Maybe Phil will tell me I’m being an elitist, but seriously, why the fuck do King County Bus Drivers make $75K – $100K a year?! I can’t imagine bus driver training takes more than 6 weeks, if not less, or that it requires some extra-human set of reflexes, so I fail to see how, except for the fact that the public sector is on a spending spree, do bus drivers merit that kind of pay. I spent 10 years in school, not counting my Navy training, getting my Master’s & learning to be a aerospace engineer and software developer, incurring debt, and I make just a bit more than a bus driver?!
That. Is. Insulting!
I know how much the Fed.gov pays civilian employees, and chances are pretty good that if I got a job working for Uncle Sugar as a Silly-Villian, I’d be making maybe 5%-10% more, but at least the pay is still in the market competitive bracket. And I don’t buy that line of BS that Bus Drivers deserve to make a living too. I got the same line of shit from entry level IAM workers who think that $12-$15 is not enough money. No shit it ain’t enough, get off your ass and go to school, or learn a trade, and don’t bitch to me about how you can’t get ahead as a machinist (err, mechanic) because of Union senority rules, not my problem, no one made you take that job. Same with bus drivers, pay not enough, go back to school, learn a skill that adds more value than just carting people around in a wheeled box.
Nope. You’re not being and elitist. The drivers I work with have a starting wage of $75K per year too.
Unions. Yours is not as strong as theirs.
What irks me is that these guys don’t even see how this is insulting to people who have invested the time, money, and skull sweat into getting an education. They just say, “Well I deserve to make a decent living too!”, but can’t grasp my reply of, “Sure ya do, go to school, do well, and you can earn that living as well.”
Uneducated public employees = welfare.
You should check out what WA state ferry employees make…
Re: the WA ST Ferrymen… they’re starting to take a lot of heat for it, especially with some of the “perks” that ferry crewmen get.
Extra drive over your normal commute to cover a shift somewhere? Triple time. One crewman last year made 70k JUST IN DRIVE TIME PAY.
Dude, it’s the gummint. The more people on gummint payroll making bank, the more people voting for growth of government, which is the health of the state….
This comes from fuzzy thinking at the County Commission level, not just the Unions. The fuzzy-thinking liberls believe that if you pay a driver as much as an engineer, that driver will be just as careful as an engineer, and the public will be safer on the buses.
Tell that to the five people who were horribly maimed (2 were killed) under the wheels of a local Tri-Met bus last month. Careful? Er….not exactly.