Heathrow tells airlines to stop selling additional flights until September
headforpoints.com
headforpoints.com
At Dublin Airport, security staff are only guaranteed 20 hours per week, need to be available for 40 hours per week, and entry level workers are paid €14.14 per hour.
Guaranteed pay: €282.80 per week, i.e. 67% of the minimum wage.
Are there any surprises why there are staff shortages?
1. https://extra.ie/2022/03/31/news/daa-taoiseach-criticised-du...
This I think is part of the huge problem with modern "low level"/minimum wage jobs. Companies don't pay enough to live of of one salary but expect to have full say over their employees time just for their own convenience in scheduling and staffing.
We were thrilled by what we'd found! It would be a quick and easy fix for the client: they had solid and reliable sales forecasts for each location so estimating the number of employees they'd need on a given day wasn't going to be difficult. In fact, they were more or less already doing it. It would hardly cost them anything to implement aside from a few tweaks to the corporate scheduling tool and a bit of training for the store managers. So when management immediately shot down our proposed solution it came as a bit of shock. The erratic scheduling and the "cut" shifts were a feature, not a bug, we were told. It kept employees from getting a second job that they might dare prioritize over their current job.
http://www.ontario.ca/document/your-guide-employment-standar...
> As of January 1, 2019 the three-hour rule applies to students (including students over 18 years of age except if the student works:
> at a children’s camp, unless the student is also a wilderness guide > providing instruction to or supervising children, unless the student is also a wilderness guide > in a recreational program run by a charity, unless the student is also a wilderness guide.
I can’t tell why wilderness guides in particular are so special
To start, as a backgrounder, for centuries, wilderness guides have held a special place in Canadian society. They have been revered, trusted, even give special authority and powers, which even traditional law enforcement do not possess.
In as they are so trusted, discussion, conversation about their powers and capabilities have been purged from all archives. Conversation with outsiders is typically prohibited. Yet CSEC, the RCMP, and others will surely not pay attention to so old a thread! And it will be archived, recorded, saved for future posterity.
So it is my goal to lay out much detail here, for just that purpose. I do not believe such knowledge should be kept secret, for while great good can be attributed to our guides, some are concerned that great wrong is done too.
Before I start documenting this in detail, I want to reiterate that Canadians are not typically allowed to speak of guides. Often we are caught and censured for doing so! I could barely wait for time to pass, barely wait until no one was paying attention, so was my excitement at finally having interest.
Why, if the RCMP knew I was speaking of this now, there'd be utter and complete hell to pay, I suspeci)S(Dxcv0f#
<NO CARRIER>
I always suspected that this was the reason for abusive retail scheduling. Thanks for confirming my suspicion. This should be illegal.
>It kept employees from getting a second job that they might dare prioritize over their current job.
I mean, clearly it fucking didn't.
They want to hand their kids the keys via no inheritance tax and recreate a top down monarchy.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...
The kicker? They were children of immigrants that did the same, except their parents were lucky to have immigrated back when buying a business/land was much cheaper. Land prices are now far higher for the newer immigrants to ever be able to save enough to get in on the ownership side of the business.
But god forbid you raise the point that perhaps we need a political shift that removes some power from corporations and restores it to labor, you get painted as socialized nazi commie scum or whatever. It's so insane and frustrating just how good a lock these businesses have on the situation (Don't even get me started on Walmart et all).
To rational people this should be a no brainer. turns out a lot of people are not rational. the current system is not tenable in my opinion.
I think there needs to be some sort of law against known unenforceable contract provisions. They seem to be pretty commonly used against individuals where they are unlikely to know what is and isn't enforceable.
What's needed is some kind of harsh punishment for including unenforceable contract clauses, coupled with awareness from the side of the employee.
They want to shave a lot of pennies for themselves by playing musical chairs with our agency.
The only thing that was keeping this jobs in place is imperfect knowledge. Most job seekers have a limited knowledge as only know their own past jobs and the ones from close people (and to talk about pay is quite taboo in many countries). And that is how we got here. Even when there is public information, many people have a hard time understanding the implications of the statistics and concrete job differences.
