5 ms·

Seems like a colossal error to have asked them all to quit. I wonder -- if half of the air traffic controllers took the offer to leave their jobs, do we have a

by runako 2y ago

Seems like a colossal error to have asked them all to quit. I wonder -- if half of the air traffic controllers took the offer to leave their jobs, do we have a Plan B? The deadline they have been given to decide is Thursday; I have not seen any communication as to whether ATC (and TSA, etc.) will be operational Friday.

taeric 2y ago
I'd be interested to see the daily staffing levels over the past couple of weeks. If anyone knows where that could be found.
- RationPhantoms 2y ago
  I couldn't find anything immediately definitive but this 2023 survey of federal workers was quite eye-opening: https://ourpublicservice.org/fed-figures/a-profile-of-the-2023-federal-workforce/ https://ourpublicservice.org/fed-figures/a-profile-of-the-20...
  - taeric 2y ago
    Good find. I'm curious what facets were eye opening for you? This is a ton of data that I find hard to 1-shot learn anything from. :(
lenerdenator 2y ago
> if half of the air traffic controllers took the offer to leave their jobs, do we have a Plan B? In theory you could do what Reagan did and tell the military to do ATC. Whether or not this is a good idea is another matter.
- robert_foss 2y ago
  Reagan taking away collective bargaining rights for ATCs seems to be what have led to the shortage and the helicopter accident last week.
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    Indeed. Wouldn't want people doing a safety-critical job being fairly compensated, after all.
  - legitster 2y ago
    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).
    - dttze 2y ago
      Police are the state's manifestation of the monopoly on violence. Comparing that to civilian safety orgs makes no sense.
      - legitster 2y ago
        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.
        lenerdenator 2y ago
        > 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.
pfannkuchen 2y ago
I thought the buyout offer went along with the cancellation of remote work. Like, if you are thinking about quitting because you don’t want to come in, here have an extra incentive to do that and take some time to find another job. ATC already couldn’t work remotely. The only people who would take a deal like this would be people who were thinking about quitting or retiring anyway. I suspect ATC will not be substantially affected by people taking that deal.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- csa 2y ago
  > I thought the buyout offer went along with the cancellation of remote work. Your sentiment is a result of their incredibly vague first attempt at messaging. The offer was (or ended up being) a full buyout offer. The “offer” is probably genuine, but it’s not a clean offer, as many edge cases are unclear (e.g., can they terminate you if they accept the offer… currently there is nothing stopping them from doing that, how can someone of retirement age accept the offer and then retire, etc.). Iirc, ATCs can accept the buy out if they so chose. I’m guessing most won’t, as the ATC deal is good to stick with until you retire. Edit: Per the article, the status of the offer is unclear. It wasn’t cleared with the union before the letter was released, and it hasn’t been officially rescinded either (despite comments that it has from DoT).
  - pfannkuchen 2y ago
    Sorry to be unclear, I didn’t mean that only people transitioning from remote to in person can take the buyout. I meant that that is what the deal seemed to be targeting based on the timing, like a release valve for people who would be angry about switching back to in person.
    - csa 2y ago
      > I meant that that is what the deal seemed to be targeting based on the timing, like a release valve for people who would be angry about switching back to in person. That’s a reasonable take. I don’t think anyone involved is actually on the same page about targeting or intent. It’s a complete shit show. I have many fed gov friends, and I’m getting some incredible insider takes. Interestingly, I think that the idea of reducing the federal work force size has a lot of supporters from both sides of the aisle, but this implementation has been haphazard (at best). A “good” implementation would remove a lot of “build headcount” positions while also adding/filling positions that are still lacking. ATCs and contracting (to name two) fall under the latter.
randerson 2y ago
ATCs have the upper hand in this negotiation because they're essential and can't be quickly replaced. If enough ATCs quit that major airports have to be shut down or reduce flights, the airlines (and stock market) will turn against Trump pretty quickly. My guess is the going salary for ATCs is going to increase substantially once they realize they need to lure back those who quit. I would love to see all ATCs in DC quit, and for others refuse to work there, so that Trump and Musk feel the consequences for their actions directly. Wouldn't it be great if Air Force One was stranded because of this.
