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Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by robert_foss on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @11:17AM (#42934348)
Reagan taking away collective bargaining rights for ATCs seems to be what have led to the shortage and the helicopter accident last week.
Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by legitster on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @11:57AM (#42935121)
Kinda. Collective bargaining rights are great for employees but they do NOT automatically lead to better outcomes for customers/citizens/etc.

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).

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by dttze on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @01:40PM (#42936715)
Police are the state's manifestation of the monopoly on violence. Comparing that to civilian safety orgs makes no sense.
Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by legitster on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @02:07PM (#42937092)
Okay, if not police, then teacher's unions: there's not a lot of available studies, but most point to a non-existent or negative relationship between CBAs and student performance.

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.

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by lenerdenator on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @02:25PM (#42937334)
> Okay, if not police, then teacher's unions: there's not a lot of available studies, but most point to a non-existent or negative relationship between CBAs and student performance.

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.

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by slt2021 on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @04:49PM (#42939338)
not true, it is better for the brand long-term to build good cars. but unionized workforce makes it economically unfeasible.

GM makes crappy because, if they tried to make high quality cars, they would be priced like Cadillacs

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by mullingitover on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @05:09PM (#42939661)
We have an apples to apples comparison with Mexican-made vehicles, though, since both GM and Toyota build there.

What's the excuse for the shoddy non-union Mexican GM vehicles?

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by slt2021 on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @05:17PM (#42939778)
Mexico is an assembly operation to arbitrage cheap low skill labor and preferential NAFTA-like agreements.

Vehicle designs, powertrains, critical components are all made by the HQ or its suppliers.

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by mullingitover on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @05:30PM (#42939950)
Citation needed, because just a cursory check is showing me plenty of powertrain manufacturing happening in Mexico. Meanwhile if by critical components you mean chips, I don't think there's a big semiconductor manufacturing union that's kneecapping GM. Design is also an apples to apples comparison, it's not a union job.
Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by whycome on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @10:41PM (#42943424)
Wait is the joke that Cadillacs are GM cars?

It's interesting that other car companies have backed off from the multiple brands/badges. We don't have plymouth, Oldsmobile, mercury, Pontiac.

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by wahern on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @05:04PM (#42939589)
> There's also a cultural difference between Japanese and American businesses, but that's far more nebulous.

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.

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by lenerdenator on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @11:22AM (#42934445)
Indeed. Wouldn't want people doing a safety-critical job being fairly compensated, after all.
Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by tayo42 on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @03:56PM (#42938528)
Did reagan do anything good in hindsight? Everytime I hear about him he seems like the worst president until trump came along
Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by garciasn on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @04:13PM (#42938804)
Nominated the first female to the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor, and using his bully pulpit to pressure the Soviet Union about East Germany and the eventual dissolution of the USSR.
Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by latentcall on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @04:11PM (#42938771)
Depends, were you rich in the 80’s? If so he was amazing at making you even richer.
Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by Octoth0rpe on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @04:30PM (#42939064)
He pushed for and signed this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control...

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.

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by brandonmenc on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @04:42PM (#42939245)
The idea back then was a one-time amnesty in exchange for a secure border, which didn't happen.

That's why Republicans are unwilling to budge a second time.

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by mullingitover on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @05:16PM (#42939758)
The idea was actually that employers would start to bear some responsibility for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants and thus creating an economic incentive for the migration.

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.

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by FireBeyond on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @07:26PM (#42941503)
Several years ago, there was a big immigration raid on a bunch of Tyson Chicken facilities.

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?"

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by wbl on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @04:55PM (#42939441)
Who ran ICE for the next 6 years?
Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by brandonmenc on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @06:37PM (#42940926)
ICE wasn't created until 2003, so no one.
Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by wbl on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @09:26PM (#42942835)
Good point, but there was an agency tasked with security.
Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by brandonmenc on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @10:52PM (#42943523)
True, and I’m sorry for the snarky reply even though I knew what you meant.

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.

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by gosub100 on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @05:05PM (#42939592)
He became very popular to hate on in the past midterms because his position that "government IS the problem" is more popular than ever given the last administration. It was a vain effort to preempt what they knew was coming.

Seriously, why else would the name of a president who hasn't served in 40 years suddenly be brought up all the time?

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by whycome on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @10:43PM (#42943438)
The challenger/teacher in space thing was under his watch. It was a great idea. It just got screwed by NASA failures.

Also, his handling of the disaster was pretty good.

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by ApolloFortyNine on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @04:10PM (#42938757)
The official investigation report is of course going to take a bit, but the ATC audio is public, and the helicopter was warned twice about the plane, and said they had a visual of the plane.

Besides never missing an opportunity to 'slam' the opposition, I have no idea why this is being construed as an ATC failure.

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by bilbo0s on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @04:45PM (#42939290)
Well, I mean, if we can blame DEI?

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.

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by mullingitover on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @05:02PM (#42939554)
I think the underlying problem was the irresponsible amount of air traffic that has been allowed in that space. It sounds like the pilot made a mistake any pilot might've made and truly it was just a matter of time until something like this happened given the overcrowded nature of the air traffic in the area.

Operator error is only the first 'why' in the 5 whys for this incident.

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by xdennis on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @06:57PM (#42941157)
> Besides never missing an opportunity to 'slam' the opposition, I have no idea why this is being construed as an ATC failure.

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.

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by whycome on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @10:37PM (#42943400)
That's a system failure if there's no way to verify just what plane the helicopter had in its sights. If continuing with visual separation in the same place, ATC may very well adjust their language. It would help to identify where in the sky the plane is. Or, if there's a potential for cutting it close, just getting the helicopter to hold back until the plane lands? We wouldn't let a plant fly 200ft above another plane in any other situation
Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by pj_mukh on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @10:47PM (#42943475)
Can I just admit how insane it feels that in the Year of our Lord Automation 2025, air safety basically amounts to:

"Yo watch out for that big plane on your left" and then hope for the best.

Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by stevenwoo on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @04:49PM (#42939342)
Congress keeps approving more flights into DCA over the in hindsight, clear objections by those in charge of safety at DCA, the FAA and several congress people in the minority. Congress people use it as their personal transit hub. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/us/reagan-airport-flights...
Re:America desperately needs more air traffic controllers by WillPostForFood on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @05:53PM (#42940286)
It was 44 years ago. We have had 6 presidents since then. Every single ATC controller from 1981 is retired, most for over a decade. You probably should be looking at a more proximate cause.