D3 visualization of San Francisco BART employees' salaries and union membership

http://blog.vctr.me/bart/index.html

by douglascalhoun • 13 years ago

52 72 13 years ago

blog.vctr.me

deeths3• 13 years ago

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).

wjnc• 13 years ago

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?

nawitus• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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.

icambron• 13 years ago

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.

mjw• 13 years ago

The 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• 13 years ago

Yeah... I'm honestly not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing with this visualization. :(

tpurves• 13 years ago

Yes it's indeed visual. Is the visualization insightful? no.

glaugh• 13 years ago

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.

smtddr4• 13 years ago

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....

sadadar• 13 years ago

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.

smtddr4• 13 years ago

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.

wavesounds2• 13 years ago

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.

deeths3• 13 years ago

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.

wavesounds2• 13 years ago

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.

smtddr4• 13 years ago

Never thought of this, I like. I wonder if they're allowed to do that.

vinhboy2• 13 years ago

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.

samstave5• 13 years ago

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.

zorpner2• 13 years ago

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.

dragonwriter3• 13 years ago

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.

discardorama3• 13 years ago

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

rmc2• 13 years ago

USA is weird. How come you can get this data on people's personal lives? Why do you not have privacy laws?

anonymoushn• 13 years ago

They are public employees. Wouldn't it be a bit weirder to expect people to pay taxes without knowing what they were spent on?

cmsmith3• 13 years ago

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.

rmc2• 13 years ago

Public employees are still people, and hence have the right to privacy.

vinhboy2• 13 years ago

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.

yannyu• 13 years ago

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.

webjprgm2• 13 years ago

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.)

saryant• 13 years ago

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...

acrooks• 13 years ago

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.

dagw• 13 years ago

In Norway and Sweden this data is available for all people, not just public employees. The US is a bastion of sensibility in comparison.

w_t_payne• 13 years ago

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.

digikata2• 13 years ago

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.

nonchalance• 13 years ago

To be fair, that information isn't private. It is available for anyone to find.

digikata2• 13 years ago

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.

GusClark• 13 years ago

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.

guserson• 13 years ago

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.

mrmaddog• 13 years ago

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.

mikeryan• 13 years ago

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")

cmsmith3• 13 years ago

Perhaps she retired and was awarded the value of her accrued vacation time?

mikeyouse• 13 years ago

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...

Osiris• 13 years ago

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.

wil421• 13 years ago

I think I am in the wrong profession...perhaps one with a Union can help increase my salary/benefits.

thisispete• 13 years ago

wowsa. how does that 1 station agent make 42k more than any other?

MrZongle2• 13 years ago

Lesson I learned from this chart: if I want to earn more as a BART employee, don't join a union.

javajosh• 13 years ago

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.

martindale• 13 years ago

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.

[1] http://coursefork.org

D3 visualization of San Francisco BART employees' salaries and union membership

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