The lack of empathy in the comments is disconcerting. The post is a bit light on details (though the example given of flying 23 hours back-to-back continental flights is terrible if regular) the post deserves better than:
1. Pilots fly for fun. You made the wrong career move.
2. Capitalism!
3. you're lucky - imagine if you were a warehouse worker.
He's a pilot, not an accountant or lawyer. He knows that there is pay pressure due to companies skirting regulations. That exec mgmt gets massive bonsuses while the pilots work very long hours and (probably unpaid) overtime offends one's sense of justice.
Pay has been stagnant for the vast majority of workers for decades. We should be doing something about it, not dismissing it. Capitalism is a great tool for progress, but it should not, and is not, the answer to everything. Human dignity matters.
I think the lack of empathy is because cargo pilots flying for Amazon still have it much better than warehouse workers. Both job wise (nicer to fly than to pack) and with regards to the pay.
Aviation is one of the most regulated sectors in both the US and worldwide. The reason why DHL uses subcontractors is not because they want to save money, they aren't allowed to fly in the US. Which is somehow interesting because both Fedex and UPS are allowed to conduct inter-EU flights.
Also, flying Cargo is a hard job. Passengers don't complain too much if the flight is delayed due to bad weather, the logistics companies can lose millions due to that. Pressure for cargo pilots to be on time has always been high and shifts have been long. His view is skewed because Fedex and UPS fly mostly domestically with short legs (3-4h). If you compare Southern to other global freight companies (e.g. Cargolux), conditions aren't worse. It's normal to be away from home for a week and only have stopovers somewhere in the desert or the middle of Siberia.
I somehow doubt the 23h flight story (the wording is very vague "asked to sit on a flight") since regulation for pilots is very strict.
If Southern forces a pilot to fly a 23h shift with no third pilot on board then I'm sure the FAA would be very interested in that story and it would have consequences.
My guess is that there was a third pilot on board. It then still sucks having to be in an aircraft for 23h, but he didn't have to work for 23h straight (which would've been very dangerous).
As hard as it might be for someone who dreamed of the amazing pilot job and is now flying weird shifts to unattractive cities: This is not an issue of outsourcing to get things cheaper or of paying people minimum wage for hard physical work without the chance of being represented by a union. He doesn't see his family as much as he wants but at least he's able to feed them.
You might think that, but the law actually currently uses a concept called "portal-to-portal". Companies only need to pay for time that is "integral and indispensable" to the labor in question. In short if you aren't actually earning money for the company, they don't necessarily need to pay you.
It originated with mine workers who would have to take a long mine-elevator ride (30m+) to and from the vein, and companies didn't want to pay for that time. They successfully argued that the time spent riding the elevator was essentially part of your commute, just like driving to work, and they shouldn't have to pay for it.
Lately it's also been applied to things like Amazon warehouse workers, who need to stand in line for up to 30 minutes to go through a metal detector and be frisked on their way out of the warehouse. That time is legally allowed to be unpaid.
In short - even if the work is in some sense "necessary" as a condition of your employment (you would be fired if you didn't wait through Amazon's frisk line), if it's not actually a primary part of the job (the thing they are paying you to do) then they don't have to pay you for it.
The FAA may mandate downtime, but that's not part of worker safety per-se. Consider if the pilot were taking that downtime on the ground - you obviously wouldn't be paying them to do that. Nor would you pay a long-haul trucker taking their downtime.
The company could argue that the "portal" in this sense is the cockpit door (rather than the door of the plane), and that being trapped in the plane during your off-duty time is just an unpleasant aspect of the job (like a miner being trapped in a mine elevator during some of their off-hours). You're perfectly free to watch a DVD or whatever [0] so you're not really on-duty.
This is a pretty shitty thing in labor law overall, but as a descriptive statement - that's how things are right now. If the wheels aren't turning, you ain't earning.
Or at least if you're earning it's through the grace of your employer, not because they're legally obligated to.
[0] Interestingly enough, the FAA doesn't actually mandate sleep during off-hours. Which is a big problem since many pilots are paid so poorly nowadays - they end up flipping burgers to make ends meet, instead of getting the sleep they need. It's caused several crashes so far.
Yes, you're working, but being paid to sit/sleep before being paid to do your shift sounds like a good way to clear half a 40 hour workweek in a single day.
Unless they didn't pay or he wasn't able to relax in that time, which he should have mentioned in the article.
Yes but flying 23h straight sounds like the pilot could easily fall asleep which could've extreme consequences. In this case it just means that he's away from his family.
I know one long-haul pilot personally and he still enjoys those long trips. Yes you're away from the family and might fly to the city you don't like for the 5th time this month, but you still get to see a lot, have a prestigious job and nice views from the cockpit.
cargo pilots flying for Amazon still have it much better than warehouse workers.
