USA: Trouble in the Air

L'article qui suit est passionnant et permet de mieux comprendre la situation de nos collègues américains. Je n'ai repris ici qu'un extrait déjà très long ... l'article complet est sur le site http://villagevoice.com

Trouble in the Air

Reagan's mass firing of air traffic controllers made American skies much less safe in the 1980s. Is Bush's flight plan the same?

by Robert Gammon

Dustin Byerly is a former Marine, devout Christian, dedicated Republican, and an air traffic controller. "I love it," he said of his job. "Other than being a baseball player, I wouldn't do anything else." But these days, he is thinking about changing careers and not to baseball, either. Byerly believes officials with the Federal Aviation Administration have unnecessarily put the nation's air travelers at risk. "They say it's all about dollars and cents," he said. "But we're talking about people's lives here. It's about safety."
Jeff Tilley is neither a bagpiper nor a cross-dressing prankster. He's another frustrated air traffic controller. Worst of all, he and his colleagues are distracted. Instead of focusing solely on airplane safety, some controllers are thinking about quitting or at least coming up with novel ways to express their anger. One day last month, Tilley put on a kilt before clocking in at Northern California's largest air traffic control center, which is located in Fremont. His managers immediately told him to never do it again.
Flouting the dress code is just about the only way air traffic controllers can voice their intense disapproval of a new contract foisted on them by the Bush administration and the Republican Congress. They certainly can't strike. President Reagan stripped them of that weapon 25 years ago, when he fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers who struck for better wages and a shorter workweek.
Today, there is little dispute that those firings hastened the decline of US unions. Less widely known is the firings' equally detrimental impact on the safety of American skies. When the Federal Aviation Administration replaced the controllers with newly trained rookies in 1981, it laid the groundwork for a particularly bloody decade of air travel. During the ten years that followed the firings, according to an analysis of every fatal US accident since then, air traffic controllers were at least partly to blame for eleven deadly crashes involving commercial and commuter planes. Controller errors played a role in 253 deaths.
The election of President Clinton ushered in an unprecedented era of peace and cooperation between the FAA and the controllers. His administration rehired more than a thousand fired workers, agreed to significant pay raises, and improved working conditions. The results were startling. From 1993 until late August of this year, controllers were faulted in just two deadly crashes involving commercial or commuter planes. Those crashes claimed the lives of 39 people fewer than one-sixth of the fatalities that occurred during the prior ten years. Moreover, both those accidents occurred in 1994. Thanks partly to the rehiring of these former controllers, the last twelve years have been the safest in the history of commercial aviation.
But that era of safety may just have ended. On August 27, an overworked, sleep-deprived controller in Lexington, Kentucky, appears to have been partly to blame for the worst US air disaster in a half-decade. The unidentified controller, who was working on only two hours' sleep, apparently turned his back on a plane that had taxied onto a runway that was too short for takeoff. The Comair jet barely got its nose off the ground before bouncing off a berm, clipping the airport's fence, and shearing off the tops of nearby trees. The plane crashed and burned in a field, killing 49 of the 50 people on board.
Current and former air traffic controllers worry that the Lexington crash could be a harbinger of things to come. Many are struck by the parallels between the present day and the period following the mass firings in the 1980s. Controllers have always been overworked and tired they often put in two eight-hour shifts in the same 24-hour period, and routinely work irregular hours. But under their new contract, which the FAA unilaterally imposed just days after the Lexington accident, their lives have become demonstrably worse.
Their contract no longer guarantees ten-minute breaks, prohibits them from calling in sick if they're exhausted, and slashes pay for new controllers by more than 30 percent. The FAA says it's merely trying to save money and curb sick-leave abuse. But sleep experts say the new rules are an invitation to disaster.

