Salary list again indulges our curiosity about what the other guy makes

If our salaries reflect our value to society, then massage therapists (not the fronts for prostitution that dot the strip malls, but the real ones) are of more value than reporters in Las Vegas. Beginning newspaper reporters average $31,300 in Las Vegas, while a massage therapist rakes in $47,400, about $3,000 more than the national average. No telling how much more the massage hookers make.

Calculations by Salary.com show that in Las Vegas, jobs pay about 6 percent more than the national average. However, our cost of living is 10.5 percent more than the national average, so those higher wages aren't quite cause for wild celebration.

Sometimes Las Vegas salaries are just a few thou more, sometimes it's far more. Our surgeons earn $294,400, 10 grand more than the national average. Our pilots of large jets get paychecks of $112,800, more than $5,000 above the national average.

The fascination with salaries, our own and everybody else's, is indulged once again by Parade magazine with its annual "What People Earn" feature in Sunday's Review-Journal. Call it a compulsion, but every year I study people's photos, ages, hometowns and salaries and wonder why they would provide their salaries for public consumption. I was taught salaries always fell under the "don't ask, don't tell" admonition.

Salary.com's Lena Bottos said this is the first year that Parade and her company have produced this report together and that Salary.com relies on information from human resources departments, which makes it inherently more reliable.

"Money makes the world go around, and everybody wants to know what the guy next door makes," she said Friday.

However, there's another more practical use for the Salary.com Web site beyond our basic financial voyeurism. She said employees and employers both can use it to negotiate.

Here are some average base salary numbers Salary.com provided for Las Vegas. Anything followed by a 1 means this is with a year or two's experience. No benefits included:

• Public school teacher: $52,800

• Nurse: $62,700

• Accountant 1: $43,800

• Sales representative 1: $59,000

• Product/brand manager: $90,800

• Property manager: $85,600

• Massage therapist: $47,400

• Surgeon: $294,400

• Program manager: $130,300

• CEO: $744,200

• Retail clerk: $27,200

• Software engineer 1: $58,400

• Newspaper reporter 1: $31,300

• Janitor: $26,100

• Flight attendant: $64,000

Salary.com says our valets make $17,800, and dealers make $14,400. Taxi drivers make $26,400, and housekeepers make $22,100. But since much of their income is tip income, these numbers seemed pretty low.

So Bottos had the numbers recalculated and said that, including tip income, the average valet makes $26,000; the average dealer makes $29,300; taxi drivers make $31,700, and housekeepers make $22,200.

Still seemed kind of low, but Salary.com stands by its numbers. Bottos said the salaries we tend to hear about are the big ones.

The average Las Vegas CEO's $744,200 increases to $1,448,000 once bonuses are tossed in, which seemed more in line with what we know from public documents.

My theory about why the Wynn Las Vegas dealers aren't getting as much public support from noncasino workers is because they were making more than the rest of us before they had to share tips. They were pulling in an estimated $100,000, making them the highest paid dealers on the Strip. Meanwhile, their immediate bosses were earning $60,000.

Now that they're being forced to share tips with floormen, boxmen and pit bosses, dealers are supposedly making about $10,000 less, still a heck of a lot more than the $29,300 that Salary.com says the average dealer makes.

On Friday, a bill making it illegal to force dealers to share tips with management died in the Assembly Judiciary Committee. There's not a lot of sympathy for dealers making $90,000 to $100,000 a year when you're a legislator making $7,800 during a 120-day session. Sometimes knowing the other guy's salary makes you less sympathetic to his cause.

If dealers win this fight, it will have to be in the courts, and so far, they haven't made headway there either.

Jane Ann Morrison's column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call 383-0275.