It Could Be Worse…

It seems appropriate that this post will run on Labor Day 2009, given the subject matter. Of course, since this is a web log and not a newspaper column, I can make anything run any day I want it to, which makes it easier for me to time this sort of thing than it would be for a real columnist. But it still seems appropriate to have a column about miserable working conditions pop onto your web browser on Labor Day, so for the next few hundred words, if you’d care to imagine me as a crabby, middle-aged man with a bad complexion and a beer gut wearing a fedora with a “Press” ID stuck in the hatband, crouching over an ancient manual typewriter and grumbling quietly as I slam out this story, please feel free. I’d still be doing better than the poor bastards who appear in the news account I’m going to hot-link in a minute…

People who believe that being a commercial pilot must be exciting, glamorous, or at least nice work if you can get it may want to skip the rest of this post and wait for the next Grad School Diaries installment on Saturday. As noted in this story from the The Associated Press quoted by SF Gate online, 62 pilots and flight engineers from a Florida-based air freight company went on strike last week protesting the fact that their employers do not provide restrooms for them onboard their aircraft. It seems that these old 727 cargo conversions had everything stripped out of the original cabin, including the lavatories, leaving the crews with nothing but plastic zip-lock bags to relieve themselves in. And you thought your office restroom stank…

Now, in fairness, relief bags of this type (usually with a small sponge in the bottom to help with containment) are commonly used by military pilots assigned to make long flights in aircraft without restrooms, but it should be noted that many military aircraft have no where to put a restroom in the first place. These old 727s originally mounted several lavatories and the support systems to operate them, and we must assume that the freight company had them removed to save on weight and space. Moreover, while military flights in single-seat or two-seat aircraft may sometimes last as long as 18 hours, very few such pilots will be subjected to regular 18-hour shifts in peacetime – a practice the striking pilots describe as the rule, rather than the exception on their jobs. They also note that after 18 hours with a crew of three and nothing but zip-lock bags for sanitation, the inside of the aircraft can get a bit unpleasant…

Why, exactly, the freight company thinks this is a good idea is not addressed by the article linked above. Certainly, every pound of equipment you can remove from the airplane means more payload you can carry and less spent on fuel, but even the military will provide pilots with a chemical-pack toilet (like the one in an RV or camper) whenever there is room to do so, and there’s no doubt that the company is not coming off very well in the press accounts of this issue. To say nothing about the striking pilots or the potential loss of business if more of their personnel join the revolt…

I point all of this out to you not, as usual, because I believe that anyone following this blog (assuming anyone follows this blog) would be daft enough to believe that their employees would be okay with 18-hour shifts every day, let alone 4-hour turn-around times between shifts or plastic bags for lavatory functions, but rather to illustrate the point that decisions that make sense on paper don’t always work well in practice. The fact is, I’ve worked 18-hour (and 20-hour and 25-hour) shifts without overtime pay, had to go back to work after only 4 or 5 hours off, and worked under conditions where a plastic bag would actually have been a step up over our sanitary facilities – and every one of those companies has been destroyed by the competition, driven out of business by employee lawsuits, bankrupted by boycotts, shut down by government regulations, or all of the above. So the next time you have a great money-saving idea, remember to think it through…

Happy Labor Day, everybody!