7 ms·
D3 visualization of San Francisco BART employees' salaries and union membership
- deeths 13y agoVery cool visualization. One of the big points of confusion I've had in understanding the press around this has been trying to rationalize the differences between the (union) statements about low base salaries against the (management) statements about high total costs per employee. This provides some interesting context about how those numbers can be so different. 1) There's only one union employee with a base salary (graph union vs base pay) over $100k, and only 3 non-computer/telco union jobs with a salary above $90k. 2) There are a few folks with huge overtime (earning up to an additional 1.5x their salary in overtime). A quarter of the union employees are adding over 20% to their salary from overtime. Nearly 7% are adding over 50%. A total of 21 people are making more from OT than base pay. The big overtime users are mostly making between $50k and 65k a year in base salary, with a few making $80k+. 3) As a side-note: The biggest overtime payments go mostly to senior operations foreworkers (usually making $80k+) and train operators (usually making $60-75k). As a percentage of salary, those two titles are some of the leaders, but also joined by system service workers (described on several sites as basically a janitor and making $50-60k).
- wjnc 13y agoAstonishing for me from a cross cultural perspective. -Here in the Netherlands mechanics would never come as close to senior management as at BART. The highest ranking mechanics / technical staff are in the $/2 range of senior management? I would venture the same ratio would be >10 here. -You can actually get 100K$ in overtime! Too bad their hours aren't included. -And: all salaries are public including names. No privacy there. -I don't see much evidence of explicit union favouratism? Much of the management is non-represented, but white collar versus blue collar could account for that?
- nawitus 13y ago>-And: all salaries are public including names. No privacy there. This is actually true for all Finnish citizens. It's a bit weird since privacy is (supposed) to be respected here.
- jsnk 13y agoI don't see anything unreasonable here as they are public workers. They are paid for by taxpayers and taxpayers should damn well be able to see how much public workers get paid. Besides, the public workers all agreed to this when they enter into the contract.
- asveikau 13y agoWhy do their names have to be listed if they're just a mechanic or whatever? Why not strip the names unless they are in some kind of leadership role?
- speeder 13y agoI think you never met Brazil, where once the government even found government paid cooks earning 50k BRL month (the Brazil President wage is 19k BRL month, that is about 10k usd month)
- asveikau 13y agoAs I said, I am not even saying remove the "Profession, Salary" fields. Just the names for most people. When someone digs through the data and sees the cook being paid that much, perhaps they start to ask their government some questions. Or come up with any other criteria for whose name gets released. Just don't make everybody's name visible by default because you're fearful of the nepotistic chef scenario...
- icambron 13y agoI have no real editorial opinions to add, but some cultural context might be useful: - Management is not supposed to be represented by unions, because, in part, their jobs are to oppose the union's demands. They sit (or are generally expected to sit) on the opposite side of the negotiating table. - Overtime for public workers in the US is the subject of a lot of grumbling, because the perception is that a lot of it is unnecessary and really just the result of poor policy and management practices. - That the salaries are public is part of American expectations about transparency, and probably a result of the common American feeling that the unions and leadership are fleecing them. Put another way, we're the ones paying them and we should get to know how much.
- mjw 13y agoThe coloured dots are cute and all, but if the goal is to make visually apparent the relationship between salary and union membership, some more traditional visualisations might have made this clearer. For example boxplots broken down by union.
- taeric 13y agoYeah... I'm honestly not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing with this visualization. :(
- tpurves 13y agoYes it's indeed visual. Is the visualization insightful? no.
- glaugh 13y agoHere's a different perspective on the data. Threw the data into Statwing, related Salary to Union Membership: https://www.statwing.com/open/datasets/6019645769abb7de64d3e68811c3c9a8497ab386#workspaces/8329 https://www.statwing.com/open/datasets/6019645769abb7de64d3e... You can play around in there a bit, too. I thought just running descriptives on everything was pretty interesting. Disclosure: I work at Statwing. Thanks to OP for making original data easy to get to.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- smtddr 13y agoHey, so... this is a sorta good time to ask. I assume this website's visualization was meant to spark some discussion. Do people on HN support/condemn the BART strike(s)? I've always been under the impression that the huge salaries being reported were some how an exaggeration. Because of this, I support the BART strike(s)... but perhaps my impression is wrong. Also, the strike doesn't impact me nearly as much as some other people. git pull/commit/push works just as good at home as in the office; thus I avoid dealing with the insane traffic from EastBay to San Francisco that is made even more insane by BART shutting down. At the same time, I don't think anyone wants disgruntled BART employees doing anything dangerous so paying them to have a "comfortable" life is also a good idea. Basically, I want to know if BART employees are being overpaid for what they do. This is probably more of an opinion thing than any kind of fact one way or another. I don't wanna go into some flamewar or anything....
- sadadar 13y agoI think the graphic is also fairly misleading starting with total comp instead of base salary or cash take home. I know when talking about my salary or how much I make things like value of my medical insurance is rarely something that comes up.