That maybe so, but it isn't right to say "suck it up, there are others who have it worse". Both groups are treated badly and both groups deserve empathy
How does the FAA get involved in regulating flights that originate and end outside the U.S.? The author states "I have been asked to sit on 14-hour flights from the UW to the Middle East, only to then fly the same aircraft to Asia on another nine-hour journey"
That means ferrying the pilots as passengers to location; at which point they become pilots for the next leg. It's still shit. It's bad ergonomically, it's very dehydrating, and you're getting a higher dose of cosmic rays.
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/aircrew/cosmicionizingradia...
There have been many first hand accounts from pilots about their industry's deteriorating work conditions. The denial and pedantry by the Freedom Market™ zealots is exhausting.
Being highly trained and performing safety critical work does not exempt pilots from the predation of C (executive management) level exploitation.
The root cause is the glut of labor, progressively reducing Labor's bargaining power, since the 70s.
Our regressive tax policy is currently funneling economic growth to an ever smaller pool of people who simply don't need as many people to work for them (directly + indirectly). If the lower/middle class kept more of their paycheck they would spend more on services which would employ more people.
Further, the economic death spiral of fewer people with disposable income => reduced demand => fewer people with disposable income => ... can be avoided.
PS: Remember, we are fairly close to 'full' employment so it does not take much to shift the balance one way or another.
The silent generation taxed themselves massively compared to the baby boomers. They had next to no national debt, and massive private and public infrastructure being built.
Today's wealthy and politically connected baby boomers cannot be bothered at all with this. They demand low taxes, stuffing the stock market with the bounty rather than starting or expanding businesses, and then charge the national credit card with all the costs of their unwillingness to contribute anything meaningful. Except maybe some halfway decent music - but that does not give them a pass for being greedy, stingy, hoarders.
At the moderate to low end of the pay scale, even 0% taxes fails to mitigate the wage stagnation problem. This really only gets fixed when the cost of hoarding becomes really fucking expensive. So expensive it's saner to take the risk on starting or growing a business, and the ensuing tax deductions that come with that (those are generally 100% tax deductible expenses by the way, with exceptions for gifts and entertainment).
Right now we don't have that. It's hoarding and credit charging time. And this bullshit tax cut proposal is even more of that.
Sharing is socialism/communism/someother"bad"ism these days. It must be all about the invisible hand, the less intervention the better. Basically I see it as a bunch of greedy nuts who believe in things like low taxes, and only wince at overt things like primogeniture and unequal pay but then they pretty much do a "tee hee" and accept both because they benefit.
It's somewhere in the vicinity of neo-feudalism + neo-aristocracy + prosperity theology. It's an abomination.
How about a movement that says, "If you can't earn a decent wage working 40 hours a week, sit under a bridge until you die for your country."
Reducing the labor pool and showing the elites they can build their own roads, make their own coffee, and fly their own planes unless they allow all citizens to live with dignity after a 40 hour work week.
I believe their is much more virtue in doing this than going to war to make the elites richer. We should celebrate those that opt out of exploitation even more so than "war heroes."
I know this will never happen, but it's nice to day dream.
The part that slays me is we have so much useful work that needs doing, excess capital for want of high quality investments, and people demanding purposeful jobs.
There is substance in the article, but the author is insulting and cliched right at the start (the worst place - for him). If HN says nothing, we're agreeing to that stuff in the first paragraph.
For example, my colleagues and I have been asked to sit on 14-hour flights from the UW to the Middle East, only to then fly the same aircraft to Asia on another nine-hour journey.
It isn't clear he was actually piloting the aircraft for these flights, especially the first one where he says he was "asked to sit on". Unless "asked to sit on" is an industry euphemism for piloting, it seems like a carefully worded statement meant to deceive.
Same here. I think he wasn't involved and it was actually 3 or even 4 pilots on board. Otherwise it would be against regulation. You probably sleep better in a hotel than in the crew compartment on the plane, but he didn't work for 23h without a break and neither did his colleagues.
> The lack of empathy in the comments is disconcerting. The post is a bit light on details (though the example given of flying 23 hours back-to-back continental flights is terrible if regular) the post deserves better than: 1. Pilots fly for fun. You made the wrong career move. 2. Capitalism! 3. you're lucky - imagine if you were a warehouse worker.
The majority of the criticism is very legitimate, because the article does a terrible job of actually naming any problems beyond saying "it's bad now". Don't mischaracterize all those posts just so you can step in and be the voice of reason.
> Pay has been stagnant for the vast majority of workers for decades. We should be doing something about it, not dismissing it.
We should be doing something about it! But pay is barely mentioned in the article, and even that seems to be about the short-term effects of competition rather than decades-long pay stagnancy.
He is blaming a foreign company which is hiring his own comapny for failures his company is not adressing. Sorry stupid article. I´s not DHL´s fault that Southern Airline is not able to compete and to organize. Btw in Germany there are Unions for that. https://www.vcockpit.de/en.html
So because he's laying the blame at the wrong door then he, and so many others in his predicament, don't deserve empathy?
