Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2005 09:56:05 -0500
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>,
        WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Odd events
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

At 12/22/2005 07:13 AM, Drew Bittner wrote:

>I'm with Ted. What's the point of a union if the right
>to strike is made illegal?

Collective bargaining?  Are you saying that all unions have as bargaining
points is going on strike?

There are some jobs that can't be allowed to just shut down.  If all unions
must be able to strike at will, then some jobs can't be allowed to be
unionized.  Or do you think that hospitals, police, fire departments, power
companies, the telephone system, or, yes, air traffic control should just
shut down when the workers aren't happy enough with their current
deal?  Most of these involve unions that aren't legally allowed to strike
for that reason...and those working in them knew that when they took the
job.  If they wanted to work in a union that could strike, they should have
gone into another line of work.

With HMOs hiring doctors as employees, and medical care being too expensive
for all but the super rich without a medical insurance plan of some sort,
what happens when doctors unionize, and go on strike?  It's not out of the
question, though it isn't likely to happen soon...still, it's worth
thinking about before you go making absolute statements about unions.  Do
we just let the people locked into the HMO systems die while negotiations
drag on during a doctor's strike?  Or do we make it illegal for doctors to
go on strike, and have enough penalties for doing so anyway to keep them
from trying it?

New York estimates that it is losing $400 million a day from the transit
strike.  That's from the economy there, not tax take, meaning that's money
coming out of the pockets of those who work there and own businesses
there.  The strike is hurting those who can't really do anything about it
far more than it's hurting anyone else...such as those who are striking or
those who they are negotiating with.

Then there's the monopolistic aspects of unions.  For a given area of
endeavor, there's usually only one union.  Car making, or transport of
goods, or air traffic control, etc..  The union is essentially an
organization that's in the business of providing labor, and companies have
to buy from that union or do without...except in "right to work states"
where non-union employees may be available too.  In situations where unions
have a lock on labor, they are a monopoly...yet they are not generally
regulated the way other monopolies are.  Why is that?  Perhaps they should
be broken up so that there are several competing unions?  That way if one
union's demands get unreasonable (as with some of the car making ones), the
companies can hire workers from a different union that's more
reasonable.  The only alternative at the moment is to move the jobs
overseas, and that isn't helping anyone here.

>Yeah, the NY strike is inconvenient and costly as hell
>but the union workers didn't cause these problems.

What problems are those?

What I've heard so far is that this was triggered by management saying that
new employees would have to contribute 6% of their pay towards their
pensions.  That's still a better deal than most workers in the country
have...I'm kicking in well over 8% toward mine, and mine isn't even
guaranteed like theirs is.  They have a much better deal as far as benefits
go than most of those in the city, so what are they griping about?

>They have to work together to create a satisfactory
>solution, and demonizing the union isn't the way to do
>it.

They are demonizing themselves with an *illegal* strike.  They don't have
the right to do what they are doing, and they are harming millions with
their criminal behavior.  Only the knee-jerk "unions are good" attitude of
many is lending them any support at all.

>And Reagan's goal was to crush the air traffic
>controllers, not find a reasonable compromise. I have
>a lot of thoughts about #40... and not many of them
>are complimentary.

I don't know what his goal was, and neither do you.  We can both guess, but
we can't know (unless you have psychic abilities I'm unaware of).  It's
possible he was just enforcing the law...which was his job.

As far as what the alternatives there are to upgrading air traffic control
workers' equipment and work environment goes, there is at least one: use
the developments we've had in technology over the last 50 years.

What does ATC do?  It maintains aircraft spacing in an attempt to prevent
collisions and crashes from things like wake turbulence...particularly in
the vicinity of airports (in the air and on the ground).  Limitations in
older navigation systems (VOR and ADF for instance) led to a system of
"roads" in the sky that aircraft on instrument flight plans had to stick
to.  This leads to artificial crowding, and inefficient routing, and other
problems...but it was the best that could be done with older nav tech.  We
aren't so limited today, and other advances have made other options
possible, and better, and would seriously reduce the load on ATC workers.

For instance, with GPS you can fly direct to your destination very
accurately.  There's no need to fly to an IFR route, then follow it from
VOR to VOR until you are near your destination then get vectored by ATC
controllers to the airport.  If all aircraft did short range broadcasts of
their current GPS positions, and all aircraft had receivers and computers
that listened for these broadcasts and calculated the vectors over time,
they could alert all pilots to the locations of nearby aircraft, and what
the chances of a collision are, and the pilots could maintain their own
separations.  By not crowding them all into IFR routes you spread them over
more sky anyway, further reducing the chances of collision, without any
need for ATC to do anything.  Add some more coordination between the
various aircraft systems and they could even suggest evasive actions so
pilots could be more likely to avoid collisions well ahead of time (you
don't want two planes in a head on situation to both dive to avoid it for
instance).  There's a very poor version of this in place today for large
aircraft that uses the radar transponders, but it doesn't work very well as
there's no detailed position information involved, and no coordination on
how to handle "conflict" situations.  The equipment is very expensive too
(like $50,000+) so only high end aircraft have it, making the smaller ones
"invisible" to this system.

With proper use of modern technology we could improve efficiency and safety
and the lives of those working in ATC...but it will take money, planning,
some time, and, most importantly, the will to make a change from the
central-control model to a distributed system model.  NASA has been working
on some of the required technology, but I'm not seeing a lot of willingness
to consider it on the part of the FAA...though I'm not looking at it as
closely as I did when I was taking flying lessons a few years ago.

-- Mike B.