How is every single title considered clickbait? I'm at the point I don't even know what clickbait is anymore. Every HN thread I open, someone is saying the title is clickbait, even when the title is literally what is happening.
To me, clickbait is along the lines of "10 ways to lose 100lbs in 1 hour!" and it's an article about throwing out two 50lb weights. Or otherwise where the title is clearly not representative of the article itself.
But here we have...
>Effectively immediately, Heathrow has requested:
-the closure for sale of all flights departing from the airport until 11th September
- a reduction in the current passenger cap from 101,500 to 100,000
That seems to match the title exactly? Which part is clickbait? Or what has changed in the definition of clickbait that I'm too out of touch to have learned?
One form of clickbait is to take mundane processes that the general public is not aware of, and to publicize them as if they are news.
Is this unprecedented at Heathrow, or normal course of action? Will the average Heathrow traveler or prospective traveler a face any consequence anything from this news?
Some of the items do seem like they would impact travelers and potential travelers, so I would not classify it as clickbait yet. Unless I found out this was every summer.
But if this article means that people should avoid Heathrow because the experience will be worse than prior years, then I would say this is relevant news to share with the public.
It's certainly not clickbait. If I wanted to fly to London for a meeting in 6 weeks and then fly home, I can no longer do so via Heathrow. It's not like I can just get an earlier or later flight, travel a day earlier, whatever. It's just not an option. That's a rather big deal.
The letter says "so we are asking our airline partners to stop selling summer tickets to limit the impact on passengers." I do read this as selling any ticket, which is the title of the article.
Asks, not tells them to stop (and most airlines are still selling tickets, likely because many people that would be traveling now won't be so there will be spare capacity) - the problem is the article a) is a bit dramatic and misleading with the title, and b) isn't of particularly high quality anyway
Again the article covers that. The airport cannot enforce the rule but if the airlines do not play ball (and I suspect the airport has visibility on ticket sales), it can cancel flights wholesale.
Your article says the same thing as the one you call clickbait. They are already over the target cap, and they are asking for no additional ticket sales as a means of preventing going further over the cap, and indicating that if the numbers sold get worse, they will be forced to impose flight cancellations and may prohibit rebookings for passengers on any cancelled flights since such rebookings would defeat the purpose of reducing passengers.
to me the title sounds like its cancel all flights, like its closing. but that doesnt really make sense, it's just phrased badly. its borderline clickbait, it sounds really bad(worse than it is), and the only way to understand what the title means is read the article. 'any more seats' - i think a 'more' in there would make the title ok
No, they've asked them to stop selling tickets for the time period in question because they are already 1500 passengers/day over the cap, and are expected to be 4000 over if sales continue. They are also threatening to cancel flights (and not allowing rebookings of those whose flights are cancelled) if necessary to maintain the cap.
The last two words in that sentence are pretty important "PER DAY"
>"Kaye’s solution is to cap Heathrow passenger numbers at 100,000 per day for the Summer period" ... "the closure for sale of all flights departing from the airport until 11th September a reduction in the current passenger cap from 101,500 to 100,000"
meaning every day until 9/11 1.5k people aren't getting a seat they paid for
It still doesn’t sound that extreme, tbh. I’m not sure how Heathrow compares to Schiphol but KLM alone is scrapping on the order of 7,000 seats _per day_. And that’s one (admittedly major) airline.
> This would be fine, except that airlines have already sold an avereage of 101,500 tickets per day and seats are still on sale.
My understanding is that based on existing sales alone, there are already 101,500 passengers/day. And in order to get 100,000, they have asked airlines to not sell any more tickets at all.
If you imagine that airlines were previously planning to sell a further 20,000 tickets per day, and they cut that down to 0-100 per day, that's a huge drop that is sure to impact anyone looking to buy tickets at this time.
I learned this the hard way. No luggage, airlines blame heathrow, and heathrow has no communcation channel, I think my only option is break in and try to find it myself. How you manage to get yours?
A guy was on Irish radio and he said he bought the cheapest outbound ticket he could find. Managed to get to the arrivals lounge and find his bag there.
The slightly cheaper tactic may be to actually to buy a fully refundable fare (usually for thousands) for much later in the day, and then cancel it and ask for a full refund.
Fully refundable tickets are awesome. My old company had a contract where all international business travels to customer sites must purchase fully refundable business class tickets. I remember someone had to cancel their travel just before boarding, and the airline refunded everything no questions asked.
It can help a ton. There's been reports of people calling up an airport and telling an employee exactly where their bag is, and then getting it delivered.
Often the biggest impediment to getting lost luggage back is finding out where in the airport it actually is.
Yeah we just recovered a lost bag thanks to an Airtag. The airline’s system thought it was still at the origin city, but we knew exactly which terminal it was at, and we just went there and asked in person. Never checking any bag without an airtag ever again.
Like I dummy, I waited around in line for an hour in Costa Rica before remembering to check my tag.
... Turns out, they move "military looking" (lol, pelican) boxes to a separate spot instead of running them on the carousel. I'd have had it in minutes if I remembered to check the tag first.
Another Pelican Box Luggage Fan!!! I've got a few Pelican trunks too (1615s). They are often (but not always) treated as "Out of Gauge" at various international airports for me and I'm asked "What's inside?" as if they are loaded with some sort of weapon. Nope! I just like large & durable luggage that can be tied to roof of a cab if it doesn't fit in the back
I don't often check luggage. United does have a pretty good online tracking system you can use these days but I always throw an AirTag into checked luggage now and it seems like a really good idea.
Yeah and if you want some order them now, there's been a flood of articles (and comments!) recommending this approach, so no doubt they are flying off the metaphorical shelves.
I hit up 2 Apple Stores and a few authorized resellers in my area and everyone was out of stock. I ordered mine online and it still took a few weeks to get it.
I've used airtags when travelling the past month, they are amazing. Sometimes I sit down on a nice chair instead of crowding around the baggage reclaim belt waiting for it to arrive, and my airtag will show when its there
What should those of us with Android phones do? As far as I can tell, you can use an Android phone to locate any random airtag nearby, but no way to hunt down your own tag unless nearby. Other tag systems won't have the Find My network advantage.
If you have a Samsung phone you could consider using a Galaxy SmartTag. It uses a network of Samsung devices, so its coverage should be quite good too.
Your point is clear but I do not think there is a need for such hyperbole (or for the exclamations).
I could not find a reference reliable enough to quote here, but I would be surprised if any major airport loses more than a few percent of checked luggage. So you will most likely not lose your luggage.
Just went through Heathrow on a redeye and walked through baggage claim at 6:30 in the morning. THOUSANDS of bags sitting there that had not been claimed the day before. Crazy.
I've just come back from holiday via Heathrow - having had my original flights cancelled by BA at the last minute. The experience of getting back through passport control was pretty bad - took about an hour, with the usual combination of poor queue management, useless e-gates and only 2 passport control staff initially on duty to take those who the e-gates failed for (which was about 50%, and always happens to me as I have a common name so there are always people wanted with my name, according to local passport officers).
It certainly wasn't this bad last time I flew via there (pre-pandemic, I'm not a regular flier), but something needs to be done, for sure.
> Those e-gates really suck always. What's so hard about reading MRZ?
Its because its not fully-automated.
If you keep an eye out, you'll spot an officer sitting in a booth with a couple of LCD screens.
They are actually touch screens showing a grid of mugshots of the people passing through the gates.
Officer needs to tap his finger on your mugshot to open the gate.
Hence if its a busy day, or the officer is eating a donut, you'll get the sucky delay experience.
Obviously there is little public information available, but there is one public document that makes some vague hints about what a "Monitoring Officer" does, including a reference about requiring being logged into a "Monitoring Terminal". See here[1].
A decade ago Heathrow had IRIS entry at passport control. You had to register, and in theory had to use heathrow a lot to get on the list.
It was great, walk in, no need to fish out a passport, 5 seconds later you walked through, and because it was frequent flyers only you didn't have grandma still wearing sunglasses, or dropping her passport, or putting her boarding card in, etc.
I measured the "e-passport" queue at Paris last time I got the train to London. There were 5 gates, on average each one took 45 seconds to process someone, the fastest being 31 seconds, the slowest over a minute before rejecting them
That's 1 person every 9 seconds, or 400 per hour. The hourly train has 900 seats. That simply doesn't work.
This IRIS entry is the same with Privium in Schiphol (which, as of this time is not accepting people).
But, what I don't understand, why the hate on the e passport gates? I really like them at Schiphol. There are usually about 8 of them and in my experience there are always more egates open then actual officers. And they are on par or faster than an officer.
