This is a terrible article. In this case, "lifeguard" is anyone in the 1000 employee lifeguard unit. The $392k is attributed to Fernando Boiteux who is an Assistant Chief in the LA Fire Department. Do you know a lot of people with 1000 people reporting to them who make less than 400k?
I wasted some of my time and tracked down the "Open the Books" org. It's a disingenuous non-profit that is part of the right wing bullshit industry. Think James O'Keefe, Newsmax, Heartland Institute, Sinclair, etc.
I really hate this trend of including benefits in someone's earnings. Yes, it makes sense logically, but 90% of people are going to assume it means salary, especially since a lot of the time they don't even know the monetary value of their own benefits.
Adding the cost of an employee's health care plan to their earnings is an easy way to mislead people since most people have no idea how much their health care plans even cost.
I don't think people typically include 401k matches in what they say they earn.
That said, state pension contributions are a significantly greater part of state employees' compensation than 401k matches are for private employers, so it does merit something. Perhaps a phrasing like "Top Paid LA Lifeguard earns $270k plus a $60k pension benefit" or whatever would be most descriptive.
Is the "benefits" portion mostly money in a retirement account or something though? Otherwise I don't understand how a single person can have $125,900 in benefits.
Overhead costs for most jobs including benefits are typically only 120%-150% of salary (people in sales are typically 200% of base salary with most of that being travel and expenses, but they are the ones bringing in top-line revenue for the company so doing more than most CEOs).
You can easily use that to compare apples-to-apples. And doing that this is still extreme.
Why? That's literally what a company is paying you. It's your fault if you don't realize it and negotiate for terms that are in your favor. Do you think this money isn't yours? It sure isn't the companies.
Oh, you don't care about $10,000 in medical benefits because your spouse has them? Great, roll that into my base.
Obviously I look at the respective benefits packages when comparing multiple offers. But it's definitely not a norm to, when asked how much you're paid, include not only salary and fungible compensation but also your valuation of the benefits package. That'd be considered a lie (and, if you're e.g. applying for a mortgage, literal fraud).
The only reason the author does it here is because the actual salary would draw traction as a headline, and his organization paid good money to get this editorial presented in Forbes.
Many of us do. These benefits often include a car, gas, per diem, pay for one's internet and other expenses that are normally paid out of one's pocket. It's a way to boost pay without increasing salaries.
I wouldn't assume beach lifeguarding to be an easy job, and I would expect a job that puts my life at risk to compensate me fairly for that risk. The overtime numbers are concerning, however, since the last thing I would want is to have exhausted lifeguards on duty.
> Do we really think the top lifeguard in LA is putting his life at risk?
Risk is meaningful to this discussion in that it deters people from taking the job. That reduces supply and boosts price. I don’t think lifeguards are paid a premium for being supply constrained.
California has a public sector compensation problem. (In particular, its unwillingness to investigate overtime fraud.) But estimating pay solely based on how dangerous the job is won’t be accurate.
Being a lifeguard in LA would be a dream job for millions of people especially if they could make $400k a year doing it!
This is low skilled labor! The only requirement is to be a strong swimmer and have basic leadership skills.
I don't think supply of willing lifeguards is a constraint here.
I'd imagine if LA county put out an ad to replace their top lifeguard and offered even $200k a year they'd receive thousands of applications from perfectly qualified people.
Teenagers lifeguarding at suburban pools is unskilled labor. For an urban beach, I want someone with medical training—say, a paramedic—as well as knowledge of the local oceanography and meteorology. They need to be able to pull people out of the water, yes, but also be able to close beaches when they become unsafe and anticipate when things will become unsafe.
Accurately calculating the risk of a lifeguard job seems tough to me. It seems to me it’s a rather binary risk. You either don’t drown or you drown, but obviously the less probable of those outcomes is very serious. In other dangerous jobs, there is more of a gradient of danger.
Saving a panicky drowning person can involve them punching you etc. Local hazards can include sea life, infections, debris, rocks etc leading to a host of serious injuries.
