D3 visualization of San Francisco BART employees' salaries and union membership
blog.vctr.meThe 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.
Here's a different perspective on the data. Threw the data into Statwing, related Salary to Union Membership:
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.
Yeah... I'm honestly not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing with this visualization. :(
Yes it's indeed visual. Is the visualization insightful? no.
Very 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).
Astonishing 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?
I 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.
>-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.
I 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.
Why 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?
I 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)
As 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...
I 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 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.
Perhaps she retired and was awarded the value of her accrued vacation time?
That'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...
I'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.
You should at least adjust by cost of living.
But now you know exactly why people save up vacation like this: To get a larger payout at the end of the career.
Personally I think unused vacation days should be savable for 2 years, and then are automatically paid at the current salary rate.
Personally I don't care about being paid for unused vacation days. I just want my vacation. And I don't want to have to use it all for Christmas. (Some employers I've worked for give you a week or two for Christmas automatically, some make you use your allocated days.)
I think it makes sense to pay out for vacation days one could have taken but didn't when they quit or get laid off. I'm not sure it makes sense to pay for vacation not taken in previous years, but maybe.
Well, I'd assume here vacation time from 25 years ago didn't incur compounded interest?
(I'm actually in favor of a 1~2 year cap, but I'm betting she left money on the table by not getting it paid out)
My brother is a CHP officer and they have the same type of arrangement. They get paid out vacation, sick leave, etc if they don't use it. But then they end up getting double-paid. You get paid because you worked and then you get paid again because you didn't take vacation. if they USE the vacation, then they only get paid once (no work pay + vacation pay).
There should be a vacation cap. Once you hit the cap, you can't accrue any more. The cap should be 2 years worth of vacation. You should never get paid out vacation. It's a benefit, not an entitlement.
I 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")
I 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.
Then 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.
To be fair, that information isn't private. It is available for anyone to find.
I 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.
Oh man, you'll hate this: http://salary.sanjoseca.gov/salary/
USA is weird. How come you can get this data on people's personal lives? Why do you not have privacy laws?
They are public employees. Wouldn't it be a bit weirder to expect people to pay taxes without knowing what they were spent on?
We 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.
Public employees are still people, and hence have the right to privacy.
Public employee salary is public knowledge: http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area
As an aside, I think the hush-hush nature of salary is pretty silly to begin with, and really only hurts employees.
I might point out that some employment contracts specifically say you can't discuss salary with fellow employees. (I know I read it somewhere I applied or worked, probably at my current job too.)
In Norway and Sweden this data is available for all people, not just public employees. The US is a bastion of sensibility in comparison.
I can see the attraction. Actually, I think it is a good idea. We should do it in the UK too ... although people are traditionally a bit weird about money here, so I can't see it happening.
The 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.
Salary data on public employees is public data in most (all?) states.
For example, the salaries of all of Texas' 674,000 employees: http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/government-employee...
Coming from Canada, I find it amazing that 30% of the top 25 salaries are related to athletics. Really goes to show how important sports are in the US.
It has more to do with the amount top athletic programs bring into big athletic schools. If the school is making millions on tickets and TV rights on their top-rated football team, they're willing to pay a lot for a coach that helps them keep winning.
Wow - 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.
You 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.
This 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.
Hey, 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....
Here is my perspective as a daily BART rider where 99% of the time I also have a bike, as well as often travelling with small kids/strollers (Forgive my BART Rage): If you have ever taken a BART elevator; every single BART employee should be fired, here is why:
BART elevators, in 100% of my experience over the years has been a cesspool covered in urine and who knows what. EVERY time I take the elevator - I hit the emergency help button and complain about the stench, the state of the service.
Every station operator has had the exact same response: "It's not my job" -- to which I tell them "Then tell someone whose job it is!"
---
I am enraged that I have to pay for such a horrible rider experience, that I have to subject my small children to the horrific conditions of the BART elevators, their filthy cloth seats and their terrible customer service.
I would be happy to have these people make a great salary if they could keep the basics of a clean, safe, efficient service going. As it stands now - I have no sympathy for anything they are doing due to the conditions of the service.
I now exclusively take my bike up the escalator. The station operators try to tell me to take the elevator, and I say I refuse to take it until they clean them.
> I hit the emergency help button and complain about the stench, the state of the service.
Please stop wasting everyone's time with your abuse of the emergency help button. Your problem is not an emergency.
Additionally, you do not "have to pay" for the experience, you choose to do so.
> Additionally, you do not "have to pay" for the experience, you choose to do so.
Actually, we _all_ have to pay, even if don't ride BART. There's a 0.5% sales tax addon to fund BART in the Bay Area. Next time, check your facts.
Of course. That's neither what I nor the GP were talking about (read the next few words after "have to pay" in either of our posts if you're still confused).
The last time I used the piss-laden elevator with my children there was a homeless person convulsing on the platform of embarcaderro station.
