Pay Scales — VDE Annual Salary & Overtime Data
Pay Scales — VDE Annual Salary & Overtime Data
⚠️ DATA GAP: 2001–2009 IS NOT INCLUDED ⚠️
Per-employee VDE annual salary and overtime data does not exist in this folder for years 2001 through 2009. Public Massachusetts state payroll only starts at CY 2010 (the launch year of the Comptroller's CTHRU portal).
This is a hard data limitation, not an oversight.
Files in this folder
| File | Coverage | Notes |
|---|---|---|
vde-annual-salary-by-employee.csv | 2010–2023 | One row per (employee, year). Annual rate, regular pay paid, overtime paid, total paid. Latest CTHRU snapshot per row. |
vde-annual-salary-aggregates.json | 2010–2023 | Per-year and per-(year, grade) stats: min, P25, median, mean, P75, max, stdev, mode, sum. Plus IQR outliers + top-5 lists per metric. |
vde-grades-extracted.json | 2024-07-14 → 2026-07-12 | Scheduled bi-weekly chart rates by grade and step (current/future contract period). |
effective-YYYY-MM-DD.md | Single chart per file | Markdown text of each Unit 8 SEIU 509 salary chart (5 charts spanning 2024-07-14 → 2026-07-12). |
_salary-compensation-guide.md | Reference | mass.gov "Salary and Compensation" guide — index of all bargaining unit charts, mileage rates, intern rates, etc. |
_raw_cthru_vde_2010-2023.json | Raw API dump | Reproducibility — re-run _build_vde_pay.py to regenerate the CSV/JSON outputs from this. |
_build_vde_pay.py | Build script | Pulls fresh data from CTHRU Socrata API and rebuilds CSV + aggregates JSON. |
What's missing and why
| Years | Status | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 2001–2009 | GAP — NOT AVAILABLE PUBLICLY | CTHRU portal began CY 2010. No predecessor public dataset exists. Verified across MassOpenBooks, OpenTheBooks, Massachusetts Almanac, and Wayback Machine. |
| 2010–2022 | ✅ Complete | Annual snapshots include November or later → pay_total_actual ≈ W-2 amount. |
| 2023 | ⚠️ INCOMPLETE | CTHRU's latest snapshot for VDE-MRC is 2023-01-14. annual_rate is fine; actual_paid and OT sums reflect only ~2 weeks. |
| 2024+ | Not yet published | CTHRU lag — expect 6+ months after CY end. Re-run _build_vde_pay.py quarterly to refresh. |
Three options to address the 2001–2009 gap
You have to pick one of these. There is no fourth.
(a) PRR — file a Public Records Request with the MA Comptroller
What you get: per-employee historical HRCMS extracts (the same fields CTHRU later exposed).
Cost: weeks-to-months turnaround, possibly fees.
Best for: bargaining-table evidence, members who need real W-2-grade history.
Template: build one in prr-templates/ (parallel to prr-templates/massability-prr.md).
(b) Wayback / CBA scrape — chart-based scheduled rates only
What you get: the contract step-rate that VDEs in each grade should have been paid each year, derived from old SEIU 509 Unit 8 CBA appendices and historical Unit 8 salary chart PDFs preserved on the Wayback Machine. Cost: a few hours of scraping + PDF extraction. Limit: scheduled, NOT actual paid. Cannot produce overtime, cannot show step-progression for any individual person, cannot reveal pay distribution within a year. Best for: "what was the contracted top-step rate in 2003" type questions only.
(c) Declare the gap acceptable
What you get: nothing for 2001–2009; rely on 2010–2023 alone. Cost: zero. Best for: when the storyline only needs to show recent trends (e.g., the 2019→2023 staffing/OT collapse).
See docs/methodology.md "Pre-2010 gap" section for full evidence trail.