
D3 visualization of San Francisco BART employees' salaries and union membership - douglascalhoun
http://blog.vctr.me/bart/index.html
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mjw
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.

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

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

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deeths
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).

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wjnc
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?

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nawitus
>-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.

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jsnk
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.

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asveikau
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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speeder
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)

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asveikau
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...

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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](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.

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

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mikeyouse
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...](http://blog.sfgate.com/matierandross/2013/07/24/barts-golden-ride-
into-retirement/)

~~~
cmsmith
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.

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ars
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.

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digikata
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.

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

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digikata
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.

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Domenic_S
Oh man, you'll hate this:
[http://salary.sanjoseca.gov/salary/](http://salary.sanjoseca.gov/salary/)

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

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

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cmsmith
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.

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javajosh
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.

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martindale
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](http://coursefork.org)

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guserson
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.

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smtddr
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....

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sadadar
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.

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smtddr
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.

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jamesaguilar
Then toggle the drop-down to Salary + OT + Misc.

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smtddr
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.

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wil421
I think I am in the wrong profession...perhaps one with a Union can help
increase my salary/benefits.

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MrZongle2
Lesson I learned from this chart: if I want to earn more as a BART employee,
don't join a union.

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