The man is a pilot not a political anorak/economist/pundit. It would be more helpful to point out where the blame lies:
lobbying, party/campaign financing, unfair trade agreements etc.
That's a copout. This bullshit is unacceptable and shouldn't be allowed.
The big companies are pushing down the gruntwork to these companies and setting performance standards that require unfair or otherwise unreasonable labor practices. DHL and Amazon know full well what their procurement standards mean. The contractor just exists to push accountability out.
You see the same thing in the auto industry... there was a Bloomberg article a few months ago about this topic. Honda runs well-administrated, safe factories in Alabama. The supplier a mile down the road gets some crazy SLA for delivering parts that results in cut corners. (http://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/markets/inside-alabamas-auto-...)
Thats a falacy right there- if a outer system integrates a inner system, any flaw of that integration resides upon the component in direct control of the world (the outter system). If you ingest arsenic, and your liver is unable to discard it- its not the livers fault- its the outter system who decided to put the inner system under impossible strain, thats at fault.
And democracy includes the rights to call upon government to hinder capitalism from destroying the citizens. Like it or not. If you disrespect that part of freedom, you are not a true democrat.
I think CEO pay is what it is because they're narcissistic personalities who are very good coddling the fragile emotional state of board of directors, and they all make each other feel important and useful.
The only solution I see is a syndicalism, or perhaps participatory economics (one of those is real, has existed, the other is an idea possibly with no potential in the real world). Basically the only thing people understand is go fuck yourself. Let's face it. It's a might makes right world. People don't negotiate win win if they can negotiate I win you lose and that's a win, so go fuck yourself. It's always adversarial when a single entity owns both capital and means of production.
But the very idea of worker unions brings about the open question of committing murder by certain capitalists. It's that much of a threat to their ability to say and get away with, go fuck yourself.
>the post deserves better than: 1. Pilots fly for fun. You made the wrong career move. 2. Capitalism! 3. you're lucky - imagine if you were a warehouse worker.
Maybe if those same commenters lost their relatives or kids in an accident with a commercial pilot that was forced to fly to exhaustion, they'd answer with better sense.
Bonus points if they lost them because a cargo plane fell on them...
While they're punching a hole in the air, yes. Takeoff & landing in most modern commercial aircraft have some auto-throttle/auto-braking assistance, but those are still generally flown by hand on every flight. Note that the cargo airlines this article addresses are primarily working with a much older fleet of airplanes that the major passenger airlines got rid of, so their tech generally lags behind what you see on the flight deck of your travel flights.
No one has yet implemented a real point-to-point autopilot, and there are none in the pipeline for certification. It's possible there are engineers working on them, especially at Boeing/Airbus, but given airframe lifetimes at the major commercial carriers pilots are here for at least another 20 years with them, and probably 30-40 years at cargo carriers.
Not all of them at the same time. It depends upon how many pilots are on the flight; but observing while auto-pilot is engaged only takes one person. The other people can relax, nap, read, etc.
>Capitalism is a great tool for progress, but it should not, and is not, the answer to everything.
Nor should it be considered the final or best possible form of human organisation, I should add. Marx's comcept of alienation is quite relevant to your point.
There aren't really any facts here just pure emotion that you would hear in any industry where costs are cut. I've no idea how fairly these pilots are paid. But surely there are regulations about pilot rest just like on commercial flights. And a pilot cannot really pull heart strings about being away from home when they chose that line of work where your job is literally to be away from home all the time.
I think transportation is an incredibly important (food!), but the way this is written seems incredibly tone-deaf. He should have focused on the facts (if there are any) about incident rates and length of time flying, instead of saying how his dream of connecting "our great country with the rest of the world" is being jeopardized.
The nature of commercial flying is such that actual incidents are pretty rare (150 or so a year recently[1]), and very very expensive. So taking the "data-driven" approach to pushing what's safe really isn't economically feasible, to say nothing of the ethics issues. Instead the principle of "if it seems unsafe, it's probably unsafe" applies. I believe the situation mentioned in the article of riding for fourteen hours then flying for nine is allowed by the FAA, but if the pilots aren't rested (reasonable after riding in a cargo plane for a day), then the airline shouldn't be asking them to fly.
A crash of a cargo jet (eg. converted airliner approx. $40m value) is such a rare event that "bean counters" can justify a certain level of risk.
A good comparison is SpaceX Falcon[0] or Orbital Sciences Antares launch vehicles. If they have a mishap, there is high probability that it'll take 6mo+ to return to flight. There is a significant cost to that ($300m+ cost to SpaceX, for vehicle replacement and compensation for delays). If UPS crashes a jet due to pilot fatigue[1] and nobody on the ground is hurt, the airline will continue flying with minimal interruption.
There have been issues with Fatigue causing accidents at both UPS[1] and FedEx[2]. If a cargo jet crashes but doesn't cause ground fatalities, the general public forgets fast. The UPS Airbus A300 crashed in Birmingham, AL with 'only' two crew fatalities. A passenger A300 would likely have resulted in many more fatalities.
