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- "Its utterly ridiculous" "They well deserve it."

Why?

You seem to be forgetting the basics of economics. It really doesn't matter what you think they "deserve" or how hard you or they think it is to deal with the general public.

What matters is how many people could/would be willing to do their jobs. And the answer is quite a few, whereas there are many fewer people who could manage a McDonalds.

Thus demand is low for flight attendants, and thus the price is low.

I'm all for people negotiating for as much as they can get, but I certainly don't think it's ridiculous that the market offers different prices for different services.

If this is the case, then the "basics of economics" sucks. If Virgin really cares about customer service as much as Branson's letter purports, then they should have no problem paying people who do their jobs at a level far above industry standard appropriately.

Maybe I'm being naive but I'd much rather pay a flight attendant who constantly goes beyond the call of duty and does his/her job at an extremely high standard, say $50K rather than paying someone else 30K, just because they're willing to do the job for less money.

You get what you pay for, right.

And I'd happily pay a premium to an airline with this philosophy.

Aside from that, arguing that he is ignoring the basics of economics also sucks.... 'the basics of economics' are not an end in and of themselves.

(However something like the 'greater good' or 'the right thing to do', which is what the op seems to be arguing, actually can be construed as a reason).

You seem to think the market for jobs operates with something approaching market economics. If this were true then we should be running PSAs to encourage people to become investment bankers because the incredibly high salaries paid are indicating a severe shortage. Instead I see commercials encouraging people to become teachers - if there were really a shortage wouldn't salaries rise by market forces?

The truth is economists have long recognized that the job market is different than the market for most other products. For one thing wages are "sticky," they don't change every couple of days the way the price for gas or a loaf of bread does.

You're right. You're also slightly wrong.

Yes, labor is not exactly comparable in market terms to other products--more sticky prices, more difficulty in estimating value, etc.--but the principle and its consequences remain.

We DON'T HAVE to run PSAs to encourage people to become investment bankers precisely because there are high salaries. The salaries are the advertizement and they're incredibly effective.

As far as teachers, we don't have a shortage. We don't need more teachers, we need better teachers. How to attract those better teachers is unclear--a strictly higher salary would attract more of all caliber of teachers which would not help. I suppose commercials are thought to be one way and I think it's likely better compensation will have to be a part of it as well.

The labor market is different than a commodity market, but that doesn't mean economics don't apply. There are switching costs, people are not fungible, and labor skills represent a huge time/money investment.

But this misses the point. We want our economic system to be as fair as possible, and in most cases (and certainly in the case of flight attendants), the "fairest" solution and the one that pays what flight attendants "deserve" to make is the fair market wage.

If demand is low, no-one will miss them much when they strike. If they are missed, basic market economics dictates that they should get paid more. Further, there are two sides to the demand curve. There is supply - how many people are prepared to do the job, and there is demand - how much those who pay them, directly or indirectly, appreciate what they do. Now, clearly there is some variation in the demand - you perhaps have little demand for their services, whereas some commenters value them more highly. So I guess in the fullness of time, perhaps with the aid of a strike for clarity, we'll see who's in the majority.

Noone will miss them much when they strike? Regardless of how "large" the supply of cabin-crew is; a strike that cancels flights will still affect my hypothetical holiday, and I will miss them an awful lot. That's more because there's a latency in the training duration and short-term availability of staff, than because there's a labor shortage for aircrew. (My understanding is that cabin crew is an exceptionally competitive job with many more applicants than successful employees).

I believe that being a flight attendent is seen as a desirable job, and therefore they just don't need to pay more. They can get keen and well suited people to apply for any job openings they may have, regardless of what the airlines are paying.

This is true, but this same logic applies also to pilots. The key difference is that pilots are very expensive to train and therefore more difficult to replace, whereas flight attendants are relatively easy to train and replace.

Right. And most customers want their pilots to have as much experience as possible. Having senior experienced pilots on your payroll is seen as a plus. Sullenberger, the guy who successfully managed to put a plane down on the Hudson river, basically epitomizes how you want your pilots to look:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesley_Sullenberger

You'll never seen an airline advertising how they have the youngest pilots in the industry.

On the other hand, having flight attendants to be as young, attractive and perky as possible is probably considered a positive thing.

On the high end (why pay a pilot 200k a year, etc) that argument may hold, but on the low end, it causes sleep deprivation as pilots struggle for workable living conditions close to work, etc.

I'm fine paying $10 more a ticket if the low end pilots make 40k or more a year and can afford a good nights sleep. They're someone I don't want many mistakes from.

Pilot rest time is regulated by the FAA in the U.S., regardless of salary. The regulations specify minimum rest-opportunity time prior to flight duty, as well as maximum hours of flight duty per day, per week and per month.

Does the U.K. have similar rules?