- Octoth0rpe 2y ago
  > Wouldn't it be great if Air Force One was stranded because of this. I was under the impression that AF1 flew in/out of Andrews air force base, which I (possibly naively?) assumed did not use civilian ATC. But yes, that would be great :)
  - ianburrell 2y ago
    The US air space is civilian ATC. Air Force One couldn't go anywhere if the area control and destination airport were down.
    - Octoth0rpe 2y ago
      Thank you for the info, TIL!
  - varloid 2y ago
    https://123atc.com/facility/ADW https://123atc.com/facility/ADW
mayneack 2y ago
It seems they clawed back the offer or never gave it in the first place. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-exempts-safety-workers-air-traffic-controllers-resignation-2025-02-02/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-exempt...
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  So what does that really mean for those he outright fired? They didn't "resign".no one who (stupidly) responded to that email to resign would have taken any effect anyway.
  - mayneack 2y ago
    Were there air traffic controllers fired? I saw reports about some upper management at the faa and related, but haven't seen anything here.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      Tbh I have no idea at this point. I read info he did fire people, but I'm seeing conflicting reports between his actions, intent, the deferred layoffs and later cancelation of the deferred layoffs. It's all a twisted yarn: https://wlos.com/news/nation-world/no-evidence-trump-fired-thousands-of-air-traffic-controllers-despite-social-media-claims-american-airlines-flight-5342-black-hawk-dc-plane-crash-faa-federal-hiring-freeze https://wlos.com/news/nation-world/no-evidence-trump-fired-t...
  - lmm 2y ago
    In a country with the rule of law, employers can't generally take away these kind of things when they've promised them - this got Musk in to trouble when he made a generous severance offer in Europe and had to actually follow through on it. In America? Who knows.
- runako 2y ago
  They have nonetheless signaled that a subset of the staff is marked for firing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936406
lesuorac 2y ago
It's a colossal error to accept. The government isn't authorized to do a buy-out by congress so you're just quitting and won't receive the payment.
- germinalphrase 2y ago
  It never was a buy out, and everyone should stop referring to it as such.
  - Jtsummers 2y ago
    Yep. It was a pinky swear to maybe pay for 8 months that might be able to be spent on leave, but none of it was guaranteed. The employee's agency determines if they spend it on leave, not OPM. Congress will determine if there's even money after March 14th available to pay for 8 months of anything, let alone 8 months of admin leave.
stevenwoo 2y ago
The number that I've heard that accepted that offer across the government is in line with normal attrition rates with federal employees - the only people who bit were already planning on quitting. It appears that most or all else was wise to how shady this deal was.
- CYR1X 2y ago
  Part all of this BS is sure at twitter if you pull this you might get a decent attrition rate but isn't the federal government known for people never quitting? If they quit, it's quiet quitting coming in every day and doing nothing. Isn't that generally the purpose behind this too? Like...good luck get a real amount of people to quit they are going to hold on for dear life
  - acdha 2y ago
    > they quit, it's quiet quitting coming in every day and doing nothing You think air traffic controllers are “doing nothing”? What VA staff, park rangers, food inspectors, etc.? I realize this stereotype is something a lot of people spend money reinforcing but you should consider why you believe it to be true of a nationwide group doing a huge range of jobs and what evidence that’s based on.
    - runako 2y ago
      I'm convinced a lot of people who espouse this view have never worked at any large[1] private sector organization. My last stint working at a big company included seeing people routinely taking naps at work and generally behaving in the ways people associate with government employees. Smaller organizations are more efficient, but are limited in possible scope of impact. [1] "large" here generally meaning over 100k employees, relatively concentrated (so a hypothetical org with 5k employees in each of 20 countries likely does not fit). For scale, the US has any number of domestic bases where personnel count exceeds Meta's total staffing, with a couple being roughly the size as Microsoft's US employment.
      - 2y ago

by runako 2y ago

taeric 2y ago

I'd be interested to see the daily staffing levels over the past couple of weeks. If anyone knows where that could be found.