Turkish Airlines had a cargo 747 crash[3] in Kyrgyzstan, killing 4 crew and 35 people in the village that it crashed into. This involved a contract operator, and received minimal attention in the world media.
In aviation there is a tendency towards "regulate by tombstone"[4] When an El Al 747 crashed shortly after takeoff in Amsterdam and killed 39 in an apartment complex, along with 4 crew, It was a huge story in the European media.[5] 747s were inspected, repaired and upgraded to prevent a recurrence.
Cargo airlines do a lot of "back of the clock" or overnight flying, which is considerably risky from a fatigue point of view. I'm actually amazed that more accidents haven't happened.
Someone needs to quantify the cost for various level of risks. If the air cargo industry could save an average of 1 live per year at the cost of $1B a year in additional costs to pass to it's customers, should it?
"The essential characteristic of the Argument from Intimidation is its appeal to moral self-doubt and its reliance on the fear, guilt or ignorance of the victim. It is used in the form of an ultimatum demanding that the victim renounce a given idea without discussion, under threat of being considered morally unworthy. The pattern is always: “Only those who are evil (dishonest, heartless, insensitive, ignorant, etc.) can hold such an idea.”"
etherael doesn't appear to be supporting the logical clout of that type of argument, but rather commenting on its ubiquity in modern public discourse and success in driving policy.
E.g., "think of the children," "if we don't X, the terrorists win," or "we must censor the Internet or undermine crypto, because it enables Y."
> Normal people don't connect with or understand facts.
I consider myself and, almost by definition, most of the people I know to be normal and I can assure you us plebians are perfectly capable of understanding facts.
Industry costs magically cut while Bezos is almost the richest person on the planet. And Amazon is a behemoth doing incredibly well. Very competitive industry. Costs must be cut. Let's talk about the metrics. Employees live to work, if they are not working what's the point on their existence? /s To me all of this points to the need for unions to return. Without the threat of communism there is nothing to keep this class of people from abusing workers, just to show the world they are not just about money, and creating good working conditions and good jobs. To them it's like a game, like a simulation, an RTS, the people don't matter. Their lives don't matter. Only thing that matters is the bottom line. I personally prefer Bezos was a mere millionaire, his company wasn't doing that well, and that his workers had relatively good jobs. How about you?
Well actually most of Bezos's wealth is in Amazon stock. Which he has to sell to make money. Its really not your gold-bricks-in-basement-vault money. Most of which he won't be selling till he dies. And that will go into some trust which will be owned by his descendants as inheritance.
The real thing about communism or capitalism isn't much about the merit of the idea in itself.
The quality of the political system that implements these ideas, efficiency of execution matters.
> We work long hours, fly in dangerous conditions and go through years of training, but we do it because we understand that our work is vital to keeping our economy humming.
No. Pilots become pilots because they love flying and because it pays well (mostly the former). Haven't heard of any pilot who chose the job because it's important for the economy.
Isn't this exactly the definition of capitalism and what is at the basis of the entire American economy? You can complain that a foreign company is hiring you for what you consider below-par payment, but unless you find a better paying job elsewhere, isn't this what capitalism is all about?
Next to that - aren't American companies doing exactly the same? Why does IBM have more employees in India (80.000 I believe) than it has in the US? Not because the weather is so great in Bangalore - because the people work for $3000 per year(!!).
Exactly. I often see and hear the "Engineers from India are cheap and they are taking away our jobs". Why blame the Engineers. Talk to your Capitalist organizations which are hiring them. A worker no matter where he/she is from is the same as you, works to earn his living.
I can imagine people honestly believing that. So many jobs today are utter bullshit, and so many more are enough layers of abstraction away from anything useful than it's hard to find any motivation other than paycheck. And there are many people who would like to feel they're contributing to something, not just selling their time for currency.
I think this view is very wrong. Lots of people take pride in the fact that they're doing some socially valuable job. That might not be their primary motivation but it's an important one.
A lot of people get into jobs to help people, or help society. But to help "the economy"? I'm skeptical (in the sense of doing a day job because markets need it, not a job that's making the economy as a whole more efficient). If the market doesn't pay for a job, then "the economy" doesn't need that job.
Most of those are in the service, police, fire, or rescue. being a delivery driver (pilots are a form) and making such statements is just an odd romanticism or at least a bad attempt at making the job seem more important than it is.
You're confusing fungibility for importance. While one particular delivery driver or pilot may be less important than one particular "rockstar programmer," society is much more reliant on delivery drivers and pilots as a group than on programmers. That may change with automation but we're not there yet.
> Pilots become pilots because they love flying and because it pays well (mostly the former)
And increasingly so - pilot employment is no longer a sinecure but I have nevertheless seen pilots sacrify considerable career opportunities to get to fly professionally.