You have no clue what you're talking about - Bart is broken and their staff are near useless.
I'm not wasting time and your a pretentious jerk for trying to tell me "I don't have to pay for their service"
Actually, you're the pretentious one here, using a device specifically labeled for emergencies to complain at someone every day about the cleanliness of the elevator. They're telling you it's not their job because you're ringing the fucking police, not custodial staff. You are diverting police resources away from, you know, responding to rapes and stabbings because you're a precious snowflake that can't handle a bit of piss on his way to work (undoubtedly in a city that also smells like piss). I'm surprised you haven't been arrested or shot yet, particularly since you are arrogant enough to believe that the rules do not apply to you. Take your bike in the elevator and suck it up. I bet you sneak on with your bike during rush hour, as well.
Those of us that ride BART daily are smart enough to understand that BART has culturally drifted into a transportation service that is inappropriate for children. Particularly during rush hour, BART is an extremely unsafe place for children, and the reason you are disgusted by bringing your children onto BART is because you are taking an unnecessary risk by doing so. You are correct that it shouldn't be this way, but you are a terrible human being for abusing BART employees for the situation in the manner that you do.
We get it. BART is disgusting in some places. You know what? It still beats the hell out of traffic for me every day that I rode it, and I don't walk around making my problems everyone else's problems because I expect perfection out of everything I do. It's a public transportation service, not your personal train. Hop off your horse, get in line with the rest of us and shut up, or go on Craigslist and buy a car, for crying out loud. You're a technologist. You can afford one.
God, I hated people like you when I commuted daily on BART. People like you are too self-absorbed to realize that they make everybody else's commute suck by broadcasting and/or protesting how much the commute sucks. If I had a dollar for every time someone tried to sneak a bike on during rush hour and then had a standoff with the train operator, making the rest of us miss our transfers, I could buy a car.
The only person broken in this situation is you. You wouldn't last a second in New York. I'd think twice about letting these comments stand attached to your name, because they make you look really bad. Like, I hope I never interview you bad.
You're being an ass: If you are in an elevator, there is a button to call the agent. This is THE ONLY BUTTON to all the agent. When you are in a confined room with an infant and a 2 year old and the space is covered in piss and god-knows what else - it is perfectly appropriate to us that button to complain about the hygiene, cleanliness and SAFTEY of that space.
In the event of an overdosing homeless person outside the elevator upon arriving to the platform level, it is again appropriate - and to demand that BART keep these services not only functional - but at a level of accepted cleanliness should not be some ridiculous request.
>It's a public transportation service, not your personal train. Hop off your horse, get in line with the rest of us and shut up, or go on Craigslist and buy a car, for crying out loud. You're a technologist. You can afford one.
> If you are in an elevator, there is a button to call the agent. This is THE ONLY BUTTON to all the agent.
The emergency call button is the only button to call the agent because the only reason to call the agent is to report an emergency.
> it is perfectly appropriate to us that button to complain about the hygiene, cleanliness and SAFTEY of that space.
No, its not. It is appropriate (and more likely to be effective) to complain about non-emergency problems of this type by other mechanisms, but it is neither appropriate nor effective to use the emergency call button to complain about it.
> In the event of an overdosing homeless person outside the elevator upon arriving to the platform level, it is again appropriate
Well, yes, that is an emergency.
> and to demand that BART keep these services not only functional - but at a level of accepted cleanliness should not be some ridiculous request.
The demand is not ridiculous. The use of the emergency call button to make the demand is.
> You're being an ass:
Call someone a pretentious jerk but get it back and suddenly that person's an ass. Got it.
> This is THE ONLY BUTTON to all the agent.
That button contacts BART police dispatch in some cases because stations do not always have operators. Particularly in my old home station, I've seen people use it and communicate with someone while the station agent was not in the kiosk. That's the expectation around something labeled "emergency." Give me your pager number so I can page you at 2am to complain about reading your comment.
Do you ever listen to yourself? Seriously, I was being brutally honest. Your comment ranks among the most pretentious and awful I've ever read on HN, and I received a link to it in an e-mail thread where the subject was you. There is no plane of existence where anything you have typed in this thread is normal, rational human behavior.
Do you have any idea what would happen if you pulled this stunt on the New York subway? NYPD would probably paralyze you with a night stick for abusing resources while New Yorkers recorded it with their cell phones. And I've stepped around human shit in the stairwell in New York. And you know what? I don't care! I didn't rage! I didn't vent on HN! I accepted that bad things happen in the world and who gives a flying fuck, and went on my day without sparing two brain cycles except laughing about it later. Who cares? Keep on clenching and frothing at the mouth over every little inconvenience and you're going to die by 50. Relax.
It's public transportation. It's going to be bad. Universally. That's the rule. Wake up into reality, carry hand sanitizer, and focus on things that actually matter. If you're worried about your kids seeing a homeless person because oh no think of their precious beliefs and ideals, drive them where they need to go. Come on. You're better than this.
