[rahimnathwani]

Don't air traffic controllers get paid at a higher rate for overtime than for their 'regular hours'?

If so, doesn't the understaffing (lower # of employees) result in each employee being overpaid (paid a higher hourly rate)?

EDIT: And it seems like air traffic controllers can retire after just 20 years and draw a defined benefit pension: https://www.faa.gov/nyc-atc

[travisgriggs]

It’s also the only industry that is legally allowed to practice ageism. You have to start before or up to 31 years of age. You’re out at age 56. This figures into how the benefits are structured.

You can still do contract ATC work after 56.

[userbinator]

Guess what happens to people's brains when they get old... the saying "teach an old dog new tricks" comes to mind.

[FireBeyond]

Certainly not all departments, but many fire departments have an upper hiring limit for new hires. Above that age you can only be hired as a "lateral" (transfer hire from another department).

[gerdesj]

The RNLI also has an age limit: 45 or 55 for inshore or all weather crew.

[renewiltord]

Doesn’t this seem like the common practice in high-pension systems? You don’t use the overtime in pension calculations so it’s way cheaper to hire P people and run them on a 2x duty cycle than it is to hire 2P people and run them on a 1x duty cycle because the post retirement cost is Q in the first and 2Q in the latter.

You can’t account for overtime in pensions because the employees will conspire to force overtime for retiring employees to bounce the pension up. Just a natural risk with an entity that can’t go bankrupt hiring people.

[lelandbatey]

Yes, when they work overtime they get paid more for that overtime than regular time.

The money doesn't somehow make it sustainable for the people burning out their lives. Working 7 days a week, including overnight shifts, for 20 years to collect a pension seems like WELL earned compensation.

That's seems unrelated to "we have so few" and "we enmiserate the one's we do have".

[bondarchuk]

I think rahimnathwani's point was not that they get extra pay so it's fine, but that it seems economically irrational to overwork fewer staff if it's actually more expensive.

[magicalhippo]

Here in Norway it's similar with doctors, they get paid a lot because they work crazy hours. But the doctors' association is fighting to keep it that way, as the old timers who didn't burn out along the way enjoys the high pay more than their spare time.

[markdown]

Air traffic controllers are NOT fighting to preserve the status quo.

[rahimnathwani]

Yes, exactly.

It's hard to argue you're underpaid if, as a result of short staffing, you're getting paid more (both in absolute terms and per unit of effort) than you signed up for.

[cenamus]

Nurses also get paid more for night shifts, doesn't mean they're 'overpaid'

[anigbrowl]

I think GP means if we're paying overtime for so many people we're wasting money vs hiring more people to work at regular pay scales.

The mystery to me is that AT shortages have been known fora. while now, so why haven't many more trainees been recruited?

[throwup238]

> The mystery to me is that AT shortages have been known fora. while now, so why haven't many more trainees been recruited?

ATC has been a shit career prospect for a while now so no one wants to enter training.

For one it requires uprooting your entire life to live near a training center, then they send you on an apprenticeship to a random airport in the country for a few years. And since there are only so many slots in the desirable metros, most people get sent to live somewhere “undesirable” to say the least.

For two, while trainees get paid they get totally fucked during government shutdowns. Many who make it to the funnel also quit at that point. Without fundamental structural changes to how they’re trained and paid at the political level, the number of trainees will remain small.

[munk-a]

The politicization of government budgeting has made inefficiency rife. Sometimes new allocations are done purely for brownie points and there's genuine wastage - other times cuts are made that save a penny but lose a pound in the guise of efficiency. Doge was an excellent example in just how many severance payouts for employees who were occasionally rehired due to staffing shortages it triggered.

[panick21_]

The problem is there is only one training school and they don't train enough people. So you can literally not heir more people. And that pipeline is not funded enough or the requirements are to high. Or their recruiting and eventual payments isn't good enough.