RationPhantoms 2y ago
I couldn't find anything immediately definitive but this 2023 survey of federal workers was quite eye-opening: https://ourpublicservice.org/fed-figures/a-profile-of-the-2023-federal-workforce/ https://ourpublicservice.org/fed-figures/a-profile-of-the-20...
- taeric 2y ago
  Good find. I'm curious what facets were eye opening for you? This is a ton of data that I find hard to 1-shot learn anything from. :(

lenerdenator 2y ago

> if half of the air traffic controllers took the offer to leave their jobs, do we have a Plan B? In theory you could do what Reagan did and tell the military to do ATC. Whether or not this is a good idea is another matter.

robert_foss 2y ago
Reagan taking away collective bargaining rights for ATCs seems to be what have led to the shortage and the helicopter accident last week.
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  Indeed. Wouldn't want people doing a safety-critical job being fairly compensated, after all.
- legitster 2y ago
  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).
  - dttze 2y ago
    Police are the state's manifestation of the monopoly on violence. Comparing that to civilian safety orgs makes no sense.
    - legitster 2y ago
      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.
      - lenerdenator 2y ago
        > 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.

pfannkuchen 2y ago

I thought the buyout offer went along with the cancellation of remote work. Like, if you are thinking about quitting because you don’t want to come in, here have an extra incentive to do that and take some time to find another job. ATC already couldn’t work remotely. The only people who would take a deal like this would be people who were thinking about quitting or retiring anyway. I suspect ATC will not be substantially affected by people taking that deal.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
csa 2y ago
> I thought the buyout offer went along with the cancellation of remote work. Your sentiment is a result of their incredibly vague first attempt at messaging. The offer was (or ended up being) a full buyout offer. The “offer” is probably genuine, but it’s not a clean offer, as many edge cases are unclear (e.g., can they terminate you if they accept the offer… currently there is nothing stopping them from doing that, how can someone of retirement age accept the offer and then retire, etc.). Iirc, ATCs can accept the buy out if they so chose. I’m guessing most won’t, as the ATC deal is good to stick with until you retire. Edit: Per the article, the status of the offer is unclear. It wasn’t cleared with the union before the letter was released, and it hasn’t been officially rescinded either (despite comments that it has from DoT).
- pfannkuchen 2y ago
  Sorry to be unclear, I didn’t mean that only people transitioning from remote to in person can take the buyout. I meant that that is what the deal seemed to be targeting based on the timing, like a release valve for people who would be angry about switching back to in person.
  - csa 2y ago
    > I meant that that is what the deal seemed to be targeting based on the timing, like a release valve for people who would be angry about switching back to in person. That’s a reasonable take. I don’t think anyone involved is actually on the same page about targeting or intent. It’s a complete shit show. I have many fed gov friends, and I’m getting some incredible insider takes. Interestingly, I think that the idea of reducing the federal work force size has a lot of supporters from both sides of the aisle, but this implementation has been haphazard (at best). A “good” implementation would remove a lot of “build headcount” positions while also adding/filling positions that are still lacking. ATCs and contracting (to name two) fall under the latter.

randerson 2y ago

ATCs have the upper hand in this negotiation because they're essential and can't be quickly replaced. If enough ATCs quit that major airports have to be shut down or reduce flights, the airlines (and stock market) will turn against Trump pretty quickly. My guess is the going salary for ATCs is going to increase substantially once they realize they need to lure back those who quit. I would love to see all ATCs in DC quit, and for others refuse to work there, so that Trump and Musk feel the consequences for their actions directly. Wouldn't it be great if Air Force One was stranded because of this.