Corporations have thousands of data points and share salary statistics between them.
Staying at home and even firings have helped some people to gain that knowledge.
In these sort of things, your direct manager probably doesn't even know what you make. There is a tight pay band set by HR and virtually no room for differentiation between employees. There is no mechanism in most roles to truly be rewarded for going the extra mile. The only surefire way to increase your takings is to be active in the employment marketplace and always looking for a better deal.
Working for someone is like this old Seinfeld bit[0], if you want to be rewarded you have to get someone to agree to it before you do the work, once the project is delivered and they are satiated they won't be feeling as generous. "We don't need labor now why are we giving this guy a raise?"
It's not just knowledge. Many of these jobs are TIRING jobs because you are physically on your feet a lot. You just don't have the energy to go looking for another job at the end of the day.
The break COVID gave people was a huge boon to job mobility.
Can you share some details on where you're getting this data? I'd like to dig into it more.
Imperfect information certainly is a thing, but many public jobs have public wage information. Large corporate jobs also have public wage information (say a delivery driver or warehouse worker -- everyone knows what Amazon is paying for these positions). Claiming people stay in these jobs due to ignorance goes against my experience growing up poor, where my parents and their peers constantly hunted for better paying jobs.
I don't know anything about Ireland, but a quick Google for "ireland jobs" leads me to https://ie.indeed.com/jobs-in-Ireland where I can clearly see wages and salaries for many positions.
And that's a segment of people who ought to be very good at using technology to find out that kind of stuff. I would be very surprised if this didn't hold for most other fields. I'd expect the only markets in which this kind of thing isn't common is ones that are extremely comp-focused (finance, say, and maybe sales).
I agree that white collar jobs obfuscate salaries and that power dynamic overwhelmingly favors employers.
That isn't the situation with lower paying jobs, especially ones that aren't salaried, which was what the OP was about. Those low skill jobs (I'd argue baggage handler making minimum wage at the airport to be in that category) openly list wages on the advertisement. Thinking those folks stay in their jobs due to the same information asymmetry is what I'm questioning.
When you were younger, it was worth it to work. Today basic wage often does not even cover rent and other living expenses. You loose money by working.
To get some perspective go to www.daft.ie and try to find studion near airport...
And do the same for minimum wage: an extra dollar/euro per hour for weeks where the employee works less than 35 hours.
I know there's some details to work out- vacation, employers forcing employees to say they don't want to work, and so on, but on the whole I think those could be smoothed out, and large employers wouldn't be able to get away with cheating it for long.
It isn't so much that we want to discourage investment in food supply and other service sectors but rather to increase the living conditions of those working in them.
It will mean increased labor costs, decreased stock market profits, and a bit of inflation. I argue that for humane labor practices, this is an acceptable compromise for a civilized society.
Would also help for the government to tax stock buybacks as profit and dividends.
Why? The gain from stock buy back is already captured in capital gains taxes. Simply increase the capital gains tax rate of the goal is to increase taxes collection.
Heathrow is in the UK, not in Ireland, so I'm not sure how Ireland's minimum wage, and Dublin Airport's work contracts for security, could possibly create shortages of staff at Heathrow?
In any case, the number of security staff at Heathrow isn't the bottleneck. From the article: "by the end of July, we will have as many people working in security as we had pre-pandemic".
Of course the poster is not saying Dublin airport's wages affect staffing at Heathrow. But I think you know that.
What is happening is something called a comparison or perhaps an analogy. We are being presented with another airport with staffing shortages and then presented with a cause which possibly applies to the airport in question. But I think you know this, too.
* The starting salary for Security Officers at Heathrow is 28% above the UK's minimum wage (12.13/hour vs 9.50/hour).
* They employ people as either full time (40 hours/week) or part time (20 hours/week). For the latter, there are two shift patterns available, but they don't seem to vary week by week.
