Weekly Viz 2019-12-02

How much does union membership benefit America’s workers?

About Makeover Monday

MakeoverMonday is a social data project: “Each week we post a link to a chart, and its data, and then you rework the chart. Maybe you retell the story more effectively, or find a new story in the data. We’re curious to see the different approaches you all take. Whether it’s a simple bar chart or an elaborate infographic, we encourage everyone of all skills to partake. Together we can have broader conversations about and with data.”

Starting from Jan 08, 2018, I decided to put aside one hour on Monday weekly to create some visualization and find some insights from the data.

The datasets are published each week at: MakeoverMonday Datasets.

Makeover Monday 20191202

This week’s data is about US median weekly salary by whether in workers’ union or not, by race, and by gender. The idea the original article tries to convey is that being a union member could benefit a worker with significantly higher salary. However, I personally believe the whole picture cannot revealed by just looking at these high level data, as there are a lot of confounding factors including industry, occupation, population size, etc., which all impact salary greatly.

My Visualization

To avoid potential misleading breakdown (like the huge gender pay gap shown in the article), I tries to show high level trend only with disclaimers on the top.

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Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

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Insights

• As I mentioned, though union members consistently show a higher wage than the non-members, it does not imply a causation between union membership vs. salary – more confounding factors like industry, occupation, etc. must be carefully examined to draw any conclusion.

Follow this link to find more weekly vizzes :)