It saddens me that this is even necessary. On one hand I want to say "kudos!" for recognizing the inherent hazard to their staff, but the cynical side of me also says "is avoiding cancellations worth flight attendants risking their health or safety?"
I don't have an answer. Food for thought. For myself I don't think there's enough hazard pay available to get me on a plane with a bunch of stressed out people who just spent their maskless holiday travelling with strangers and to maskless family gatherings, whether masks are required on the aircraft or not.
Seems like it was left up to the flight attendants themselves (and union) to decide. They probably have a decent idea of what risk/reward ratio they're comfortable with.
the unorthodox sleep schedules required to fit flight schedules is also probably a contributing factor. night shifts and irregular schedules have been correlated with negative health outcomes for a long time.
Please call this “fume events”, as the risk is desperately concentrated on a few flights in a dozen years, and fume events are not yet recognized as events (“just renew the air and no-one will see” - while we have amateur testimonials that people get conditions for life after such events).
Sure, if I had to guess something that wasn't radiation, I'd guess stress, which I would guess could depress your immune system and make you more susceptible to C19
As far as I can determine, once you are vaccinated, the risk of serious illness drops down considerably. So much so that (from what I can assess), you are effectively back in range of "its just the flu". No?
It’s still a nonzero risk of catching it and it being fatal. And there is the lost opportunity in being positive, having to isolate, and not having income above your base pay.
I think a bump in pay makes a lot of sense - but I sometimes get the sense that there's a large disconnect between what people _feel_ the risk profile is (with vaccines) vs. what the actual risk profile is.
From my standpoint, vaccines have transformed the risk profile back into the usual background noise of everyday life. It's perhaps slightly worse than the usual flu season, but nothing to be overly alarmed with.
It makes sense for organizations to have plans for a drop in staffing availability. But to charactertize that as putting people's lives at risk seems... over the top to me.
Zero risk isn't. But the risk picture right now is crummy.
I'm a teacher and 42 years old. I think the risk, if I catch it, being vaccinated and fully boosted, is about 3x the risk from infleunza. And I have a substantially higher chance of catching it than influenza in any given timespan with how high case counts are.
But even more than that: I can shoulder that risk. But when you stack the risk of all the disruption that would come with a mild infection, things are really crummy now.
Then there's the worst thing: my dad is immunocompromised. He's vaccinated and boosted, but one can assume the efficacy is even worse for him. So, effectively, while I'm teaching and case counts are high, I can't see him.
So I went rummaging around to see what the stats were for flu risk vs. covid-19 (w/ vaccine) risk.
Judging by the this website of historical data, looks like deaths per year seems to average around 15/100,000 a year. It's interesting to see how the number has come down quite a bit over the last 40 years. Check it out. Was quite a bit higher even in the late 90s!
Now onto the fatality rate for covid-19 for those who have been vaccinated. Judging by the CDC's table here, looks like it is around 35/100,000 after the 2nd shot. I do think (hope?) the number will improve a bit thanks to post infection treatment protocols.
> Judging by the CDC's table here, looks like it is around 35/100,000 after the 2nd shot.
Yes, so this is a different approach than I took, but it's yielding equivalent numbers. You have about 2x the risk of influenza after vaccination for the population as a whole. It's a bit worse at my age (influenza death rates don't rise much for age 42, but COVID death rates do a bit more). And now we have Omicron showing up and reducing protection from vaccination. So back of the envelope from these numbers it's reasonable to come up with an estimate of 3x, too.
Of course, this approach has myriad flaws-- better to take the conditional probability approach that I did and look at probability of infection and probability of severe illness given infection.
In any case: I can accept a 3x influenza risk. It's the cumulative effects of the others that is making me take every possible precaution. And even so, I can't really see my dad.
Who should also, hopefully, be vaxxed. And then in the case of them being severely immunocompromised, well, I’m not sure it’s the responsibility of someone to be required to do something because someone they interact with knows someone who knows someone who might be affected by it and may be among the 3% of Americans who are immunocompromised.
At that point perhaps a job that requires you being around people isn’t the job for you, or you should get and wear an N95 mask because if it’s not COVID you’re going to be bringing other germs and bacteria and viruses home anyway - for example I just got done recovering from the flu not long ago. Note that masks on a plane weren’t required prior to COVID to protect friends of friends of friends, even though the flu kills many also.
People in my county have given up with masks. We are maybe 60% vaccinated but I feel there is a false sense of security because of the low population density. It’s so easy to wear a mask and give yourself protection, but you also have the added problem that people don’t seem to understand how to fit a mask properly either.