[0] - https://encd.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/CandidateExperienc...
Sample of one, but this is the first result I got:
A baggage handler job in Heathrow earns £11/hour for a contracted temporary hourly job that involves probably shifts, working through half the weekends, a long commute and dealing with abusive passengers.
https://www.totaljobs.com/job/baggage-handler/buzz-recruitme...
Perhaps different roles are affected, but I suspect Dublin and Heathrow have staff shortages for similar reasons.
1) pay and conditions relative to other options (which your example illustrates)
2) the system's inability to react quickly to changes in required throughput, because hiring and training takes at least a few weeks(?)
I wonder what's the dominant reason for today's situation, when Heathrow worked fine before the pandemic?
A) Potential workers have better options (or better information about options) than they did before the pandemic?
B) The airport and airlines failed to forecast accurately enough?
C) Some other type of 'bug' in the system of management?
D) Something else?
But the intent was clear.
Either there will then be fewer flights and passengers, and the existing staff count can handle it, or there will be the same number of flights and enough money to hire more staff to handle it.
This is how a free market economy works, right?
Additionally, Heathrow slots are already sold, they likely can't change the price for the next 2 months anyways.
Finally, labor is a bit different then goods- if you raise the marginal cost of an orange all the oranges you've already bought don't suddenly start costing you more. If raise the wage to attract more workers you'll generally have to raise the wages of existing workers as well to retain them. This is a really bad situation if you have a lot of fixed price orders on the books (as Heathrow likely does with airlines). If you overshoot pay and hiring to fix a short term issue you can end up with a worse problem long term.
Raising prices and pay solves the shortage in the long term, but in the short term it won't fix the problem, so the 2 month cap makes sense.
The government has clear reasons for interfering: it's nearly a monopoly due to other airports not having enough capacity, and the same companies run multiple airports. Lower flight prices encourage international tourism which is a positive externality that the airport doesn't benefit from. Obviously, the government also controls flight capacity by not approving new runways, setting noise hours, etc.
That's also part of free markets. Sometimes you simply fail, because you took risks and the risks materialized.
Edit: though for their part, the airline companies have been warning that prices are going up for a few months now.
You WILL lose your luggage and it will take days to get it back! DAYS! If you HAVE to, make sure to have enough supplies in your carry-on.
... Turns out, they move "military looking" (lol, pelican) boxes to a separate spot instead of running them on the carousel. I'd have had it in minutes if I remembered to check the tag first.
Have considered its a tastier looking target for thieves, but esp in Asia they seem to have no idea what it is at all.
I hit up 2 Apple Stores and a few authorized resellers in my area and everyone was out of stock. I ordered mine online and it still took a few weeks to get it.
Often the biggest impediment to getting lost luggage back is finding out where in the airport it actually is.
(This is also how airport lounge abuse is done.)
I could not find a reference reliable enough to quote here, but I would be surprised if any major airport loses more than a few percent of checked luggage. So you will most likely not lose your luggage.
Second, if you’re a baggage handler your only wary to improve your conditions of through labor organization.
To be fair to the airport, it's not just pay: it's also waiting for enhanced background checks to complete, for staff to be trained, increased numbers of staff off sick, etc. etc.
The vast majority of the aviation industry even at the early of 2022 wasn't expecting the resurgence in passengers numbers that has been seen.
A friend of mine had to fight to get his bag in Dublin. His AirTags showed that his bag was in the baggage claim area and led him to a room where they were storing bags. He pointed it out and said, "that's mine" but was told he couldn't get it. After quite a bit of arguing he finally just walked over and took it.
Of course this is just N = 2, so YMMV. But for me, I have the feeling that Schiphol is doing quite well with the amount of people.
Edit; I have to admit that on the way back I spent 15 minutes talking to the pilots and admiring the cockpit. That is probably the reason why I didn't have to wait. But even if you include those 15 minutes it really isn't much.
It certainly wasn't this bad last time I flew via there (pre-pandemic, I'm not a regular flier), but something needs to be done, for sure.
