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STORIES:
Muni
arrives in S.F.'s top overtime spot - (www.sfgate.com)
San Francisco municipal overtime spiked $18 million over budget in the
first year of Mayor Ed Lee's administration - with one Muni
mechanic raking in an extra $163,856. Khoa Trinh, who heads the
Muni signal shop, more than doubled his base of $106,036 by clocking in 1,954
hours of overtime - which is roughly equal to working an extra 40 hours a week,
every week, at $83.85 an hour. Add in more than $23,000 in premium pay and
shift differentials, and Trinh's salary for fiscal 2011-12 totaled $293,370. As
for how he could pile up all those hours: "We had to do a lot of work at
night, when the trains weren't running, to get the new train control system
working," said Muni chief Ed Reiskin. While Trinh was
tops in OT earnings, Muni Transit Supervisor Evette Geer-Stevens clocked
the most hours - with 2,262 hours of overtime, for $147,446. According to
Reiskin, Geer-Stevens is one of the supervisors you often see on street
corners, keeping an eye on the buses and trains - and helping out
in emergencies. Last year, 10 Muni supervisors made more than $100,000 in
overtime - bringing their pay to $200,000-plus apiece.
Ranks of working poor increasing - (www.washingtonpost.com) Nearly a third of the nation’s working families earn salaries so low
that they struggle to pay for their necessities, according to a new report. The
ranks of the so-called working poor have grown even as the nation has created new jobs for
27 consecutive months and is showing other signs of shaking off the worst
effects of the recession. “Although many people are returning to work, they are
often taking jobs with lower wages and less job security, compared with the
middle class jobs they held before the downturn,” said a report released
Tuesday by the Working Poor Families Project, a
national initiative aimed at fostering state policies to help low-income
working families. With the nation’s economy in recovery, the report said, more
than 70 percent of low-income families and half of all poor families were
working by 2011, the report said. The problem is they did not earn enough to
cover their basic living expenses.
U.S. Crop-Insurance Claims Rise to Record After 2012 Drought
- (www.bloomberg.com) The worst U.S. drought since the 1930s led to record payouts on
crop-insurance claims, with farmers collecting $11.581 billion as of yesterday
for damage in 2012, government data show. Payments are up 6.8 percent from
2011, when claims reached the previous record of $10.843 billion, according to
a Risk Management Agency report published
today on the U.S. Department of Agriculture website. In 2010, the total was
$4.251 billion. Last year’s Midwest drought sent corn and soybean prices
surging to records as output fell, while dry fields across the Great Plains
left winter-wheat conditions in November at their worst since at least 1985,
when the USDA began collecting the data.
Hedge funds nurse heavy losses after UPS-TNT deal collapses
- (www.reuters.com) United Parcel Service's decision to abandon its 5.2 billion euro bid for
TNT Express has left hedge funds nursing
potential losses of more than $700 million, as the Dutch delivery firm's shares
slid. So-called merger arbitrage funds - which make money betting on the
outcomes of corporate events including takeovers - are estimated to have owned
around 30 percent of TNT shares before Monday's news European anti-trust regulators would veto
it, several sources familiar with the sector said. With TNT shares losing half
their value when the market opened and ending the day down 41 percent, funds
collectively could have lost more than 540 million euros. "This was one of
the only large, liquid, all-cash deals in Europe right now. It's going to have
been really painful across the street," one merger arbitrage manager who
owned TNT shares before selling them on Monday morning told Reuters.
Fitch warns on US and Spanish ratings - (www.reuters.com) The United States faces a "material risk" of losing its
triple-A status if there is a repeat of the wrangling seen in 2011 over raising
the country's self-imposed debt ceiling, credit ratings firm Fitch said on
Tuesday. Fitch also said Spain will continue to face downgrade risks even if it
avoids having to ask for a bailout, while Ireland could claw its
way back into the single-A rating band if a deal is struck to share the burden
of its banking debts. Despite December's deal by U.S. politicians to avoid the
so-called "fiscal cliff" of spending cuts and tax hikes, Fitch's head
of sovereign ratings, David Riley, said pressure on the country's rating was
increasing.
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