Trump's shutdown is 'unraveling' the aviation system -- and soon planes will stop flying: union reps

[bdamomma]

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/01/trumps-shutdown-is-unraveling-the-aviation-system-and-soon-planes-will-stop-flying-union-reps/

snip of article:

Dan McCabe, representative of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association and Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants, told CNN Monday they weren’t satisfied with President Donald Trump’s supposed border security compromise and demanded he end his shutdown before people get hurt.

“We know all too well what it means when you have gaps in security,” said Nelson. “The TSA was created after 9/11, when I lost my friends, our country shut down, airplanes stopped flying, and we had a massive economic impact from that.”

another snip of article:

“Federal workers cannot cash ‘thank yous,'” chimed in Nelson, slamming Trump’s statement of gratitude for unpaid workers still on the job. “They can’t even put a tank of gas in their car to get to work. As this starts to crumble and unravel, we’re going to see mass flight cancellations, we’re going to see a system that completely unravels and falls apart.”

“We are days away when the planes stop flying,” she added. “Our members’ jobs are hurt but packages don’t get to trucks that get loaded on those trucks and get to our communities, and medicines don’t get to the hospitals to treat people in those hospitals. No one is going to get away from this unscathed.”


tRump is breaking the country, so will air travel just be privatized?? this is horrible this cannot happen.
tRump is our greatest threat, don't they get that??? Oh Stephen Miller he needs to be pulled into this.

[UniteFightBack]

1. If they are 'days away' then there is one group that could end this in a couple of hours and that

is the aviation dept. I would give rump a heads up...if you don't sign it by X....we walking out, choice is yours.

[bdamomma]

2. I hate this

this could affect a lot of people. Today is a holiday is there any business being done to stop this.

[Goodheart]

6. And EVERYBODY in this country apart from trumplodytes would see a walkout as entirely reasonable.

"We can't cash 'thank you's'".

[pangaia]

15. He will not care

Only CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS or the CABINET can stop him.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

36. There is no such thing as an "aviation department."

There are individual unions, which can strike only if their contracts are violated by their employer, the airline. The exception is the air traffic controllers, who can't strike because it's illegal. They tried it in 1981 and they were all fired.

[UniteFightBack]

45. Well if there was some way for them to all work in concert..or everybody except the

air traffic controllers then. I know it's wishful thinking I just want rump stopped this moment!

[cwydro]

76. Aviation dept?

To whom are you referring?

[spinbaby]

3. Putin is thrilled

Trump worked out better than he could have imagined.

[Duppers]

26. +100

[dixiegrrrrl]

72. Yep.

The unreasonableness of his wall demand/price was a giveaway. He made it impossible for Dems to agree, I am hoping they know the real plan as well.

[YessirAtsaFact]

4. Airline pilots could strike in solidarity with wait traffic controllers

That would end the shutdown

[pangaia]

16. I doubt it.

That is part of the goal of destroying the US of A.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

34. Air traffic controllers can't strike; it's illegal. PATCO tried it in 1981

and Reagan fired all of them. It caused a mess even then, when there was a lot less air travel. I don't think it will happen again.

[YessirAtsaFact]

38. I'm talking about a strike in sympathy for ATC

Not the ATC striking.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

40. The pilots couldn't strike either, because the law allows a strike only if

the employer (the airline) violates their contract. Also, airline labor law is governed by the Railway Labor Act, which doesn't allow a strike until several layers of mediation and cooling-off periods have occurred first. It's a slow, complicated process. Any strike that didn't follow these procedures would be an illegal wildcat strike. In short, pilots can't legally strike in sympathy for what the government is doing to someone else.

[YessirAtsaFact]

48. I didn't say it was legal but if air travel stops

This ridiculous shutdown stops.

It’s the only thing I can see that would move OrangeTurd. He doesn’t care about the workers not being paid. In fact his sick, cruel ass probably enjoys the suffering caused by the shutdown.

[KY_EnviroGuy]

61. The question though is one of public safety BEFORE a labor action.

In '81, I think the disagreement was over the union's demand for more money, and the government claimed that if they struck, the public safety would thereafter be in danger.

Here, we have a group that's rightfully saying the public will soon be endangered if nothing changes, so that a work slowdown or stoppage is justified for public safety's sake so that controllers can get rest and do their job without undue stress.

