APP: NJ Transit employee pay shoots up 24%

The Asbury Park Press ran this story the other day that you may have missed but I guarantee you will find interesting.

New Jersey Transit's payroll rose more than $154 million from 2006 to 2009, when the agency paid a total of $804 million in salaries and wages.

The payroll increase was up 24 percent between those years, about three times the rate of inflation. The consumer price index for New York-northern New Jersey rose just 7.3 percent from 2006 to the end of 2009.

This is interesting. New Jersey Transit raised fares in 2002, 2005 and 2007. They are preparing to raise fares 25% this year. But isn't it interesting that when they recognized a few years ago (2005) that they couldn't live within their budget, it didn't impact their hiring practices.

Note the following from the APP.COM article:

Other payroll facts regarding 2006 and 2009, as obtained by the Press from public records:

-- Total overtime costs rose 22 percent, from $97.4 million to $118.5 million;
-- The total payroll rose 24 percent, from $646.4 million to 804.3 million;
-- The number of employees rose 14 percent, from 11,247 to 12,809;
-- The average total pay for all employees, including overtime, rose 9 percent, from $57,474 to $62,794.

So they added a significant number of people during a time when most companies were reducing their workforce by large amounts. They also increased the pay for their people at a 9 percent. We have very few if any readers that would tell you that their company average employee pay increased during this period. As a matter of fact, I would bet that if you analyzed the pay at most companies during the 2006-2009 period, the average pay would have gone down.

These figures suggest that perhaps New Jersey Transit could use a downsizing before they ask to raise fares by such a significant margin.

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