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
#2Very 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).
Re: D3 visualization of San Francisco BART employees' salaries and union membership
#3Astonishing 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?
Re: D3 visualization of San Francisco BART employees' salaries and union membership
#4The 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.
Re: D3 visualization of San Francisco BART employees' salaries and union membership
#5Astonishing 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 pri…
>-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.
Re: D3 visualization of San Francisco BART employees' salaries and union membership
#6Astonishing 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 pri…
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.
Re: D3 visualization of San Francisco BART employees' salaries and union membership
#7The 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.
Yeah... I'm honestly not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing with this visualization. :(
Re: D3 visualization of San Francisco BART employees' salaries and union membership
#8[deleted]
Re: D3 visualization of San Francisco BART employees' salaries and union membership
#9Hey, 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....
Re: D3 visualization of San Francisco BART employees' salaries and union membership
#10The 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.