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

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

#31

Post by mrmaddog »

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.

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

#32

Post by jamesaguilar »

smtddr wrote: post #17
sadadar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#34

Post by mikeryan »

mrmaddog wrote: post #31

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 assista…

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")

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

#35

Post by dagw »

rmc wrote: post #12

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

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

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

#36

Post by smtddr »

jamesaguilar wrote: post #32
smtddr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#38

Post by acrooks »

saryant wrote: post #25
rmc wrote: post #12

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

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.

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

#39

Post by cmsmith »

anonymoushn wrote: post #13
rmc wrote: post #12

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.

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

#40

Post by asveikau »

jsnk wrote: post #28
nawitus wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>-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?
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