Sunday, February 15, 2009

City workers still cashing in on overtime

From the Daily News:

The lean times have yet to catch up with city government's bonus babies - scores of workers are still racking up hefty six-figure overtime.

The king of New York overtime remains Pablo Martinez, a Board of Elections senior systems analyst who scored $144,768 in overtime last year. He has been top overtime dog for several years.

Adding his base pay of $91,210, Martinez made $235,978. Not exactly A-Rod money, but it's still almost $11,000 more than the mayor's official $225,000 salary.

A list of the city's top 100 overtime earners was released Friday after a Freedom of Information request by the Daily News.

Officials of their respective agencies gave similar explanations for the high overtime: They hold essential, specialized jobs and have to put in a lot of hours because of workloads, staff shortages and no budget funds to hire additional staffers.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's what happens when you don't want to hire anyone--the work still has to be done. The only difference is that in private industry we scam clerks into being called, "managers" or "independent contractors" or "freelancers", and then they don't have to be paid overtime. If such folks had a quiet word with the IRS and the State Department of Labor, heads would roll.

Anonymous said...

They hold essential, specialized jobs and have to put in a lot of hours because of workloads, staff shortages and no budget funds to hire additional staffers.

Hey I am in this industry and when you need specialized staff for a short period of time, you hire a consultant or better yet Indian offshore programmers whom are superior tech programmers at 10% the cost. OT of 144K? Fire Bloomberg this wastefull. Everyone knows in the IT industry that no one needs to hold you hostage for specialty work - programmers are commodities & can be found to work on contract with a desired result delivered in a given time frame for a set price.

Anonymous said...

If the Commissar truly wanted this OT to end (We read about it endlessly), he would issue executive orders that capped the overtime to some sensible percentage, and fire any agency head who allowed the OT to get out of control.

How many agency heads would have to be fired before the bad OT ended?

The Commissar is a Titan of Commerce? Titan's of Commerce can actually manage; the Commissar is too stupid and disinterested to manage.

So, what's his real reason he wants to be the honcho?