Could it be more efficient? yes. But, if the alternative is an old fashioned officer this is better.
1) People don't like them when they total throughput turns out to be less than before, which tends to be the case - especially when people notice them. This is quite common as they often replace 1 passport officer with 1 e-passport machine.
2) As a user they are more difficult to use, and no faster. For me, manual passport control into my home country involves dropping my passport on the desk with one hand, standing for 20 seconds, then leaving. For e-gates it means opening it up (usually a two handed process), sliding into a reader, making sure the crinkly passport bit doesn't scrunch up, wait, wait, wait, half the time get told to reinsert, wait again, look at a camera, wait, wait, then about 1 in 4 times get rejected and have to do the manual process
3) For the minority of people who had iris, they replaced a system which was better for the user in all ways
Iris itself was of course a security issue - it was no longer something you have + something you are, it was just something you are, which was the beauty. Have too many people on the system and you get false positives and end up with a tremendous mess
Of course the best innovation in passport control in the UK would be to join Schengen, so we don't need passport control for the majority of arrivals into the UK. Would save a fortune and make everyones lives easier.
About #2, maybe this is something that is different in Schiphol compared to Heathrow. None of the things you mention here are a problem to me. I always get a picture in one go, my pasport fits easily (even with a cover), it doesn't scrumble because it is glass and it slides in automatically, both gates open automatically. Along with that I think there are 8 gates which are being checked by 2 or 3 people, but I might be mistaken of that.
It's split second to read. It's all the other stuff they are potentially mandated to do. Checking no fly lists, police databases, taking scans of your photo for storage. Having crazy expensive SDKs that run "tests" on you passport to check that it's according to your country's specific passport format and unique fraud checks. Some run UV scans, etc.
I'll bite. How is this to do with Brexit? My local airport is not in Britain but has been a shit-show for months. My understanding is that this is true for several major European airports. Can I blame that on Brexit too?
Very plausible that people from other EU countries who worked in airports left, and it’s a reduced pool of people willing and able to take on those jobs today because of Brexit.
So it clearly isn’t the cause of airport chaos, but it can’t be helpful.
Earlier it was Schiphol, now Heathrow... I wonder why there's such an issue with airports.
Of course the direct answer is "inadequate staff" but the next question is why is that so much more now? Why aren't the airports doing more to entice workers like perhaps better benefits, pay or flexibility? Are airports already operating at thin margins? (If anyone from the aero industry could comment that would be great!) Did they overestimate the downturn due to covid? Are traffic volumes legitimately larger than what was expected/predicted in 2022 (even ignoring covid's drop)?
I flew out of Schipol yesterday. Everything was fine at the KLM check in counter and gate, and at passport control. But they were short of security screening staff and it took an hour to get through the line.
What I heard (and there is a lot on conjecture involved) is that lots of staff were layed off or put on part time during covid. Now travel levels are coming up to precovid times and much previous staff has moved on. On the other hand, the airports are not really offering significantly increased salaries. In general it seems that there is strong reluctance to adjust salaries for workers despite the increased demand.
Seems like we're seeing this pattern across the board in the economy: shortages of labor, and salaries aren't increasing enough to lure people in. Are employers unable to raise salaries, or are they unwilling? If they are unable, where does this leave us if no one can afford the price of labor? If they are unwilling, is this just a game of chicken to see who blinks first between employees and employers?
Also take into account many people got laid off/furloughed/etc... during the Pandemic, and have since found a new, probably better job. Why go back to making a pittance for a stressful, heavy workload?
Ah, but we are still "during covid", though people are traveling again, meaning that the number of pilots and staff who are out sick is significantly higher than pre-covid times. That's a major factor causing flight cancellations in the US, not sure abut Europe.
When travel picked back up they tried to employ people. They failed because
1) Brexit -- many people who were laid off in the UK returned to their country of origin
2) Security clearance -- there is a massive backlog getting security clearance (for things like airside passes) in the UK
BA ground crew were recently on strike because they're being paid less than they were in 2019 for the same job (which was already a low wage), even before inflation. There's better jobs to go to with better hours and better conditions.
I suspect BA and co are hoping to get some form of P&O style deal where they can employ people who aren't UK citizens in the airports on a low wage that someone with full access to the labour market wouldn't take.
The job roles involved (security staff, baggage handlers, cabin crew) often have poor pay and undesirable working arrangements (e.g. unsociable hours).
The current high level of employment means people are able to choose to not do that kind of undesirable work.
When Airports and Airlines do manage to find staff to fill the jobs, they have to go through a government background check process for security reasons. That process has a huge backlog at the moment.
Aside from the issues that others have mentioned (Brexit, security clearances), the UK is in the middle of a huge BA.5 Covid wave. Estimates are something around 1 in 25 people had it last week, and it's getting worse. That's driving a lot of staff absences.
> Of course the direct answer is "inadequate staff" but the next question is why is that so much more now?
Simple: here in Germany, all workers at airports authorized to enter controlled zones have to pass an extensive background check, a process that takes 3-4 months under normal conditions [1]. During COVID, a lot of these workers were laid off instead of being placed under the employment protection program or left entirely since the Kurzarbeit only paid out 60% of already extremely low wages (14€/h for baggage handlers, [0]). They found other employment and won't come back - to make it worse, airports are usually well outside the city borders, so there's an awful lot of commute involved at a time when public transport doesn't run as well.
> Why aren't the airports doing more to entice workers like perhaps better benefits, pay or flexibility?
There has been a continuous pressure on costs everywhere at airports, which means the airports themselves have not much flexibility on raising fees to account for increased costs, and the companies providing the services like baggage handling, refueling and whatever usually won their contracts by tender which means they are locked in as well by law.
> There has been a continuous pressure on costs everywhere at airports, which means the airports themselves have not much flexibility on raising fees to account for increased costs, and the companies providing the services like baggage handling, refueling and whatever usually won their contracts by tender which means they are locked in as well by law.
Our governments (that all signed the Paris agreement) should be happy and seize the opportunity to let airports raise taxes, let service providers renegotiate and pay their staff more, and make low cost flights a little less cheap.
> let service providers renegotiate and pay their staff more
That is impossible, they cannot raise the agreed-upon rates without terminating the contract and holding a fully new tender process. Contract termination would require agreement of both parties, but no vendor would ever agree to the termination of a contract if they could not be sure to win the new tender.
The checks are extensive - almost every relevant database the government has on you [1]. They can also oder medical exams to check if you've been using drugs if they find any indication of any usage in the past in the data. It's absurd, utterly absurd.
You realize there's a worldwide pandemic going on that's causing people to be sick for days and weeks at a time, repeatedly, right? And that nearly all airports and airlines have given up the most basic mitigations like mask wearing mandates to prevent spread.
RTFA: Kaye’s solution is to cap Heathrow passenger numbers at 100,000 per day for the Summer period, which they are specifying as ending on 11th September.
The London bombings on July 7th 2005 (or 7/7 as they were known) were a big thing in the UK obviously.
Not to Sky Sports though, who posted on July 7th
"In honour of 7/7, who's the first player you think of"
To really grasp dates like 9/11 or 7/7 you'd have to have been at least say 10 years old at the time. The 20 year old intern posting the sky sports tweet would have been 3 at the time and wouldn't associate the date. People under the age of 30 wouldn't remember 9/11 like the rest of the world did, and it did have a massive affect on the whole world - not least because of the response to it (unlike say March 11th 2004 in Madrid)
In Ireland, the minimum wage is €10.50 per hour and the standard work week is 40 hours, that works out to €420 full time minimum wage per week.
At Dublin Airport, security staff are only guaranteed 20 hours per week, need to be available for 40 hours per week, and entry level workers are paid €14.14 per hour.
Guaranteed pay: €282.80 per week, i.e. 67% of the minimum wage.
Are there any surprises why there are staff shortages?
Many people were working these jobs without realising what a bad deal it was. They were kicked out during the pandemic and learned that any other job is better.
The only thing that was keeping this jobs in place is imperfect knowledge. Most job seekers have a limited knowledge as only know their own past jobs and the ones from close people (and to talk about pay is quite taboo in many countries). And that is how we got here. Even when there is public information, many people have a hard time understanding the implications of the statistics and concrete job differences.
Corporations have thousands of data points and share salary statistics between them.
Staying at home and even firings have helped some people to gain that knowledge.
People also get old advice that no longer applies. "Stay with a job, arrive early, go the extra mile and they will reward you down the road!"
In these sort of things, your direct manager probably doesn't even know what you make. There is a tight pay band set by HR and virtually no room for differentiation between employees. There is no mechanism in most roles to truly be rewarded for going the extra mile. The only surefire way to increase your takings is to be active in the employment marketplace and always looking for a better deal.