Nasal cleansing sounds interesting. Where can I read more about it? How often would you need to cleans and what’s the cost? Is this recommended in the US? How is it different from traditional nasal spray for stuffed nose?
It’s not recommended in US but apparently it’s big in Thailand, some 80% of the population making use of it as a part of traditional medicine (Hatha Yoga) - Thailand was famously doing very well for the first year (low case rates), but apparently they have since caught up.
Thanks, I vaguely remembered some bad news about it but did not imagine it was brain eating amoeba ! Apparently all that’s needed to avoid this is using sterile saline solution or first boiling the water, but I don’t know whether the ol’ sacred texts include this bit of advice.
> "is avoiding cancellations worth flight attendants risking their health or safety?"
It seems you are disproportionately concerned with Covid as opposed to other occupational hazards. There's a lot of jobs that are dangerous, and being a flight attendant isn't one of them.
I'd trust that if it gave Business Insider gave a methodology that wasn't absurdly vague. And in the top three hazards listed for flight attendants is "Exposure to minor burns, cuts, bites, or stings." That's not threatening to the health of anyone familiar with bandaids and Neosporin.
Presumably flight attendants' jobs became substantially more challenging when so many Americans want to take off their mask, and it's the flight attendants that have to get them to keep them on.
> "All flight attendants, regardless of how you have obtained your pairing, will be receiving 200% pay for any pairing that touches Dec. 28 through Jan. 4," the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA said in a statement.
Headline thinks 200% + base pay. Even the line you cite supports that view. That sentence is ambiguous anyway. One can read it as 200% pay (including the base pay) or as bonus.
The actual statement was "flight attendants [...] will be receiving 200% pay", which means they'll be getting double their pay. If the statement had been "flight attendants will receive a 200% pay increase", then that'd be triple their pay.
The actual confusion was caused by the fact that pilots will receive triple pay through an overlapping period.
"Will be receiving twice their pay" would be even less ambiguous though. I'm always unsure about the parsing of statements like these.
"If the statement had been "flight attendants will receive a 200% pay increase", then that'd be triple their pay." I'd be very uncertain what the writer meant by this even if your interpretation is the technically correct one.
At least in Canada, it is sometimes only when in the air. They do not seem to be paid for boarding time.
> It's industry standard for flight attendants' pay to be based on the time from wheels up to wheels down, although most airlines also provide some compensation for the time flight attendants spend at airports before and after flights. WestJet does not, and it's become a sticking point with flight attendants as minimum wages rise across the country.
That is unbelievable. I am already furious when I am stuck sitting on the tarmac pre/post flight "do nothing". Cannot imagine how angry I would be if I was at work but not getting paid for it.
This seeps into the unskilled-adjacent industries (like foodservice, on the ground or in the air) because approximately ~anyone can be trained up to do the job.
Being unionised just means you can collectively ask for what you want. It doesn't mean you necessarily get it. I'm sure they're not massively happy being paid $12 an hour either, but by your argument they are?
My argument is that they're happy enough with "wheels up" pay because that's how things work, and if airlines started paying for time at the airport, they'd make the same, just at a lower wage.
Not sure, though there is more to it. There's also usually a smaller hourly per-diem that isn't bounded by block hours. And seniority drives pay. If you stick to it, it does eventually pay higher than many other jobs that don't require a college degree.
Spirit probably isn't the best example either. Some other airlines provide much higher starting wages, and things like profit sharing.
If you told me to guess whether Hell had frozen over with flying pigs overhead or Spirit Airlines would somehow make a move like this, I would have bet the farm on the former.
But in all seriousness, friend’s mom is a flight attendant for a major carrier as a sort of “semi-retirement” career. I can’t believe the stories she has to share when we see her. They are so underpaid and overworked. She likes the free travel though so I guess that’s something. She also has a pretty sarcastic personality and does a good job rolling her eyes at bullshit.
Some horror stories:
- Having to stop a couple from actively fornicating in their row (not even in the restroom)
- Being handed a leaking poopy diaper for her to “do something with”
- Routinely being harassed, sexually/physically/mentally
Which is what happened, at one airline. Which is why the pay went up.
It's a little bit ridiculous to complain about low wages for a job in a thread about an employer tripling wages to ensure that the job in question is staffed.
Adding on, the aforementioned worker is semi-retired and gets travel perks as part of the package. I don't know what the value of their travel is, but it seems fair to consider that part of their pay (used or not).
