Metro is going to pay out large amounts of overtime for the near future, the transit agency’s general manager said. The Washington Examiner reported Monday that the 10 employees who logged the most extra hours in January and February all worked more than an extra full-time job’s worth of overtime on top of their regular schedules.
One construction inspector earned more than $32,000 in two months by working the equivalent of 16-hour days every single day in the period for which Metro provided data.
| Filling empty slots |
| Metro has been on a hiring blitz since General Manager Richard Sarles joined the agency. He has brought in new executives and asked the board for permission to increase the agency head count by more than 260 workers to top 11,000. |
| But filling positions can be harder than it seems even for lower-level positions such as bus drivers, the agency says. In December, the agency said it had 91 bus operator vacancies out of 2,436 positions. Assistant General Manager Jack Requa said Tuesday that the agency has people training to fill the void but about 60 vacancies remain open. It could take up to a year to close the gap, he said. |
| Part of the challenge is that bus operators move up to other jobs such as train operator and station manager, areas that also have many vacancies because of an earlier hiring freeze. So, he said, there’s a constant need to fill the positions. Furthermore, only about one of every 10 bus driver applicants makes it through the agency’s initial screening. |
General Manager Richard Sarles defended the payouts Tuesday and told The Examiner that the agency will have to continue to rely on long hours of time-and-a-half pay as it undergoes a major rehabilitation campaign and tries to meet national safety recommendations. The agency had blown through its entire $48 million overtime budget after the first seven months of its fiscal year, which started July 1.
“As we hire more people, we’ll decrease the amount of overtime,” he said.
But Sarles had no timetable for when that would happen. And he said it takes time to train such skilled workers as inspectors and supervisors.
He also dismissed concerns that working such long hours would compromise the workers’ — or the system’s — safety.
“Construction inspectors watch people, they’re not actually doing the work,” he said.
He said he worked as a construction inspector early in his career and remembers the long hours it entailed.
Such inspectors and track work supervisors made up eight of the top 10 overtime workers. The others were a Metro police officer and a mechanic who checks electrical power in the rail system.
Furthermore, Sarles said safety officers now work in the field to help make sure employees are staying safe.
Trackside workers are not specifically limited in the number of hours they can work overtime, he said, unlike train operators who must have eight hours off every 24 hours.
Sarles said that the agency does hope that the workers get “good rest” when they are off-duty, though.