I only know the situation in Europe. But here, many get the license by taking out a loan without any prospect of employment. They then have to fly in Asia for dodgy airlines for some years to get enough hours to be considered even for a low-cost airline such as Ryanair. Getting a job at a full-service carrier or even long-haul is next to impossible. These are usually people with a good high school degree and often even university degree. They just do it because they love flying.
There's a TV show called "Worst Place to be a Pilot" about how young people from Britain risk their lives in Southeast Asia just to get a job as a pilot one day. I don't think people take these kinds of risks for many other jobs.
Yeah, realistically, the best way to get a full service carrier pilot position is to go military, early, get your certs, training, time in there, and then make your way to civilian life. The big airlines tend to love military pilots.
Yes, really, the aviation industry is populated mostly by enthusiasts. I'm sure some bus drivers love driving, but bus driving isn't a job with high barriers to entry and enormously expensive training taken up by people who could have taken easier professional jobs on higher salaries instead.
Well if you love driving you can have just about any job and earn enough to buy and maintain a car. If you love flying you have a lot fewer career options that afford you to buy and maintain an aircraft.
This isn't the first time we've heard first-hand accounts of massive companies treating workers like slaves. Amazon is already notorious for the ways it treats its warehouse workers. Once again, upward concentration of wealth in our country has created pressure on the people at the bottom to produce more, more, more. If you don't see the parallels to the time period leading up to the massive workers' rights reforms of the Progressive era - you aren't looking very hard. We seem to have have already forgotten the lessons we learned just a century or so ago.
There's a very big difference between a cargo pilot and an Amazon warehouse worker. Just because both feel treated unfairly, the warehouse worker will be much worse off. Cargo pilots dream of salaries that were usual in the past, warehouse workers just want to earn enough to have an acceptable lifestyle.
The dividing line in jobs nowadays seems to be headquarters or operations, brain or hands. If you're in operations, you are already or will be optimized to the extent possible and permitted. Not pretty, but the modus operandi.
Pilots are part of operations and not different to drivers or cleaning staff, even if they still consider themselves part of an elite.
Thank you for putting it into clear words. Seems like these things are more visible when the nice headquarter jobs exist in a different country. Guess how almost all countries where Amazon operates (all but one?) think about the qualities of Amazon as an employer...
is Southwestern Air really independent when the largest shareholder is DHL, and DHL owns and leases the planes to Southwestern?
Even if you can claim the board or management of Southwestern is "independent" what, exactly, can they do? all their inputs are literally owned by DHL.
Why not allow foreign airlines to fly domestic US routes? DHL would buy the other 51% and make the ownership clear. They only have to use these vague relationships because of US regulation that tries to protect domestic players.
* Hour restrictions for passenger transport are significantly more stringent than for freight.
* Southern Air's fleet consists 737s and 777s -- not small planes.
* These plans have to fly over and into major metropolitan areas.
* Many parts of flying can be automated, but in the end, and for aircraft this size, you probably want a human operator in the plane for the sheer reason that they are better equipped to handle unplanned emergencies.
It's a tough call whether flying freight or regional airlines pays worse -- but in either case, you're anywhere from a quarter to half of what a software engineer of similar years experience in the bay area would make. The hours are in a lot of ways worse -- mostly because you're away from home a lot of the time, and you have really limited control of your schedule. (As someone who's worked as an on-call engineer for ten years, and who also flies, I'd take the on-call responsibilities over flying freight any day of the week.)
I'd agree that the article lacks for details. But, a relatively quick reading through things like airliners.net will give you an idea of the kind of hours and pay these guys typically work -- it's not an easy job. If we care about their safety -- and our own, given the number of freight aircraft flying over us every night -- we shouldn't write them off as just asking for money they don't deserve.
I think most people will agree that the $200k+ starting salary in the bay area is an anomaly. Everyone is doing everything to "fix" this problem.
If we care about safety, we prohibit them from doing things that are unsafe. If management tries to make them do things that are prohibited, we should make it easy for people to say no without repercussions.
You're right. But as always in history, these changes can't come by asking companies nicely. You either need a strong union that is willing to strike (and Southern actually has one) and/or federal regulators.
Why are hour restrictions different for freight than passenger? Adapting this would probably already change much. And a strike at Prime Air for a few weeks during holiday season should also help improving conditions.
1) DHL started in the US in 1969 and became German owned a little after 2002 (it has a pretty cool origin story where the founder felt there was a better way to deliver overnight goods to Hawaii than to literally sit a person on a plane and stuff legal documents in his luggage. He used his student loans to... "bootstrap"). IMO the article loses some credibility by using "foreign competition" verbiage a lot to emotionally sway the reader.
2) Is DHL skirting regulator rules and putting pilots in unsafe conditions? Regulations need to first and foremost be in place to prevent deadly disasters.
