![]() ![]() The pay of the MTA head could perhaps be a little higher, but not much. It’s like the politicians and public employee unions negotiating pension increases in Albany. And the directors and top paid labor on two sides of the table are really on the same side. They have continued rising without any justification at all, other than Executive A got X and therefore Executive B deserves X plus 10 percent, in a never ending spiral.Įxecutive pay consultants are hired to bless this, and are only hired if they are willing to provide the right results. The run up in executive pay got started in the 1990s, justified by rising stock prices that were later exposed as a bubble. It is more like a very rapacious union negotiating with itself and passing the cost to shareholders. It’s a tough argument for the public to swallow, but how else can we retain top talent anyway?Īs I noted, in a comment that disappeared off Bloomberg, the current private market in executive pay is not a real free market. Absent employment restrictions in contracts - which aren’t legally permissible - a higher salary may be the only way to go. Over the last few years, we’ve tried to figure out how to get transit executives to stay in place for longer than a year or two. Dropping the last goal would make it easier to achieve the first three, which is a reason to give Prendergast a big raise. And we want them to work for a lot less than they could make elsewhere. We want them to stay in their jobs long enough to see projects to completion. We want them to be talented managers who run the government well. Voters expect a lot from top public officials. So Walder left for a job that … pays more and Lhota to seek one that would bring greater non-monetary benefits… Unlike presidents and governors, it’s hard to say that MTA executives are compensated in prestige: As Lhota’s poll numbers make clear, the public generally doesn’t know who runs the MTA, and if they do, they’re predisposed to think he’s doing a bad job. As Barro argues of recent MTA departures: As he notes, in the private realm, someone tasked with leading a $13 billion organization would be compensated much better than the MTA head is, and as we saw with Jay Walder, when the right opportunity - notably at triple the salary - comes around, jumping ship is on the table. Even though a mid-six-figure salary sounds good, there’s an argument to ebe made that New York State is under-compensating the MTA head, and that’s just what Josh Barro put forth on Bloomberg News yesterday.Īs Barro argues, we as a society should be willing to pay top government officials far more than we do, in part in order to entice them to stick around and in part in order to entice them to do a good job. ![]() While overseeing an annual budget of $13 billion and employments rolls in the tens of thousands, the MTA CEO and Chairman earns $350,000 a year and a housing bonus, but by many accounts - particularly that of the TWU - that compensation is far more than he deserves.
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