Its because its not fully-automated.
If you keep an eye out, you'll spot an officer sitting in a booth with a couple of LCD screens.
They are actually touch screens showing a grid of mugshots of the people passing through the gates.
Officer needs to tap his finger on your mugshot to open the gate.
Hence if its a busy day, or the officer is eating a donut, you'll get the sucky delay experience.
Obviously there is little public information available, but there is one public document that makes some vague hints about what a "Monitoring Officer" does, including a reference about requiring being logged into a "Monitoring Terminal". See here[1].
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
It was great, walk in, no need to fish out a passport, 5 seconds later you walked through, and because it was frequent flyers only you didn't have grandma still wearing sunglasses, or dropping her passport, or putting her boarding card in, etc.
I measured the "e-passport" queue at Paris last time I got the train to London. There were 5 gates, on average each one took 45 seconds to process someone, the fastest being 31 seconds, the slowest over a minute before rejecting them
That's 1 person every 9 seconds, or 400 per hour. The hourly train has 900 seats. That simply doesn't work.
But, what I don't understand, why the hate on the e passport gates? I really like them at Schiphol. There are usually about 8 of them and in my experience there are always more egates open then actual officers. And they are on par or faster than an officer.
Could it be more efficient? yes. But, if the alternative is an old fashioned officer this is better.
1) People don't like them when they total throughput turns out to be less than before, which tends to be the case - especially when people notice them. This is quite common as they often replace 1 passport officer with 1 e-passport machine.
2) As a user they are more difficult to use, and no faster. For me, manual passport control into my home country involves dropping my passport on the desk with one hand, standing for 20 seconds, then leaving. For e-gates it means opening it up (usually a two handed process), sliding into a reader, making sure the crinkly passport bit doesn't scrunch up, wait, wait, wait, half the time get told to reinsert, wait again, look at a camera, wait, wait, then about 1 in 4 times get rejected and have to do the manual process
3) For the minority of people who had iris, they replaced a system which was better for the user in all ways
Iris itself was of course a security issue - it was no longer something you have + something you are, it was just something you are, which was the beauty. Have too many people on the system and you get false positives and end up with a tremendous mess
Of course the best innovation in passport control in the UK would be to join Schengen, so we don't need passport control for the majority of arrivals into the UK. Would save a fortune and make everyones lives easier.
Of course the direct answer is "inadequate staff" but the next question is why is that so much more now? Why aren't the airports doing more to entice workers like perhaps better benefits, pay or flexibility? Are airports already operating at thin margins? (If anyone from the aero industry could comment that would be great!) Did they overestimate the downturn due to covid? Are traffic volumes legitimately larger than what was expected/predicted in 2022 (even ignoring covid's drop)?
Simple: here in Germany, all workers at airports authorized to enter controlled zones have to pass an extensive background check, a process that takes 3-4 months under normal conditions [1]. During COVID, a lot of these workers were laid off instead of being placed under the employment protection program or left entirely since the Kurzarbeit only paid out 60% of already extremely low wages (14€/h for baggage handlers, [0]). They found other employment and won't come back - to make it worse, airports are usually well outside the city borders, so there's an awful lot of commute involved at a time when public transport doesn't run as well.
> Why aren't the airports doing more to entice workers like perhaps better benefits, pay or flexibility?
There has been a continuous pressure on costs everywhere at airports, which means the airports themselves have not much flexibility on raising fees to account for increased costs, and the companies providing the services like baggage handling, refueling and whatever usually won their contracts by tender which means they are locked in as well by law.
[0] https://de.talent.com/salary?job=flughafen
[1] https://www.luftsicherheitsschulung-online.de/faq-beantragun...
Our governments (that all signed the Paris agreement) should be happy and seize the opportunity to let airports raise taxes, let service providers renegotiate and pay their staff more, and make low cost flights a little less cheap.
That is impossible, they cannot raise the agreed-upon rates without terminating the contract and holding a fully new tender process. Contract termination would require agreement of both parties, but no vendor would ever agree to the termination of a contract if they could not be sure to win the new tender.
