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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You need labor laws with teeth.

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.

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 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.

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-...)

how, exactly, do you propose this "independent" company supposed to address these "failures"?

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.