In the U.S., it’s not based on how you’re paid. Some low-level unskilled jobs don’t offer you paid vacation, sick days, or holidays, but most jobs do offer you some degree of paid vacation, sick days, and holidays, if not necessarily very much.
It’s possible that some low-level unskilled jobs don’t even offer unpaid vacation, sick days, or holidays, except as required under the Family and Medical Leave Act. If you don’t show up, you’re fired.
And it’s not common to be paid monthly in the United States. Whether or not you are technically paid a wage (hourly) or salary (annual), you generally get paid weekly, biweekly/fortnightly, or semi-monthly.
It would suck to have to wait a full month for pay.
I’m sorry your majesty. I’ll go tell the peasants they’re overpaid and should take a pay cut. Your ire should be directed at the fact that wages for most people have not risen and that far too many of our citizens are underpaid for the honest wages they earn. The notion that any public employee who earns a salary that allows for more than a bare bones existence is a cause for outrage is just ridiculous.
You want me to get annoyed? I work for multiple companies. One of them is Company X. Company X is HQ’d in NJ and a non-profit. As it happens the New York Times ran an article about the CEO of Company X. The fucker was making 800k a year a few years ago. Meanwhile people like myself saw wage cuts.
Since that time CEO Fuckface (according to reliable sources) has increased his salary to over a million. In that time I’ve received a lousy 3% pay raise on one project and no raises on the other two I do for them. Management of this company is poorly run. Under CEO Fuckface’s leadership the company has lost contracts and been repeatedly critized in the media for doing a bad job with the contracts they have.
But hey his salary keeps climbing so I suppose all is okay.
CEO Fuckface bugs me. He’s a miserable, greedy, incompetent shit head who ought to have been fired years ago. He’s making over twenty times the average income for doing a lousy job. I’ll reserve my contempt for him and not the local working guy who doesn’t hand himself giant raises while doling out paycuts for everyone else.
why do you need to reserve the outrage for only the top (which, I completely agree outrage is very, very necessary for).
part of the push-back on the right is that society is constantly asking the rich to get soaked while not asking anyone else to take a haircut. which, in the face of $32 an hour change makers and the posters on here acting as if they are getting nothing less than a completely fair wage, starts to sound like there’s some truth behind it.
now, i get off the haircut train when you start asking $10 an hour workers to sacrifice. they can’t afford it, they are getting screwed the worst, and they deserve better. the $30 an hour workers who have successfully and unjustifiably inflated their wages? not so much.
I’ve never taken the etst, so I don’t know. But all civil service positions require the civil service test, and the score on it determines who gets the offer. You can’t get a job with the state just because you know someone who has one. Do you have any evidence that New Jersey allows people to find jobs for their family or friends? I’m pretty sure they have civil service laws there.
Also, you seem to never have been in a McDonald’s. That job is worse than tollbooth operator? Seriously? Whenever I go in one, the employees seem to be having a conversation that they resume as soon as they’re done with me. Most of the people don’t deal with the public at all.
I think what you mean by “civil service” is better reserved for the administrative support staff of the bureaucracy. I can’t imagine the test being the same for all government jobs. (i.e. do you have a cite that tollbooth workers take the same civil service exam as “Clerk I”)
And, you’ve clearly never driven through a tollbooth where the collector is either on the phone or has a friend in the tollbooth, then. It happens. alot.
But, ok, fine, McDo is a collegial fun atmosphere compared to a toll collector. What about a meat plant worker or any number of solitary wage jobs?
I have to disagree. In New York State, on Long Island, Southern State Parkway retained a toll long past the time when the road construction bonds were paid off, where the 10 cent toll barely covered maintenance of the toll plaza and salaries for the toll collectors and administration costs. Only the delays caused by the tolls and the risks of accidents, and heavy publicity by Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, closed the tolls.
I agree with you though that in many toll situations, it is a huge cash cow for the state or local government. The state will justify keeping the tolls to control traffic flow, and gain union support by keeping the toll collectors working.
Don’t underestimate the power of the union, especially in the New York area. It would be reasonable by union standards to keep the toll collectors on staff, staffing automated booths if that’s the only alternative. Traffic in our area would, in the long run, improve if there were more automated lanes, since more drivers would realize that EZ-pass is a necessity.
I am not a financial idiot. My stocks are up tremendously even thought my contributions are not all that up. This month alone we’ve made over 1k in dividend income. That income gets taxed (correct me if I’m wrong) at a mere 15%. Meanwhile my salary (far harder to earn) gets taxed at upwards of 30%. I dread filling out our taxes this year because I know we’re going to pay more percentage wise than Warren Buffet.
The toll collectors are working people. If they’re doing somewhat okay BECAUSE they work (and under 4k a month after taxes is hardly particularly well off) well you go get all huffy and puffy. I’m not going to join you.
The idiots on the right constantly tell me that I should get annoyed not because I pay more percentage wise in taxes than Warren Buffet but because some guy who works hard isn’t living in a studio apartment, wearing rags and existing on bread and water for every meal.
what part of my post did you get that I’m not agreeing with you that things need to be severely changed at the top.
That’s got nothing to do with people getting grotesquely overpaid for their jobs due to inherent issues in governments negotiating with public sector unions.
He multiplied the monthly dollar amount by the exchange rate (approx. $1.61/Euro) instead of dividing.
$39/hour X 2080 hours/year X 1year/12 mo. X 1 Euro/$1.6101 = 4198.5 Euro/mo.