The problem is that there are plenty of ways to undermine these rules. For example, most junior pilots commute to work because your duty station is a function of seniority and they don't want to live in the shitty places they have been assigned to. So, such a pilot might start his day in the city where he actually lives, catch a ride in the jump seat from there to his duty station and then begin his work day, which is allowed to be up to 16 hours long (the actual hours of flying allowed is less than 16, but the time from when he shows up to work to when he has to stop flying is 16 hours unless the airline imposes a more conservative limit). Depending on how long his commute was, he might make his final landing after being awake for well over 20 hours.

And what compounds the reply Lucas made just above (below?) mine here is that you've got entry level salaries for pilots often as low as $20-30k and senior pilots making $150-250k. (Philip Greenspun has a great write-up on this if you care to google for it).

So when you've got that kind of disparity, you're going to have guys who are quite ambitious and willing to sacrifice long hours to move up into the more livable parts of the salary range available in their profession.

I had a very similar experience with Virgin Blue (Australian national flight service). We arrived an hour late to a flight (daylight savings mixup) and fortunately the plane had been delayed. Not only did a Virgin Blue staff member get us to the front of the line, they let us purchase space for luggage and check it in late (we had cheap no-luggage tickets), and made sure to check with flight staff that the luggage would be on our flight and that our seats were still available.

Contrast with Qantas, where being less than 45 minutes early to a flight usually means you cannot board (you certainly cannot check-in luggage).

It's worth pointing out that Virgin America is a completely independent company of Virgin Atlantic and that your experience seems to be mostly based on Virgin America.

You talk about increased pay - the only way to increase staff pay would be to raise fares which customers don't want.

> the only way to increase staff pay would be to raise fares which customers don't want.

This is far from "the only way". Southwest Airlines, for example, has excellent fares and excellent pay.

So Virgin should chuck their entire brand out the window and start herding people onto planes like cattle?

I said nothing of the sort. Virgin should do whatever is in its own best interest.

Are you stating that flight attendants worldwide should go on strike, or just the Virgin ones?. My friend has just completed flight attendant training at Virgin, it's an intensive 6 week course with exams etc and the 40 or so that went through th training were selected from in excess of 2,000 applications.

I think your experience of Virgin is great, but I think your comment that they should go on strike because they offer great service is way off. The experience you had is most likely due to the sheer quality of the training and their impeccably high standards, it's also these qualities that mean they are extremely highly regarded talent in their industry.

In "Capitalism, A Love Story", Moore claims that new pilots average the same as a McDonalds low-level manager. If this is true, it would make Virgin pilots comparatively well paid.

I think by "new pilots" they mean "new pilots at regional carriers," not "new pilots at the majors." Of course, these days, the regional carriers have become the primary path to employment in the majors (it used to be the military), so most airline pilots have to endure a few years of that. The fact is, a lot of people love to fly (at the controls, not in the back), so getting paid to fly for a living is an incredible draw. When you add in the great benefits and the high pay for experienced pilots, you're bound to get a situation where people have to pay some serious dues to break into the majors.

My dad is a retired airline pilot, so I've heard plenty about the airline industry from him. For airline pilots, seniority is everything. Part of it is the pay scale, which as you pointed out, is unbelievably steep: the new guys get paid almost nothing, the oldest hands make (at least) the kind of money people normally associate with lawyers and doctors. However, other things that dramatically effect lifestyle are also driven by seniority, such as scheduling and vacation. The senior pilots are able to schedule themselves for contiguous trips and to be home for weekends. My dad used to pull a trick where, if we were planning a vacation, he would book himself up solid with flying for the first two and a half weeks of the month and then hit his legal monthly limit for flight time, after which he got the last week and a half of the month off without having to take any vacation. New guys, on the other hand, get stuck with crazy schedules where there are inconvenient gaps between flights, leaving them with low ratios of hours flown/days worked. Seniority also determines where you can get stationed: the most senior get to pick their home station, the more junior must select less-desirable stations. The most important aspect of seniority is furlough: least senior gets furloughed first. In a cyclic industry with big swings of expansion and contraction, this is a very big deal. When my dad first got out of the Navy and went to work for Pan Am, they gave him an offer: start immediately as a flight engineer and move up to co-pilot in a year, or wait six months to hire on directly as a co-pilot. Even though he wanted to get back into the pilot's seat as quickly as possible, he chose to hire on immediately and delay co-pilot status. He didn't know it at the time, but it turned out to be the best career decision he ever made: a few years later there was a major furlough, and he was just a few seniority numbers above the furlough line. If he had waited those six months, he would have been furloughed and out of work for several years.

It's not set up this way because of the airlines, its because of the pilots' unions. Part of it is driven by position: Captains get paid more than co-pilots, and pilots of bigger jets (longer flights) get paid more than pilots of smaller jets (shorter flights). Even that is driven by seniority, though: the most senior pilots get the big jets. Some aspects of the seniority system make complete sense: you don't want the airline to use a furlough as an excuse to get rid of its most highly-paid pilots. However, the pay scale doesn't need to be nearly as steep as the unions make it, and if it wasn't so steep then the airlines wouldn't have to lay off as many junior pilots to save a given amount of money.

