Apparently $80,000 per year to sit in a ticket booth isn't enough? There are reports coming in that the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) is considering yet another fare hike in 2010.

We just got through a smelly garbage strike (and other union workers). I'm generally getting sick of these unions and their idiotic demands.

According to the an article I read on CP24, the TTC had a record number of riders this year. Over 470 mln people used Toronto's grossly inadequate transit system. However, they are still posting a loss of $17.4 mln.

Not too bad.

However, TTC chair Adam Giambrone told the newspaper that the TTC needs an additional $80 million from the city in 2010 to help prevent a fare hike.

Wait... what? Since when is 80 equal to 17.4? Ok, lets forget about that for a second. Because, we did a bit of digging. It seems, that the TTC's operating budget is $1.3 bln. $1 bln of that goes to labour (employees salaries, see the link with the first sentence?).

$350 mln of the TTC's budget comes from the city of Toronto, they are expected to raise the rest themselves. This means that the money the city of Toronto provides can pay for all of the buses, streetcars, subways, and tracks required to run the transit system and then some.

This also makes the TTC employees' salaries seem a lot more exhorbitant. We can now directly see, that if the TTC wants to turn a profit, all they have to do is pay TTC staff what they should be making. And yes, I went there, I think TTC staff is extremely overpaid.

Sitting in a ticket booth $80,000? Really?

The other thing that really bothers me about this, is the way these unions handle seniority. If you've been working at a place for a long time, I agree -- in most cases -- you deserve to get paid more than when you started. Yearly raises? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on your performance. But what really gets me is the fact that with seniority, you also get other preferential treatment. Like when other shifts become available -- maybe someone got sick -- the people with higher seniority get first dibs on those shifts. This means that in extreme cases, people that already get insanely high salaries, can take away shifts from people who knowingly get paid a lot less than them.

Weren't unions originaly started to look out for the little guy???