9mikemike

No better way to say it. Thank you

TransWorld

Essentially 100% of governmental jobs are union. They allow poor performance. Ever been to the DMV? Good public school teachers complain it is very difficult to fire bad teachers.

Compare to pilots. A bad pilot is given a chance to retrain. If they fail, they do not continue. Similarly with journeyman construction craft.

Not perfect, but a whole different ballgame than governmental employee bad performers. My dad was in personnel with the federal government. He told me many stories. (Don’t show up for work and still get paid. Show up and do little or nothing work related. Do a shoddy job. Still very hard to fire them.)

DeltaboundRedux

Ditto my father. Got pretty high up in the agency he was with.

He quit trying to fire underlings for repeated gross negligence because it just wasn't worth the hassle. Easier to give them a room, some non-toxic playdough, and a salary.

Except for drug use. That was the on thing that could get you fired. Probably not that way anymore.

Firefighterpilo

I have been part of ALPA and IAFF (firefighter union). It is true, as an off probation firefighter, it takes a lot to lose your job, but probation year is hell and we weed out 50% of our probies. This provides a way to get rid of the problem children before they become a problem career.

Firefighter probation was by far the most physically and mentally demanding year of my life. Of course some guys slide through the cracks but most are weeded out before they are protected by the union. We try hard to police ourselves.

When I was with ALPA, however, I had tons of stories and flew with guys who should have lost their job years ago but kept getting it back thanks to the union. Any union job, government or private, is going to have those 1-2% members who create the most problems and reflect badly on everyone else.

All in all since both of my careers are very safety oriented the unions have been a necessary evil with more benefits then liability.

Gspeed

Thanks to the Union? Or thanks to the ineptitude of the manager(s) doing the firing? In my experience it’s almost always been the latter.

Firefighterpilo

Well I guess both. The guys I know of were all fired and then got their job back throw union intervention.

Gspeed

Likely (in my experience) because they were fired in a sloppy/incompetent manner. That ain’t the union’s fault.

DeltaboundRedux

I see LAX and surrounding areas going back under "lockdown" for another 3 weeks due to COVID spikes.

Wonder what the compliance rate will be? The highways were "Walking Dead" level empty when the first lockdowns went into effect in the spring.

Going to go out on a limb here and say you won't be able to tell a difference between the traffic last Thursday and the traffic Monday. Rightly or wrongly, Americans who can't afford to shelter in place aren't going to do so a second time.

Still waiting to see some Civil Air Reserve puff pieces showing mostly empty 330's and 777's shuttling millions of does vaccines around the country.

FangsF15

Not to derail the thread, but at what point should a union say, “yeah, you done f-d up bad, and we aren’t going to cash in all our green stamps defending your (repeated) dumb a**”?

It’a a slippery slope for sure, and everyone deserves due process and fair representation as a dues-paying member, but...

The Whale guys sitting SC from home in California for *two years* come to mind. One guy reportedly had 23 CPO visits over the years... 23. That whole episode cost us dearly, at least to blanket go to full battle-stations for all of them, anyway.

DeltaboundRedux

No organization is perfect. There's a 1% of every one of them that make the other 99% look bad. Unions are no different.

25 years of anti-union rhetoric have made the one guy who should've been fired but for the union rhetoric a common, go-to anti-union trope. It's very effective; the few of us that are in private sector unions have probably seen it in action (I have).

The saying comes to mind, however: "Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good."