Data!

http://www.pea.com/imd/airline-pilot-salary.html http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/McDonald-s-Store-Manager-Sal...

Maybe they start around the same, but they certainly diverge pretty quick.

Somehow they heard there were 3 passengers (us and another fellow) who had missed the flight. They all ended up getting off and giving us their seats.

They heard you were there because the gate agent went aboard and told them (nicely, I am sure) to get off the plane.

Employees flying standby are always at the mercy of late arriving paying passengers.

And, sure they had no compunction about getting off because

1) they were told to

2) employees are keenly aware that grousing in front of the customers is a Bad Idea.

I'm sure they were actually in good spirits about it: flying non-rev you know you can be bumped and after all it's in favor of people paying your salary.

On the matter of paying a little extra for better service shouldn't we consider the option of "tipping" our flight attendants then?

I know this won't fly in general, especially outside the US where tipping is not nearly as customary, but this has been a method to offset low paying jobs where service level influences our overall spending.

I don't know what the lifestyle of a flight attendant is, but if the advancement of flight has reduced their positions to that of a McD's manager, blame us, the general public, because we've forced Airlines to optimize for scale transport.

As for Pilots...it gets tricky because they are very much vital. The seniority crap sucks but is understandable in a job market with a very finite requirement of personnel. To be a Senior Captain with a large carrier, like Singapore Airlines, means you'd be in the 200k+ salary club.

The number of short-hop vs long-leg flights is probably indicative of why there are so many junior level pilots paid less than senior level pilots paid more.

Furthermore, I'd say aircraft like the Airbus 380 compounds this problem by basically forcing a hub and spoke model where the large "carrier" aircraft can only be manned by senior pilots. If we had more direct-direct flights it would open up room for many semi-senior pilots and potentially distribute wages better.

    I'm the kind of person that will pay a little extra 
    for quality. I do it with food, personal products, and
    travel. I don't fly Virgin because its cheaper, though it
    often is. I fly them when I can because I enjoy the
    experience and don't want to be stressed out when I get
    to where I'm going. If it means that I pay an extra $10     
    $20 to fly Virgin so that their employees directly 
    benefit, that's something I would do gladly.

I feel similarly, although I think most people don't see it that way, or at least aren't willing to pay more unless they know about the end result. Otherwise, average people just as well assume the company is money hungry "like everyone else". I think Branson does a good job in reaching out to customers, sadly the average person probably doesn't see it.

Proof of that is the success of airlines like Ryan Air. The CEO (don't remember his name) said something like: people don't care about drinks and pretty stewardesses, they care about getting cheaply from A to B (even if it means shitty seats, no food, earlier boarding times, etc...).

Michael O'Leary is a brilliant example of a CEO who is almost the complete polar opposite of Branson in every way except one: he uses his own persona and personality in the media to really drive Ryanair's value propositions forward. His widely publicised (and blue-sky) proposals, amongst others, to have only one co-pilot per flight, ask passengers to load their own baggage, and have standing-only sections are great examples of this.

Edit: his proposal to remove all but one lavatory to make room for extra seating and charging for use of the remaining one is textbook.

> Its utterly ridiculous that some of the nicest, caring people in the airline industry have to deal with such people as the general public (myself included, of course) and yet make less money than a manager at a McDonalds franchise. Day in, day out.

If you want to give them more of your money, or start a company that pays them better, or take up a collection for them, nothing is stopping you.

The airline is paying them a salary and you are paying them nothing. Yet you are mad at the guys who are providing their job in the first place?

What a vapid comment. GP is perfectly within his rights to gripe about people performing a stressful job admirably while receiving less money than they deserve. Saying "start your own airline" hardly advances the conversation. As a counterpoint, you could have linked to median wages for all flight attendants and pointed out a systemic issue.

While I don't think it was presented as such, the "start your own airline" comment is, to me, the correct response to "people aren't being paid what they deserve". It turns out we are unlikely to agree as to what people deserve to be paid for their jobs, so we have decided the most fair thing to do is rely on labor markets and competition.

I'm sorry, that's still as vapid as saying "you don't like Google search? Well, build your own search engine..."

But exactly this line of thinking WAS needed for Larry+Sergej to DO "build their own search engine".

It may taste vapid to you or not -- but it's entirely valid.

In fact, Richard Branson at one point was so dissatisfied that he DID "build his own airline".

Your point was?

1) OP's opinions about flight attendant pay are his. Others think it's a bit more exciting to fly around the world than to manage a McD's, and that pay isn't the only measure of comp.

2) There are many things OP could do besides starting his own airline. Do some Kickstarter like thing for the ostensibly underpaid flight attendants. Do a Hipmunk like thing where there's a wage surcharge on each ticket, given directly to the flight attendants.

In short, do something to put money in their pocket rather than pointing a finger at Branson, the guy who is actually putting money in their pockets today.

Otherwise, it's all too easy to be generous with other people's money.