Working for someone is like this old Seinfeld bit[0], if you want to be rewarded you have to get someone to agree to it before you do the work, once the project is delivered and they are satiated they won't be feeling as generous. "We don't need labor now why are we giving this guy a raise?"
Friend of mine sat in a meeting between the CEO, CFO, and their senior store manager while they argue whether to give an assistant manager a $0.35/hr raise or a $0.25/hr raise. For 45 minutes.
there is a power relationship between those people, and they are being paid quite well to engage privately. Of course it is obnoxious if you have any empathy at all -- many employers remove empathy as "weak" .. they have key-word one liners between each other to signal about it. not fun
My mother tries her best to pay her reports fairly and it’s been a constant source of conflict between her and her manager. The amount in dispute? Always <$100 a month — that’s the total across ~30 employees. It’s insane how petty some people can be.
> Many people were working these jobs without realising what a bad deal it was.
Can you share some details on where you're getting this data? I'd like to dig into it more.
Imperfect information certainly is a thing, but many public jobs have public wage information. Large corporate jobs also have public wage information (say a delivery driver or warehouse worker -- everyone knows what Amazon is paying for these positions). Claiming people stay in these jobs due to ignorance goes against my experience growing up poor, where my parents and their peers constantly hunted for better paying jobs.
I don't know anything about Ireland, but a quick Google for "ireland jobs" leads me to https://ie.indeed.com/jobs-in-Ireland where I can clearly see wages and salaries for many positions.
Some friends I know returned to Poland and other countries. It does not make a sense to stay in ultra expensive Dublin, if there is no work during covid.
When you were younger, it was worth it to work. Today basic wage often does not even cover rent and other living expenses. You loose money by working.
To get some perspective go to www.daft.ie and try to find studion near airport...
I've known lots of tech workers who went as much as years without realizing how badly they were being underpaid, even by the standards of their weak local market. It can take a surprising amount of pushing to get someone who thinks their current pay is OK to realize that it's very much not—I think there's a certain amount of disbelief people tend to default to. "Well, those others must be more skilled, or got lucky". Nope, you're just getting fucked.
And that's a segment of people who ought to be very good at using technology to find out that kind of stuff. I would be very surprised if this didn't hold for most other fields. I'd expect the only markets in which this kind of thing isn't common is ones that are extremely comp-focused (finance, say, and maybe sales).
> I've known lots of tech workers who went as much as years without realizing how badly they were being underpaid, even by the standards of their weak local market
I agree that white collar jobs obfuscate salaries and that power dynamic overwhelmingly favors employers.
That isn't the situation with lower paying jobs, especially ones that aren't salaried, which was what the OP was about. Those low skill jobs (I'd argue baggage handler making minimum wage at the airport to be in that category) openly list wages on the advertisement. Thinking those folks stay in their jobs due to the same information asymmetry is what I'm questioning.
> Many people were working these jobs without realising what a bad deal it was. They were kicked out during the pandemic and learned that any other job is better.
> The only thing that was keeping this jobs in place is imperfect knowledge
It's not just knowledge. Many of these jobs are TIRING jobs because you are physically on your feet a lot. You just don't have the energy to go looking for another job at the end of the day.
The break COVID gave people was a huge boon to job mobility.
In my country many young people people found out that delivery apps are a much better deal. Working for Wolt has given them enough money to live and total flexibility over their schedules.
In the case of airport security and information jobs the salary offered now is between 1.5-2.0 the minimum wage with some seasonal bonuses added and they can't still have huge difficulty to fill those positions.
> guaranteed 20 hours per week, need to be available for 40 hours per week
This I think is part of the huge problem with modern "low level"/minimum wage jobs. Companies don't pay enough to live of of one salary but expect to have full say over their employees time just for their own convenience in scheduling and staffing.
God, this is such a good point. This gap between scheduled hours (~20) versus expected dictation of 'available' hours (~40) is one of the things powering the obnoxious "side hustle" idea...
Wait till you dig into companies forcing non-competes on non-full time staff like this. Jimmy Johns didn't let their minimum wage sandwich cooks work at other fast food places. So not only are you not getting full time hours, you aren't getting health coverage, and have to find a job outside of QSR (quick serve restaurants) to make ends meet.
It's a convenient cause to point to if they're being annoying about scheduling though and the threat of even a nonenforcable contract clause will stop most people, who can afford to fight it just to go back to a job where they'll make up another reason to fire you later anyways, assuming you're in a reasonable state that even forces them to do that.
I am not justifying Non-Competes for food service jobs, I am merely pointing out to anyone that might be in that position not to fear taking another job.
Easier said than done and few of the affected people are likely to be members of this community (HN). Try telling that to a person getting threatened with losing their job.
The issue with such problematic clauses is that even though they might not be enforceable, some fraction of people who sign them will stick to them, to their own detriment.
What's needed is some kind of harsh punishment for including unenforceable contract clauses, coupled with awareness from the side of the employee.
The last few noncompetes I've been presented with have clauses saying that if any part of the noncompete is found to be illegal, the rest still stands. I wholeheartedly believe that if a noncompete contains elements that are illegal at the time of signing, the entire document should be void and the entity presenting it should owe damages.
That's standard wording in any contract, and in most cases it holds. However, the issue is who is going to present the case for the low wage worker who's lost say $200 in illegal deductions. There is no part of society that will reliably perform that role. By design of course.
"Luckily" the minimum wage part-time employees can't afford a lawyer to find out if it is unenforceable.
I think there needs to be some sort of law against known unenforceable contract provisions. They seem to be pretty commonly used against individuals where they are unlikely to know what is and isn't enforceable.
When I worked in consulting we had a large retail client who had a lot of turn-over and was looking for ways to "stabilize" hiring. (Short of paying more money, of course!) When we looked into it their system was regularly over-scheduling shifts "just in case" there was a rush and then having store managers "cut" shifts if there wasn't a rush. There aren't a lot of surprise "rush" shifts in shopping malls outside of the holiday season so sometimes employees would come in, work an hour of a scheduled eight hour shift, and then get cut. The cuts tended to happen by "seniority" (so newest hires, paid the least) and a decent number of these employees who were frequently cut were traveling at least an hour by public transportation. Some days employees lost money by going to work.
We were thrilled by what we'd found! It would be a quick and easy fix for the client: they had solid and reliable sales forecasts for each location so estimating the number of employees they'd need on a given day wasn't going to be difficult. In fact, they were more or less already doing it. It would hardly cost them anything to implement aside from a few tweaks to the corporate scheduling tool and a bit of training for the store managers. So when management immediately shot down our proposed solution it came as a bit of shock. The erratic scheduling and the "cut" shifts were a feature, not a bug, we were told. It kept employees from getting a second job that they might dare prioritize over their current job.
This is the reality now for many working class people in the US, and has been for some time. They end up working two part time jobs with constant scheduling conflicts, and god help you if you have childcare needs as well. It's very consciously and deliberately designed to minimize both employee costs and their bargaining power. I mean we have freaking companies demanding non compete agreements to work in fast food.
But god forbid you raise the point that perhaps we need a political shift that removes some power from corporations and restores it to labor, you get painted as socialized nazi commie scum or whatever. It's so insane and frustrating just how good a lock these businesses have on the situation (Don't even get me started on Walmart et all).
> But god forbid you raise the point that perhaps we need a political shift that removes some power from corporations and restores it to labor, you get painted as socialized nazi commie scum or whatever. It's so insane and frustrating just how good a lock these businesses have on the situation (Don't even get me started on Walmart et all).
To rational people this should be a no brainer. turns out a lot of people are not rational. the current system is not tenable in my opinion.
The comment is absolutely correct. Small, locally owned, franchises, and family businesses do it too. Back in 2015 or 2016, I sat at a lunch with the leaders of a business advocacy organization, and they were livid that Obama raised the statutory minimum salary to $45k or whatever it was, and how they could no longer pay an immigrant “manager” to work 80+ hour weeks for $31k.
The kicker? They were children of immigrants that did the same, except their parents were lucky to have immigrated back when buying a business/land was much cheaper. Land prices are now far higher for the newer immigrants to ever be able to save enough to get in on the ownership side of the business.
Looks like the exception for students is no longer a thing:
> As of January 1, 2019 the three-hour rule applies to students (including students over 18 years of age except if the student works:
> at a children’s camp, unless the student is also a wilderness guide
> providing instruction to or supervising children, unless the student is also a wilderness guide
> in a recreational program run by a charity, unless the student is also a wilderness guide.