- smtddr 13y agoYes!!! That's something I really think is going on. I really want to know the base-salary; not the potential health-care, plus 401k, plus something-else, that makes it all look huge.
- jamesaguilar 13y agoThen toggle the drop-down to Salary + OT + Misc.
- smtddr 13y agothanks for the tip. Looks _much_ more reasonable now; still a bit higher than what I would have guessed. I kinda think this website should default to base-pay. In my mind, when someone tells me their salary I assume they're talking base-pay. If I wanted other info, I'd specifically ask for it. But that's just me.
- rmc 13y agoUSA is weird. How come you can get this data on people's personal lives? Why do you not have privacy laws?
- anonymoushn 13y agoThey are public employees. Wouldn't it be a bit weirder to expect people to pay taxes without knowing what they were spent on?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cmsmith 13y agoWe should know where our tax dollars are going, but I don't really see the problem with anonomizing the data - at least for the bottom 95% of earners. There are also aspects of government spending which would be way more interesting to me (and way more likely to be evidence of corruption) than how much my neighbor the train mechanic makes.
- rmc 13y agoPublic employees are still people, and hence have the right to privacy.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- vinhboy 13y agoThe thing that bothers me is that it only has information for people working in government related jobs. For example, you can also get the name, salary, and title of all state workers. I find that kind of wrong. Why not make the list anonymous.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- yannyu 13y ago
- digikata 13y agoI don't think I'd feel comfortable if someone posted my name, title, and salary along with everyone I worked with to a public website.
- nonchalance 13y agoTo be fair, that information isn't private. It is available for anyone to find.
- digikata 13y agoI don't think any laws were violated, and I understand the oversight justification in general. However, I find this salary data is fairly specific, when compared to other budget/spending data released by cities and school districts (at least my local ones). I'd actually prefer much more detail on non-payroll spending, particularly with public spending on sub-contracted companies.
- Domenic_S 13y agoOh man, you'll hate this: http://salary.sanjoseca.gov/salary/ http://salary.sanjoseca.gov/salary/
- GusClark 13y agoThen don't plan on working for the government. I work in Higher Education and every few years the local newspaper in my area posts our salary information on the web, just in a less visual way.
- guserson 13y agoThis is not a good visualization. It's actually harder to find the information one might be interested in and making comparisons is not easy or really possible.
- mrmaddog 13y agoI like how you can click on a person's representative dot and follow them through the different sorting metrics. One point stood out to me: how does Assistant Treasurer Ms. Collier get $289,534 in "other" pay? The raw data provided didn't offer any details, and http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area/2012 http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area/2012 classifies "Other" as lump sum payouts for vacation, sick-leave, bonuses and comp-time. How does the assistant treasurer get such a high bonus? (For reference, one other assistant treasurer was included in the data, and made a base of 150k (vs Ms Collier's $30K), but only 6k in "other" payment). Visualizations make it very easy to spot outliers like this.
- mikeryan 13y agoI like following around Carl Oliver highest compensated union employee at 271k has an 80k base pay 121k in overtime, 23k in "other" (with that much overtime you better get a bonus) and 4k in "Misc" (not sure the diff between that and "other")
- cmsmith 13y agoPerhaps she retired and was awarded the value of her accrued vacation time?
- mikeyouse 13y agoThat's exactly what happened. She had been employed for 21 years and accrued that much PTO over that period. http://blog.sfgate.com/matierandross/2013/07/24/barts-golden-ride-into-retirement/ http://blog.sfgate.com/matierandross/2013/07/24/barts-golden...
- cmsmith 13y agoI'm just going to add that I think it's silly to get paid your last salary for vacation time you earned when you were 25. While I don't care for caps on the accrued time, I see nothing unfair about scaling the time by your salary - such that if you have 100 vacation days and you get a 10% raise you now have 90 vacation days.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wil421 13y agoI think I am in the wrong profession...perhaps one with a Union can help increase my salary/benefits.
- thisispete 13y agowowsa. how does that 1 station agent make 42k more than any other?
- MrZongle2 13y agoLesson I learned from this chart: if I want to earn more as a BART employee, don't join a union.
- javajosh 13y agoWow - I'm a lot less interested in the BART strike and more inspired about the idea that news stories and their source data will be published as github projects. This is an amazing concept. I can fork this "story" and edit it to my liking, add different analyses, commentary, etc. I could combine the data with other data - all without bothering the author. I can also verify the data, amend it, etc (which is a little risky). But overall, the idea of an interactive news story in git is one of the best things I've seen so far this decade.
- martindale 13y agoYou might also be interested in Coursefork, my startup for creating forkable educational materials [1]. We're considering building some "deploy to x" tools, where x is a set of publishing tools such as Wordpress or Jekyll, or even a GitHub pages instance. [1]: http://coursefork.org http://coursefork.org