> ATC isn't even the worst offender. Law enforcement and prison guards can pull 100+ hours a week on a regular basis. This is how prison guards can pull $400k/year.

There's definitely elements of that - but part of that is that many pensions are based on the two highest earning years of your career, so it's "common" among cops when they are planning to retire to spend two years working every possible piece of OT available, to maximize their pension income.

Sounds like a weird incentivization for sure. Why not base the pension on the average over all the years worked as in many other countries? When you offer such incentives, people will naturally work in such a way.

Because you'll loose half a career's worth of inflationary salary rises that way. Also, women might work part time after having children which would skew the average annual salary down. Over a 40 year career, just from inflation alone, you'd be getting about half your final salary that way, even ignoring any increases later on from being better qualified or taking on more responsibility.

Mind you, in the UK, defined benefits pension schemes are very rare nowadays, but where they exist they are defined as a percentage of the final year salary with that company, so the highest 2 year thing seems a bit weird to me but for a different reason.

Highest 2 year is an attempt to address the edge cases around 1 year (especially final year).

You can adjust for inflation and only exclude year where you don't work full time.

Much more obvious solution is to not include overtime pay in the pension calculation.

In the US, social security is based on the 35 highest paying years. If that system is good enough for social security, I don't see why we don't do the same for government pensions.

But wouldn't it be cheaper for them to just hire more people to do the same amount of hours so that no overtime was used? And they would get better work output as well, since people would be rested.

It would, yes. There's large worker/union pressure in many of these fields to not take away overtime by reducing hours, though, since it is such a huge part of total compensation.

It would be cheaper.

But then you don't get to go on stage with a chainsaw and bragging about how you're downsizing government.

Yes, but it's a local maximum since hiring more people is going to be expensive/difficult until overtime is fixed.

Some state prisons have escaped the overtime pit by offering huge sign-on bonuses and doing a hiring surge. But it takes longer to train ATC than a CO.