Tim from Ft. Worth Texas weighed in on a way previous post that I wrote on the subject of airline travel. I really love it when you guys cruise back to see stories in the archive and even more when you comment about them. You know every one is evaluated solely for profanity or egregious nastiness to me personally and then published to the site. Same with this one. But I didn’t want it to get lost in the miasma of time, because it says something important about why the whole experience of flying domestically is so horrendous and headed in the wrong direction. Sometimes things seem arbitrary or non-sensical. Turns out they’re not.
In a lot of flights (not the longer ones I guess 1500 miles or shorter), flight attendants are required to clean the plane before they deplane and go on to next flight. And they don’t get paid for any work they do on the ground unless the door is closed, so, basically flying time. But even boarding, deplaning, cleaning and delays (5 hours or wherever) they don’t get paid for that! Not even a dime! So during delays and all that: Remember this: The crew is not getting paid at all! That’s why pre boarding is an issue as well! There has to be a line, or the company will have crewmembers working even more for free. Gate agents know better than to ask the crew if they want to start pre boarding and work a few minutes more for free… Typically they can have about 3 flights a day maybe 4, and the day can be as long as 15-16 hours, but because a lot of the work they do they don’t get paid, In the end, for a 15 hours work day they got paid for about 6 or 7 hours. As you can see the problem is a lot bigger than just bad employees or rude people. There’s the UNION telling workers to say NO when asked to work for free because management certainly doesn’t [work for free]! Then you have customers that paid a lot of money to fly and have to deal with crap and no right to complain! I really feel for the passengers! But employees are overworked, underpaid, working many hours for free. So it comes back to consumer‘s power: Write to the AIRLINE COMPANY and tell them what you think from your point of view. Do something about it! Fight to get things changed! It will take a lot of people making a lot of noise for something to be done.
So what do you say? It’s pretty clear that the people who work for the airlines are equally victimized by a) their companies and b) the FAA. There are probably other culprits too, don’t you think? Shouldn’t we, as Tim suggests, make a lot of noise?
I can’t hear you!