Montreal’s crime numbers last year showed a modest drop and we remain lower than the Canadian average. La Presse’s graphs are striking, but they also point out that it’s in youth numbers that Montreal has some concerns. CTV emphasizes the youth crime numbers.
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Kate
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Kate
The Congregation of Notre-Dame has agreed to sell the Villa Maria estate, with various provisos.
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Kate
TVA claims that the STM has had to spend $100,000 to clean union strike stickers off metro trains, station walls and windows and other surfaces, which were placed last year during labour unrest. The STM has sent a bill to the union, which is refusing to pay.
Taking the word “Metro” in a different direction, La Presse reports that, earlier this month, unionized Metro‑Richelieu workers trashed the office of a call centre located in Place Bonaventure, which contracts its services to the grocery chain.
Nicholas
Just goes to show that it’s convenient to put low paid jobs downtown due to increased transit access from all directions rather than out in the burbs. Who says downtown is dead?
saintlaurent
Remember kids: vandalism is bad, unless your heart is in the right place.
GC
So, the STM pays their cleaners $51 per hour?
Kate
When I think of some of the things an STM cleaner might have to mop up, $51 per hour seems on the low side.
steph
51$ is Salary + back end expenses (health insurance, pension, vacation pay…). chatgpt tells me it’s 50% additional to the salary for these types of goverment jobs. I found this base salary chart on reddit: https://tinyurl.com/2868a2da The math check out (but damn that’s a lot of $$)
Ian
Calculating opex into the hourly is misleading though as open is distributed over the entire fiscal year, and is not directly tied to on-the-clock hours. Stop using ChatGPT for “insight”, it’s just giving you plausible sounding autocomplete.
R T
For what it’s worth, hourly+50% or salary+50% is what I have seen used for back-of-the-envelope internal accountings of “fully loaded” employee costs at public employers in multiple jurisdictions in both Canada and the US, and I know it roughly reflects what I myself cost my employer.
GC
Thanks, Steph. I did wonder if it was the salary+admin-overhead calculation, rather than the literal money given to each employee. I figured that, since they are unionized, they were obviously getting much more than minimum wage.
Kate, I’ve felt that way when I think about trash collectors. Many of us wouldn’t want that job, even if we physically could do it, so the people who do should be compensated for it.
Ian
@R T salary + 50 as an overall opex calculation makes a lot more sense than hourly + 50, but both still make the mistake that opex is only distributed across 37.5 hours per week. Rent on your office space (another thing that counts as operational expenses) isn’t 37.5 hours a week, for instance, but if you make that part of your 50% calculation, it artificially inflates your hourly employee costs when you have to trot out an argument like “the union owes us $X for the costs of cleaning stickers”. Opex includes not just salary, personal insurance, and employer pension contributions, but office supplies, software licenses, heating, cleaning, property tax/ rent, et cetera – literally all the business expenses that are required for a business to generate revenue. Those are business expenses, not expenses tied to employment. It also sounds like capital expenses (capex) like maintenance and asset management might be getting bundled in there, too.
R T
Our hourly+50%/salary+50% is just the fully loaded cost of our wages, benefits, pension contributions, employer-side payroll contribution and other costs directly tied to a single employee.
Using fully-loaded costs to account for employee time on a specific task can be appropriate because the time the employee spends on a task is time the employee isn’t spending on another task. Most of these fully loaded costs are actually variable costs that scale with pay, but even fixed costs still need to be accounted for somewhere. (The most notable fixed cost that doesn’t really scale with pay is employer-paid insurance where the benefit is not tied to pay, such as supplemental health benefits. This is a much bigger issue stateside, where any employee that goes from 29 hours to 31 hours will probably put a public employer on the hook for a ~US$10k health insurance tab.)
Ultimately, $100k at a fully-loaded cost of $51/hour implies just under 2,000 hours of work—in other words, this was the equivalent of a full time position for one year.
bob
“Plus de 2300 affiches au total ont été dénombrées par l’employeur” – I wonder who got paid and how much to count the stickers.
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Kate
Le Devoir’s Marco Fortier writes that repeated stoppages on the REM, capped by last Friday’s dramatic halt between Central Station and Nuns’ Island, are undermining public confidence in the system. You don’t say.
Later, Radio-Canada had a video on the same topic.
Uatu
I agree with the lack of communication problems. Riders would be more forgiving if they feel like their needs to info etc. are promptly and competently addressed. Instead the feeling is that Pulsar doesn’t care because the non-compete clause means you don’t have a choice so they do the minimum required. The removal of alternative routes to the Shore is the worst thing about the REM.
bob
People think that the REM was designed to move people from place to place, when in reality it was designed to move public money into private pockets. In that respect, and that respect only, it has been a great success.
Chris
I wonder: is public confidence of the road network undermined by the random crashes? The constant repairs and closures?
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Kate
A cyclist hit by a car a week ago at Frontenac and Ste‑Catherine has died. A second cyclist was seriously injured in the same incident.
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