Octoth0rpe 2y ago
> Wouldn't it be great if Air Force One was stranded because of this. I was under the impression that AF1 flew in/out of Andrews air force base, which I (possibly naively?) assumed did not use civilian ATC. But yes, that would be great :)
- ianburrell 2y ago
  The US air space is civilian ATC. Air Force One couldn't go anywhere if the area control and destination airport were down.
  - Octoth0rpe 2y ago
    Thank you for the info, TIL!
- varloid 2y ago
  https://123atc.com/facility/ADW https://123atc.com/facility/ADW

mayneack 2y ago

It seems they clawed back the offer or never gave it in the first place. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-exempts-safety-workers-air-traffic-controllers-resignation-2025-02-02/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-exempt...

johnnyanmac 2y ago
So what does that really mean for those he outright fired? They didn't "resign".no one who (stupidly) responded to that email to resign would have taken any effect anyway.
- mayneack 2y ago
  Were there air traffic controllers fired? I saw reports about some upper management at the faa and related, but haven't seen anything here.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Tbh I have no idea at this point. I read info he did fire people, but I'm seeing conflicting reports between his actions, intent, the deferred layoffs and later cancelation of the deferred layoffs. It's all a twisted yarn: https://wlos.com/news/nation-world/no-evidence-trump-fired-thousands-of-air-traffic-controllers-despite-social-media-claims-american-airlines-flight-5342-black-hawk-dc-plane-crash-faa-federal-hiring-freeze https://wlos.com/news/nation-world/no-evidence-trump-fired-t...
- lmm 2y ago
  In a country with the rule of law, employers can't generally take away these kind of things when they've promised them - this got Musk in to trouble when he made a generous severance offer in Europe and had to actually follow through on it. In America? Who knows.
runako 2y ago
They have nonetheless signaled that a subset of the staff is marked for firing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936406

lesuorac 2y ago

It's a colossal error to accept. The government isn't authorized to do a buy-out by congress so you're just quitting and won't receive the payment.

germinalphrase 2y ago
It never was a buy out, and everyone should stop referring to it as such.
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  Yep. It was a pinky swear to maybe pay for 8 months that might be able to be spent on leave, but none of it was guaranteed. The employee's agency determines if they spend it on leave, not OPM. Congress will determine if there's even money after March 14th available to pay for 8 months of anything, let alone 8 months of admin leave.

stevenwoo 2y ago

The number that I've heard that accepted that offer across the government is in line with normal attrition rates with federal employees - the only people who bit were already planning on quitting. It appears that most or all else was wise to how shady this deal was.

CYR1X 2y ago
Part all of this BS is sure at twitter if you pull this you might get a decent attrition rate but isn't the federal government known for people never quitting? If they quit, it's quiet quitting coming in every day and doing nothing. Isn't that generally the purpose behind this too? Like...good luck get a real amount of people to quit they are going to hold on for dear life
- acdha 2y ago
  > they quit, it's quiet quitting coming in every day and doing nothing You think air traffic controllers are “doing nothing”? What VA staff, park rangers, food inspectors, etc.? I realize this stereotype is something a lot of people spend money reinforcing but you should consider why you believe it to be true of a nationwide group doing a huge range of jobs and what evidence that’s based on.
  - runako 2y ago
    I'm convinced a lot of people who espouse this view have never worked at any large[1] private sector organization. My last stint working at a big company included seeing people routinely taking naps at work and generally behaving in the ways people associate with government employees. Smaller organizations are more efficient, but are limited in possible scope of impact. [1] "large" here generally meaning over 100k employees, relatively concentrated (so a hypothetical org with 5k employees in each of 20 countries likely does not fit). For scale, the US has any number of domestic bases where personnel count exceeds Meta's total staffing, with a couple being roughly the size as Microsoft's US employment.
    - 2y ago