If they have not already, it would seem wise for the controllers to sue the government for reckless endangerment toward the general public. And, the thing that reinforces that case is that they were very short-handed prior to this event.

It's hard to believe our courts wouldn't stand behind them if they reach a point of stress where they no longer can function.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

63. Labor contracts are agreements between the union and the employer.

An airline employees' union can strike if the employer violates the contract - but only after weeks and weeks of mediation under the RLA, if they are airline employees. And there's another wrinkle to the RLA: The president can cancel a strike if the strike is causing significant harm to interstate travel. You really think Trump wouldn't call off an airline strike?

Likewise, the air traffic controllers' union's contract is between the union and its employer, the FAA - not the federal government in general. If the FAA violates the contract there are some negotiating procedures but the controllers can't strike. The principle of sovereign immunity would also prohibit them from suing the government.

[bluestarone]

68. Agree BUT

NO ONE should have to work in an UNSAFE environment? That would be my argument to the company. Also safety of the general public.

[KY_EnviroGuy]

70. So, the question remains....

if the air traffic controllers as a group feel current conditions prevent them from doing their job in a manner that protects travelers (and those on the ground) from crashes and/or near-misses, what can they do?

And, if an accident does occur, who's ass will be held to account?

One thing I am sure of: while working in heavy industry for many years (retired now), we were told many times that if we observe a situation involving safety on a job site where it was likely someone (even just one person) could get hurt and didn't report it, we could potentially be held liable if there was a serious accident.

[bdamomma]

5. don't these jerks tRump, Miller and his regime

realize how much money they are loosing, since they are all for the almighty dollar.

[dewsgirl]

7. The article goes on to state, medications, various other life saving goods will be affected by this.

[bdamomma]

9. this is sickening

holding everyone hostage, for his fucking wall, he met his obligation of breaking the US for Putin. Or is tRump being blackmailed and also put in the horrible McConnell thugs.

[dewsgirl]

11. Carl Berstein said, he has sources Mueller has info that Trump is intentionally helping Putin

Destabilize the US. Before the last week, I felt like a conspiracy theorist saying this. What if Putin has asked him to do this? And it isn't about a wall at all?

[peggysue2]

23. I don't know that Putin specifically asked for this but . . .

Russia's state TV people are high-fiving the action, predicting that the end of America is in sight.

[bdamomma]

42. nt

to fucking to Russia. They have crap, and their people have nothing.

[greymattermom]

55. So why don't our networks show that?

It's easy to caption, and hearing it from them might make a difference.

[Delmette2.0]

58. $$$$$$ Viewers $$$$$advertising $$$$$$ ratings$$$$

[dewsgirl]

60. There is a lot they don't air, that is fact. They seem to ease the audience into

certain scenarios.

[peggysue2]

62. I can't answer that question but I posted a clip about the Russian attitude . . .

around ten days ago. See here:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100211653688

This was when Trumpski was threatening a State of Emergency.

I think it's safe to say anything that sows chaos here is greeted favorably by Putin. He may be Donald's bud but he's no friend of the United States. I also think it's safe to say that anything appearing on Russian State TV is with Putin's blessing.

But yes, airing this and other gleeful reactions abroad from unfriendly places might make a difference. But then there are goobers running around with sweatshirts saying: Better Russian than Libtard or waving banners--Thank you, Russia. Or Donald Trump himself claiming the Chinese President and his officials have more integrity than Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer.

The real rot is running from the head. In the land of the blind and deaf gathering and presenting persuasive evidence is going to be really, really tough. Because the easy, knee-jerk reaction currently is: Fake News, Fake News.

[triron]

64. Many Americans are easily duped. We've been dumbed down.

[bdamomma]

67. dumbed down

for a very long time, what better way to control the masses, keep them ignorant.

[OMGWTF]

59. A Russian Oligarch who owns steel mills in the USA would make a killing.

https://crooksandliars.com/2018/12/guess-who-likely-profit-if-trump-gets-his

IMPEACH THE MOTHERFKER ALREADY and PAY THE COAST GUARD!

[UniteFightBack]

66. Well Carl Bernstein is saying that not Alex Jones so I listen to what you are saying with a keen

ear. This HAS to be what is going on...all the private meetings..??

Now I don't think this wall thing is about Putin, this is about his political survival. But yes I believe they have
very good intel on this fake prezident....especially after they opened up that counter intel investigation...lord knows what they have been hearing but perhaps rump is helping them out massively and givin them an earful.