>Do you ever listen to yourself? Seriously, I was being brutally honest. Your comment ranks among the most pretentious and awful I've ever read on HN, and I received a link to it in an e-mail thread where the subject was you. There is no plane of existence where anything you have typed in this thread is normal, rational human behavior.
Seriously? Calling the emergency when I come out of a piss-filled elevator to a body convulsing on the floor on the platform is not an emergency? And when I am attempting to bring small children through a public service elevator where there is real risk of infectious disease? Complaining about this is "on no plane of existence rational"???
You're deluded.
Your original story was that you use the emergency call button every time you use the elevator. You later added that the most recent time you used the elevator, there was a someone convulsing on the platform floor.
No one has suggested that the latter single incident was an inappropriate use of the emergency button, what people have said is that the former, recurring use was inappropriated.
> Complaining about this is "on no plane of existence rational"?
Complaining is not the isssue. Using the emergency call-button for those complaints when there is not an actual emergency is the issue.
> Calling the emergency when I come out of a piss-filled elevator to a body convulsing on the floor on the platform is not an emergency?
Yes, it is, and good for you for doing something. Minus the piss-filled elevator part, which is an irrelevant detail.
> And when I am attempting to bring small children through a public service elevator where there is real risk of infectious disease?
No, it isn't. The difference between these two was pointed out to you elsewhere, and now you're just being obtuse. Take the stairs. They're good for you. There are foldable strollers. I have a toddler and we love the stairs. He makes a game out of them.
I feel like I'm teaching second grade here, but an emergent situation is when someone is in immediate danger. Someone having a seizure is in danger. You using an elevator with contaminants in it is not an emergent situation. You probably need some education about when it's appropriate to call 911, as well.
> You're deluded.
Sigh.
I'm pretentious, yet you're teaching me as though I am a second grader, right.
You insinuated that I was "sheilding my precious kids from the homeless" and have stated that I'm pretentious for expecting a functional, clean elevator from a service which already pays a respectable income while threatening strikes if not given more money while doing nothing to fix their current issues.
So, while I obviously did a poor job expressing to you how I find a piss-filled elevator unacceptable - and you're clearly not bothered by human excrement in your public transportation systems - I find calling to the attention of the system, by the only means made available, perfectly reasonable. I also did that holding a standard for cleanliness for a system that wants more money an acceptable thing to expect as a user of the system.
Please stop this, both of you.
> Those of us that ride BART daily ....
and then
> I hated people like you when I commuted daily on BART.
Which is it? Do you take the BART daily or not?
When I took my new position, I stopped because it's in the peninsula. It was a recent transition. Before that I rode it daily for years. I'm not sure what you're getting at; in the first instance I'm referencing an aggregate group that I consider myself a part of.
> I am enraged that I have to pay for such a horrible rider experience, that I have to subject my small children to the horrific conditions of the BART elevators, their filthy cloth seats and their terrible customer service.
You don't have to. You choose to. Assuming this enrages you, you should probably stop doing it. There are other transportation options in the Bay Area besides BART, including busses (many of which can transport bikes), rental vehicles (including ad hoc rentals like ZipCar), and owning your own vehicle.
I personally think hiring more BART employees and expanding the network (creating construction jobs) would be better then the current BART employees making more money (except for maybe those at the very bottom).
I also think they lost a lot of public support by striking. I think canvasing the platforms to appeal to the public while continuing operations would have been a better tactic.
Never thought of this, I like. I wonder if they're allowed to do that.
I hope someone does the math and figure out whether paying money for OT work is more cost effective than just hiring more people.
I personally think OT should be paid in comp time, not cash.
I 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.
They have the other stats, but in the drop-down, but consider that this is a situation where in some cases salaries+overtime are 2.5x the base salary.
Only a small number of workers are skewed that high, but the overtime is significant for a large percent of workers.
They should have excluded other benefits by default, but I think you need to include the overtime to get a real picture.
A lot of people I know have jobs that don't have medical or 401k's so its almost always brought up when discussing salaries around my neck of the woods.
Yes!!! 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.
Then toggle the drop-down to Salary + OT + Misc.
thanks 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.
> Basically, I want to know if BART employees are being overpaid for what they do.
Correction: this BART strike (threat...) is from the "train operators" union.
Consider the fact that BART trains are (almost) fully automated. The "operator" does nothing more than monitor things. If there is an emergency evacuation, s/he would help the passengers get out of the tunnel or whereever they are.
Now, given this: why should an operator make $100K? Take a look around: how many other jobs pay this much with so little qualifications? A starting teach in SF makes $54K, after a Masters degree and certifications. A BART operator needs a few weeks of classes and that's about it. You can train a person in a few days to run BART trains: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?id=9255291
I think I am in the wrong profession...perhaps one with a Union can help increase my salary/benefits.
Lesson I learned from this chart: if I want to earn more as a BART employee, don't join a union.
wowsa. how does that 1 station agent make 42k more than any other?