I can’t tell why wilderness guides in particular are so special
I can’t tell why wilderness guides in particular are so special
To start, as a backgrounder, for centuries, wilderness guides have held a special place in Canadian society. They have been revered, trusted, even give special authority and powers, which even traditional law enforcement do not possess.
In as they are so trusted, discussion, conversation about their powers and capabilities have been purged from all archives. Conversation with outsiders is typically prohibited. Yet CSEC, the RCMP, and others will surely not pay attention to so old a thread! And it will be archived, recorded, saved for future posterity.
So it is my goal to lay out much detail here, for just that purpose. I do not believe such knowledge should be kept secret, for while great good can be attributed to our guides, some are concerned that great wrong is done too.
Before I start documenting this in detail, I want to reiterate that Canadians are not typically allowed to speak of guides. Often we are caught and censured for doing so! I could barely wait for time to pass, barely wait until no one was paying attention, so was my excitement at finally having interest.
Why, if the RCMP knew I was speaking of this now, there'd be utter and complete hell to pay, I suspeci)S(Dxcv0f#
Growing worker insecurity has been a policy since Reagan, I’d argue. They were much more honest about it back in the day[1]. Now it’s just how society works to all the younger folk.
They want to hand their kids the keys via no inheritance tax and recreate a top down monarchy.
> The erratic scheduling and the "cut" shifts were a feature, not a bug, we were told. It kept employees from getting a second job that they might dare prioritize over their current job.
I always suspected that this was the reason for abusive retail scheduling. Thanks for confirming my suspicion. This should be illegal.
It's the kind of bullshit people got shot fighting against 100 years ago then we've slowly slid back over time to a different but still quite shitty place for workers. The labor movement in the US has unfortunately been neutered over time, maybe it'll make a come back now that it's becoming a bit more clear the US's fortune in the later 20th century might be more down to coming out of WW2 untouched rather than the glory and perfection of the US system.
You’re mad about the right thing (the system is rigged towards money controlling everything). Your anger has been directed in the wrong direction (immigrants, et al.).
This is a class issue. The affected classes are disproportionately weighted, but include everyone who isn’t at the top with working class laborers taking a significant brunt and undocumented immigrants getting massively exploited.
The system is doing what it was designed to do and it’s destroying itself from within.
The problem is the owners. Sowing distrust among affected groups is how they stymie class solidarity.
> Your anger has been directed in the wrong direction (immigrants, et al.).
No it's not. What gave you that idea? That I spoke a simple truth? I never said it is immigrants who are a problem or who I hate, it's the ruling class.
You are exactly the person I'm talking about -- calling me racist for daring to even discuss it. Well, not you actually, but the people who have convinced you that most of the working class are hordes of racist nazi white supremacists. I'm sure you mean well.
I feel employers should be forced to pay an extra tax, something like a dollar/euro per hour of work, for employees who are given less than 35 hours per week.
And do the same for minimum wage: an extra dollar/euro per hour for weeks where the employee works less than 35 hours.
I know there's some details to work out- vacation, employers forcing employees to say they don't want to work, and so on, but on the whole I think those could be smoothed out, and large employers wouldn't be able to get away with cheating it for long.
Conceptually great idea, but I think setting the cap of top employee compensation as a multiplier of the lowest paid employee is a better start, as well as requiring full benefits for any employee rather than a minimum. (You will have to tweak other things, and make sure to crack down on wage theft for overtime, etc, but this will remove the disincentive to hiring full time.)
It isn't so much that we want to discourage investment in food supply and other service sectors but rather to increase the living conditions of those working in them.
It will mean increased labor costs, decreased stock market profits, and a bit of inflation. I argue that for humane labor practices, this is an acceptable compromise for a civilized society.
Thinking mode you could adjust the corporate tax rate, tax on officers salaries, dividends, and capital gains to account for the lower tax rate on lower paid employees.
Would also help for the government to tax stock buybacks as profit and dividends.
> Would also help for the government to tax stock buybacks as profit and dividends.
Why? The gain from stock buy back is already captured in capital gains taxes. Simply increase the capital gains tax rate of the goal is to increase taxes collection.
In the US are forced to pay more when they work over 30 hours a week. Over 30 hours and you are considered full time and the employer is required to pay for health care. The historical accident of having healthcare attached to your job due to war time wage freezes turns out to cause lots of problems when that cost becomes a double digit percent of your wage. Seems impossible to change and we seem to just keep forcing more companies to provide healthcare instead of breaking the link.
Yeah. The actual cost of an employer group health plan is $7000 per year. If the employee has a family that's $20000 per year. Usually the employer pays for 80% of this and the remaining 20% of the premium is paid by the employee. That's another $2-9/hr.
> Are there any surprises why there are staff shortages?
Heathrow is in the UK, not in Ireland, so I'm not sure how Ireland's minimum wage, and Dublin Airport's work contracts for security, could possibly create shortages of staff at Heathrow?
In any case, the number of security staff at Heathrow isn't the bottleneck. From the article: "by the end of July, we will have as many people working in security as we had pre-pandemic".
> Heathrow is in the UK, not in Ireland, so I'm not sure how Ireland's minimum wage, and Dublin Airport's work contracts for security, could possibly create shortages of staff at Heathrow?
Of course the poster is not saying Dublin airport's wages affect staffing at Heathrow. But I think you know that.
What is happening is something called a comparison or perhaps an analogy. We are being presented with another airport with staffing shortages and then presented with a cause which possibly applies to the airport in question. But I think you know this, too.
It would be a reasonable analogy if the point made (low hourly pay combined with lack of guaranteed hours) applied to Heathrow, but it doesn't appear that it does[0]:
* The starting salary for Security Officers at Heathrow is 28% above the UK's minimum wage (12.13/hour vs 9.50/hour).
* They employ people as either full time (40 hours/week) or part time (20 hours/week). For the latter, there are two shift patterns available, but they don't seem to vary week by week.
From the article: "There are some critical functions in the airport which are still significantly under resourced, in particular ground handlers, who are contracted by airlines to provide check-in staff, load and unload bags and turnaround aircraft."
Sample of one, but this is the first result I got:
A baggage handler job in Heathrow earns £11/hour for a contracted temporary hourly job that involves probably shifts, working through half the weekends, a long commute and dealing with abusive passengers.
For relatively little money, the private terminal services offer you a very high quality stress-free experience. No need to navigate crowded airports or tow your luggage around. They’ll drive you from a comfortable lounge straight to the plane (and vice-versa). For passport control, you just sit in a comfy armchair as the border force girl comes to check your documents.
Depending on the airline and airport you depart from, your luggage will often get binned separately in order to guarantee a super fast delivery to the VIP terminal.
Well yeah, but the prices for those have actually more than doubled in the post-COVID world. Makes more sense for bigger groups, but hard to justify for many individuals who’d have previously flown private.
Why bait? Heathrow has terrible service and 400 pounds may be worth it to get normal service. It is something like bakshis in Egypt...
It pays off after couple of hours.
> Prices for the Black service start at GBP £2,750 + VAT for up to 3 persons for an arriving or departing flight, as well as those on flights connecting within 3 hours.
> Prices for the Black service start at GBP £2,750 + VAT for up to 3 persons for an arriving or departing flight, as well as those on flights connecting within 3 hours.
For perspective, LHR-JFK is around £500 return including taxes for one adult in economy, or £850 for premium economy.
People making more than $300k/yr TC aren’t exactly a small minority on HN. While the VIP service at Heathrow is unusually expensive compared to other airports, it’s really not a crazy price to avoid some very stressful hours.
In my experience, flying from/to Heathrow is no more stressful than the average day at work. If I made something crazy like $10M/year, I might consider paying those fees. As long as my compensation is at the level of mere mortals, my time is not worth even remotely that much.
My experience with Heathrow which is considerable (although not recently) is that other than a lot of walking--which is fine if you're able-bodied and your carry-on is reasonable is OK--it's mostly OK. Especially as a US citizen who was latterly able to use the electronic entry lanes.
I flew out of LHR a couple of weeks ago. The security lines were longer than I have ever seen (took ~45m to an hour total, but I forgot some sunblock in my bag and had to wait quite a while for them to search it) but it was hardly stressful. I suppose if you're tight on time and cut things fine this could become a worry but that's avoidable by getting there a bit earlier. The airport staff were pretty good about checking for people on flights that were going to close soon, too. For me spending £2750 + VAT to avoid this is absolutely crazy (it's 5 years' worth of laptops) but perhaps I don't value my time as much as others here.
I flew out last week, took 20 minutes. They are clearly understaffed, but it was smooth. My entire holiday cost £600 so not planning on taking up that offer anytime soon :P
>People making more than $300k/yr TC aren't exactly a small minority on HN. ... it's really not a crazy price...
