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Two thoughts: 1. Wow, that looks like an extremely useful app if you're a flight attendant! 2. How is their employer not providing this functionality? I guess
by ketzo 4y ago
Two thoughts:
1. Wow, that looks like an extremely useful app if you're a flight attendant!
2. How is their employer not providing this functionality? I guess maybe they are, but only parts, or it's a shittier version. But still.
- pjc50 4y agoThe critical bit is probably the "legality checker". Absolutely no way an employer would offer one of those. Reading between the lines, flight attendant scheduling is probably quite .. adversarial, as shift scheduling at restaurants can be. The employer would like employees to have the minimum information so they meekly accept the shifts they're given.
- badcppdev 4y agoWhat's a legality checker?
- mannerheim 4y agoMy guess is it checks whether their shifts are compliant with labour laws.
- anovikov 4y agoThese aren't labour laws strictly speaking, more like airline safety laws. I.e. they aren't about well-being of employees but safety of planes operated by overworked crews.
- adastra22 4y agoWell they are about the well being of the employees. That’s just not the ultimate justification for it—rested employees mean safe flights.
- sidewndr46 4y agoThey are labor laws. They restrict the exchange of labor for income.
- shagie 4y agohttps://www.paddleyourownkanoo.com/2022/10/04/u-s-flight-attendants-win-right-to-longer-hotel-rest-periods-after-28-year-battle/ https://www.paddleyourownkanoo.com/2022/10/04/u-s-flight-att... > Although the law was passed back in October 2018 and was meant to be implemented within 30 days, the Trump administration allegedly put the measure on the backburner and “on a regulatory road to kill it”. > The previous administration initially blamed the delay on a massive backlog facing the FAA caused by a partial government shutdown and then the worldwide grounding of the Boeing 737MAX.
- dopamean 4y agoMy guess is that it has something to do with whether or not a trip can be legally flown by an airline employee given the amount of hours of flying time they already have clocked for a given period.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoChecks if the airline scheduler is complying with duty limits. Trust but verify. "14 CFR § 121.467 - Flight attendant duty period limitations and rest requirements: Domestic, flag, and supplemental operations." https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/121.467 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/121.467
- shagie 4y agoI believe - making sure that they're not working too many flights back to back. This can get tricky when flying across time zones and date lines.
- gpvos 4y agoReading the descriptions under the sibling comment, it seems to be something that every airline absolutely should offer their employees. You don't want them to work illegally as that could mean huge fines for you.
- thayne 4y agoIt's quite possible they consider the benefit of overworking their employees to be worth the risk of having to pay those fines.
- bronco21016 4y agoAt most airlines there are two sets of scheduling rules. The regulatory rules, and the union contract negotiated rules. You can guess which one the company doesn’t want audited.
- fn-mote 4y agoPerhaps surprisingly, I can't. Violating "regulatory rules" should result in fines and the government coming down on you. I would think this is the worse outcome, but less likely than... Violating "union contract negotiated rules" should result in grievances ending in legal action if the employer doesn't agree they broke the rules. This should be a lighter penalty but the union seems more likely to pursue the remedy than the government. So which actually is it that the company considers worse?
- dar610 4y agoI would imagine that pretty much every airline offers some sort of legality checker to their crew members. If an FA worked a trip illegally that would mean heavy fines from the FAA and from whatever union contract they also violated.
- srveale 4y agoHow does the FA know to complain without a legality checker? They have to go through the work of parsing the legalese and calculating time zone differences etc. And if they did complain, the airline says "Sorry, here's a freebie for your trouble" (worth 0.01% of the fine) Compare that to every FA knowing every single time there's a breach, being able to compare notes etc.
- karlkatzke 4y agoThey don’t. Employees are responsible for checking the math of the scheduler. in the case of pilots, the employee has liability in this situation as well as the airline. Especially in situations where there is bad weather nationwide, employees can be and absolutely are scheduled incorrectly by schedulers and employees have to maintain several sets of numbers (rest time, etc) besides the flying hours that are logged in the airline’s app.