I'm surprised that small engine mechanics are #18 and supervisors of mechanics are #19. Since the two are so closely correlated, perhaps this is caused by duels or something violently similar, between mechanics and supervisors of mechanics. It just seems it shouldn't be life-threateningly dangerous to be a small engine mechanic.
It'll be car crashes. Any job where you're in the field around vehicles will be pretty dangerous. It's why garbage collectors and delivery drivers are high on that list too.
Cars are very convenient, and necessary in many places. But we really underestimate just how dangerous they are, and how bad the US is at regulating them. Our society is nearly identical to Canada, yet we have twice the traffic fatality rate. Something has gone very wrong with US car culture.
I don't know, but if he's managing a lot of people and made it so that those people also get highly paid - he's built a little empire. Maybe that's wrong. But these are also people that save lives. If you cut off the top, and try to keep the lower levels, when is a new "top dog" going to take over and demand high pay again?
Lifeguarding in LA is a combination safety job and entertainment job. LA depends a lot on tourism, and specifically beach tourism. Keeping the beaches safe is very important for tourism.
I did this in New York when I was younger. Not as highly paid, and shorter seasons of course. The common thread I see here is that the pay scales with seniority/leadership more than with risk. The main difference is that this can be someone's career in LA, whereas in New York it's more or a seasonal supplemental (usually only teachers are longtimers) thing.
Easy or not, the pay numbers are obscene regardless. Let alone how many employees are in the 100k club. The danger is how much this contributes to their retirement payout.
California had to change the law to prevent ridiculous retirement payouts and that is where the ire belongs. There is no logic to public employees pulling down 100k retirements but this is where we are. People bemoan private employer payouts need to be watching their backs as they are fleeced by public employee salaries, boosted by overtime and other bonuses, and then their retirements. My favorite is Forbes's work on Illinois 100k club[1]
Look, the average pension for many public servants is not all that grand, it is the big money people who are fleecing not only the tax payers but other public service retirees. There is every reason a retiree should have a good retirement payout but when you start getting into multiples of what the average income of someone in your state is someone needs to step back and say, what gives.
Let alone the pension debt Illinois carries - this is not uncommon across the country
The second person on the chart has base pay of 140k, and overtime of 131k. If they have 1.5 overtime rate, then that is an AVERAGE of 62 hours a week, every week.
I know utility workers that make over $250k/year due to extreme overtime. Often a sticking point with their salaried management.
It's not a lifestyle I would choose, but I can see the allure of being top dog in a close knit team. I heard an NPR interview the other day with a CA firefighter. He basically admitted to working so much because 1) he didn't know how to function at home with his family and 2) he was a respected crew chief. When you're "married to the sea" you have a routine of people getting your coffee, etc., that I'm sure you don't receive at home.
I doubt that the risk to lifeguards, that have a flotation device with them, approaches anything experienced by fire fighters, cops, truck drivers, etc. As noted in the article, valor in rescues doesn't seem to correlate with pay. The danger is mostly from sun exposure.
This is outrageous, frankly. The job is really not that hard.
> Macko jumped into the rough waters in a remote Palos Verdes gorge and pulled a man to safety through potentially skull-crushing swells and over razor-sharp rocks.
It would be good to know the median compensation for the lifeguards instead of just some outliers. Focusing on the highest paid earners gives readers a false sense of the distribution. Imagine a similar article that listed the top incomes of FAANG employees!
Also this $400k number isn't really what they are paid, it includes benefits that don't directly affect take home pay that most people wouldn't include when talking about a jobs pay
Not trying to be a jerk, but basic supply and demand.
There are literally millions of Americans who are able to perform the duties of a lifeguard. Millions more that could "manage" lifeguards.
Having your job be spending most of your day on a beautiful beach in southern California? That's a dream to many people!
I hearing on NPR (maybe This American Life?) about a lawyer who works full-time at his own firm during most of the year, but during the summer months goes on sabbatical to work as a lifeguard in the NY area. He's been doing this since he was a kid. Working as a lifeguard is his vacation!
You can't say the same about a Google or Facebook engineer. There's only so many people that could do the job, and very few would consider it their "dream" to code all day for a giant corporation. No one would consider it a vacation!