Heathrow doesn't serve only HN users, nor only the wealthy, though. I'd wager that £2750 plus VAT is hardly "relatively little money" for the average person traveling through Heathrow.
This isn’t the “average person traveling through Heathrow” forum. This is a forum run by a big VC fund for startup billionaires and temporarily embarrassed startup billionaires.
I make more than that and still think this isn't worth it. I understand flying business on a long haul but you're not exactly saving on traffic, etc. using this service.
Ah! I took first class from NYC to London as a treat to myself once (using a RTW fare). On the flight there Keith Richards was sitting a few seats away. Cool guy, gave me shit about it being "the wrong time to use the loo" while I was waiting near the end of the flight. After we landed, he got off before everyone and got into a black car like this - I had always wondered how one goes and does that.
> They’ll drive you from a comfortable lounge straight to the plane (and vice-versa). For passport control, you just sit in a comfy armchair as the border force girl comes to check your documents.
For some airports you don't have to pay for a separate extra service for this, flying first class with the right airline at the right airport will get you that. I'm trying to remember where I did this - I think it was Taipei. Wherever it was, I didn't have a black car, but a thing resembling a baggage cart that played Fur Elise to let people know I was coming. I don't think I would use the cart service again, but the checkin experience was nice.
Is this phenomenon a psychology trick? Most folks doing bad stuff are guys, so have a hot young woman ask the questions to throw them off and make it harder to lie?
I've wondered whether it's a deliberate tactic employed by some border controls since I stepped off a plane in Canada and saw that every single one of the half-dozen folks doing our "what are you doing in Canada?" Q&A stuff was a very attractive, put-together young woman. Like, that's a hell of a coincidence if it's not intentional.
Oh, I’ve never been asked questions at the VIP terminal. Just a quick look at my passport and they tell me I’m good to go.
Regular LHR border control on the other hand used to quiz me all the time. What are you doing? Where are you staying? Who pays for your travel? What do you do for a living?
Oh, I meant at regular border control, I'm not rich enough to spend money on VIP services and not feel terrible (that is, like I really should have done something else with that money) about doing so.
Yeah, LHR immigration has some intense questioning. I have been to a lot of countries, and they leave the impression as most invasive. (The rest of Europe is very pleasant. Hong Kong was my favorite; I felt like they gave 0 fucks about who comes into their territory. I've also been yelled at in Japan because I filled out some form in blue ink instead of black ink. The immigration agent gave me a long lecture about how "I know you can read Japanese because you had a student visa, what part of black ink didn't you understand?" I said I didn't have a black pen, and they didn't have any around. That seemed to be good enough of an answer. I guess the strategy is to rile people up so they say something dumb, but I guess I had nothing to hide except my taste in pens. And I suppose they want to test that I'm who I say I am; I should be able to answer that question in Japanese if I am who my passport says I am, though gotta admit this was about 10 years after that and I was pretty rusty! The mind games are pretty transparent, though tedious after an 18 hour flight.)
US immigration is also very invasive, but I have Global Entry now and haven't spoken to immigration in years. Love it. (Customs, yeah they'll still ask you questions. Immigration questions upon arrival to the US always annoy me because I feel like I have a right to exist in my country of birth and citizenship. If I have the wrong answer to some question, where are they going to deport me to? The US? But, I don't feel like I have any right to bring in goods from abroad without paying taxes, so if people ask me those kinds of questions, it doesn't bother me.)
Don't you just get out of the car and walk up the stairs and tell the pilot you are ready to go?
Protip: have your staff book a car for your luggage, saves having to wait for someone to unload your luggage from the plane, you can just get into the waiting car on the tarmac and go.
Super protip: have your luggage shipped ahead and unpacked in advance of your arrival.
"Luggage" sounds like you bring preowned (by you, but that's barely better) things on your trip. You're already having new bedding delivered to your chateau, just have your stylist have some new tailored clothes and accessories hung in your closet when you get there.
Plus that way if there's something small (like one of the watches) you particularly like, you have a souvenir you can take home as opposed to leaving for housekeeping.
I prefer to have everything shipped back to the home office for secure destruction, nobody really would have much use for a once used bedding, or silver ware except something to sell for heroin or some other perversion.
Better to spare the staff the temptation of such sins.
Very occasionally I like to blend in and perhaps get a second use out of a Patek, the leather strap really show up the wear much more, making it an even bolder statement.
I am shocked, shocked to think that housekeeping might be stealing some of the items as opposed to destroying them. Next you'll tell me they take my half-empty bottles of Moet (the bubbles leave too quickly to get a refill out of an opened bottle) and drink it.
Europeans don't go spend their money in Britain because their currency's value doesn't make it worth it; therefore it's not worth to have many flights to accommodate them
I don't get why this is difficult: charge the airlines more money. They will charge the passengers more money.
Either there will then be fewer flights and passengers, and the existing staff count can handle it, or there will be the same number of flights and enough money to hire more staff to handle it.
Airlines are taking people's money and not delivering on flights. I'm not sure that giving them an excuse to rake even greater profits is going to help the situation.
Airports can't unilaterally raise the fees, because there are existing contracts between them and airlines. The fees will eventually rise to a stable level, but that could take months or even years.
That's also part of free markets. Sometimes you simply fail, because you took risks and the risks materialized.
That assumes a perfect, friction less economy. I'm going to make some assumptions here, but to hire a baggage handler you'll have to 1) pass a background check 2) Receive training on airport safety, 3) be trained on how to load and balance bags. That will likely to take 2-4 weeks, minimum.
Additionally, Heathrow slots are already sold, they likely can't change the price for the next 2 months anyways.
Finally, labor is a bit different then goods- if you raise the marginal cost of an orange all the oranges you've already bought don't suddenly start costing you more. If raise the wage to attract more workers you'll generally have to raise the wages of existing workers as well to retain them. This is a really bad situation if you have a lot of fixed price orders on the books (as Heathrow likely does with airlines). If you overshoot pay and hiring to fix a short term issue you can end up with a worse problem long term.
Raising prices and pay solves the shortage in the long term, but in the short term it won't fix the problem, so the 2 month cap makes sense.
Weeks? In Canada, anecdotally, it can take up to 9 months for them to clear the background checks, as the background checking offices are also dealing with high turnover.
The government has clear reasons for interfering: it's nearly a monopoly due to other airports not having enough capacity, and the same companies run multiple airports. Lower flight prices encourage international tourism which is a positive externality that the airport doesn't benefit from. Obviously, the government also controls flight capacity by not approving new runways, setting noise hours, etc.
It's a mess out there. Barcelona/Frankfurt/Munich are still solid options for connections into Europe but Amsterdam/Dublin/London/Paris are not great.
A friend of mine had to fight to get his bag in Dublin. His AirTags showed that his bag was in the baggage claim area and led him to a room where they were storing bags. He pointed it out and said, "that's mine" but was told he couldn't get it. After quite a bit of arguing he finally just walked over and took it.
I flew from AMS to SFO on the 24th of June, I flew back to Schiphol today (12th of juli) and to be honest. It was a breeze. Didn't have to wait for my luggage when picking it up. Dropping it off was a bit of a hassle but all in all it took me 1.5 hours. I had longer waits at Schiphol pre and during covid to be honest.
Of course this is just N = 2, so YMMV. But for me, I have the feeling that Schiphol is doing quite well with the amount of people.
Edit; I have to admit that on the way back I spent 15 minutes talking to the pilots and admiring the cockpit. That is probably the reason why I didn't have to wait. But even if you include those 15 minutes it really isn't much.
Glad it was smooth for you. Are they still doing the line down the outside of the terminal to check people in or have the reduction in flights kept that from being needed?
Frankfurt is absolute warzone and worst of them all, avoid it at any cost this summer. A week ago there were more heavily armed police telling people to leave the airport and find a hotel than workers.
Yeah my experiences at Frankfurt have been poor. And it's a psychotic German cop thing that basically any kind of "special" deployment means they're all toting submachine guns, even if there's zero notion of an increased threat of violence. A deeply bizarre practice.
You might have been lucky, Frankfurt is now second worse this summer in Europe (68% delayed, 7.8% canceled). Heathrow doesn't make it top the negative top10 for comparison.
I find it truly baffling how articles nowadays have three headlines: the one in the URL, the one in the page title (shown by the browser) and the actual one on the page:
> Just your daily reminder that there are no “chronic staff shortages”. There are only “below market wages”.
To be fair to the airport, it's not just pay: it's also waiting for enhanced background checks to complete, for staff to be trained, increased numbers of staff off sick, etc. etc.
