Summary
Elon Musk called on retired air traffic controllers to return to work, citing a shortage amid heightened scrutiny of the FAA under Trump’s second term.
With DOT Secretary Sean Duffy’s support, Musk’s DOGE attempts to “upgrade” aviation systems despite recent FAA job cuts.
The AP reports fired employees included radar and navigational aid maintenance personnel, though Duffy insisted no “critical safety personnel” were terminated.
Musk’s appeal comes amid increased public concern over recent aviation incidents, though experts consider the uptick an anomaly.
Well if it isn’t the consequences of his own actions.
Fucked around ✅
Found out 👈
Not really, tbh. He’s pretty clearly just doing as much damage as he possibly can. This whole “Oooh whoopsie, we did a bad, does anyone want their job back?” shit is pure show to give himself some plausible deniability to keep the guillotines at bay.
If you look at what’s happening through the lens of his goal being malice, and ignore the “ooooops!” pony show, what you see is a man who’s hamstrung an entire nation with literally zero consequences.
I wonder if he regrets this one though. If it becomes dangerous to fly he’d have to travel on the ground like a peasant
He’d sooner take the oligarch route and privatize the FAA, fill it with his own loyalists, then give his flights priority wherever he goes, including whatever private aviation business (e.g. FedEx clone) he wants to push.
😞
ATC training takes a long time, he assumes it can be done by anyone, it cant.
Are malignant narcissists like him capable of the critical self-reflection required to regret things?
From my experience, no I don’t think so
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VFR is fine for those Piper Cubs but no so great for high speed, congested airspace.
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There’s also the “fire everyone, then hire them back at a reduced salary while leaning on the fact that they care about preventing deaths enough to take the deal” aspect.
In less than a month too.
Feels like we need no confidence/snap elections or some shot to deal with this.
But really we needed better protections from dictators and better under-represented vote counting long ago and now we have to fix shit the hard way.
It’s called impeachment and could happen at any time. Every single Republican is complicit with the Nazi regime.
Every single Republican is complicit with the Nazi regime.
That’s the problem. Half of our representatives are Nazis. How is an impeachment going to go anywhere?
or some shot to deal with this.
I mean…
Blessed autocorrect.
we have to fix shit the hard way.
No going to be fun.
IIRC the FAA layoffs did not include air traffic controllers, so I don’t think that he was involved with that.
“There is a shortage”
ah damn i love that language. reminds me of the boss that abused my mother back when she was still in employment. “there is a shortage, you need to come over on your day off, otherwise we can’t handle the workload”. how about employing more people? no? maybe because you can’t find another fool who will do the work with these bad working conditions?
There has been a shortage for a decade, and the post is literally Musk trying to hire early retirees to fill staffing shortages.
There’s no such thing as a labor shortage, especially if it’s been long enough to train more ATCs. If the pay is high enough, then people will come out of the woodwork.
The work is difficult, and the expectations and stress are high. They 100% need to pay better, but the pool of qualified candidates is already fairly small.
Sounds like they need to increase pay and reduce the number of hours worked while still getting a salary and benfits to entice more people to the position and make the stress more bearable for those they can get to fill the position. It’s not a matter of how many people are qualified it’s a matter of how many people want to make the tradeoffs to work there and be upskilled to meet the requirements. If your deal is not enticing enough, you need to restructure how the position works in order to entice more people for the position.
retiring at 56, and only able to apply until the age 30, doesnt make it very unappealing to people at all, especially when people retire in thier 60s and 70s in many less stressed jobs.
Maybe increase the pay so they aren’t searching for another job when they are forced to retire at 56 without training for another career. And also decrease hours needed to work per week to account for the additional stress they face so they can recoup. You would surely have more people applying when taking these factors into account.
Yet it’s larger than the number of people required.
It’s also difficult to qualify for. As I recall the civilian route to become an ATC is at least six months of full time training (also - usually you need to have already had some work experience/college background) and the test has at least a 50% failure rate.
You need a college degree only to be qualified, but you are only put into groups 2 or 4. Veterans and people who do to college for atc or aviation safety go to groups 1 or 3. That’s just to then do the minimum 6months of atc training. They also just started direct hiring from colleges with approved programs.
I got to tour the FAA training facility and it’s kind of difficult to convey how intense that atmosphere and the training seemed to be in text. Just walking past the guys eating lunch felt stressful.
I got to do a simulation where they even gave me a script with timing and fucked it up.
I think they give you a stipend to live on when you’re in training at least. It would really suck to fail though.
for things like atc there is, theres a maximum age you can become one, and a max age to retire, very little exceptions outside of that.
- Claim a federal agency is inefficient
- Fire employees and defund agency
- Agency performs worse than before
- Point finger at the agency showing how it is incompetent
- Move to privatize agency
- $$$$$$$
That’s been the Republican M.O. for like 40 years.
