Employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) make a good buck, and six-figure cash compensation in 2013 was by no means limited to the white-collar higher-ups, according to 2013 payroll records posted at SeeThroughNY today.

In fact, the vast majority of MTA workers pulling down more than $100,000 in total pay last year were hourly employees, including police, blue-collar workers and their supervisors, the payroll database shows. This does not include fringe benefits such as health insurance and pension expenses.

MTA Police, in particular, stand out: their average pay was $125,000, and fully 85 percent of the authority’s police department employees pulled down more than $100,000. To be sure, this is not atypical of county and municipal police departments throughout the metropolitan New York City region — not to mention the Port Authority police, whose average pay was virtually equal to that of their MTA counterparts. The 2013 figures don’t reflect the 7.5 percent retro pay boost MTA’s rank-and-filers will get under a sweet deal their union negotiated with the authority earlier this year.

Among non-police operating subsidiaries, Long Island Rail Road employees were the MTA’s 21013 pay champs, earning an average of $84,000. Twenty-eight percent of LIRR employees received more than $100,000, including 166 who more than doubled their base pay with overtime and other extras, five of whom more than tripled their their base salaries. 

The LIRR has been threatened with a strike in September by its main union, which wants the MTA to knuckle under to a six-year pact including a 17 percent total base pay increase, as recommended by a presidential mediation board. That’s more than the Transit Workers Union got in its recent six-year deal, which boosts base pay by 11 percent.

On that subject, here’s an interesting article explaining the difference between New York City transit workers and most public employee unions in New York, who are subject to the strike prohibition in the Taylor Law, and the LIRR unions, which are covered by the federal Railway Labor Act.