DHL pilot alleges poor labor practices that are spreading throughout industry
qz.com
qz.com
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.
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.
My napkin math says truck drivers are a MUCH higher % of ground shipping cost compared to airline pilot and flying cost.
Airlines have a lot of staff costs, but those would seem like it would be maintenance and ground crew which is even harder to automate.
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.
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.
how, exactly, do you propose this "independent" company supposed to address these "failures"?
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-...)
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.
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.
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.
If you're away from what you'd rather be doing at the company's discretion, you're working.
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.
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.
Unless they didn't pay or he wasn't able to relax in that time, which he should have mentioned in the article.
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
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...
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.
What is the fix?
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.
But why, in the name of fairness, isn't the surplus shared with all the stakeholders?
We wouldn't be in this pickle to begin with if profit sharing was the norm. Like when I was kid.
It's somewhere in the vicinity of neo-feudalism + neo-aristocracy + prosperity theology. It's an abomination.
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.
You need labor laws with teeth.
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.
The opportunities are insurmountable.
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...
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.
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.
I think this might be a case of content audience mismatch.
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."
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_inciden...
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos-6
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_1354
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedEx_Express_Flight_80
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_6491
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tombstone_mentality
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_1862
PS. I had a fatigue related car accident in flight school. The "symptoms" can sneak up on a pilot and quickly become an extreme hazard.
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.
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.
but it's disingenuous to claim you're motivated by something else in your pleading.
Do they really? I mean, if you love driving, do you become a bus driver?
It is not like it is flying your cessna around the place.
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.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/worst-place-to-be-a-pilot...
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.
Pilots are part of operations and not different to drivers or cleaning staff, even if they still consider themselves part of an elite.
While they undoubtedly contribute, putting all the blame on their shoulders seems a bit silly.
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.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/2014/01/05/ell...
* 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.
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.
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.
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."]
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.
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"]
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).
While the military argument may be used by some, to me, this is pretty clearly an economic treaty issue rather than a matter of national security.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Convention_on_Internat...
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?
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.
http://pilotjobs.atpflightschool.com/2015/01/23/how-much-mon...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curv...
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.
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.
http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines
[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.
Then bargain for different terms and conditions for junior pilots? There is no "one" way that unions work.
"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."
How often are they asked to take the marathon flights?
More details would be helpful...it's not clear if this is a new norm from the article.
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.
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.
Eventually moved upstream into moving the cargo itself.
DHL == Dalsey, Hillblom and Lynn
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.
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.
It's up to us. This is not a technology issue.
The author has a great job where he is well paid and occasionally has to sleep on a plane. What's the problem?
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.
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]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_6491
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_1862
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214
[4] http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/20...
Why do cargo planes even need pilots? He isn't likely to get more money - instead his job is likely to be automated away.
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.
"US patriots, protect our labour achievements from this evil German company!"
"veterans or reservists who have spent years in selfless service"
Both veterans and reservists get paid for their work. It's no more selfless than being a programmer or a cleaner.
> 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?
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.