder’s fee we pay if the person is hired. Once the person is called for an interview, the people doing the interview and the recommendation to hire have no idea as to the source of the applicant. It would be an ethics violation for that to be considered in any way.
In my entire adult life, I never got a job through ‘knowing someone’, and I believe that’s the norm. Most of us look for job postings and apply for them, or register with placement agencies and let them do the heavy lifting.
Where I have seen connections matter has not been nepotism, but the kind of case where a senior manager leaves for another company, and then poaches the best employees from his old place by offering them a better salary. But that’s still a merit-based decision. Work really hard and do good things, and opportunities come your way. That’s the opposite of nepotism.
Personally, I think that the free market would have decided the proper combination from each.
And before you repaint the ceiling O+ with outrage about the wage of a toll collector further, I’m curious how a regular commuting resident could ignore all the empty construction equipment littering the sides of the GSP being billed to & paid for daily by the state.
Personally, I can’t possibly imagine even one empty crane’s daily rental cost as close to to price of a toll collector’s wage …or that its rental is anything other than normal highway maintenance.
I of course didn’t know those numbers, but I could guess people at minimum wage were making far less, and that they would surely love to be paid as much as those toll workers. I just meant that people making US$ 32/hour (once I saw it expressed in €/month) aren’t rolling in dough, living in mansions and driving sport cars. They just have a middle class income.
And I can’t be bothered about unskilled workers being paid a middle class salary. More power to them if they managed to avoid being paid € 876/month.
And by the way, a gross salary of € 876 is a pittance. Living on that, especially in an urban area (costly housing) has to be a bit nighmarish, especially if you can’t hope to get any better (I’ve lived on less than that, but didn’t expect to be stuck forever in this situation. And it makes all the difference in the world).
Is it Jersey or NY where the toll collectors’ union got their status ratcheted up to that of police officer?
I read about this in some negotiating book, How to Negotiate Anything, I believe.
According to what I read, the toll collectors study at the police academy, carry guns, and have some sort of LEO status.
I’m sure the NJ toll collectors are overpaid, just like prison guards here in CA. They have to be part of some union that’s too powerful to take on directly.
Then again, you most likely have a challenging job. Punching tickets all day long makes you want to shoot yourself in the 'nads just to spice up the day. It’s not even like machine stamping plates, where at least you can plug earphones in and focus on something else - you have to do the job and interact with motorists full time. I have absolutely no idea how these guys can keep that job for any length of time without heavy sedation.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, nor do I really give a shit either way. I’m just saying, just because it’s a job a monkey could do, doesn’t mean it should be paid chimp change (see what I did there ? 'Cause the expression is “chump change”, but a chimp is a type of monkey and… oh forget it).
Exactly. I had a temp job for about three weeks one summer when I was in university working in a ticket booth in a parkade, which I imagine is somewhat similar to being a toll-booth operator. It was the worst job in my life. Even though I was allowed to read a book when it wasn’t busy, it was a soul-sucking, dead end job and I thank my lucky stars I only worked there a few weeks before school started up again. IIRC, I was making about $11 per hour (in Canadian dollars, and this was in about 2001). To go back to that job again even for a few weeks I wouldn’t do it for less than double that. As a career? I think I wouldn’t do it unless I had literally no other choice and make at least $25/hr to start. I would rather work in fast food and make less money than work in a parkade booth again, unless I had no choice.
Now imagine that same job except at NYC traffic flow levels. There is no downtime. 2 AM? Still a car every thirty seconds. 8 AM? Serve a car every two seconds or you’re toast.
In my entire working life, starting from my first job delivering newspapers when I was 11 up to the present day, nearly every single job that I have had I got because I knew someone, and I believe that that’s the norm. I’ve had to fill out applications and have had plenty of interviews, but in these 30 years, I’ve had jobs that I got from a want ad once or twice, tops.
There’s been plenty of talk about nepotism in the public sector, and that it’s a terrible thing. Nepotism isn’t always a bad thing, as the younger person will often have the benefit of insiders knowledge of the nuances of any particular job; also, it would seem to me that this hiring practice would be waaaaay more prevalent in the private sector.
Disclosure: one of my best friends has been a Toll Collector in NJ for 25 years.
The NJ Turnpike’s expenses don’t cost NJ taxpayers one dime. Not one dime of Taxpayer money is used to pay the Toll workers. The Turnpike generates revenue, pays its own expenses and then hands tens of millions of dollars in “profit” over to the state.
My friend has had guns pointed at him (not to be robbed, just because the guy ion the car thought it would be “funny”. He has had people heat coins on their heater vent until they were burning hot so they burned his hand. He has had money handed to him covered with blood and shit (on separate occasions).
Last year the news was a buzz because the Turnpike received something like 300 complaint letters for the year. They deal with literally thousands of transactions a day so that ends up being a complaint rate that is a fraction of a percent. Instead of being commended, the entire staff had to go threw weeks of training on their own time plus they had to deal with weeks of “hidden camera” news media trying to instigate confrontations so they could film it.
His days off are Saturday and Sunday. If a holiday falls on those days, he gets it off, otherwise he works (for holiday pay).
This probably deserves a separate thread but salaries the private sector (of which I am a part) have not changed in 30 years. The reason the public sector seems so well off is that they have been getting the cost of living increases everyone should have been getting. instead that money has been funneled upwards. Rather than getting mad at our unfair treatment, the people benefiting from this arrangement are getting you angry at people who’s only crime is they have not been screwed for 30 years.
Yes, there are bad toll takers and yes some people in unions are lazy but every workplace has people like that. Is it such a crime that a blue collar worker can have a middle class existence? Instead of trying to drag someone down to the private sector’s level, maybe ask yourself why the private sector works the way it does and who is benefiting from it…
The turnpike workers are costing taxpayers the opportunity costs associated with their above necessary wages, if they really are paid above what’s necessary. As in, more money would be handed over to the state (to be wasted on something else, probably.)
Are your parents wealthy? Are they especially connected?
Because I don’t think it’s typical at all that people get the majority of the jobs from ‘knowing someone’. Maybe it’s because I come from a poorer socioeconomic background, but other than the kids I knew who went to work on the family farm I don’t know anyone who got their main jobs because they had special connections.
I think the common typical experience for workers in America is that they go to school, then they shop resumes around and eventually find work. I think it’s a pretty small minority that go to work for mom and dad or who get jobs through special connections. And certainly not for the majority of jobs they get in their lives.
I will grant that the percentage will be much higher among Ivy League grads, the upper middle class and the rich.
Very basic-level unskilled jobs, like food service or clerical temping jobs tend to be more accessible, but I don’t know anyone who has gotten any kind of private-sector white-collar professional-level on a cold application and I don’t know any Ivy League grads or trust fund babies. Everyone has to scrounge for contacts or connections or introductions of some kind. That’s one of the big reasons why being white is still such a huge advantage in our society, because white people tend to have connections with other white people and the cycle is self-perpetuating.
My parents? Wealthy? That’s a larff. The only job that I got because of either one of them was a teaching position at a catholic high school in Paterson, NJ (which I held for all of 5 months). In my current career (a unionized location scout working in film/tv in LA) all of my jobs are referrals.
I find it highly telling that you’ve chosen to make assumptions about me that couldn’t be further from the truth; that it’s not unlikely that your assumptions about the “common typical workplace experience in America” may be incorrect as well.