The vast majority of the aviation industry even at the early of 2022 wasn't expecting the resurgence in passengers numbers that has been seen.
The industry laid off lots of staff in the pandemic. Seems a lot of those staff are not returning - if they were then training and background checks would be faster.
Good luck with that! I just spent an evening watching a commercial TV channel (in UK) and every other commercial was for booking your holiday by air. Deserted beaches, only ones at the pool, no restaurant queues.. wonderful! If you can get a flight. Yes, I realise buying ad slots are bought well in advance, but there's something dishonest about this.
Yes, there's a huge exodus every year because the UK climate is so lacking in reliable sun. It's even worse this year because people want some R & R after Covid lockdowns. For an idea of how bad it is this year, just Google "UK airport chaos".
One big issue is self-inflicted: Heathrow (maybe all of UK) steadfastly refuse to implement one-stop-security, so everyone transiting goes through x-ray and gets their carryon re-scanned.
Much of this is whipsaw effect. First the pandemic dramatically dropped air traffic, then recovery saw relatively high rates of travel return. Staffing would be pressed to keep up even if wages were good.
One interesting tidbit that I forgot about... Heathrow is heavily slot controlled. The options the airport is giving airlines is:
1) Cancel flights
2) Operate with lower loads on the existing flights
#1 is the best option as it reduces the number of staff needed on the ground and in the air but airlines are likely going to go with #2 because they don't want to risk this edict from the airport going on long enough to threaten their slots. And regulators are not budging. They actually come out and said that any slots not used, even for capacity reasons, will be returned and are not exempt.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 381 ms ] threadDoesn't seem that dramatic?
Should I flag this post? Feels a bit over the top. At the same time I can't downvote it. shrug
To me, clickbait is along the lines of "10 ways to lose 100lbs in 1 hour!" and it's an article about throwing out two 50lb weights. Or otherwise where the title is clearly not representative of the article itself.
But here we have...
>Effectively immediately, Heathrow has requested:
-the closure for sale of all flights departing from the airport until 11th September
- a reduction in the current passenger cap from 101,500 to 100,000
That seems to match the title exactly? Which part is clickbait? Or what has changed in the definition of clickbait that I'm too out of touch to have learned?
That usually leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of the reader.
Because the title is almost a word for word copy of the actual announcement, straight from the CEOs mouth.
Is this unprecedented at Heathrow, or normal course of action? Will the average Heathrow traveler or prospective traveler a face any consequence anything from this news?
Some of the items do seem like they would impact travelers and potential travelers, so I would not classify it as clickbait yet. Unless I found out this was every summer.
But if this article means that people should avoid Heathrow because the experience will be worse than prior years, then I would say this is relevant news to share with the public.
but the "clickbait" bit is the dramatic title, weak definition of perhaps, but its still excessive
example of level reporting: https://news.sky.com/story/new-summer-holiday-threat-as-heat...
I am genuinely perplexed as to how someone could get that from this title.
>"Kaye’s solution is to cap Heathrow passenger numbers at 100,000 per day for the Summer period" ... "the closure for sale of all flights departing from the airport until 11th September a reduction in the current passenger cap from 101,500 to 100,000"
meaning every day until 9/11 1.5k people aren't getting a seat they paid for
https://nos.nl/artikel/2433371-klm-schrapt-7000-stoelen-per-...
My understanding is that based on existing sales alone, there are already 101,500 passengers/day. And in order to get 100,000, they have asked airlines to not sell any more tickets at all.
If you imagine that airlines were previously planning to sell a further 20,000 tickets per day, and they cut that down to 0-100 per day, that's a huge drop that is sure to impact anyone looking to buy tickets at this time.
You WILL lose your luggage and it will take days to get it back! DAYS! If you HAVE to, make sure to have enough supplies in your carry-on.
(This is also how airport lounge abuse is done.)
Often the biggest impediment to getting lost luggage back is finding out where in the airport it actually is.
... Turns out, they move "military looking" (lol, pelican) boxes to a separate spot instead of running them on the carousel. I'd have had it in minutes if I remembered to check the tag first.
Have considered its a tastier looking target for thieves, but esp in Asia they seem to have no idea what it is at all.
I hit up 2 Apple Stores and a few authorized resellers in my area and everyone was out of stock. I ordered mine online and it still took a few weeks to get it.
I could not find a reference reliable enough to quote here, but I would be surprised if any major airport loses more than a few percent of checked luggage. So you will most likely not lose your luggage.
It certainly wasn't this bad last time I flew via there (pre-pandemic, I'm not a regular flier), but something needs to be done, for sure.
Its because its not fully-automated.
If you keep an eye out, you'll spot an officer sitting in a booth with a couple of LCD screens.
They are actually touch screens showing a grid of mugshots of the people passing through the gates.
Officer needs to tap his finger on your mugshot to open the gate.
Hence if its a busy day, or the officer is eating a donut, you'll get the sucky delay experience.
Obviously there is little public information available, but there is one public document that makes some vague hints about what a "Monitoring Officer" does, including a reference about requiring being logged into a "Monitoring Terminal". See here[1].
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
It was great, walk in, no need to fish out a passport, 5 seconds later you walked through, and because it was frequent flyers only you didn't have grandma still wearing sunglasses, or dropping her passport, or putting her boarding card in, etc.
I measured the "e-passport" queue at Paris last time I got the train to London. There were 5 gates, on average each one took 45 seconds to process someone, the fastest being 31 seconds, the slowest over a minute before rejecting them
That's 1 person every 9 seconds, or 400 per hour. The hourly train has 900 seats. That simply doesn't work.
But, what I don't understand, why the hate on the e passport gates? I really like them at Schiphol. There are usually about 8 of them and in my experience there are always more egates open then actual officers. And they are on par or faster than an officer.
Could it be more efficient? yes. But, if the alternative is an old fashioned officer this is better.
1) People don't like them when they total throughput turns out to be less than before, which tends to be the case - especially when people notice them. This is quite common as they often replace 1 passport officer with 1 e-passport machine.
2) As a user they are more difficult to use, and no faster. For me, manual passport control into my home country involves dropping my passport on the desk with one hand, standing for 20 seconds, then leaving. For e-gates it means opening it up (usually a two handed process), sliding into a reader, making sure the crinkly passport bit doesn't scrunch up, wait, wait, wait, half the time get told to reinsert, wait again, look at a camera, wait, wait, then about 1 in 4 times get rejected and have to do the manual process
3) For the minority of people who had iris, they replaced a system which was better for the user in all ways
Iris itself was of course a security issue - it was no longer something you have + something you are, it was just something you are, which was the beauty. Have too many people on the system and you get false positives and end up with a tremendous mess
Of course the best innovation in passport control in the UK would be to join Schengen, so we don't need passport control for the majority of arrivals into the UK. Would save a fortune and make everyones lives easier.
So it clearly isn’t the cause of airport chaos, but it can’t be helpful.
Of course the direct answer is "inadequate staff" but the next question is why is that so much more now? Why aren't the airports doing more to entice workers like perhaps better benefits, pay or flexibility? Are airports already operating at thin margins? (If anyone from the aero industry could comment that would be great!) Did they overestimate the downturn due to covid? Are traffic volumes legitimately larger than what was expected/predicted in 2022 (even ignoring covid's drop)?
When travel picked back up they tried to employ people. They failed because
1) Brexit -- many people who were laid off in the UK returned to their country of origin
2) Security clearance -- there is a massive backlog getting security clearance (for things like airside passes) in the UK
BA ground crew were recently on strike because they're being paid less than they were in 2019 for the same job (which was already a low wage), even before inflation. There's better jobs to go to with better hours and better conditions.
I suspect BA and co are hoping to get some form of P&O style deal where they can employ people who aren't UK citizens in the airports on a low wage that someone with full access to the labour market wouldn't take.
The current high level of employment means people are able to choose to not do that kind of undesirable work.
When Airports and Airlines do manage to find staff to fill the jobs, they have to go through a government background check process for security reasons. That process has a huge backlog at the moment.
Simple: here in Germany, all workers at airports authorized to enter controlled zones have to pass an extensive background check, a process that takes 3-4 months under normal conditions [1]. During COVID, a lot of these workers were laid off instead of being placed under the employment protection program or left entirely since the Kurzarbeit only paid out 60% of already extremely low wages (14€/h for baggage handlers, [0]). They found other employment and won't come back - to make it worse, airports are usually well outside the city borders, so there's an awful lot of commute involved at a time when public transport doesn't run as well.
> Why aren't the airports doing more to entice workers like perhaps better benefits, pay or flexibility?
