Jesus Fucking Christ. A NJ toll collector can earn $31.58 an hour?!?!?

How much should burger flippers at McDonald’s make? Seems to me it’s a worse job. More demanding and you’re going to get burns all over your hands. That’s a good $90k/yr right?

How much money are these toll collectors making for the state? Maybe, instead of a salary, they should just get to keep half the till at the end of their shift.

They could be free to decorate their booths in a particular style to attract more customers in their lane.

“Free backrub and hula girls in Lane 7!”

Median income in New Jersey is $70,378. I imagine that, and the fact that nobody wants to do the job is the reason it pays what it does, not anything to do with unions.

Because it’s incredibly boring?
Franckly I don’t know how much US$ 39/hour is (I’d have it to be translated in net monthly income in €), but assuming that it would be significantly more than what I’m making, I still wouldn’t take the job.

And the reason why median income in Jersey is so high is because nobody wants to live there!

Slightly more than 11,000 Euros a month, if my calculations are correct. That’s 40 hours a week of standing there, getting cursed at, breathing in car exhaust.

Careful with those translations: actual translation of “how much this is” would involve purchasing power, not just taking off taxes and insurance.

Moving from Philadelphia to Castellón, I lost about 30% of my income in terms of “straight dollars” but more than doubled my purchasing power. Those calculations aren’t easy to make, and one of the simplest methods (McD dollars: take the original number, divide it by the price of a McD burger in the original location, multiply by the price of the same burger in the target location) serves only to calculate across country borders, the difference in cost-of-living for different locations within the same country further complicates things.

Travis, I get 39*160= 6240 USD/month, the rate Oanda gives me today is 1USD=0.72916€ so 4549.93€/month assuming a “full standard month”, and that’s before taxes and insurance are taken out.

But yeah, once I’ve trotted out that favorite high horse of mine, there is more to a job than pay. I’ve left high-paying jobs for health reasons (the working conditions were quite literally driving me up the wall) and refused others because I could see they were going to be hellish.

Note that my calculation from the previous post is without trying to account for purchasing power. I can’t access cost of living or median income data from here, in order to do that.

Have you ever been to NJ in the wintertime? Ever worked shift work? Ever tried to make change with enormous gloves on? Ever tried breathing exhaust fumes for hours on end? Ever dealt with NJ drivers? (I’m sorry, but you know it’s true.)

I would take that job only if it were the last possible option for feeding the Celtling, and I’d be looking like crazy for something else. Pay them what it takes to keep the experienced folks there and the traffic moving quickly.

It also seems that folks are comparing their own cost of living with the NJ COL. In most of the areas along that road $60,000 gets you a small cramped 1 bedroom apt.

Patting Scott Walker on the back and indicating that one approves of anything that lying corporate tool is attempting to do indicates a serious lack of perspective.

Yep.

I think your arithmetic is off.

$39 an hour is a bit less than 30 € an hour (28.4 to be more precise).

So, 28.4 € X 8 hours a day X 21 working days in a month (appx) is 4771 € per month or 57250 € per year.

(By the way, a quick way to figure out an approximate annual salary when you know the hourly rate is to multiply the latter by 2000. In this case that would be, 28.4 X 2000 = 56800 € per annum).

The yearly pay and the “21 working days per month” assume no vacation, sick days or holidays ever.

My main problem with it is that their are other government workers who are more important yet get paid less. Like the teachers mentioned above.

Also, I know people around here who do a lot worse work for a lot less pay. My uncle would brag about getting $10 an hour at a stupid packing job. It’s not only repetitive, but you actually have to move, and move quickly. Sitting in a booth all day sounds positively luxurious to them, I’m sure.

Or it assumes that they get paid holidays. Not unreasonable for people that make $65k a year.

All you that are comparing the work to what you can get with a graduate degree know that’s retarded, right?

Sorry, do you get paid holidays when being paid by the hour in the US? It isn’t the case in Spain, either you get paid by the month and your salary and total working hours are set yearly, or you get paid by the hour/day and then don’t get paid except for those hours/days you’ve actually worked/been at work.

No, they assume no unpaid vacation, sick days or holidays. And even that’s probably just a couple weeks worth, max. Toll booths have to be open on holidays, and the U.S. is pretty stingy with vacation/sick days relative to other countries.

The bigger question is whether you actually work every day. That would seem odd, and is a good thing to point out. It would seem that spreading out the pay would be more efficient.

Still, it doesn’t entirely negate my previous post. $30,000 a year and then having to work part time somewhere else would still be preferrable to a lot of people I know. Heck, they might even just get the #30,000 and live frugally. I know my family gets by on less than $40,000 for four people.

$31/hour isn’t the starting rate, though. And there are teachers who make crazy pay too, if they have enough credentials and time under their belt.

But I agree that it does astound the mind once you hear it, especially if you work for the government. I don’t live in NJ (though I used to live there). I know what an entry level environmental scientist (Master’s degree or higher) makes with the state. It’s ain’t close to 60K.

I know bus drivers in NYC can pull in 55K, 60K a year too. When I heard this, I felt some resentment and asked myself why I was even bothering to go to school. But then I realized that being a bus driver is hard. Imagine sitting all day long, driving the same loop eleventy-billion times a day, every day. Dealing with crazy passengers and confronting fare jumpers. Trying to navigate NYC traffic without killing anyone. Trying to stay awake.

Yes, my job is hard too. It’s mentally challenging and stressful sometimes. But I’m not stuck to my desk–if I decide to take a walk to stretch my legs, no one is going to say anything. I can talk on the phone whenever I want as well, listen to my mp3 player all day long, and dress how I want to (within reason). Lives do depend on me doing my job well, but it’s a tenuous connection. I also can set my own schedule, decide what I’m going to work on (within limits), and not have to clock in and out every time I come and go. I can even work at home sometimes. You can’t attach a dollar value to some benefits. Sometimes you just have to count your lucky stars you have a job and forget about people who, deservedly or not, make more money than you do.

How much money would be enough money to keep someone in a boring-as-all-hell job? Some incredibly tedious, monotonous task… perhaps standing on a factory line and performing the same 5 second routine of “pick up, clip together, turn, pull and twist, put back down, pick up the next one…” for 8 hours a day? I’m not the sort of person that thinks such work is demeaning, but there must be some people working jobs they absolutely hate, but the money is too good to give it up.