MTA: When it comes to OT, we're on the right track
The MTA gave a progress report Wednesday on its efforts to reduce overtime, after paying out a record $1.35 billion in OT in 2018. The figures were especially high at the Long Island Rail Road. Here, an LIRR conductor signals all clear to close doors. Credit: Howard Schnapp
MTA officials believe they’ve made strides in reducing the alarmingly high overtime rates that led to several law enforcement investigations, and that the time is right to start paying workers more money.
The transit agency on Wednesday gave a progress report on its efforts to reduce overtime, after paying a record $1.35 billion in overtime in 2018. The figures were especially high at the Long Island Rail Road, where one employee alone made $344,147 in overtime that year. That employee, former chief rail measurement officer Thomas Caputo, was sentenced last month to 8 months in prison on federal fraud charges related to overtime.
Since 2018, overtime spending has dropped by 16%, according to MTA auditor general Michele Woods, who briefed MTA board members at a Manhattan meeting.
Woods said the number of employees making more than $150,000 annually in overtime has fallen by 60%, from around 100 in 2018 to around 40 last year. The transit agency also is doing a better job of budgeting for overtime spending. In 2018, the agency blew its overtime budget by 26%. Last year, it was above budget by 3% — within the margin of error, MTA officials said.
The MTA plans to release a more detailed report next week.
Preliminary numbers already published by the agency show that the MTA spent $1.19 billion on overtime last year, up from $1.12 billion in 2020. MTA officials said the spending last year was due in part to staffing shortages caused by COVID-19, and by the need to carry out construction projects on nights and weekends so as not to affect weekday service.
“Overall, we are on a very good path and headed in the right direction,” said Woods, who attributed the improvements to better management controls, including the use of biometric time clocks and uniform policies for assigning and approving overtime. “We’ve defined the problem. We have better protocols. And we have much better data in real time.”
Woods said “extreme abuse” of overtime remains rare. Vincent Tessitore Jr., the LIRR labor representative on the MTA Board, agreed.
“It’s a few people — some of whom are serving time for it as we speak,” said Tessitore, who believes recent overtime figures reflect the fact that the MTA is “incredibly short on manpower.”
“You call us, we work,” Tessitore said. “We’ll continue to do that.”
Woods acknowledged that, throughout much of the pandemic, the MTA froze hiring to keep costs down. She said the agency plans an “aggressive” strategy this year to fill those vacancies.
Part of that strategy, MTA chairman and CEO Janno Lieber said, will entail paying workers more.
“I want to make sure that we’re hiring the competence and the muscle that we need, and supporting the talented folks at every level of the MTA so that they want to stay and make their careers here,” Lieber said. “Being more competitive with compensation is something that will help on that front.”
Peter Warren, research director for the Empire Center for Public Policy — an Albany-based fiscally conservative think tank — questioned the strategy and noted that the average LIRR employee in 2020 earned nearly $114,000, and had benefits “far superior to the private sector.”
Warren said that, although there remains “considerable progress to be made” in reducing overtime, the MTA deserves credit for curbing the “really absurd overtime payouts” of a few years ago.
Alfonso Castillo has been reporting for Newsday since 1999 and covering the transportation beat since 2008. He grew up in the Bronx and Queens and now lives in Valley Stream with his wife and two sons.
