City workers missed over 17,000 hours of work due to subway delays this year
Photo courtesy of Roman Kruglov’s Flickr
New Yorkers employed by the city have missed 17,143 hours of work because of transit delays and malfunctions, according to the Daily News. A new analysis by the Independent Budget Office (IBO), shows that city workers are on track to miss nearly 26,000 hours of work for the entire year, an increase of almost 30 percent from previous years. The report found the incident that caused the most city workers to be late happened in January when city workers lost a total of 1,075 hours after water spilled onto the tracks at West 4th Street-Washington Square station.
The IBO used information from a city worker database, the Citywide Human Resources Management System, which shows all excused tardiness. When a city employee arrives late to work for an excused reason, they enter a code that explains their lateness, along with proof. If the tardiness is excused, city workers are paid for the missed time. As the Daily News reported, the median salary for a city employee in 2015 was about $32.40 an hour for a 40-hour work week. This means that so far this year that the 17,143 hours excused so far cost the city $550,000 in pay.
While the database takes information from most major city agencies, like the NYPD, FDNY and Sanitation Department, it does not include data for Department of Education, NYCHA and the Health and Hospitals Corporation. This totals about 200,000 employees unaccounted for in the human resource database.
In response to the IBO’s analysis, a spokesperson for Mayor de Blasio said this solidifies the need for his proposed “millionaires tax” to be enacted, a plan which would tax the wealthiest New Yorkers to pay for subway fixes. “Riders’ cries might be out of Albany’s earshot, but they’re mad as hell and they won’t stand for it anymore–including our city employees,” mayoral spokesperson, Austin Finan, told the Daily News. He added: “The state should step up now and support the mayor’s plan to tax the wealthiest 1 percent to pay for the fix of our subways and buses, and return the half-million dollars it took from the MTA to fund the immediate turnaround plan.”
A spokesperson for the MTA, Shams Tarek, responded by saying the city should take some of the responsibility for the failing transit system by paying their half of the authority’s emergency action plan to fix the subway that costs more than $800 million. “Any increase in delays experienced on the subway show the critical need to support and fund the MTA’s Subway Action Plan and why City Hall and Mayor de Blasio should step up and fund their half of the plan,” Tarek said.
[Via NY Daily News]
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