The travel is standby for flight attendants, so they don't go if flight is full. Though sometimes they take a folding seat.
A few years ago it was $10,000 a year to get added as pilot's family member for that travel perk. I don't know how that may have changed over the past couple years.
I did not understand why the carriers allowed that.
Sure but there are enough people who want & use the travel perk for it to be effectively part of the compensation. If you don't want that or can't use it then a career as a flight attendant is probably not very attractive.
You could make an argument that COVID has made it difficult/impossible to use that perk so perhaps that perk really is worth ~2x the salary.
It's peculiar that left leaning people profess that supply/demand based systems work only in circumstances that line up with their preset beliefs (or more accurately, the narrative they are to express); almost certainly a cognitive dissonance avoidance strategy.
Eg:
Shortage of Y increases prices of Y and higher prices of Y drive consumers to substitute Y with X
but not
XY get paid more than XX for same work, and higher price for XY drive employers to substitute XY with XX
You're making unfounded assumptions to believe you know the poster's political leaning. All people you disagree with are not by definition "the other side" politically.
Rather than anything related to my personal views, there is a pattern of what I mentioned above coming from people that identify as progressive; and certainly the narrative that I alluded to(and the broader idea behind it(1) ) is a progressive cause of late.
(1) The notion that certain special-cause voluntarily participated activities are per se exploitative, and others are not, even though the underlying economic mechanics are identical for both categories. It's got all the hallmarks of back-fitting rationale to the narrative.
Interesting, though, that everyone seems to have taken "left leaning people" as some sort of invective.
No one took it as an invective, they simply took it as an unfounded assumption about the political viewpoint of the other participants in the thread on which you were commenting.
I don’t lean left, but many high turnover jobs like flight attendant can be reasonably called overworked and under paid. The line of suckers willing to make video games is a semi-stable situation that exists as a distortion of normal market forces.
Companies are more or less forced to overwork and underpay people in jobs which have suckers lining up to fill them. That’s the market forces at work.
"forced to overwork and underpay people in jobs which have suckers lining up to fill them"
The first half of your sentence is incongruent with latter half. If you have people lining up for the position, you are demonstrably not underpaying. What you wrote is merely an inversion of the "jobs that americans won't do" fallacy.
To bring it all the way around, it was only very recently that Spirit was underpaying people and could not get enough staff. Low and behold, Spirit doubles the comp and presumably attracts more people.
I think you missed the first half of why I was saying. Job turnover is an objective measurement you can take.
If people show up to work the job but then quickly quit that’s just a sign of information asymmetry. Which is one of the ways economic systems can get unbalanced. It’s no different than an investment bubble or other situation that takes more than Econ 101 levels of analysis to understand.
It’s weird that some right leaning people think the labor market is a perfect market.
It’s not - employers have vastly more power and information than most employees.
This is why unions exist - to bring balance to the labor market. Though right leaning people often call that socialism and/or unAmerican. Talk about cog dis!
It's peculiar that some people insist on ignoring the unequal power relationships in most employment situations, enabling exploitation and/or opportunities to use the corporate structure to implement personal biases, and so insist it doesn't happen.
My gf is a flight attendant for a major airline and I am always dumbfounded at the borderline abuse that flight attendants put up with…both from the passengers and from other internal employees. While some would think market dynamics would even this out, it does not happen overnight, and putting the burden on the employee to go “find a better job” can be pretty harmful.
> It's a little bit ridiculous to complain about low wages for a job in a thread about an employer tripling wages to ensure that the job in question is staffed.
It's a little bit ridiculous that their pay is so low that increasing it enough to keep it staffed means triple.
If your employer started getting desperate could they offer 3x your salary? Would they need to come anywhere close?
Double pay is quite common over the holidays for any hourly role. Flight attendants are unionized so they're far from making minimum wage. This article is really not news, every decent company pays double time over the holidays.
Care to give any specifics? A quick Google shows flight attendant salry in the US can range anywhere from $17k/yr to $120k/yr, with an average answer closer to about $32k-$50k/yr
Can you define overworked? How many hours a week is your friend's mom working a week? 40? 50? 60?
If she's working 60 hours a week for $40k/yr, I would say she's partially to blame. It's up to you to not let your employer take advantage of you.
This comment is really lacking in compassion. I hope you realize eventually how crass it is to blame an employee just trying to feed and house themselves when they're faced with abusive or exploitive employers.
It's an interesting market because the job was historically glamorous, requires minimal skills (HS diploma) and training (10 weeks?), and has the perk of free travel. That's a recipe for low wages, and the reality is the job can be a slog, and the perks are only good if you're with a major carrier.