3) It sounds like pilots are losing their market power in the labor market (supply is increasing faster than demand) leading to lower wages and benefits and worse scheduling policies. This is a place where unions typically would play as a way for laborers to gain back their market power. Not sure the union conditions in the airline industry but I'm guessing there are issues with global labor competition that's making this difficult. We as a society need to understand how globalization (and now automation!) is/will effect every job on the planet.
> DHL started in the US in 1969 and became German owned a little after 2002
Wow, thanks for pointing this out. I've been under the mistaken impression that DHL was always German (and that German precision is why they were better than the competition), and I'd assumed DHL stood for Deutsche Something Something.
[From the DHL company history: "On 25 September 1969, Adrian Dalsey, Larry Hillblom and Robert Lynn (the D, H and L in our company name) incorporate DHL."]
>and that German precision is why they were better than the competition
To me seeing that my package will be shipped with them is a negative since I've never had a positive experience. Is a bit better now that I'm regional so they basically only control the package until customs but still bit great before it reaches the country.
I'm in Australia, so it could be a different experience here (and my Amazon deliveries here are still superior to DHL & other providers).
The one that really makes my heart sink is Toll - anytime I see "delivered by Toll", I know there's only a 50% chance of my parcel arriving. [The last time I had to pick up a parcel from a collection point, I overheard someone calling out "Can't use Chrome for that, Toll requires IE6 for the log-in"]
And worth pointing out that this is a very rare case where subcontractors are not used because it's cheaper. DHL is legally not allowed to own an airline which flies domestically within the US. Works the other way around (Fedex and UPS have EU flights) but no European airline can fly within the US.
I'm quite sure that otherwise, they'd fly themselves as they own all airlines flying for them within the EU and Asia (except the ones that also fly to US).
Hot topic in The Netherlands right now is the threat of a hostile takeover of Akzo Nobel, a chemical company with 50,000 employees, by a US company. The government is discussing putting the same protective regulations in place that Trump is threatening with. The US isn't "losing" jobs to Germany, they are trade partners. If Americans want to stop trading then both sides lose.
I wish there was a little bit more detail on what laws are bypassed. Unfortunately I'm also a little put off by the emphasise on averting foreign influence. Regulations against foreign carriers operating in the US were always uncomfortable to me.
> At another DHL carrier, pilots went on strike for two days after a year of regularly being forced to cover overtime shifts due to short-staffing.
Sounds like they need to do more of that.
Is there a surplus of pilots waiting in line for jobs? This isn't the first time I've heard that pilots get paid very little and have to work incredibly long hours. Are there no unions?
I'd like them to define "forced", I don't think there really is any mechanism for an employer to compel anyone to do things.
People learn to fly because they like flying, it is fun. Because people like to fly, the going rate for piloting is low. If people didn't like flying so much, the rates would be higher.
At very low wage levels, near the subsistence level, the supply curve may also be curved backwards for a completely different reason. That effect creates an "inverted S" or "backward S" shape: a tail is added at the bottom of the labour-supply curve shown in the graph above with the quantity of labour-time supplied falling as wages rise. Then, because families face some minimum level of income needed to meet their subsistence requirements, lowering wages increases the amount of labour-time offered for sale. Similarly, a rise in wages can cause a decrease in the amount of labour-time offered for sale, and individuals take advantage of the higher wage to spend time on needed self- or family-maintenance activities. [3] [4]
There's certainly a mechanism by which an industry can compel its workers not to leave the industry - the cost of retraining. Most countries front-load training for jobs into 2-5 years near the beginning of people's adult lives putting them into debt - but they're often not able to retrain later on, due to debts (remaining loans from the first time, a mortgage, a car, etc) and responsibilities (often having a family). I don't know anyone with a family who could realistically spend a couple of years working part-time so they could free up the time to go to college again.
Pilot pay varies widely depending on airline, seniority and rank. The big gap is between the regionals (low to mid five figures) and the major carriers (six figures).
Depends on the airline. Pilots of major legacy carriers (and not their low-cost spin-offs) are typically really well paid (sometimes excessively so). In Germany I'm aware of cases of >500k$ annually for end-of-their-career pilots. I believe the situation in the US is similar. However, pilots of low-cost carriers earn significantly less. In Europe I heard of salaries in the range of 50k$ annually. I would guess cargo carriers that are not 100% subsidiaries of legacy carriers are closer to low-cost carriers in their salaries
Welcome to the world of competitive market. This is how capitalism works.
This article is filled with emotion and lack of facts. You express how difficult your job is however 80% of the time the computer is doing all of your job. This is why a lot of tech companies are focusing on AI driving/flying automation. Of course it is good to have a pilot on the plain but very little is done now days by him. You only bear the responsibility(not that it is little).
You have few actions:
- Make sure all pilots are on the same page as you and put on a strike (Create Demand in the face of Amazon)
- If others are OK with the working condition then problem is with yourself. You need to provide something more to the table than flying skills - teaching, management, experience.
Stop blaming businesses, they have a very predictable morality - profit.
