[tatersolid]

The shortage of ATC staff dates back to the Clinton Administration. It’s just hard to attract people into a 5+ year training program for a very stressful job where you might get bounced near the end with no payout and no transferrable job skills.

[achr2]

No the shortage goes back to Regan when their justified strike was busted. It ended the PATCO “union” and was a negative turning point for labour unions in general.

[lesuorac]

I think you mean Reagan. He removed the union for the ATC not Clinton.

Honestly, you can generally just blame Reagan for about anything. A presidency about weaking labor, strengthening Iran, and ballooning the deficit is uh never going to leave good traces.

[nradov]

Reagan did the right thing in that case. Government employees should never have collective bargaining rights. Public employee unions are contrary to the interests of taxpayers.

[kube-system]

Over the course of the past year, I think we've seen more evidence that the federal workforce's collective bargaining rights aren't strong enough. Workers' employment contracts are being ignored, employees are being threatened, constructively terminated, all in an attempt to enact RIFs without following the law.

Things are happening to the federal workforce right now that aren't even legal in the private sector.

[nradov]

If contracts are violated then the impacted parties can seek redress through the courts. Government employee unions aren't needed for that.

[throwway120385]

You have to have your contract violated for a significant amount before you can notionally afford to hire a lawyer to fight it out. Below 5 figures it doesn't make much financial sense to do that for most people, so they just eat it instead. It's how a lot of "theft of wages" and other mistreatment happens so often. Lawyers don't take those cases for free, and court isn't free either. And you're not going to instantly appear at the top of the docket for something small like that especially if the government buries you in procedure. They can do that for years.

But sure, yeah you can seek redress through the courts.

[kube-system]

The result of some of the issues at hand might not even be damages, but simply to realign policies with what the law requires.... which may no longer be relevant for someone who lost a job a year ago and has since moved on out of necessity.

And this admin doesn't simply stop an initiative when courts block them, they find a new "creative interpretation" to do the same thing, and carry on for however long it takes the next trial to happen.

[kube-system]

Suing the federal government solo is an insurmountable task for most people -- even more so while they're being constructively terminated. Employee unions have been suing on their workers behalf over the past year, but the executive branch can drag out federal trials for a lot longer than people can stay without a job.

[superxpro12]

Centralization of all power in the government is also contrary to the interests of the taxpayers.

Every time i see an anti-union article, its usually about unions that do good union things...

But noone ever complains about the police union. It's always the public goods people like ATC or teachers.

[InitialLastName]

People complain about police unions all the time, it's just their complainants don't overlap much with the people who complain about private sector unions.

[RC_ITR]

This is a discussion with nearly unanimous agreement that poor ATC working conditions are causing Americans to die in preventable aviation accidents.

Maybe this is the one evidence-driven case where you can be open minded about the value of a public employee union?

[nradov]

Nope. Public employee unions bring zero value and this incident is not evidence to support such unions. Relying on unions to act as ersatz safety regulators would be stupid, just completely the wrong approach. Decisions about things like ATC procedures, staffing levels, and training standards should be the responsibility of apolitical career bureaucrats.

[RC_ITR]

Why would a career bureaucrat be a more efficient way to figure out how to attract and retain ATC workers, ass opposed to a union representing those ATC workers?

Your proposal intentionally injects inefficiency and noise into the system because you don't like some political boogeyman.

[fatbird]

Public employee unions are contrary to the interests of taxpayers

This is not obvious on its face, but also, paying taxes is not my only concern wrt the civil society in which I live.

[QuiEgo]

The dead people on that airplane are a pretty strong contradiction too this.

I’d love to see ATC funded by usage fees (some kind of “landing toll”) instead of the government (with some kind of licensing / oversight - like how pilots and pilot licensing works). The current system clearly is not working.

The government is a great tool to regulate but not execute.

If the regulations are crazy let the people who have to implement them strike.

[callmeal]

Does your comment also include the police union(s)?

[cake_robot]

Yes absolutely. They're a perfect example of the unique issues w/ collective bargaining for public services.

[nradov]

Yes, absolutely. No government employees should ever have collective bargaining rights. If they want better wages and working conditions then they can advocate for those through the political process, the same as any other citizen.

[wat10000]

Collective bargaining rights shouldn’t even be a separate thing. They’re just a natural consequence of the fact that free speech is protected and slavery is illegal. The idea of an illegal strike is bizarre.

[rounce]

In your suggestion any other citizen has collective bargaining at their disposal, do they not?

[anigbrowl]

This adversarial mindset isn't conducive to good governance.

Of course public employee unions have conflicting interests with taxpayers in general. But that's not a bad thing, unless you subscribe to the peabrained 'everyone is ripping us off mentality' of some professional whiners and presidents. There is this image deliberately created of federal government employees who show up for work and collect a huge check for doing nothing except resting their feet on the desk all day, but I don't see any basis for believing this.

In reality, it makes a lot of sense for government employees to communicate information upward about safety and working conditions, not least because managers (many of whom are political appointees) have their own career interests and those too are not always aligned with taxpayers. It's weird to me that people demonize the bottom tier employees while turning a blind eye to the economic incentives for the managerial and secretarial class in government. Look at the recently departed secretary of Homeland Security, who racked up hundreds of millions of questionable expenses.

[mememememememo]

Yeah the job should say have 10 year income guarantee. If there are no jobs you get paid. We must be talking peanuts. Just do one less invasion per decade. Can call ATC defense spend if you like :)

[xboxnolifes]

Not just attract, it also has very high standards. And many people fail out.

[rwyinuse]

Somehow Europe manages to do that well enough.

[MaxfordAndSons]

ATC/GTC seems like a really strong candidate for partial automation with recent advances in AI. Obviously we'd still want some expert humans in the loop for exceptional situations, but I have to imagine there's a way to significantly reduce the cognitive burden/stress for these folks.

[nradov]

Recent advances in AI aren't useful for routine operations in safety critical domains such as aviation because we don't know how to verify and test them. An LLM is effectively an unpredictable black box with unknown failure modes. There is opportunity for greater automation but probably based on classical deterministic programming.

[matthewkayin]

In addition to this, LLMs are also simply too slow right now to deliver the results ATC would need.

Ridiculous to see people acting like LLMs are a silver bullet for every problem without putting any thought into what that would actually look like.