There has been a continuous pressure on costs everywhere at airports, which means the airports themselves have not much flexibility on raising fees to account for increased costs, and the companies providing the services like baggage handling, refueling and whatever usually won their contracts by tender which means they are locked in as well by law.
[0] https://de.talent.com/salary?job=flughafen
[1] https://www.luftsicherheitsschulung-online.de/faq-beantragun...
Our governments (that all signed the Paris agreement) should be happy and seize the opportunity to let airports raise taxes, let service providers renegotiate and pay their staff more, and make low cost flights a little less cheap.
That is impossible, they cannot raise the agreed-upon rates without terminating the contract and holding a fully new tender process. Contract termination would require agreement of both parties, but no vendor would ever agree to the termination of a contract if they could not be sure to win the new tender.
This literally means "how much do you earn as an airport in Germany". The answer is 2194€. Made me laugh.
Makes me wonder how many minutes of actual investigation take place in those months.
Seems like there was serious opportunity for process improvement all along that was never done, and now things went from bad to worse.
[1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/luftsig/__7.html
The London bombings on July 7th 2005 (or 7/7 as they were known) were a big thing in the UK obviously.
Not to Sky Sports though, who posted on July 7th
"In honour of 7/7, who's the first player you think of"
To really grasp dates like 9/11 or 7/7 you'd have to have been at least say 10 years old at the time. The 20 year old intern posting the sky sports tweet would have been 3 at the time and wouldn't associate the date. People under the age of 30 wouldn't remember 9/11 like the rest of the world did, and it did have a massive affect on the whole world - not least because of the response to it (unlike say March 11th 2004 in Madrid)
*at their current price point
At Dublin Airport, security staff are only guaranteed 20 hours per week, need to be available for 40 hours per week, and entry level workers are paid €14.14 per hour.
Guaranteed pay: €282.80 per week, i.e. 67% of the minimum wage.
Are there any surprises why there are staff shortages?
1. https://extra.ie/2022/03/31/news/daa-taoiseach-criticised-du...
The only thing that was keeping this jobs in place is imperfect knowledge. Most job seekers have a limited knowledge as only know their own past jobs and the ones from close people (and to talk about pay is quite taboo in many countries). And that is how we got here. Even when there is public information, many people have a hard time understanding the implications of the statistics and concrete job differences.
Corporations have thousands of data points and share salary statistics between them.
Staying at home and even firings have helped some people to gain that knowledge.
In these sort of things, your direct manager probably doesn't even know what you make. There is a tight pay band set by HR and virtually no room for differentiation between employees. There is no mechanism in most roles to truly be rewarded for going the extra mile. The only surefire way to increase your takings is to be active in the employment marketplace and always looking for a better deal.
Working for someone is like this old Seinfeld bit[0], if you want to be rewarded you have to get someone to agree to it before you do the work, once the project is delivered and they are satiated they won't be feeling as generous. "We don't need labor now why are we giving this guy a raise?"
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-hk5turqgA
Can you share some details on where you're getting this data? I'd like to dig into it more.
Imperfect information certainly is a thing, but many public jobs have public wage information. Large corporate jobs also have public wage information (say a delivery driver or warehouse worker -- everyone knows what Amazon is paying for these positions). Claiming people stay in these jobs due to ignorance goes against my experience growing up poor, where my parents and their peers constantly hunted for better paying jobs.
I don't know anything about Ireland, but a quick Google for "ireland jobs" leads me to https://ie.indeed.com/jobs-in-Ireland where I can clearly see wages and salaries for many positions.
When you were younger, it was worth it to work. Today basic wage often does not even cover rent and other living expenses. You loose money by working.
To get some perspective go to www.daft.ie and try to find studion near airport...
And that's a segment of people who ought to be very good at using technology to find out that kind of stuff. I would be very surprised if this didn't hold for most other fields. I'd expect the only markets in which this kind of thing isn't common is ones that are extremely comp-focused (finance, say, and maybe sales).
I agree that white collar jobs obfuscate salaries and that power dynamic overwhelmingly favors employers.
That isn't the situation with lower paying jobs, especially ones that aren't salaried, which was what the OP was about. Those low skill jobs (I'd argue baggage handler making minimum wage at the airport to be in that category) openly list wages on the advertisement. Thinking those folks stay in their jobs due to the same information asymmetry is what I'm questioning.
It's not just knowledge. Many of these jobs are TIRING jobs because you are physically on your feet a lot. You just don't have the energy to go looking for another job at the end of the day.
The break COVID gave people was a huge boon to job mobility.
This I think is part of the huge problem with modern "low level"/minimum wage jobs. Companies don't pay enough to live of of one salary but expect to have full say over their employees time just for their own convenience in scheduling and staffing.
What's needed is some kind of harsh punishment for including unenforceable contract clauses, coupled with awareness from the side of the employee.
I think there needs to be some sort of law against known unenforceable contract provisions. They seem to be pretty commonly used against individuals where they are unlikely to know what is and isn't enforceable.
We were thrilled by what we'd found! It would be a quick and easy fix for the client: they had solid and reliable sales forecasts for each location so estimating the number of employees they'd need on a given day wasn't going to be difficult. In fact, they were more or less already doing it. It would hardly cost them anything to implement aside from a few tweaks to the corporate scheduling tool and a bit of training for the store managers. So when management immediately shot down our proposed solution it came as a bit of shock. The erratic scheduling and the "cut" shifts were a feature, not a bug, we were told. It kept employees from getting a second job that they might dare prioritize over their current job.
But god forbid you raise the point that perhaps we need a political shift that removes some power from corporations and restores it to labor, you get painted as socialized nazi commie scum or whatever. It's so insane and frustrating just how good a lock these businesses have on the situation (Don't even get me started on Walmart et all).
To rational people this should be a no brainer. turns out a lot of people are not rational. the current system is not tenable in my opinion.
The kicker? They were children of immigrants that did the same, except their parents were lucky to have immigrated back when buying a business/land was much cheaper. Land prices are now far higher for the newer immigrants to ever be able to save enough to get in on the ownership side of the business.
http://www.ontario.ca/document/your-guide-employment-standar...
> As of January 1, 2019 the three-hour rule applies to students (including students over 18 years of age except if the student works:
> at a children’s camp, unless the student is also a wilderness guide > providing instruction to or supervising children, unless the student is also a wilderness guide > in a recreational program run by a charity, unless the student is also a wilderness guide.
I can’t tell why wilderness guides in particular are so special
To start, as a backgrounder, for centuries, wilderness guides have held a special place in Canadian society. They have been revered, trusted, even give special authority and powers, which even traditional law enforcement do not possess.
In as they are so trusted, discussion, conversation about their powers and capabilities have been purged from all archives. Conversation with outsiders is typically prohibited. Yet CSEC, the RCMP, and others will surely not pay attention to so old a thread! And it will be archived, recorded, saved for future posterity.
So it is my goal to lay out much detail here, for just that purpose. I do not believe such knowledge should be kept secret, for while great good can be attributed to our guides, some are concerned that great wrong is done too.
Before I start documenting this in detail, I want to reiterate that Canadians are not typically allowed to speak of guides. Often we are caught and censured for doing so! I could barely wait for time to pass, barely wait until no one was paying attention, so was my excitement at finally having interest.
Why, if the RCMP knew I was speaking of this now, there'd be utter and complete hell to pay, I suspeci)S(Dxcv0f#
<NO CARRIER>
>It kept employees from getting a second job that they might dare prioritize over their current job.
I mean, clearly it fucking didn't.
They want to hand their kids the keys via no inheritance tax and recreate a top down monarchy.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...
I always suspected that this was the reason for abusive retail scheduling. Thanks for confirming my suspicion. This should be illegal.
You’re mad about the right thing (the system is rigged towards money controlling everything). Your anger has been directed in the wrong direction (immigrants, et al.).
This is a class issue. The affected classes are disproportionately weighted, but include everyone who isn’t at the top with working class laborers taking a significant brunt and undocumented immigrants getting massively exploited.
The system is doing what it was designed to do and it’s destroying itself from within.
The problem is the owners. Sowing distrust among affected groups is how they stymie class solidarity.
No it's not. What gave you that idea? That I spoke a simple truth? I never said it is immigrants who are a problem or who I hate, it's the ruling class.
You are exactly the person I'm talking about -- calling me racist for daring to even discuss it. Well, not you actually, but the people who have convinced you that most of the working class are hordes of racist nazi white supremacists. I'm sure you mean well.
They want to shave a lot of pennies for themselves by playing musical chairs with our agency.
And do the same for minimum wage: an extra dollar/euro per hour for weeks where the employee works less than 35 hours.
