Reagan taking away collective bargaining rights for ATCs seems to be what have led to the shortage and the helicopter accident last week.
Besides never missing an opportunity to 'slam' the opposition, I have no idea why this is being construed as an ATC failure.
That's part of the problem here, everyone is just taking political potshots. Which is to be expected. But the danger is you lose sight of the real issue. As you mentioned, the helo pilot's loss of situational awareness. (Did they ever even have situational awareness?)
We can't be getting into these situations where every crisis is met by this typical American emotional reactionism. We can't be blaming the "left", or the "right", or the most ridiculous one which was "it was the black guys somehow". We gotta stop letting that crap distract us.
Operator error is only the first 'why' in the 5 whys for this incident.
Just saying what I've heard. One issue is that the controller allowed visual separation, to begin with. They say he should have known that it was difficult, especially at night, and shouldn't have allowed it.
"Yo watch out for that big plane on your left" and then hope for the best.
A good counter-example of ATC would be police. Police have strong collective bargaining rights, but mostly came at the expense of accountability and citizen oversight. (And also police departments are still chronically understaffed).
Or in the private sectors, non-unionized manufacturers like Toyota and Honda always outperform legacy manufacturers in the US on quality.
I'm not saying there's not a strong argument for unionization, but an improvement in quality is not one backed by any sort of evidence and it's a really weak argument. To put it another way, it would be hard for a unionized employee to outperform a Foxconn employee with no human rights on output quality - but it's not at all the kind of argument we should be making.
I'm going to guess that there are far stronger correlations with household wealth when it comes to student performance than there are whether the students are taught by teachers who are employed under a CBA.
> Or in the private sectors, non-unionized manufacturers like Toyota and Honda always outperform legacy manufacturers in the US on quality.
That could very well be because of how the cars are engineered and made versus the union representation for the people who make them.
GM, for example, tends to build cars in a way as to make them as cheap as possible to build. That lets them compete on price versus quality. You need the car now, after all; what happens in 40k miles isn't as important to you now. Of course, that comes with the risk, like when some essential component on my college girlfriend's Pontiac's shat the bed, and they'd had to take the entire front of the car apart to replace it because it was cheaper to build that way. They've just taken the price of having a functioning vehicle and charged you for it at the mechanic, not the dealership.
Toyota and Honda used to do the opposite, of course. You were going to pay more (depending on exchange rate) upon purchase of the vehicle but the result was that the car wouldn't need as many trips to the mechanic. They've since started doing more value engineering.
There's also a cultural difference between Japanese and American businesses, but that's far more nebulous.
GM makes crappy because, if they tried to make high quality cars, they would be priced like Cadillacs
What's the excuse for the shoddy non-union Mexican GM vehicles?
Vehicle designs, powertrains, critical components are all made by the HQ or its suppliers.
It's interesting that other car companies have backed off from the multiple brands/badges. We don't have plymouth, Oldsmobile, mercury, Pontiac.
The abstract cultural differences might be difficult to articulate, but many of the effects are concrete: Toyota still maintains lifetime employment for Japanese factory employees. And Toyota factory workers in Japan are represented by a union, AFAIU, though like Germany the relationship between unions and management is less adversarial in Japan.
Interestingly, the change in union employment in Japan seems to have tracked the US, from a high of over 50% mid-century to 16% today versus ~35% and ~10%, respectively, in the U.S.
which was a substantial improvement for millions of people. It's worth pointing out that the one (and probably only) good thing I can think of that Reagan did would get him tossed out of today's republican party.
That's why Republicans are unwilling to budge a second time.
But regardless of if this was the fault of Reagan or the largely Democratic-controlled Congress, Republicans in government since then have soured on any idea giving an ounce of amnesty because of it.
That didn't really happen. You see plenty of roundups of illegal immigrants, many/most are employed. What you don't see ever are roundups of their employers.
If you want to actually see this problem solved immediately all you need to do is show a daily perp walk of the employers on the evening news for a few months.
They found about 900 undocumented workers.
Many of them gave evidence to officials, including written instructions from Tyson that advised them how to fill out employment, banking, taxation paperwork if they "didn't have documentation" and how to stay under the radar, i.e. Tyson didn't just know they might have undocumented workers, they were facilitating and actively enabling it.
In press conferences, when journalists asked "Are there any plans to investigate the company or issue fines or charges?", the response? "We are not considering that at this time." (And they never did.)
What it ended up looking like was that Tyson had been getting in some trouble, getting bad press for OSHA safety issues and perhaps had decided their undocumented workers were getting a little too angry about poor safety standards, making waves.
It would be entirely unsurprising to me if Tyson made a sweetheart deal with ICE that said "Hey, if you come to these plants, you'll get to make this big stink about undocumented workers" (and this was during the Trump administration), "but in return, can you leave us out of it?", very much shades of "Won't someone rid me of these meddlesome workers?"
Seriously, why else would the name of a president who hasn't served in 40 years suddenly be brought up all the time?
Also, his handling of the disaster was pretty good.