FWIW we should pay lifeguards a living wage! But $400k for an low-skill job that doesn't even require a high school education? Wow.
I don't think Lifeguard is a low-skill job, you need to be an extremely skilled swimmer. This is only achievable by learning and training from a very young age and being a minimum gifted for it.
That's just it. There are millions of developers who could do FAANG jobs. Or at least, hundreds of thousands.
The companies go through hoops -- or rather, make you jump through hoops -- to get what they imagine to be the "cream of the crop". But the vast majority of them will tell you that they're not really that much more productive than the next developer who didn't make the cut. They're not sucking up all the 10x developers while the rest of us are stuck with 1x developers. Even if their tests really did get them the 10x developers, they could get a 9.9x developer for half the price.
Worldwide, it's certainly millions. Even just in the US, it's tens of thousands at a minimum, if not hundreds of thousands.
FAANG developers get paid mid six figures because FAANG companies make 11 figures. Lifeguards are not less skilled, more numerous, or less important. They just don't have access to the enormous pot of money. Same with schoolteachers, programmers in other industries, and lots of other people.
Being a programmer is great, and a lot of us are really good at our jobs. No reason to break our arms patting ourselves on the back. We're incredibly fortunate to be skilled at something that's making somebody a ton of money, and they're slightly unbinding the mouths of us kine who tread the grain. But we should remember that this is more about luck than our inherent greatness -- and that goes 10X for FAANG employees.
And remember, the people making these salaries are at the top of their field. They aren’t the lifeguards at your condo’s pool, they are highly trained ocean rescuers. The person at the top of the list is an Assistant Chief at the Los Angeles County Fire Department and manages 900 people. Few people have the experience necessary to be qualified for that position.
Maybe the whole system of basing pay on supply and demand needs some serious adjustments based on the societal impact of a job?
It’s not that I’m unhappy with my cushy tech job and the life style that comes with it, but making literally 5x or 10x more than a nurse or a janitor and pretty much anyone who does essential and often backbreaking work is fundamentally unjust and cruel.
Also lifeguards are viewed as an expense, who deliver no direct income to the city/county. A developer has his/her work translated into direct value to the company.
> A developer has his/her work translated into direct value to the company.
Only in companies whose product is software. In other companies, IT and in-house/backoffice software systems are a cost center, just like the accounting department.
Teachers in my school district in CA work schedules that rotate between 4 hour days & 6 hour days. At most that is 26 hours / week (MWF 6 hrs/day & TR 4 hrs/day). There is also the occasional teacher/department meeting, but the district shortens Wednesdays class schedule for the students & substitutes that time with a teacher on teacher meeting.
In essence, teachers aren't working >30 hr a week. They get 2 weeks winter break, 1 week spring break, ~2.5 month summer, most every Monday holiday off. So they work about 9 months a year.
On top of that, they receive the amazing lifetime CA Pension which is like 90% of your top 5 earning years.
I looked up my teacher's salaries from high school. They make more than my CA public university STEM professors make.
About 5 years into teaching, a high school teacher will make about 60k/year regular + 25k/year in benefits. Tenured will make 120k+ in base and benefits. That is pretty good for an average of 25 hour workweek, 9 months a year.
Nothing stopping them getting another job that works between the hours of 3-10pm during the school year, putting them closer to the hours a GS analyst would work.
> Nothing stopping them getting another job that works between the hours of 3-10pm during the school year
You don't think they just go home and do nothing at 3pm, do you? They still have to grade the work and plan the lessons.
My wife was a teacher. She generally worked from 7:30am till 8pm, sometimes as late as 10pm. I would usually drop her off, go to my engineering job, and then go back to her school where I would spend a few hours hanging out helping her or working or watching TV while she kept working.
And in the summer they spend a bunch of time prepping for the next year and learning new things at conferences.
Anyone who thinks that teachers only work 25 hours a week 9 months a year are sorely mistaken. She definitely did more hours than I did at my engineering job, despite the fact that I made more than 4X her salary.
"The 2020 Medal of Valor winner, Edward “Nick” Macko, an ocean lifeguard specialist, earned “only” $134,144 in compensation. His compensation ranked 167th out of the 1,001 employees in the L.A. lifeguard corps."