I know there's some details to work out- vacation, employers forcing employees to say they don't want to work, and so on, but on the whole I think those could be smoothed out, and large employers wouldn't be able to get away with cheating it for long.
It isn't so much that we want to discourage investment in food supply and other service sectors but rather to increase the living conditions of those working in them.
It will mean increased labor costs, decreased stock market profits, and a bit of inflation. I argue that for humane labor practices, this is an acceptable compromise for a civilized society.
Would also help for the government to tax stock buybacks as profit and dividends.
Why? The gain from stock buy back is already captured in capital gains taxes. Simply increase the capital gains tax rate of the goal is to increase taxes collection.
Heathrow is in the UK, not in Ireland, so I'm not sure how Ireland's minimum wage, and Dublin Airport's work contracts for security, could possibly create shortages of staff at Heathrow?
In any case, the number of security staff at Heathrow isn't the bottleneck. From the article: "by the end of July, we will have as many people working in security as we had pre-pandemic".
Of course the poster is not saying Dublin airport's wages affect staffing at Heathrow. But I think you know that.
What is happening is something called a comparison or perhaps an analogy. We are being presented with another airport with staffing shortages and then presented with a cause which possibly applies to the airport in question. But I think you know this, too.
* The starting salary for Security Officers at Heathrow is 28% above the UK's minimum wage (12.13/hour vs 9.50/hour).
* They employ people as either full time (40 hours/week) or part time (20 hours/week). For the latter, there are two shift patterns available, but they don't seem to vary week by week.
[0] - https://encd.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/CandidateExperienc...
But the intent was clear.
Sample of one, but this is the first result I got:
A baggage handler job in Heathrow earns £11/hour for a contracted temporary hourly job that involves probably shifts, working through half the weekends, a long commute and dealing with abusive passengers.
https://www.totaljobs.com/job/baggage-handler/buzz-recruitme...
Perhaps different roles are affected, but I suspect Dublin and Heathrow have staff shortages for similar reasons.
1) pay and conditions relative to other options (which your example illustrates)
2) the system's inability to react quickly to changes in required throughput, because hiring and training takes at least a few weeks(?)
I wonder what's the dominant reason for today's situation, when Heathrow worked fine before the pandemic?
A) Potential workers have better options (or better information about options) than they did before the pandemic?
B) The airport and airlines failed to forecast accurately enough?
C) Some other type of 'bug' in the system of management?
D) Something else?
Same goes for Schiphol https://www.schiphol.nl/en/page/schiphol-vip-service/
For relatively little money, the private terminal services offer you a very high quality stress-free experience. No need to navigate crowded airports or tow your luggage around. They’ll drive you from a comfortable lounge straight to the plane (and vice-versa). For passport control, you just sit in a comfy armchair as the border force girl comes to check your documents.
Depending on the airline and airport you depart from, your luggage will often get binned separately in order to guarantee a super fast delivery to the VIP terminal.
Kind of pricy, source: https://www.heathrowvip.com/s/faqs
€200. Now we're talking!
> Prices for the Black service start at GBP £2,750 + VAT for up to 3 persons for an arriving or departing flight, as well as those on flights connecting within 3 hours.
For perspective, LHR-JFK is around £500 return including taxes for one adult in economy, or £850 for premium economy.
On what planet? It costs £2750 plus VAT, sometimes I think I live in a different universe than HN posters
2750 pound? Maybe if you made $3 million a year.
Heathrow doesn't serve only HN users, nor only the wealthy, though. I'd wager that £2750 plus VAT is hardly "relatively little money" for the average person traveling through Heathrow.
I think most people would balk at the price. If it was 30 quid it would be reasonable.
> They’ll drive you from a comfortable lounge straight to the plane (and vice-versa). For passport control, you just sit in a comfy armchair as the border force girl comes to check your documents.
For some airports you don't have to pay for a separate extra service for this, flying first class with the right airline at the right airport will get you that. I'm trying to remember where I did this - I think it was Taipei. Wherever it was, I didn't have a black car, but a thing resembling a baggage cart that played Fur Elise to let people know I was coming. I don't think I would use the cart service again, but the checkin experience was nice.
Is this phenomenon a psychology trick? Most folks doing bad stuff are guys, so have a hot young woman ask the questions to throw them off and make it harder to lie?
I've wondered whether it's a deliberate tactic employed by some border controls since I stepped off a plane in Canada and saw that every single one of the half-dozen folks doing our "what are you doing in Canada?" Q&A stuff was a very attractive, put-together young woman. Like, that's a hell of a coincidence if it's not intentional.
Regular LHR border control on the other hand used to quiz me all the time. What are you doing? Where are you staying? Who pays for your travel? What do you do for a living?
US immigration is also very invasive, but I have Global Entry now and haven't spoken to immigration in years. Love it. (Customs, yeah they'll still ask you questions. Immigration questions upon arrival to the US always annoy me because I feel like I have a right to exist in my country of birth and citizenship. If I have the wrong answer to some question, where are they going to deport me to? The US? But, I don't feel like I have any right to bring in goods from abroad without paying taxes, so if people ask me those kinds of questions, it doesn't bother me.)
So just like the Tom Brady method of avoiding sexual harassment[1]
[1] https://youtu.be/PxuUkYiaUc8
Protip: have your staff book a car for your luggage, saves having to wait for someone to unload your luggage from the plane, you can just get into the waiting car on the tarmac and go.
Super protip: have your luggage shipped ahead and unpacked in advance of your arrival.
Plus that way if there's something small (like one of the watches) you particularly like, you have a souvenir you can take home as opposed to leaving for housekeeping.
Better to spare the staff the temptation of such sins.
Very occasionally I like to blend in and perhaps get a second use out of a Patek, the leather strap really show up the wear much more, making it an even bolder statement.
Edit: Y'all really think they would have limited flights in touristic high season if the Euro was what it was 2-3 years ago? Please!
Either there will then be fewer flights and passengers, and the existing staff count can handle it, or there will be the same number of flights and enough money to hire more staff to handle it.
This is how a free market economy works, right?
That's also part of free markets. Sometimes you simply fail, because you took risks and the risks materialized.
Additionally, Heathrow slots are already sold, they likely can't change the price for the next 2 months anyways.
Finally, labor is a bit different then goods- if you raise the marginal cost of an orange all the oranges you've already bought don't suddenly start costing you more. If raise the wage to attract more workers you'll generally have to raise the wages of existing workers as well to retain them. This is a really bad situation if you have a lot of fixed price orders on the books (as Heathrow likely does with airlines). If you overshoot pay and hiring to fix a short term issue you can end up with a worse problem long term.
Raising prices and pay solves the shortage in the long term, but in the short term it won't fix the problem, so the 2 month cap makes sense.
Edit: though for their part, the airline companies have been warning that prices are going up for a few months now.
The government has clear reasons for interfering: it's nearly a monopoly due to other airports not having enough capacity, and the same companies run multiple airports. Lower flight prices encourage international tourism which is a positive externality that the airport doesn't benefit from. Obviously, the government also controls flight capacity by not approving new runways, setting noise hours, etc.
A friend of mine had to fight to get his bag in Dublin. His AirTags showed that his bag was in the baggage claim area and led him to a room where they were storing bags. He pointed it out and said, "that's mine" but was told he couldn't get it. After quite a bit of arguing he finally just walked over and took it.
Of course this is just N = 2, so YMMV. But for me, I have the feeling that Schiphol is doing quite well with the amount of people.
Edit; I have to admit that on the way back I spent 15 minutes talking to the pilots and admiring the cockpit. That is probably the reason why I didn't have to wait. But even if you include those 15 minutes it really isn't much.
> heathrow-tells-all-airlines-to-stop-selling-any-flights-until-11th-september
> Heathrow tells BA (and other airlines) to stop selling tickets for the Summer period
> SOLD OUT: Heathrow tells all airlines to stop selling ANY flights until 11th September
Isn't that just much more work for so little "benefit" (SEO?)
Anyway, now none of them match the title on HN, so I have no answer to your question.
Second, if you’re a baggage handler your only wary to improve your conditions of through labor organization.
To be fair to the airport, it's not just pay: it's also waiting for enhanced background checks to complete, for staff to be trained, increased numbers of staff off sick, etc. etc.
The vast majority of the aviation industry even at the early of 2022 wasn't expecting the resurgence in passengers numbers that has been seen.
1) Cancel flights 2) Operate with lower loads on the existing flights
#1 is the best option as it reduces the number of staff needed on the ground and in the air but airlines are likely going to go with #2 because they don't want to risk this edict from the airport going on long enough to threaten their slots. And regulators are not budging. They actually come out and said that any slots not used, even for capacity reasons, will be returned and are not exempt.