Another one of many Fake T.V. Ads, this one about the Tennessee Valley Authority, which for years has paid its top executive a ridiculous FORTUNE. Not run by the U.S., but I have long been fighting that crazy “salary” & its polices. Strange ad paid for (?) by “U.S. Tech Workers”.— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 17, 2020
“this one about the Tennessee Valley Authority”
I don’t know anything about the TVA’s salary structure, but we’ve seen first-hand (friends and family living on the Clinch River and Watts Bar Lake) that TVA is intoxicated with their power. They’re heavy handed thugs, basically.
I can give a little of the insights into TVA, since I know someone very close to me that works there.
A couple of things in play here - One, the “CEO” of TVA and a handful of very high-up officers are extremely well-compensated, higher than any typical government officer. The reason that was given is that they “have to remain competitive with salaries in the rest of the utility industry”. How that lines up in the rest of the world, I do not know. I haven’t looked at the salaries of other large utilities (investor-owned) such as AEP, Southern Co., or Entergy.
Pay scales within the rest of TVA are competitive with utility pay for similar jobs - lineman pay in line with linemen elsewhere, outside of highly-inflated areas like New York or the west coast where pay is significantly higher (as is the cost of living).
A larger group of top-end officials enjoy a separate (but unequal) pension system, whereas they chopped the contribution to employee’s pension in half a few years ago, and new employees have no pension at all. Old timers enjoy a very lucrative “30-35 and out” plan that remains untouched, but was eliminated back in the 80s but grandfathered for everyone that was in the plan at the time.
Anyway, that notwithstanding, the other element in play regarding “US tech workers” is that TVA recently laid off some 100 IT employees, and replaced them with outside contractors. These 100 former employees are obviously not happy, but it goes a little deeper than that. Some of the functions of IT are classified as “sensitive”, and require employees to obtain background checks and such. I don’t know the extent of the layoffs or what parts of IT were affected. Not sure I want external entities doing this work, but I don’t know the back story on why these employees were let go either.