A janitor in BART (Bay Area Railway Transit) was discovered to be earning a little more than $250,000 every year since 2015, KTVU reports.
Liang Zhao Zhang, the BART janitor, managed to earn more than a quarter of million dollars through the combination of salary, overtime, and benefits. In 2015, Zhang’s base salary was $57,945. He’s assigned in taking care of the maintenance in San Francisco’s Powell Street station.
According to public records obtained and released by Transparent California, Zhang also earned an additional $162,050 in overtime pay. His total income for that year, including his annual benefits, was $271,243.
Robert Fellner, analyst for Transparent California, said, “It’s absolutely outrageous. For janitors, that’s obscene! It’s unconscionable!” Fellner analyzed salary information of public employees for years.
Zhang’s overtime is truly ridiculous, especially, given how Powell station rivals any New York subway station in becoming one of the world’s dirtiest public transit stations.
According to an investigation performed by KTVU, Zhang’s timecard data showed that he apparently worked every single day in 2015. Almost every day he worked clocked in more hours as overtime, totaling to 17 hours of work per day. In addition to that, he also had some paid vacation and holidays for that year.
Roy Aguilera, BART’s Chief Transportation Officer, said that Zhang didn’t refuse to take some extra work and was offered overtime hours. According to Aguilera, almost half of the work made by janitors is to clean up urine, feces, and needles due to the homeless people who were taking shelter in almost every station.
Aguilera said, “People are not raising their hands and saying, ‘I want some of that overtime.’ Mr. Zhang has said yes, he’s worked hard, he’s completed his assignments, so I stand by the work he’s done.”
Although he admitted that he never checked Zhang’s performance or his time cards, Aguilera said that the supervisors who were working under him did.
KTVU, however, discovered that BART never broadly scrutinized and investigated Zhang’s case. Zhang earned a total of $705,000 in salary, overtime, and benefits for four years from 2012 to 2015.
KTVU’s investigation also revealed that 49 other BART janitors earned more than $100,000 in 2015 alone.
Alicia Trost, BART spokesperson, said, “There are multiple management systems in place to ensure hours worked and assignments are completed.”
Trost told the San Francisco Business Times, "All of Zhang's supervisors and the entire line management report that this employee is well respected, very reliable, and gets his work done.”
KTVU looked through videos captured by BART’s surveillance cameras to examine the thoroughness of Zhang’s work. Although he could be seen sweeping and mopping throughout the station, Zhang was caught on camera hiding inside a storage closet for a number of hours at a time.
KTVU looked through two days of videos. According to what they found, Zhang went inside the closet twice, for a total of 144 minutes. On Day 2, Zhang spent a total of 168 minutes inside the storage closet.
Another BART spokesperson said that the janitors had things inside the storage closet that they could possibly do, such as cleaning equipment or repairing them.
Aguilera, however, clarified that the storage closet is not meant to be an area where workers can take their break in or eat lunch in. BART provides a separate room for them to relax. He also didn’t let KTVU check what’s inside the storage closet.
Grace Crunican, BART General Manager, wasn’t aware that Zhang didn’t use the timesheet for two whole months. She said, “Well, this piece is news to me, yes that would be concerning if we had an examination with the supervisor and there wasn’t a good reason for that.”
She added, “We’ve increased the staffing two years in a row, we’ve reduced the overtime this past year. We’ve reduced the number of hours for overtime.”
Aguilera also contended that due to the constant requirement of janitors to be on floor and the complete demand of the work would sometimes fail to give the workers time to take care of their time sheet.
Although BART insisted that supervisors checked and approved all of Zhang’s time sheets, Fellner didn’t seem to agree with it. They even claimed that Zhang is one of their best employees. He said, “I would say a catastrophic management failure there.”
