Thursday, September 21, 2006

Air Controllers Chafe at Plan to Cut Staff


This is the same story we hear these days throughout the Bush administration. Its the same ole strategy of treating people like shit as shown by this line:

In an interview, the administrator of the agency, Marion C. Blakey, said the goal of the changes was to make the agency run more like a business.

When are these people going to get a clue and realize that government is NOT a business and the goal should not be to run it like one????

DALLAS, Sept. 13 — A drive by the Federal Aviation Administration to cut the number of air traffic controllers nationally by 10 percent below negotiated levels, and even more sharply at places like the busy radar center here, is producing tension, anger and occasional shows of defiance among controllers.

At the radar office that controls planes around Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and at a cluster of other airports where staffing levels are falling fast, unhappiness is usually not visible in the darkened radar centers where they work, except when it is glaringly obvious.

Like the recent day when a controller here went to work in lime green pants and a clashing brown jacket, along with hair dyed blue, to protest a new dress code. Elsewhere, male controllers have rebelled by going to work in dresses.

Most controllers here say they are far more concerned with workplace changes that do not involve wardrobe, including salary caps, lower pay for new hires and stricter control of vacation schedules and sick leave.

In an interview, the administrator of the agency, Marion C. Blakey, said the goal of the changes was to make the agency run more like a business.

“You can’t serve an industry that’s largely teetering on bankruptcy and ask for a bigger slice of the pie,” Ms. Blakey said last month in a speech. Explaining why the dress code matters, Ms. Blakey said there are “folks who push outside the norms of what is professional dress and what’s professional behavior.”

The dress code bans jeans, as well as T-shirts and shirts with big lettering and requires that controllers not appear “disheveled,” rules that are not onerous, she said.

I guess small lettering on their shirts would not be such a hazard to air traffic????

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