There is no such entity as a business. Every business is a collection of individuals and I have trouble believing that every one of those individuals holds only profit, and the consequent race to the bottom, as a favourable outcome. It's a sad state of affairs where a group behaves in the opposite fashion to how they would behave as individuals.
> Stop blaming businesses, they have a very predictable morality - profit.
Anarcho-capitalism cannot be the final goal for our society. If businesses try to circumvent important regulations that were implemented to protect employees, they need to be stopped. Burnout and depression is on the rise in first-world nations and the constant stress doesn't help there.
Unions sound nice in theory. But in practice, pilot unions work only for very senior pilots [1]. All other pilots in the union get paid much less and have worse working conditions. The detailed story about the effects of pilot unions:
[1]: Senior vs junior pilots gap is also the incentive for the airline owner to go bancrupt and start a new airline. So that there'll no senior pilots in the airline.
"The answer is to look at who controls the pilot's union: very senior pilots. The airline management is mostly interested in what percentage of its revenues are paid out to pilots; the distribution of the money among the pilots does not affect profitability. The very senior pilots on the other side of the table say "We need the most senior pilots to get $300,000 in pay and benefits." The airline's response is "The only way that could work is if we pay the new pilots $16,000 per year." The group of senior pilots responds "We can live with that."
Note that being classified as "junior" or "senior" has nothing to do with flying skills or experience. If Captain Sully were to start work today at a regional airline, he would earn between $16,000 and $20,000 per year, depending on the carrier, and fly as first officer. He was "senior" at US Airways, but is "junior" at the new carrier."
Company Propaganda writers unionize. Do no longer produce lengthy treaties about how unions destroy companys and are bad for workers, in a infinite race to the bottom against your fellow sellouts. Do no longer pay for the paint needed to hide the facts that lots of other country (VW- Germany for example) have unions who run cooperations together with shareholders. Raise your flag, and together future flags may not be raised, for cheap!
Unions are run by senior pilots; it's very much in their interests for pay to continue to be weighted towards senior pilots (and they could trot out plenty of justifications related to experience and training for it if they wanted to)
Junior pilots aim to become senior pilots when they've accumulated enough experience so it's generally not in their interest to rock the boat
There will have been 3 pilots on board. One can always rest so that you don't get over the maximum time. 23 hours is still at the limit of what you can do with 3 pilots. For passenger planes, you would've probably needed 4 pilots.
Amazon is making life difficult for the USPS as well...forced them to work on Sundays. They definitely have leverage.
That said, most everyone at USPS is probably quite happy that Amazon is helping their business thrive when it had been floundering for years. USPS folks are also not working marathon hours like these pilots, except at Christmas, but they've been doing that for decades.
Trucking isn't a lot different. My dad has worked for a few companies where all out breaking the law is the norm. It was expected and required. The big problem is if a driver is caught, who is it on? Only the driver. That is why he is lucky to be with a company that doesn't ask him to cook his log book.
Another company would not pay for time sitting at a loading dock or line. They say you must be at point X at 9:00. You are 10th in line. At noon you finally get unloaded. That was 3 hours of sitting without pay, but yet you aren't free to walk a way.
They also wouldn't pay for time to fuel the truck. Does the truck fuel itself? I think not. From what I know it is legal to require this task to be done, but not pay for it? Just to be clear, it is a company owned truck and he was an employee.
Labor laws are a mess and I'm sure there are all kinds of industries that are in a similar position.
Particularly ironic inversion since DHL was formed as a US company to fly bills of lading between San Francisco and Honolulu. Initially they used spare capacity in air passengers' baggage so that the bills would arrive ahead of the actual cargo on ships.
Eventually moved upstream into moving the cargo itself.
The health insurance system is corrupt and medical services are arguably on the decline.
When you don't have money or a job, you can get basic benefits and in return get treated like a dog. For many people that is still better than in their home countries, so they come here.
The middle class is getting smaller, because they're the ones paying for all this.
Is milking the middle class from all ends socialist? Doesn't feel like it.
If you're from Germany, go to a US hospital once to get a basic treatment. Then look at the bill and think about the argument of a corrupt insurance system. Because as a German, you'll likely never have seen how much a doctor or hospital actually charge a patient.
Yes, the problem isn't Germany's companies; the problem is the lax regulation and weak unions in the US. Both foreign and domestic companies frequently mistreat their employees in the US.
Anyone here - not me, but only because I live in Australia - who doesn't recognise they they are the problem, are the problem.
We all want things, and we all want them the cheapest. Amazon is the cheapest. And how? This is how.
We either get used to a world where things cost less and people all across the delivery chain get treated really shitty, or we all accept that we have to pay a dollar more for that 12-pack of toilet paper.
Discussions of flying hours and labour rules here are disingenuous. We choose. Cheap, and people get fucked over? Or pay more, and (hopefully) they don't.
