[adgjlsfhk1]

>This isn't one guy's fault.

Counterpoint. It's Regen's fault. He's the guy who decided that a high priority of the government was making sure air traffic controllers had no power to fight back against being horrifically overworked (because unions are evil you see)

[jordanb]

One thing people forget is that the key complaints PATCO's members had were:

  1. outdated equipment
  2. staffing levels
  3. workload and fatigue

Reagan went to war with the union instead of addressing these things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...

[voxic11]

Wasn't it Congress who passed 5 U.S.C. § 7311. which says a person may not “accept or hold” a federal job if they “participate in a strike” against the U.S. government.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7311

originally passed as

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?edition=2023&num=0&req=g...

So arguably if Reagan had not fired them he would be failing to uphold the laws of the United States.

[adgjlsfhk1]

They were striking for less outdated tools, improving staffing levels, and other safety improvements. The solution was to give them the things they wanted.

[sonar_un]

Pretty much everything broken in the USA stems directly from Reagen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g95fiZCzjlo

[antonymoose]

I’m not saying he didn’t ignore a real problem - but it’s been 45 years since the 1981 airline strike. Surely the blame ought to be spread around our incompetent Federal government.

[phendrenad2]

This is mostly nonsense, by the way. While Reagan won his presidential elections by a huge margin, he never had the House of Representatives on his side, only the Senate. So it's not like he had a unique position to make changes that hasn't happened since. In fact, any government since then could have undone any or all of these "everything broken in the USA" things. But they didn't. Probably because people like, oh, the viewers of this video, will keep blaming a dead president instead of them. Hah! It's beautiful in a way...

[coryrc]

You don't need a union to have effective management. It should also be their incentive not to cause people's death by overworking employees. Which is also dumb because it costs more to overwork then hire appropriately with overtime laws... cops exploit this all the time to steal money from taxpayers. (The ones in Seattle only get caught when they accidently charge over 24 hours of overtime in a day)

Union rules that say only a particular classification of employee is allowed to pick up a small package from a loading dock and move it twenty feet are also bad.

The blame can go to the top, for not managing correctly.

[achierius]

> It should also be their incentive

You can't just proclaim what incentives should be. We do have a mechanism for changing the incentives of management though: it's called unions.

[coryrc]

If it was a traveler's union, maybe. Cop unions don't result in better outcomes for the general public, and there's no reason a controller's union won't end up just boosting pay and having a rubber room for hacks (referencing NYC schools paying teachers to not work because they're either predators or terrible at teaching, but being unable to fire them).

[denkmoon]

Try looking outside the US to see how unions work without being crushed by 100 years of anti union legislation. Also police unions are a joke.

[wahnfrieden]

A traveler's union? So there is no solution you see?

[jen20]

There have been six presidents who could have addressed this since Reagan. Every one of them shoulders some of the responsibility.

[_ph_]

Yes, they should all have taken actions. But also, it is much more difficult to fix something broken once the damage has settled in. I guess none of them was willing to risk the disruption a fix would have caused. And the system seemed to have held up for quite a while. Weren't there some mass firings of ATC personal at the beginning of the Trump presidency?

The bottom line is: don't break things that are difficult or impossible to fix.

[jen20]

The is a good idea, but once they are broken, you should at least try to fix them, or bear some of the blame for not having tried.

[_ph_]

Absolutely. But for many things, denial is easier than fixing. See climate change. We knew about the problem for a long time. At latest after the oil crisis in the early 70ies, it would have been the perfect moment to reduce fossil fuel usage. Of course we know, how this has not happened and so we just entered the next oil crisis last week. And everyone is to blame for that.

[newsclues]

Or instead of pointing fingers we can uses our brains to solve the problems and increase safety.

You could spend a ton of time and money automating the process, and probably should especially in the future with the proliferation of drones.

But in the meantime there are simple solutions. Tunnels. No ground vehicles should be crossing runways when then could go under.

[wsbetter]

It might sound simple, but won't tunnels lower the strength of the runways (I presume that's where you would put them)? Strengthening that would create an expensive solution to a basic communication problem. That's like saying instead of 4 way stops, we elevate the two intersecting roads to avoid collision, just because someone may have ran the stop sign.

Also, ground vehicles typically need to be on the ground for a reason. Why seperate them?

[busterarm]

The issue is the shortage, which that doesn't address. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Was in three different unions. Union didn't do squat for me. Mainly kept my wages down and gave the friends of the union rep the best shifts.

[anonymars]

Firing them all broke the pipeline

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47495739

[busterarm]

When I don't show up to work I expect to get fired and not rehired too.