Don’t know why clairobscur got away with inflating the hourly rate to $39, though, when the OP is estimating it at $32. So let’s divide by 39 and multiply by 32. 3445 Euro/mo.
Thanks for the stats; I appreciate it. (Full disclosure, I got about two hours of sleep last night. I just came back to this thread after eating lunch and have almost no memory of even making any of my prior posts, so if any of it sounds really incoherent, I apologize.)
Yes, this is basically true. And what they would do if the job market were subject to free market pressure.
Why assume that? Why not assume that like, say, California prison guards, they’ve got a legislatively mandated overpaid good gig?
This isn’t some blind “bash all public employees” notion. I bet the vast majority of people would be okay with higher teacher, police, and firefighter pay. But this is the public sector equivelant of any other crappy unskilled job out there, paying several times more.
To all of those who are using the “oh I see, you get angry when someone is making a decent wage!” type arguments - do you feel as though it would be appropriate for all McDonald’s workers to also make in the area of $25-32 (ie basically everyone should make a whole lot more), or that there’s something uniquely defensible about these tolll workers? Because these are really clearly two seperate arguments.
I really don’t think you’ve demonstated that most public sector employees are overpaid. A teacher isn’t particularly overpaid. In NJ they earn about the average salary for a job that requires a bachelor’s degree. My husband is a public sector employee. He was recruited for his job because he has an engineering degree. He’s paid one third less than his similar qualified friends in the private sector. Then again he gets about a third more time off.
Toll collectors have a shitty job. So what if they’re getting paid a halfway decent salary to do it? What good would it do to lower their salaries by a third? They are not the reason NJ has financial issues. The idiot Republican education commissioner cost us $400 million in state education funding alone.
Governor idiot has also cost us millions by turning down money we need to modernize our transportation connections to NYC.
The hatred we’re supposed to muster because some honest worker isn’t being fiscally screwed over is ridiculous and tiresome.
where did I make that claim?
and you have a very odd definition if you think that someone believing that a truly unskilled job position that pays 32 an hour is inane is equivalent to trying to fiscally screw them over.
look, it’s obvious you have a deep hatred for Christie. go start your own thread. this thread has nothing to do with NJ’s Governor or its fiscal dire straits.
No. Seriously, the general civil service exam is the same. A friend of mine took it, and was offered toll booth operator, in addition to a librarian position in a state program for rural towns.
Based on the figures provided by Steronz, I calculated that the collectors’ salaries represent one-six hundredth of the state’s budget. Reduce their wages, sure; that’s really a huge savings.
Don’t know about Joisey, but in Indiana our economic development people, politiicans, and business critters are always telling us that a dollar spent locally will circulate three to seven times through the economy. That means the money the collectors earn is being spent in New Jersey on things like food, shelter, gasoline, et cetera, thereby stimulating the local economies to everyone’s benefit.
Therefore I must conclude that Jack Blatty and others are correct: This is just another of asshole conservatives bitching that some working people are earning a modest wage. How dare they aspire to be anything but serfs.
My mom is a teacher in a public school. She worked pretty hard to get where she is. She had to go to school for 4 years, student teach, do continuing education, start out at a low income/troubled school because that’s where the entry level jobs were. She has to deal every day with coming up with creative ways to educate children, some of whom are always trying to make her life miserable.
For all this effort, she makes less than a guy who makes change on the side of the road who has no education or skill whatsoever.
Or, how about… what if McDonalds suddenly raised their wages to $25/hr? Would people here be outraged? I’d think it was quite strange, and that McDonalds would end up bankrupting themselves, but I wouldn’t be outraged. It’s the company’s money, and if they’re bucking the market to make a badly considered business decision, the market will put them out of business.
Compare to this a public sector job that’s legislatively mandated. They aren’t going to bankrupt themselves by paying too much. They don’t have the same incentive to reduce salaries to their lowest practical level. They didn’t arrive at their salaries through market forcesThe people who pay for this are the taxpayers - our money being used to fund this well paying jobs program. But this will continue so long as the government maintains the status quo.
Let’s say we find 600 little things out there that only reduce the state budget by 1/600th. You’d say about each little proposal “well, it doesn’t fix the budget itself, let’s not do it” and end result is that nothing is ever cut, even though there are plenty of places that we could.
This is a broken window fallacy. It’s not as if the money dissapears if it isn’t paid to these people. If the money instead went to pay skilled workers, it would still be spent in the economy.
You “omg you’re just angry someone isn’t poor” people are just making bizarre arguments. Is there no level of skill required/salary paid ratio that would anger you? How about DMV workers making $150,000 a year? Dog catchers making a million?
Because her job isn’t the one where the ratio between skill, education, and difficulty isn’t the one that’s wildly out of tune with every other job out there. Yes, teachers are generally underpaid, but not to nearly the degree that these toll takers are wildly underpaid. I mean you’re essentially saying the solution is “rather than reduce the pay on one job, let’s raise the pay on every other job in the world to match it!”
Wouldn’t it be awesome though if we could wave a wand and everyone made $32 an hour and our currency didn’t devalue? Because then… rock on!
The reality is that wealth isn’t infinite. We can’t all have high paying jobs. Now - the wealth distribution in this country is wonky, and certainly people could be better off on average, but this is wildly out of tune with that. There’s no way we could possibly increase every no-skill job to pay $27-32 an hour and actually get it to function.