Read the article carefully and you'll note that he was never required to pilot a plane 23 hours in a 24 hour period (which is against all regulations). He was forced to ride along with one flight in order to get to his work flight.
The author has a great job where he is well paid and occasionally has to sleep on a plane. What's the problem?
Welcome to Capitalism. In this case, there are no H1B pilots to put the blame on in this field. Like cheap H1B engineers from India are taking away our jobs, cheap field workers from Mexico are taking our jobs, cheap Chinese products. Emirates..I can go on. If anyone knows how Capitalism works, they will stop complaining that why their jobs are being replaced. Its not the cheap employees fault, its the very same capitalist organizations that you work for. Dont put the blame on a worker for taking away your job.
Long haul truckers also have a difficult job, and are squeezed by large shippers.
People associate used glamour with flying, but I think that is because it was so expensive and most people were shut out. I think of a passenger airplane as a greyhound with wings. There's no reason not to think of a cargo plane as a semi with wings, in which case you shouldn't expect the pilots to be much better off than truck drivers.
I thought that with all the safety regulations, cargo pilots were doing more or less the same number of hours that passengers pilots. In fact I read previously that pay was now pretty much aligned between the two, and that this previously unpopular profession among pilots was attracting increasing interest.
DHL is doing the same with their workers in Germany (so it's not because Germany has more loose regulations on their workers, I think they are even more strict in maximum hours work time in comparison even to USA). The problem is that this big logistic companies like DHL and Amazon trying to max. their profit and min. their losses without any ethics and with pressure from competitors on the shoulders of their most important employees. Logistic is going mad and it should be better regulated world wide. A lot of people in logistics and postal service are frustrated because of this online trade trend nowadays.
to be honest, why not start by having cargo planes flown by AI in an unmanned aircraft?
You can have an office where drone-operator style aircraft operators can log in for 8 hour shift and then 'handover' to the next shift's operator before heading home.
I understand the sentiment of having an actual human(s) fly passengers but cargo is just -- cargo and it's not as if the skies are as complicated as the roads with rules and other manual driving cars.
1) Because if a cargo jet crashes a large number of ground fatalities is a possible outcome.[0][1]
2) Drone "operators" who are basically monitoring the AI and instruments will not be at peak focus when they need it most. Compare US Air 1549 [2] with Asiana 214 [3]. Capt. Sullenberger well rested and 110% focused on landing the jet, as safely as possible. The crew of Asiana 214 were obviously not focused 100% on landing and were unable to make a "manual" visual landing on a clear day in a normal functioning 777.
The USAF has a contingency plan to shoot down a drone if it drifts off course towards a populated area, or to prevent capture by non-friendly governments.[4]
How it is even possible for pilots to fly 23 hours straight? I am pretty sure there are some regulations limiting pilot's working time for safety reasons.
Because you don't want to experience a bug in the automatic flight while the 777 is above a major city.
Self driving cars will come soon, self driving planes won't come for decades. The risk of losing >1000 lives because of one bug or hack doesn't justify the cost savings.
Yesss, evil nazis taking over the country. I don't see the point of the article. Automated work and cheaper labour is searched everywhere to produce more profit. Only way for people to survive in this race is to develop themselves, educate, learn, specialize, make more value. Not to build walls.
It is EXTREMELY difficult to be empathetic with a pilot. As a class, they are the most FYIGM ultraconservative group. Now they feel the trickle down on their heads....
Well, if not pilots, what about private EMTs? Averaging minimum wage or 1-2% above, usually working 24 hour shifts, often without meal breaks, responding to 911 calls. They're a little less FYIGM.
> For example, my colleagues and I have been asked to sit on 14-hour flights from the UW to the Middle East, only to then fly the same aircraft to Asia on another nine-hour journey
Which is a lot to __ask__ for. Wasn't the company willing to pay overtime wages?
I'm not a pilot, but to me it sounds like that's a pretty much unavoidable issue in the industry and the pilots are compensated heavily for this overtime, aren't they?
Maybe tax cuts to corporations would help. If a company that was previously keeping 65% of profits started keeping 85% due to lower taxes perhaps they would invest some of that in employee pay / benefits / more employees. Of course, they also have the choice to just keep the extra money for themselves.
Ha ha hilarious. You don't think they'll just pay larger C-suite salaries?
The question you should ask is: who has the power in this relationship? If the pilots unionized properly, they'd have the power to demand higher wages or better conditions.
hasn't enough been written, using historical numbers and factual mathematics, that plainly shows this idea of "trickle down economics" is depressingly incorrect?
He's a pilot, not an accountant or lawyer. He knows that there is pay pressure due to companies skirting regulations. That exec mgmt gets massive bonsuses while the pilots work very long hours and (probably unpaid) overtime offends one's sense of justice.
Pay has been stagnant for the vast majority of workers for decades. We should be doing something about it, not dismissing it. Capitalism is a great tool for progress, but it should not, and is not, the answer to everything. Human dignity matters.