MBTA Salary Analysis

Year 2015 data thanks to Matthew Rocheleau, the Boston Globe staff reporter on the 22 Dec 2015 MBTA overtime article.

1. extract text tables from PDF using Poppler pdftotext
2. load with Pandas
3. look for interesting aspects of the data.

For example, in 2014, the top MBTA earner was a Technician with an estimated $145 K of overtime on top of an $89 K salary. Excessive overtime can be a concern for worker performance and safety in any field, with possible drastic consequences for the public when working in sensitive areas like transportation and medicine.

The Washingtonian published a 9 Dec 2015 article by Luke Mullins and Michael Gaynor that explores at length issues with WMATA and overtime abuses.

Backpay is excluded as it represents a retroactive increase in base salary for the previous year. Backpay is last year's pay, paid out this year.

Examples

We currently have 2013-2015 salary data. Other trend analyses may find it useful to request prior years data.

2015 MBTA Salary

MBTAsalary EMP-2015-Gross-Bpay-Ovt.xlsx 2015

yields plots and the output:

Highest earning MBTA staff $256080 in 2015 was a Foreperson,Section, including estimated $171257 overtime.

2014 MBTA Salary

MBTAsalary Wages2014.txt 2014

yields plots and the output:

Highest earning MBTA staff $235194 in 2014 was a Technician,Power Equip, including estimated $145401 overtime.

MBTA 2013 Salary

MBTAsalary "FOIA 14-11 final.txt" 2013

yields plots and the output:

Highest earning MBTA staff $238770 in 2013 was a General Manager

Obtaining Salary Data

You will need to download and convert the salary data first. Each year's format is a little different.

2015 Salary Data

We obtained this data from Matthew Rocheleau, the Boston Globe staff reporter on the 22 Dec 2015 MBTA overtime article. We anticipate a request for the whole year 2015 data once we're into 2016.

2014 Salary Data

1. Download 2014 MBTA salary data
2. Extract text from PDF:

   pdftotext -layout Wages2014.pdf
   

2013 Salary Data

1. Download 2013 MBTA salary data
2. Extract text from PDF:

   pdftotext -layout "FOIA 14-11 final.pdf"
   

3. The last three lines of this .txt file are missing a space between the salary and "2013". Just open in a text editor and manually add one additional space before 2013 in these last three lines.