At least 50
Well, there was a brief period after the civil rights era where they still held the pro-union stance from before the conservative shift, you can still find posters in the 70s/80s, but for the most part yes you’re right.
I feel like it may have been getting started, but Reagan cranked it up to 11.
Not just republican, the whole neoliberal politic.
US law mandates retirement at 56 for Air Traffic Controllers due to the high stress and fast-paced multi-tasking nature of the job
It’s considered one of the most mentally challenging jobs there are.
Interesting.
The EU & UK would consider that age discrimination and illegal. You can’t be forced to retire at a given age.
Strange that America uses it - especially given the age you allow your presidents to be.
Age discrimination is illegal in the US for almost every job, there are a handful of exceptions.
It would be in America as well, except ATC is classified as a secure role like the military or police so they get away with stuff like this.
exceptions include the military for obvious reason(but even they have exceptions, rare though), and certain federal jobs, like ATC, and they have science to back up why you have to retire by 56.
I’ll just leave that scene from Breakind Bad here. If i was in the US i would not enter any flights for the foreseeable future, unless it is the flight to permanently leave.
We should have this same law for politicians.
probably one of the reasons why its such a shortage, low-retirement age, maximum age for becoming one, among other requirements.
How about you just increase the pay and benefits you’re offering? if you love the efficiencies of the free market so much why don’t you fucking act like it
The free market dictates that in a shortage, the cost of the goods or services must rise to meet the equilibrium of supply and demand. Anything else is surely incredibly inefficient.
This is so easy to fix. Just ask the remaining ATCs to put in 30 more hours per week. If there is a safety law which needs to be amended to make this happen, just amend it. Remove all the rules and safeguards. We should do it like the Tesla factories.
Look. More air accidents will happen. People should be ready to sacrifice themselves. It’s that easy.
So easy to fix.
PS: /s for some of you who may need it…
We also need to brace ourselves for hardship. I mean Elon won’t be facing monetary hardships but you will. So brace for that.
Seriously you couldn’t pay me to fly these days.
Fucking beg, fascist bitch.
No no. Pay is what he needs to do.
¿Por que no los dos?
My thoughts exactly
Maybe fill in the blanks with racist assholes? I want to watch that work itself out.
Surprise Surprise Surprise (Gomer Pyle voice)
Just what the fuck did you think was gonna happen Elonia? Fucking idiot…
Leopard, meet face…
🤦♀️ 🤷♂️ 🖕
This is intentional. They want to replace everything with their own shitty for-profit systems.
Which will be a disaster of epic proportion.
Yo, air traffic controllers still at work: if y’all have ever considered going on strike, now’s the time.
Easier to quit; last time ATCs went on strike Reagan just fired them all
Would they still be able to replace the fired workers as quickly as they did in 1980?
What is quick? From what I remember reading, they didn’t really get back to normal until the early 90s. I could be wrong, I saw this a while ago.
They still aren’t back to the same staffing level.
The linked article says they were back up and running at 75% in days. They had started training replacements in preparation for the strike, then had scabs and people breaking the picket line due to the threat of firing, then brought in military ATCs to fill in blanks.
I’d rather get fired than quit. Unemployment benefits!
Came here to say this.
“No OnE wAnTs To WoRk AnYmOrE” - guy firing a bunch of people without cause.
I used to work for Amazon in a division I didn’t feel grimey for. Spent over 7 years of my life in that division, doing great things and recurringly got top performer review status and was even awarded role model on top of that on several occasions.
Then they laid me off in 2023, after my latest review of “top performer” & award of “role model”.
About 2 weeks ago a recruiter reached out to me for a role in AWS and I responded with, “Amazon shouldn’t have laid me, a top performer and role model, off if they’d like me to work for them.”
ATCs should give this response to Musk.
A friend of mine was laid off in a firing of 300 workers. A couple of years later, a new upper manager comes in and tries to hire 500.
The people making decisions at large corporations have no idea what’s happening on the ground, they just see major shareholders, a budget and expenses.
they did a wave massive layoffs in tech in 2023, my bro was included i knew he would be a target, because if you earning that much income, its bound to happen.
Shame you can’t do the same with CEOs
*Luigi enters the chat*
One way to cut down on costs.
Yeah I’m sure they’re just RARING to work for the most publicly toxic boss (that isn’t even a boss) in the world…
As a guy who has to travel for work. I hope that these guys tell him to pound fucking sand
Really highlights how stupid Republicans and Musk really is and how his companies thrived despite his leadership not because.
It’s never a problem until it affects them
I was told there was no such thing as a shortage in a free market, why won’t the executive branch embrace free market economics?
Musk is discovering he can’t hire foreign workers to replace people at will. That some federal workers perform highly specialized and high stress tasks that you can’t fix with his typical knuckle dragging tactics.
Pay more wages, the way of a free market is supply and demand
There’s no such thing as a labor shortage.