This literally means "how much do you earn as an airport in Germany". The answer is 2194€. Made me laugh.
Makes me wonder how many minutes of actual investigation take place in those months.
Seems like there was serious opportunity for process improvement all along that was never done, and now things went from bad to worse.
The current high level of employment means people are able to choose to not do that kind of undesirable work.
When Airports and Airlines do manage to find staff to fill the jobs, they have to go through a government background check process for security reasons. That process has a huge backlog at the moment.
When travel picked back up they tried to employ people. They failed because
1) Brexit -- many people who were laid off in the UK returned to their country of origin
2) Security clearance -- there is a massive backlog getting security clearance (for things like airside passes) in the UK
BA ground crew were recently on strike because they're being paid less than they were in 2019 for the same job (which was already a low wage), even before inflation. There's better jobs to go to with better hours and better conditions.
I suspect BA and co are hoping to get some form of P&O style deal where they can employ people who aren't UK citizens in the airports on a low wage that someone with full access to the labour market wouldn't take.
Same goes for Schiphol https://www.schiphol.nl/en/page/schiphol-vip-service/
For relatively little money, the private terminal services offer you a very high quality stress-free experience. No need to navigate crowded airports or tow your luggage around. They’ll drive you from a comfortable lounge straight to the plane (and vice-versa). For passport control, you just sit in a comfy armchair as the border force girl comes to check your documents.
Depending on the airline and airport you depart from, your luggage will often get binned separately in order to guarantee a super fast delivery to the VIP terminal.
Kind of pricy, source: https://www.heathrowvip.com/s/faqs
On what planet? It costs £2750 plus VAT, sometimes I think I live in a different universe than HN posters
2750 pound? Maybe if you made $3 million a year.
Heathrow doesn't serve only HN users, nor only the wealthy, though. I'd wager that £2750 plus VAT is hardly "relatively little money" for the average person traveling through Heathrow.
I think most people would balk at the price. If it was 30 quid it would be reasonable.
> They’ll drive you from a comfortable lounge straight to the plane (and vice-versa). For passport control, you just sit in a comfy armchair as the border force girl comes to check your documents.
For some airports you don't have to pay for a separate extra service for this, flying first class with the right airline at the right airport will get you that. I'm trying to remember where I did this - I think it was Taipei. Wherever it was, I didn't have a black car, but a thing resembling a baggage cart that played Fur Elise to let people know I was coming. I don't think I would use the cart service again, but the checkin experience was nice.
Protip: have your staff book a car for your luggage, saves having to wait for someone to unload your luggage from the plane, you can just get into the waiting car on the tarmac and go.
Super protip: have your luggage shipped ahead and unpacked in advance of your arrival.
Plus that way if there's something small (like one of the watches) you particularly like, you have a souvenir you can take home as opposed to leaving for housekeeping.
Better to spare the staff the temptation of such sins.
Very occasionally I like to blend in and perhaps get a second use out of a Patek, the leather strap really show up the wear much more, making it an even bolder statement.
Is this phenomenon a psychology trick? Most folks doing bad stuff are guys, so have a hot young woman ask the questions to throw them off and make it harder to lie?
I've wondered whether it's a deliberate tactic employed by some border controls since I stepped off a plane in Canada and saw that every single one of the half-dozen folks doing our "what are you doing in Canada?" Q&A stuff was a very attractive, put-together young woman. Like, that's a hell of a coincidence if it's not intentional.
Regular LHR border control on the other hand used to quiz me all the time. What are you doing? Where are you staying? Who pays for your travel? What do you do for a living?
US immigration is also very invasive, but I have Global Entry now and haven't spoken to immigration in years. Love it. (Customs, yeah they'll still ask you questions. Immigration questions upon arrival to the US always annoy me because I feel like I have a right to exist in my country of birth and citizenship. If I have the wrong answer to some question, where are they going to deport me to? The US? But, I don't feel like I have any right to bring in goods from abroad without paying taxes, so if people ask me those kinds of questions, it doesn't bother me.)