Salary data is from 2019 and "Nick" won the Medal of Valor in 2020.
It's a lot of money but it's also a weird job. Lifeguarding at the ocean isn't like sitting beside the neighborhood pool. It's a pretty niche skill and seasonal on top of that. It sucks that we have to spend so much but given that, it seems inevitable that you either have a well paid staff or a less qualified one. A friend of mine was recently rescued from a tricky situation after getting pulled offshore in a rip current and I definitely know which side I'd come down on.
Primarily because 1. California has over $1,000,000,000,000 in unfunded pension benefits promised and 2. It only takes one year of employment to reap these lifetime pension and healthcare benefits.
I wonder what will happen in the long run, especially if high-earning tech companies continue to allow remote workers and the California exodus continues.
Overtime abuse seems to be a thing. I bet if people were looking into these, they probably aren't working all the hours they claim. Same thing with the BART janitor they found sleeping in a closet who was racking up massive overtime.
And one three years before that. And one two years before that. If you Googled it back when the most recent "scandal" was new you'd see multiple years of news results because the new stuff hadn't dominated the algorithm yet. It's not a scandal, it's the known status quo of that organization.
That's a scam if there is one, I hope someone with a straight spine will look into it. A similar investigation would be warranted for LEOs making similar money in Northern California.
BART's explanation for this is that heavy overtime plus few employees results in lower total lifetime costs to cover the same area (of time or space) than no overtime and more employees. This is likely due to post-employment costs since most CA pensions are defined benefit not defined contribution.
I would be unsurprised if this weren't also true for other CA departments.
Though there is a likely positive feedback loop as increasing compensation with a fixed budget results in fewer hires, more work, and therefore more compensation.
I guess the article is asking for LA to lower the pay. And maybe that's correct. However some of the people in these jobs have saved lives. So maybe they are overpaying by $8M per year... but if they cut that back, should the talent saving maybe 10 or 15 people decide to quit... would that be worth it?
Each person that is saved is arguably worth millions to their family (we're just talking money here not love etc...) and millions to the GDP over their lost lifetime (we're talking about people that can afford to live in LA).
That's silly. If we want to look at it in a purely utilitarian view, you could spend $8M per year and spend that on doctors and nurses, or EMT.
Swimming is a calculated risk. While I appreciate what life guards do, that doesn't necessarily mean that they are more important that other jobs that save lives. You can avoid drowning by simply choosing not to go swimming. If we really want to base things on cost-benefit analysis, someone with some actuary knowledge could probably make a more efficient investment here.
> You can avoid drowning by simply choosing not to go swimming.
That's a personal decision, not a community one. At the community level that would be equivalent to banning visiting the beach. But yes, the rest of your comment definitely applies.
However as of right now, LA's government does not believe this to be silly.
The community has to choose where to spend money. So, they want a lifeguard because swimming makes life more enjoyable to live. That's fine.
But saying something like "life is priceless" or worth millions or whatever, that's silly. That's not how we decide to pay for any other dangerous job.
I don't know what a reasonable pay for a lifeguard is, but Glass door seems to say that the market rate is about 20-40k. This job may be risky, and it has benefits to society, but so do a lot of other jobs.
Get ready for a major pay increase for nurses then. There are a lot of them. Not against it, btw. If we cannot pay everyone $300K with our taxes, who should get it first?
Yes, but it's not exactly a skill which is marketable otherwise, so most of those people (the top earners making over 200k) will do the same work for half the pay because there is no other market for thier skills
I mean based on the article the top paid lifeguard is a firefighter and is the chief of the Los Angeles County Fire Department. His responsibilities include, among other things, managing the the lifeguard department.
it appears that in LA, lifeguards are part of the fire department. the "top paid lifeguard" is a fire chief. If you look at other top compensated LA public employees, there's tons in the fire department and port pulling down "$400k+" if you count benefits + whatever "other pay" is.
It seems very misleading to include "perks" - undefined in this article - and benefits as earnings. Obviously they have an impact on comp & what taxpayers spend, but you wouldn't include it if somebody asked how much you make.
