D3 visualization of San Francisco BART employees' salaries and union membership
blog.vctr.me
blog.vctr.me
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.
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).
-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?
- 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.
This is actually true for all Finnish citizens. It's a bit weird since privacy is (supposed) to be respected here.
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...
Visualizations make it very easy to spot outliers like this.
http://blog.sfgate.com/matierandross/2013/07/24/barts-golden...
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.
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.
(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)
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 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.
As an aside, I think the hush-hush nature of salary is pretty silly to begin with, and really only hurts employees.
Why not make the list anonymous.
For example, the salaries of all of Texas' 674,000 employees: http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/government-employee...
But overall, the idea of an interactive news story in git is one of the best things I've seen so far this decade.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
and then
> I hated people like you when I commuted daily on BART.
Which is it? Do you take the BART daily or not?
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 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.
I personally think OT should be paid in comp time, not cash.
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.
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