So just like the Tom Brady method of avoiding sexual harassment[1]
> Prices for the Black service start at GBP £2,750 + VAT for up to 3 persons for an arriving or departing flight, as well as those on flights connecting within 3 hours.
For perspective, LHR-JFK is around £500 return including taxes for one adult in economy, or £850 for premium economy.
Doesn't seem that dramatic?
>"Kaye’s solution is to cap Heathrow passenger numbers at 100,000 per day for the Summer period" ... "the closure for sale of all flights departing from the airport until 11th September a reduction in the current passenger cap from 101,500 to 100,000"
meaning every day until 9/11 1.5k people aren't getting a seat they paid for
https://nos.nl/artikel/2433371-klm-schrapt-7000-stoelen-per-...
My understanding is that based on existing sales alone, there are already 101,500 passengers/day. And in order to get 100,000, they have asked airlines to not sell any more tickets at all.
If you imagine that airlines were previously planning to sell a further 20,000 tickets per day, and they cut that down to 0-100 per day, that's a huge drop that is sure to impact anyone looking to buy tickets at this time.
To me, clickbait is along the lines of "10 ways to lose 100lbs in 1 hour!" and it's an article about throwing out two 50lb weights. Or otherwise where the title is clearly not representative of the article itself.
But here we have...
>Effectively immediately, Heathrow has requested:
-the closure for sale of all flights departing from the airport until 11th September
- a reduction in the current passenger cap from 101,500 to 100,000
That seems to match the title exactly? Which part is clickbait? Or what has changed in the definition of clickbait that I'm too out of touch to have learned?
but the "clickbait" bit is the dramatic title, weak definition of perhaps, but its still excessive
example of level reporting: https://news.sky.com/story/new-summer-holiday-threat-as-heat...
I am genuinely perplexed as to how someone could get that from this title.
That usually leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of the reader.
Because the title is almost a word for word copy of the actual announcement, straight from the CEOs mouth.
Is this unprecedented at Heathrow, or normal course of action? Will the average Heathrow traveler or prospective traveler a face any consequence anything from this news?
Some of the items do seem like they would impact travelers and potential travelers, so I would not classify it as clickbait yet. Unless I found out this was every summer.
But if this article means that people should avoid Heathrow because the experience will be worse than prior years, then I would say this is relevant news to share with the public.
Should I flag this post? Feels a bit over the top. At the same time I can't downvote it. shrug
1) Cancel flights 2) Operate with lower loads on the existing flights
#1 is the best option as it reduces the number of staff needed on the ground and in the air but airlines are likely going to go with #2 because they don't want to risk this edict from the airport going on long enough to threaten their slots. And regulators are not budging. They actually come out and said that any slots not used, even for capacity reasons, will be returned and are not exempt.
*at their current price point
> heathrow-tells-all-airlines-to-stop-selling-any-flights-until-11th-september
> Heathrow tells BA (and other airlines) to stop selling tickets for the Summer period
> SOLD OUT: Heathrow tells all airlines to stop selling ANY flights until 11th September
Isn't that just much more work for so little "benefit" (SEO?)
Anyway, now none of them match the title on HN, so I have no answer to your question.
The London bombings on July 7th 2005 (or 7/7 as they were known) were a big thing in the UK obviously.
Not to Sky Sports though, who posted on July 7th
"In honour of 7/7, who's the first player you think of"
To really grasp dates like 9/11 or 7/7 you'd have to have been at least say 10 years old at the time. The 20 year old intern posting the sky sports tweet would have been 3 at the time and wouldn't associate the date. People under the age of 30 wouldn't remember 9/11 like the rest of the world did, and it did have a massive affect on the whole world - not least because of the response to it (unlike say March 11th 2004 in Madrid)
Edit: Y'all really think they would have limited flights in touristic high season if the Euro was what it was 2-3 years ago? Please!