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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

If you read that a CEO managed to accumulate $220K extra what would you think? Business as usual? Not worth a headline? How about $2.5 million? A $25 million golden parachute?

What about an attorney or a top salesperson pocketing a little extra?

I don't support corruption and it should be put to a stop, but let's focus our attention on the real money and the powerful.

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It doesn't really sound like corruption so much as mis-management that means they don't have enough janitorial staff or just need to manage how many hours people can work better.

It's a pretty standard tactic within municipal workforces to intentionally under-hire full time employees to "force" overtime among the remaining ones. Low level corruption.

And to rotate who gets to take advantage of the forced overtime to allow those about to retire to clock in a few years of inflated pay to boost their pension payouts.

Interesting, is the incentive here to undermine wage limits in place to give their employees a better living?

Notice how the last name of the janitor is the same as his supervisor's name.

That's the nature of government jobs. Certain groups (families, friends, ...) "conquer" them. They only hire from the group and do whatever you can to make the group as a whole earn as much as possible, and "re-divide" the results (e.g. in order to get overtime you have to pay 50% of it to the supervisor).

I didn't see mention of the supervisor's name anywhere in the article. Did I just miss it? Where did you find it?

Well the CEO isn't being paid with public funds, first of all.

Some are, and some are paid with government contracts.

Not directly paid, but certainly indirectly paid using billions of dollars of tax-payers money in the form of corporate welfare payments and fiscal policies designed to boost profits. Tax breaks and various direct and indirect subsidies by government allow his company to make the profits that allow him to be paid as much as he is.

This means that anyone who believes there is a free market economy operating anywhere in the world is gravely mistaken. Arguably, the case of this janitor making lots of money is really not about public ownership at all. The public (via the government) effectively support both private and public sectors almost equally in a lot of cases.

Here's the situation in the UK at least:

http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/SPER...

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