Back in PanAm days it was a job you mostly did for five years post HS or college and then got married. I’m told the situation still somewhat applies in the big Asian carriers that get all the top ratings.
> Coupled with the prospect of dealing with unruly passengers, many pilots and cabin crew are even forgoing overtime incentives.
I doubt their union had much to do with this beyond saying "yes" and passing on the good news. Spirit did this because they're desperate to not cancel more flights.
I would guess they are doing this entirely to keep people working through this crazy season. I have had 3 legs of flights cancelled (on different airlines) over the holidays due to lack of staff.
I think if this had anything to do with unions it would have happened a while ago.
If airlines did not make money from flying, then it seems like a no brainer for them to stop flying in order to avoid wasting time and effort for no gain.
I assume the people the operate airlines have at least some brains, though.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadI don't have an answer. Food for thought. For myself I don't think there's enough hazard pay available to get me on a plane with a bunch of stressed out people who just spent their maskless holiday travelling with strangers and to maskless family gatherings, whether masks are required on the aircraft or not.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5865289/
I wonder how the COVID risk compares?
From my standpoint, vaccines have transformed the risk profile back into the usual background noise of everyday life. It's perhaps slightly worse than the usual flu season, but nothing to be overly alarmed with.
It makes sense for organizations to have plans for a drop in staffing availability. But to charactertize that as putting people's lives at risk seems... over the top to me.
“Zero risk” is not a reasonable threshold for routine life decisions, IMO.
I'm a teacher and 42 years old. I think the risk, if I catch it, being vaccinated and fully boosted, is about 3x the risk from infleunza. And I have a substantially higher chance of catching it than influenza in any given timespan with how high case counts are.
But even more than that: I can shoulder that risk. But when you stack the risk of all the disruption that would come with a mild infection, things are really crummy now.
Then there's the worst thing: my dad is immunocompromised. He's vaccinated and boosted, but one can assume the efficacy is even worse for him. So, effectively, while I'm teaching and case counts are high, I can't see him.
Judging by the this website of historical data, looks like deaths per year seems to average around 15/100,000 a year. It's interesting to see how the number has come down quite a bit over the last 40 years. Check it out. Was quite a bit higher even in the late 90s!
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184574/deaths-by-influen...
Now onto the fatality rate for covid-19 for those who have been vaccinated. Judging by the CDC's table here, looks like it is around 35/100,000 after the 2nd shot. I do think (hope?) the number will improve a bit thanks to post infection treatment protocols.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7043e2.htm#T2_down
Yes, so this is a different approach than I took, but it's yielding equivalent numbers. You have about 2x the risk of influenza after vaccination for the population as a whole. It's a bit worse at my age (influenza death rates don't rise much for age 42, but COVID death rates do a bit more). And now we have Omicron showing up and reducing protection from vaccination. So back of the envelope from these numbers it's reasonable to come up with an estimate of 3x, too.
Of course, this approach has myriad flaws-- better to take the conditional probability approach that I did and look at probability of infection and probability of severe illness given infection.
In any case: I can accept a 3x influenza risk. It's the cumulative effects of the others that is making me take every possible precaution. And even so, I can't really see my dad.
There is also a nonzero risk of the plane crashing and being fatal.
...
Zero risk is not posible. It's about reducing the risks as much as possible and then managing them.
At that point perhaps a job that requires you being around people isn’t the job for you, or you should get and wear an N95 mask because if it’s not COVID you’re going to be bringing other germs and bacteria and viruses home anyway - for example I just got done recovering from the flu not long ago. Note that masks on a plane weren’t required prior to COVID to protect friends of friends of friends, even though the flu kills many also.
Do they not?
One article with lots of interesting stats (get your Adblock ready): https://www.indiatoday.in/news-analysis/story/did-nasal-rins...
General details on the practice: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neti_(Hatha_Yoga)
It seems you are disproportionately concerned with Covid as opposed to other occupational hazards. There's a lot of jobs that are dangerous, and being a flight attendant isn't one of them.
https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/flight-at...
I'm confused, is it triple pay or 200% pay?
Just to say, it's odd how often people trip themselves up on this!
https://spiritafa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/AFA-2021-Ho...
https://afanewsletters.org/view/?id=30743
That "triple" word, though, is now in many news stories.
The actual statement was "flight attendants [...] will be receiving 200% pay", which means they'll be getting double their pay. If the statement had been "flight attendants will receive a 200% pay increase", then that'd be triple their pay.