- sammalloy 4y ago> The employer would like employees to have the minimum information This kind of old, hierarchical thinking from the 1950s needs to go away.
- toss1 4y ago>>This kind of old, hierarchical thinking from the 1950s needs to go away. Yes, it does, but no, it won't. Just as democracies must always be better armed and prepared than expansionist autocracies, or the autocracies will take over, people need to be better armed and prepared than those who want to exploit them, or they will get exploited. Unfortunately, the exploiters often arrive better armed and prepared, and it is an uphill battle. Often, the only winning move is to not play the game.
- munk-a 4y agoWell the winning move in these cases is usually unionization - when a large number of employees are being exploited by an employer a union that allows collective bargaining can force the employer to act in a more sane manner.
- shagie 4y agoFlight attendants have a union. https://www.afacwa.org https://www.afacwa.org They've recently backed strikes and raised wages https://unitedafa.org/news/2022/1/21/solidarity-works-flight-attendants-who-back-strike-move-closer-to-pay-raises/ https://unitedafa.org/news/2022/1/21/solidarity-works-flight... The rest is part of the contract - https://www.afacwa.org/flight_attendants_achieve_10_hours_rest_faa_final_rule https://www.afacwa.org/flight_attendants_achieve_10_hours_re... > Washington, D.C. (October 4, 2022) — The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) today finalized a rule requiring 10 hours minimum, non-reducible rest for Flight Attendants between duty days – finally implementing a 2018 law that will make aviation safer for over 100,000 Flight Attendants and the passengers in our care. The rule will increase the rest period to 10 irreducible hours when scheduled for a duty period of 14 hours or less. Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, issued the following statement ... What would one have in a contract to help this issue?
- mrweasel 4y agoIt should be the job of the employer to ensure scheduling is in compliance with safety regulation and agreements negotiated with the unions. The app should be necessary, but given that it is, that can easily be viewed as American Airlines knowingly breaks rules. That seems legally questionable.
- acedTrex 4y agoThey are, it's just spread across multiple websites and datasources as is typical in large corporations. This app scrapes all the sites with the FAs AA credentials and aggregates the data.
- scarface74 4y agoMy wife and I are going to be doing the whole digital nomad thing across the US, Canada and Mexico starting in less than 2 weeks, getting one way flights and staying in hotels. Currently, we have been flying out of a major Delta hub and we took for granted what an airline app should be. Now as we are planning flights between Delta, American and United, I can confidently say that American has by far the worse consumer app of any of the major airlines or hotels. I wouldn’t be surprised that their internal apps and websites are a similar shit show.
- devilbunny 4y agoJust wait until you actually fly American. I'll take a flight on Delta with a layover over a flight on American that's nonstop. Of the majors, it's far and away the best. And their app is very good.
- sokoloff 4y agoRelated (but anecdotal): I was very pleasantly surprised at how good the Delta app is for flyers.
- vkou 4y agoDo you have work visas for all three countries, or will you lie about your reasons for travel when asked?
- jaywalk 4y agoWorking remotely for your employer (as in, you're not traveling for work, but working while traveling) is not in breach of any tourist visa restrictions.
- TrueGeek 4y agoAmerican Airlines was featured in a video at Microsoft Ignite last week. They showed how everyone involved in a flight talks to each other through Teams and how Microsoft / AA has worked closely together to get this working. I'm wondering if AA doesn't want this app being used instead?
- sidewndr46 4y agoThat's kind of interesting. I take so many flights I never really remember one from the next. But I do remember at least one flight attendant letting us know that videoconferencing in flight is a felony. I could never find any such regulation, but I guess that wasn't an AA flight.
- gwillen 4y agoSounds like the flight attendant had an unusually severe case of "making shit up".
- sidewndr46 4y agoI'm assuming the airline instructed them to make this announcement.
- blantonl 4y ago2. How is their employer not providing this functionality? I'll tell you how. It's because the app doesn't exist under the regime of a CIO and multiple layers of project managers, program managers, extensive regulatory requirements, fiefdoms, competing internal political interests, and the other various "enterprisy" crap that will kill off any entrepreneurial spirit. That's why.