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Compensation and Benefits Managers, when performing salary surveys, look at wages and salaries, which is an employee's spendable income, as well as total compensation. The key number is total compensation.  Potential employees almost always ask about the benefits when apply for a job because they know they are a critical component in their well being. If an employer does not provide health insurance, the employee has to buy it out of his or her pocket, or do without, which is not a good idea. If an employee has to set aside money for a 401k, for example, he or she has less disposable income. As noted, the $18.08 is a beginning wage for a lead service attendant. It comes off of Amtrak's job posting.  As I stated, it is probably 80 per cent of the mid-point for the job. Most jobs in business (Amtrak is a business) have a wage/salary range of 80 to 120 per cent of mid-point. Also as noted, if $18.08 is the beginning wage, the mid-point probably is $22.60. If a service attendant gets 80 per cent of the mid-point of a working supervisor, who is not considered part of management in most businesses, that would peg the mid-point of his or her wage at $18.08 or $37,606 for a standard work year. Adding the typical overheads would bring the average compensation package to approximately $50,768.   According to the BLS, the annual mean wage for a train attendant is $38,740 per year. This does not include benefits, but it would include overtime. This data probably includes all train attendants, i.e. Amtrak, Alaska Railroad, etc.  And it is an average of all attendants, i.e. dinning car, sleeping car, coach, etc. Depending on the raio of lead attendants to attendants, the wages for a lead attendant would not distort the averages for attendants significantly. In any case, the BLS numbers tend to support Amtrak's lead attendant number and the estimates for the service attendants.   How does glassdoor.com get its data?  Does it conduct extensive salary surveys or does it just rely on what it is told by current employees?  What is its statistical methodology? If it does not have any data for an attendant, as opposed to a lead attendant, this tells me that it is stripping its data off Amtrak's website and, therefore, does not have any better data than that offered by Amtrak's website. The median compensation reported for flight attendants is not a guess. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) , the estimated mean annual wage for flight attendants is $41,720. The median is $38,020.  They range from $24,990 in the 10th percentile to $62,470 in the 90th per centile.  Applying the same burden to the median as I applied to the Amtrak positions, the outcome would be $51,327. The BLS uses reasonably robust survey and statistical models to gather and process data.   Amtrak's short haul employees probably don't rack up a lot of overtime inasmuch as the short haul trains have had a better on-time performance record than the long haul trains. The on-time performance record for the long haul trains, however, suggests that the through crews probably collect a significant amount of overtime pay.  In FY11 Amtrak's system on-time performance was 78.1 per cent.  The numbers were 84 per cent for the Acela, 82.1 per cent for the Corridor (NEC), 78.1 per cent for the Short Distance trains, and 63.7 per cent for the long haul trains According to several articles that have appeared in the Dallas Morning News in conjunction with American Airlines bankruptcy proceedings, the typical wage for a flight attendant is approximately $41,000 to $44,000 per year before benefits.  This information appears to square with the data reported by the BLS. As noted by another participant, at the end of the day tipping Amtrak's employees but not tipping airline attendants or bus drivers is a function of tradition. It does not make sense to tip one group of employees and not another providing a similar service for similar compensation. But it is what it is, and it is not likely to change, at least in the short run.
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