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The Clinton administration had indeed solidified its relationship with the controllers in 1998, when FAA chief Jane Garvey agreed to the best contract the union ever had. The pact gave controllers significant raises and a salary structure that allowed fully certified controllers to earn a base salary of $127,000 a year. By contrast, the average controller in 1981 made $31,000 a year. Under the Garvey contract, controllers were still overworked, stressed, and using out-of-date equipment, but at least they felt respected. They also were comfortable: Clinton's FAA relaxed the dress codes.
When George W. Bush moved into the White House in January 2001, he surprised controllers by keeping Garvey on board. But she resigned the following year, and Bush appointed Marion C. Blakey, a Republican who had headed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration during his father's presidency.
At first, she calmed controllers' fears by extending Garvey's contract for two years and calling it a "win-win" for both the FAA and the union. But the era of cooperation was about to end. As soon as the two-year extension expired in 2005, Blakey took a hard-nosed approach to bargaining that would have made Reagan proud. She argued that the old contract was more generous than the FAA could afford, and demanded that the union agree to $1.9 billion in wage cuts.
Blakey argued that lagging airline fares since 9/11 were hurting the FAA's budget, three-fourths of which comes from airline taxes. Operating costs, meanwhile, had jumped from $4.6 billion in 1996 to $8.2 billion in 2005. To drive home her demands, Blakey hired Joe Miniace, a high-profile antilabor negotiator, to lead the FAA's bargaining team. Miniace has a history of in-your-face confrontations. In 2003, he forced a shutdown of all West Coast seaports when he locked out the longshoremen's union during a contract dispute.
The controllers' union ultimately proposed a contract that it claimed would save the FAA $1.4 billion. But FAA spokesman Ian Gregory said Blakey was skeptical, so she halted negotiations in April 2006. After all, she had an ace in the hole. Under a Clinton-era law, Congress ultimately mediates pay disputes between the FAA and the controllers. And this past summer, the Republican congressional leadership allowed Blakey to unilaterally implement her demands.
Blakey's "nontract," as controllers now call it, went into effect September 3, and created a two-tiered pay system by slashing the wages of new controllers by 31.5 percent. Once they become fully credentialed, they'll earn $87,000 a year compared to $127,000 under the old contract. Blakey reasoned that the FAA needed the two-tiered system because it will have to replace three-quarters of its workforce in the next decade, since most of the Reagan-era replacements will soon reach retirement age. The FAA expects to hire and train 12,500 controllers by 2015.
But a closer look at the nontract reveals that it cuts pay for more than just rookies. Controllers such as Dustin Byerly, who has completed much of his training but has not yet reached journeyman status, may never be paid what they were promised. When Byerly became a controller in 2002, the FAA told him he would earn $127,000 within five years. But now it looks as if he will be stuck at $108,000 indefinitely. There are one hundred other so-called "developmental" controllers in the same boat at Oakland Center alone. "It's very discouraging," he said. "People have accepted jobs, picked up, and moved their lives based on information that now turns out not to be accurate."
A salary of $87,000 may sound like a lot of money to a lot of people. And the controllers are keenly aware that the public sometimes views them as well-paid whiners. But it's also true that they have one of the toughest jobs anywhere. Who among us holds the lives of tens of thousands of people in our hands each day? Plus, they have crazy schedules. The typical Oakland Center controller starts at a different time every day, must routinely work weekends and graveyard shifts, and must work two eight-hour shifts within one 24-hour period every week.
Year after year, controllers miss Christmases and Thanksgivings with their families, their spouses' birthdays, or their kids' soccer matches. "We age fast with the hours we work and the stress levels we have; that's why we have to retire by age 56," said Tilley, the 46-year-old Oakland Center union president, who lives in Union City. "It's like being a football player or a baseball player. We only have a certain amount of time to make money and then we're done."
But under the nontract, most controllers will be lucky to reach 56.
Like most kids, controller Debra Price's six-year-old twins sometimes keep her up at night when they're sick. Her husband shares the burden, but he's a controller, too. Every parent of young children has to cope at some point with extreme sleep deprivation, but for controllers, who must be hyper-alert at work, the lack of rest can be brutal. "It's killer when you have kids during the cold and flu season," said Price, who commutes to Oakland Center each day from her home in Pleasanton. "If you have to work overtime and we've been working six-day workweeks since June you come home, you make dinner, you put the kids to bed, you try to sleep an hour or two, and then you go back to work and work all night."
