They're at it again: Yesterday, the unions representing the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) workers reached an agreement with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs the railroad. It's not yet clear what's in the agreement, but the demands of the striking workers were rather extraordinary: Pay raises of 5 percent, plus three years of retroactive raises since their last contract was hammered out in 2022. This might make sense if they were destitute, but they are not: "More than 325 Long Island Rail Road workers are raking in over $100,000 a year in overtime on top of their lucrative salaries, with 11 of them netting at least twice that huge figure in OT," reports New York Post (below yesterday's perfect headline: "Gravy Train").
"The LIRR workers are already the best-compensated transit workers in the United States," the Manhattan Institute's Ken Girardin told the Post. Not wrong. Workers routinely game the overtime system to rake in huge amounts of cash beyond their (already-huge) union-negotiated sums: Supervising foreman Leonardo Espinosa, for example, earned $244,954 in overtime last year on top of his $129,483 salary. Jeffrey Davies (working the same role) brought in $233,808 in overtime on top of $130,291 base. And we haven't even started talking about pensions, and how overtime reporting factors in:
