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The Latest Torment for Air Traffic Controllers: A Dress Code |
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What is it about air traffic controllers that Republican administrations don’t like?
Or, another way to rephrase the question: What is it about ensuring passenger air safety that Republican administrations don’t like?
When Ronald Reagan was president, he broke the air traffic controllers union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), by firing 11,000 air traffic controllers who went out on strike in 1981 for a shorter workweek and higher pay.
The Bush administration’s preferred method of attack is death by a hundred cuts.
Over Labor Day weekend, Bush’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) unilaterally imposed a contract on air traffic controllers that will cut pay by as much as 30 percent, increase work hours, reduce pensions and cut back mandatory breaks that helped reduce fatigue.
Never mind that controller fatigue may have contributed to the fatal Comair crash that killed 49 people in Lexington, Ky., last month. The lone air traffic controller on duty had only nine hours between two work shifts—and only two hours sleep before going back on duty, according to the Associated Press.
The union that represents the controllers, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), rejects the contract as invalid. Says NATCA President Pat Forrey:
We do not consider the imposed work rules to be valid because they were not negotiated and have not been ratified by the NATCA membership.
The FAA-imposed contract also creates a two-tier wage structure—an age-old union-busting technique. Although you wouldn’t know it from much of the mainstream media, NATCA offered more than $1.4 billion in pay and benefit cuts. Rather than proceeding with contract negotiations based on the union’s cost-savings proposal, the FAA cut off talks in April and declared an impasse. That move enabled the agency to impose the contract, which includes signficantly lower wages for new hires.
Enter part two of the attack on workers: Make life miserable for the current staff with the goal to increase turnover and boost the rate at which new staff is hired at the lower-wage levels.
As highlighted yesterday in The New York Times, the FAA seems in the process of doing just that. In addition to being forced to work on radar screens controlling traffic for more than two hours without a break, controllers now are required to follow a “dress code,” which, while not onerous, is another way to badger an already fatigued workforce.
Michael Conley, president of the NATCA local union in Dallas, told The New York Times the dress code was about more than clothes.
“It’s absolutely a power thing,” he said. “They want to show they’re in charge and this is how we’re going to do it and if you don’t like it quit.”
After all, most controllers work in dark rooms far from public view.
But the Bush administration’s obsession with dress codes is just one of many prods to make life miserable on the job: The FAA says controllers no longer are guaranteed two consecutive weeks of vacation and vacations can be canceled at the last minute. Controllers scheduled to work on holidays can be called off a few hours before and lose the holiday pay.
Short-staffing is another issue that likely contributed to the Comair crash—a situation that only will worsen under the FAA’s imposed contract. The Lexington airport was staffed by only one controller, violating even the FAA’s minimum staffing requirement that two controllers be on duty. For years before the crash, Lexington controllers and their supervisors repeatedly had voiced concern about staffing issues at the airport.
The FAA employed 15,606 controllers in 2002, according NATCA, but now that number has shrunk to 14,305 while air traffic continues to grow.
The New York Times also points out airlines have tried the same routine—longer schedules, fewer breaks between shifts—on the nation’s commercial pilots.
Referring to tougher schedules for controllers, John Cox, an aviation safety expert and a former safety official at the Air Line Pilots Association, said, “This is exactly what the airlines have done with pilots.”
“The airline pilots today are flying more hours, flying more days and they’re being more efficiently scheduled and fatigue is an issue for them,” he said.
More reason to ask: What is it about ensuring passenger air safety that Republican administrations—and big corporations—don’t like?
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