The nontract, which is valid for the next five years, also no longer guarantees a ten-minute break every two hours of work. Taking a short break four times a day to get coffee or go for a walk might seem like a cushy perk on some jobs. But for a controller who simultaneously monitors about fifteen airplanes every minute of the day, a ten-minute break could be all that's needed to prevent another Cerritos.
FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said the new rule, which says the breaks are now a "goal" but no longer required, merely gives supervisors more scheduling flexibility. "I think that it's pretty well proven that controllers can work longer on position than two hours as long as they're not getting hammered," he said.
But the union argues that the FAA's crackdown on breaks is more likely the result of having too few controllers on the payroll. And at least one scientific study of workers in stressful jobs appears to contradict the FAA claims. According to 2003 research published in the British medical journal The Lancet by Professor Simon Folkard of the University of Wales, a leading expert on the effect of work schedules on job performance, the risk of accidents doubles as workers approach the two-hour mark without a break.
Not getting a breather is one thing, but forcing a tired controller to show up day after day is just asking for trouble. The Lexington controller, who got only two hours of sleep in the previous 24 hours because he had only nine hours off between shifts, might as well have downed a beer while on duty, said Charles Czeisler, professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School. "Sleeping only two hours in a 24-hour period impairs performance as if they had a blood alcohol of .05 percent," said Czeisler, who is also a senior physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "If there's no sleep for 24 hours, then it's as if they had a blood alcohol of .10 percent." In other words, Blakey's new rules are essentially placing drunken air traffic controllers at the helm.
Gregor of the FAA said that the no-sick-leave-when-tired rule is merely an attempt to curb abuse. "The use of sick leave among air traffic controllers was much, much higher than other FAA personnel," he said. He added that FAA supervisors will send home controllers who are too exhausted to track planes: "There is no way a manager will put a controller on position who is too tired to be on position. We're not going to compromise safety." But controllers say that's exactly what Blakey's FAA has done.
If controllers are right, then the witching hour for a sleep-induced accident is the graveyard shift. Such overnighters often come at the end of a quick turnaround. Typically, controllers will report to work at 7 a.m. and be off by 3 p.m. Then, after nine hours off, they'll return at midnight. Under FAA rules, the minimum time off between shifts is eight hours. At Oakland Center, many controllers commute to work from the Central Valley, where housing is cheaper. That means they might be home by 4:30 p.m. from a shift that ends at three, and then they'll have to jump back in their cars at 10:30 that night, leaving only six hours to eat, sleep, and be a parent.
Another problem is that the most difficult time for people to fall asleep is the early evening. "We're increasing the probability of sleep-related accidents," said Czeisler, who is also president of the Sleep Research Society Foundation. Asked about the prohibition of time off to rest, coupled with the crackdown on breaks and the routine irregular shifts, he noted, "They upset the body's circadian rhythms. You're setting the stage for fatigue-related errors."
The FAA appears unconcerned about such warnings. "It's up to controllers to make sure they get enough sleep on their days off," agency spokesman Gregor said. There also seems to be nothing controllers can do about it. Thanks to Reagan, they can't strike. And thanks to the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress, they're stuck with the nontract until 2011 unless a Democratic president is elected in 2008 and decides to rip it up.
So for now, controllers will have to be content with pushing the envelope on the strict dress code that Blakey reinstated. Gregor said Blakey wanted to establish a professional workplace. "Attire in some facilities was getting extreme," he said. "There were people in shorts, flip-flops, and ratty T-shirts."
After Jeff Tilley showed up at Oakland Center last month in his kilt, the FAA immediately added kilts to the forbidden list, too. So he decided to wear a wig to work. "Hey, they never said, 'No hairpieces,'" he said, smiling. "Controllers are just trying to find ways to stand up and say, 'This is not right.'"
The FAA has since banned wigs as well.