I've met truck drivers in the US that were driving 16 hours per day. I'm not sure if it is legal or not but it certainly wasn't considered exceptional. It's insane the kind of pressure some jobs put you under. Now ATC has obviously more potential for misery than a truck driver, still a passenger bus / truck collision isn't a small thing either.

Truck drivers and the hours they're on the road need to be logged per law. Most of this is done (or perhaps MUST be done) electronically.

16 hours is generally not allowed unless there are severe adverse conditions, but it's only recently with ELD (Electronic Logging Device) mandates that these rules are being forced to a degree. Before that, many drivers would simply go as many hours as they humanly could to keep moving.

See: https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-...

much of my extended family was in teh trucking industry one way or the other. Before the electronic books you had manual log books. Lying in your log book was a very big deal, i want to say you could get in trouble with the law in addition to getting fired. Before that though it was even more the wild west than it is now. My step-father knew my grandfather's "outfit" and he would joke that if they had a chain long enough to go around it they would haul it no questions asked.

This is from a popular 90s country song:

sleep would be best

but i just can't afford to rest

have to be in Denver at morning light

- much too young to feel this damn old

They would keep multiple overlapping logbooks so they could always present a "legitimate" log to DOT.

I forgot about this, you're right. I remember some of my family members talking about this. (much of my extended family was in trucking)

It's mostly around engineering whether you have enough downtime to "move" your "driven" hours into.

For long-haul it's probably a bit different, but other routes have a lot of annoying delays.

E.g. waiting at a port, waiting for a trailer replacement, waiting for receiving, etc.

Afaik, these are all classified as driving hours for logbook purposes.

It creates a situation where you legally have to park a truck on the side of the road when you hit your cap, even though 1/2 of your day might have been waiting around for something.

Imho, that's a bit ridiculous, and I'm sympathetic to shadow logbooks there.

For the 16 hours straight cross-country pounders, less-so. But long-haul is what autonomous trucking will likely eat first.

The toll it takes on your sleep schedule is also brutal, because the rule is 10hr on / 8hr off. If those 8 "off" hours happen to coincide with sleeping hours you might get some rest but that won't be frequent, or enough. It would be better, smarter, and safer to just drive 16hr and then sleep for 8hr. But the rules are the rules, they don't have to make sense.

This was a while ago and I was absolutely shocked. In Europe they'd impound your truck.

Workers in these jobs in the US have less protections than the private sector as they are deemed imperative to operating the country. As such it is illegal for them to strike for better wages, but they do receive 1.5x wages during their mandatory overtime work, and have a base wage over twice that of the annual median income, before their significant overtime income. I think the burn out is a bigger cause.

Things are quite DOGEy in the US.

The USA has time and a half overtime above 40 hours as well under the FLSA. This applies to ATC.

Unfortunately, this is now priced into certain government jobs in the USA and people rely on it. Americans see the obscene amounts of money and hours as a challenge until they actually burn out.

ATC isn't even the worst offender. Law enforcement and prison guards can pull 100+ hours a week on a regular basis. This is how prison guards can pull $400k/year.

> ATC isn't even the worst offender. Law enforcement and prison guards can pull 100+ hours a week on a regular basis. This is how prison guards can pull $400k/year.

There's definitely elements of that - but part of that is that many pensions are based on the two highest earning years of your career, so it's "common" among cops when they are planning to retire to spend two years working every possible piece of OT available, to maximize their pension income.

Sounds like a weird incentivization for sure. Why not base the pension on the average over all the years worked as in many other countries? When you offer such incentives, people will naturally work in such a way.

Because you'll loose half a career's worth of inflationary salary rises that way. Also, women might work part time after having children which would skew the average annual salary down. Over a 40 year career, just from inflation alone, you'd be getting about half your final salary that way, even ignoring any increases later on from being better qualified or taking on more responsibility.

Mind you, in the UK, defined benefits pension schemes are very rare nowadays, but where they exist they are defined as a percentage of the final year salary with that company, so the highest 2 year thing seems a bit weird to me but for a different reason.

Highest 2 year is an attempt to address the edge cases around 1 year (especially final year).

You can adjust for inflation and only exclude year where you don't work full time.

Much more obvious solution is to not include overtime pay in the pension calculation.

In the US, social security is based on the 35 highest paying years. If that system is good enough for social security, I don't see why we don't do the same for government pensions.

But wouldn't it be cheaper for them to just hire more people to do the same amount of hours so that no overtime was used? And they would get better work output as well, since people would be rested.

It would, yes. There's large worker/union pressure in many of these fields to not take away overtime by reducing hours, though, since it is such a huge part of total compensation.

It would be cheaper.

But then you don't get to go on stage with a chainsaw and bragging about how you're downsizing government.

Yes, but it's a local maximum since hiring more people is going to be expensive/difficult until overtime is fixed.

Some state prisons have escaped the overtime pit by offering huge sign-on bonuses and doing a hiring surge. But it takes longer to train ATC than a CO.

> The OP makes it sound like the dynamic is very different in the US.

The obvious reason that US air traffic control has been understaffed for "a while now" is that, roughly a decade ago, the FAA caved in to political pressure to stop having so many white controllers by decommissioning any hiring practices that posed a risk of hiring white controllers.

This meant the size of the workforce froze, stressing the system.

Tracing Woodgrains went into a good amount of depth on the scandal: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...

That scandal exacerbated the problem, but there would still be a severe shortage had it never happened. The core issues, pay and grueling hours, predate that scandal by decades.