The actual confusion was caused by the fact that pilots will receive triple pay through an overlapping period.
"If the statement had been "flight attendants will receive a 200% pay increase", then that'd be triple their pay." I'd be very uncertain what the writer meant by this even if your interpretation is the technically correct one.
The mixture of math and regular language can be a real head spin.
[1] https://everydayaviation.com/spirit-airlines-flight-attendan...
> It's industry standard for flight attendants' pay to be based on the time from wheels up to wheels down, although most airlines also provide some compensation for the time flight attendants spend at airports before and after flights. WestJet does not, and it's become a sticking point with flight attendants as minimum wages rise across the country.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/westjet-minimum-wage-cupe-c...
This seeps into the unskilled-adjacent industries (like foodservice, on the ground or in the air) because approximately ~anyone can be trained up to do the job.
I do wonder if this odd arrangement would work for non-union jobs since you're clearly working as soon as they want you at the airport.
Spirit probably isn't the best example either. Some other airlines provide much higher starting wages, and things like profit sharing.
But in all seriousness, friend’s mom is a flight attendant for a major carrier as a sort of “semi-retirement” career. I can’t believe the stories she has to share when we see her. They are so underpaid and overworked. She likes the free travel though so I guess that’s something. She also has a pretty sarcastic personality and does a good job rolling her eyes at bullshit.
Some horror stories:
- Having to stop a couple from actively fornicating in their row (not even in the restroom)
- Being handed a leaking poopy diaper for her to “do something with”
- Routinely being harassed, sexually/physically/mentally
If they were either, they would stop showing up.
Which is what happened, at one airline. Which is why the pay went up.
It's a little bit ridiculous to complain about low wages for a job in a thread about an employer tripling wages to ensure that the job in question is staffed.
Like health insurance that doesn't get used is valued well above $0, but it's providing risk mitigation. A travel perk isn't risk mitigation.
A few years ago it was $10,000 a year to get added as pilot's family member for that travel perk. I don't know how that may have changed over the past couple years.
I did not understand why the carriers allowed that.
You could make an argument that COVID has made it difficult/impossible to use that perk so perhaps that perk really is worth ~2x the salary.
You're conflating common usage of "value".
Eg: Shortage of Y increases prices of Y and higher prices of Y drive consumers to substitute Y with X
but not
XY get paid more than XX for same work, and higher price for XY drive employers to substitute XY with XX
(1) The notion that certain special-cause voluntarily participated activities are per se exploitative, and others are not, even though the underlying economic mechanics are identical for both categories. It's got all the hallmarks of back-fitting rationale to the narrative.
Interesting, though, that everyone seems to have taken "left leaning people" as some sort of invective.
Companies are more or less forced to overwork and underpay people in jobs which have suckers lining up to fill them. That’s the market forces at work.
The first half of your sentence is incongruent with latter half. If you have people lining up for the position, you are demonstrably not underpaying. What you wrote is merely an inversion of the "jobs that americans won't do" fallacy.
To bring it all the way around, it was only very recently that Spirit was underpaying people and could not get enough staff. Low and behold, Spirit doubles the comp and presumably attracts more people.
If people show up to work the job but then quickly quit that’s just a sign of information asymmetry. Which is one of the ways economic systems can get unbalanced. It’s no different than an investment bubble or other situation that takes more than Econ 101 levels of analysis to understand.
It’s not - employers have vastly more power and information than most employees.
This is why unions exist - to bring balance to the labor market. Though right leaning people often call that socialism and/or unAmerican. Talk about cog dis!
It's a little bit ridiculous that their pay is so low that increasing it enough to keep it staffed means triple.
If your employer started getting desperate could they offer 3x your salary? Would they need to come anywhere close?
(It's also double pay; the headline has been corrected.)
Care to give any specifics? A quick Google shows flight attendant salry in the US can range anywhere from $17k/yr to $120k/yr, with an average answer closer to about $32k-$50k/yr
Can you define overworked? How many hours a week is your friend's mom working a week? 40? 50? 60?
If she's working 60 hours a week for $40k/yr, I would say she's partially to blame. It's up to you to not let your employer take advantage of you.
The fact is that those flight attended are working at 1/3 of the market rate currently.
I doubt their union had much to do with this beyond saying "yes" and passing on the good news. Spirit did this because they're desperate to not cancel more flights.
I think if this had anything to do with unions it would have happened a while ago.
it's same story as the new phones that drops -70% month after release
I assume the people the operate airlines have at least some brains, though.