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.
Visualizations make it very easy to spot outliers like this.
http://blog.sfgate.com/matierandross/2013/07/24/barts-golden...
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!"
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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.
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
