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Comment by caslon | Hacker News Reader

Why would anyone bother when you're stripped of your career for life if you try and organize collective action as an ATC? It's a sacrifice of a good deal of freedom and submitting yourself to malevolent companies and a government that doesn't care about you.

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Not sure why you are being downvoted. It is widely known that Reagan broke PATCO strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr... (Whether or not public sector unions should exist is a different question, of course. FDR, for example, was of the opinion that "no", because you can't effectively negotiate with a police/teachers/etc union.)

Because it’s totally irrelevant to today. The fact is anyone can be fired from any job they refuse to do. That’s something that happened 40 years ago and it’s incredibly odd that people keep bringing it up as if it’s got any relevance to what’s going on today.

> The fact is anyone can be fired from any job they refuse to do.

Oh c'mon, that's not what a strike for betting working conditions is and you know it.

I still fail to see what a strike from 40 years ago has to do with a worker shortage today. Especially because many different industries are reporting shortages. The strike was 40 years ago, are your really claiming that people suddenly remembered it and are now refusing to work? That’s an incredibly disingenuous take.

Just a few years ago during the government shutdown controllers were legit concerned about being paid (and from what I recall - they weren't. Airlines were literally sending pizzas to control towers and facilities).

You’re claiming that federal employees weren’t paid at all?

I believe during the shutdown there was a period they weren't receiving compensation for hours worked. Keep in mind that due to understaffing - folks were already working additional hours/days on top of that. I believe they eventually got paid out months after it, but a bit of a raw deal and could make you think twice about working for the govt.

I believe you’re just making this up. People are paid generally on a biweekly or weekly basis, the shutdown lasted a few days, even if the fed missed a payday, there is no chance it wasn’t paid the following payday. Not trusting the federal government to pay means not trusting in the US dollar at all… kinda unlikely.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.com/amp/story/2019...

And strangely Reagan was the president of the actors union and a supporter of the Polish anti-communist labor movements.

It’s not strange at all if you understand the differences between a private sector union and a public sector one. What’s really strange is how anyone that’s not a member of a public sector union could think it’s a net benefit for society as whole.

You could argue many things are a "net benefit to society" but which are untenable for moral, political, or practical reasons. In this case, however, I think you have to exclude government employees to from society to consider this a "net benefit" instead of a zero-sum benefit. The benefit to society is offset pretty much exactly by the income government employees are screwed out of by being denied basic rights to negotiate for themselves (amazing that sentence can be written about a free country). It might even be net-negative if it turns out the government can't hire good people due to artificial wage suppression created by short-term thinking.

When you hear stories from controllers both in the US and other nations about the constant pressure to cut corners and operate with fewer people I think you do need an organization to advocate for them.

Look at that midair in Europe (euro control) where one overnight controller was managing a giant chunk of airspace and was task saturated. Then afterwards all this scandal on how the contracting facility was cooking the books around staffing levels to look like things were on the up and up.

money and power for meee, not for theeee

To quote the comment below: A majority of these shortages are due to those who quit or were told to quit because of the COVID vaccine mandates.

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