Who is that person Sarah something...I'm sorry, but she said this is an international crime syndicate and dumb ass rump is gonna expose it.

[MoonRiver]

35. Don't forget transplant organs!

[malaise]

8. The only way to end the shut down is to

shut it all down

[bdamomma]

10. Malaise

will it work to end this despicable vile, vengeful actions.

[malaise]

12. Yep

It will

[Texin]

18. Are you so sure of that?

Shitler will pull a play from Reagan's old playbook. He'll fire the ATCs and any other unionized strikers within the industry and privatize everything. That'll cripple the industry for a while and it will guarantee that the workers that are hired are not properly vetted and many won't have the experience to safely populate it.

[cagefreesoylentgreen]

75. If he wants 4-6 hour lines at the airport

New personnel wouldn’t have the hundreds to thousands of x-ray experience a typical TSA officer has. Nor any experience with proper bag search procedures for carry-ons or checked bags. The only solution would be full bag dumps and search all items in every bag for every passenger. So you’d be looking at 4-6 hour waits in a moderately busy large airport and lots of people and bags missing their flight.

[Takket]

13. Eventually the pilots union is going to walk out

Those people didn’t screw around. If they feel the lives of their passengers are in danger from insufficient screening, inspections or air traffic control, they won’t fly.

If the airlines shut down this will all end in a day.

[Scarsdale]

14. As long as the tRump

family can fly, what do they care? The "most bullied woman in the country" Maleria, just flew to Florida for a well-earned vacation. Yeah, right. Vacation from what, plastic surgery, Botox injections?

[TrishaJ]

21. However, it will be Mitch McConnell

and Senate Repugs that will get the pressure put on them when the airlines shut down. It is clear by now that Trump does not care and will not budge because that will make him a "loser" and Democrats a "winner." That's. his whole philosophy of "making deals." McConnell will have to let a vote on the House passed CR take place AND he will have to allow a second vote to override the veto.

[elmac]

24. Everyone will be grounded, even the rich, so there will be a breaking point but

it will take another week or two to reach it.

[Heartstrings]

51. Great! Have flights bought and paid for to fly to Thailand on 2-11

Wonder if trip cancellation insurance covers "government shut down flight cancellations".....

So, we sit in limbo....I hate that orange mf!

[cwydro]

77. I'm flying internationally on February 2.

No idea what’s going to happen.

[Nay]

79. I'm flying within the US on the 11th -- I have no idea whether I will be able

to get on a plane.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

52. Even AF1 is controlled by ATC. It can't take off or land or go anywhere

without an ATC clearance. So if ATC is understaffed or is staffed by stress-out or overworked controllers AF1 is in danger as much as any other airplane.

[pangaia]

17. I don't believe that for a minute.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

69. Big problem with that idea: Airline labor relations are governed by

the Railway Labor Act, which makes it difficult for airline unions to strike. There are a whole series of procedures (mediation, arbitration, cooling-off periods, etc.) that must be followed before a strike can be called, and these take weeks, even months. And all of these procedures address only the question of whether the employer, that is the airline, has violated the contract. If it isn't the employer that's causing the problem, the RLA procedures don't provide any remedy. And then, even if eventually a strike does take place, the president has the authority to cancel it and force the employees back to work.

[kimbutgar]

19. Was going to fly to Arizona but am driving instead because of the orange maggots shutdown

I bet there are a lot of people rethinking travel plans and business trips.

Our country is being destroyed by a bankrupt evil despicable person. He needs to go. And the repuke party needs to be voted out in 2020.

[shockey80]

20. How much more can the government workers take?

If the government is killing you all bets should be off. That's how I see it.

[Texin]

22. This could create a catastrophic and cascading series of crises.

I guess I haven't really thought about all the mail and packages that companies rely on being delivered quickly by air. This could bankrupt the likes of the Amazons and all the online commodities that are bought and sold online, in addition to those that are stocked on shelves in stores nationwide and abroad. This will definitely start impacting businesses up and down the supply chain from manufactured items to be used in the production automobiles to produce and seafood supplies that restaurants rely on.

[elmac]

25. well, the wall street barometer keeps saying clear skys ahead

so the banksters must be ok with all of this.

[at140]

33. Stock market is the canary in coal mine

Signs of economic problems will show up on stock market faster than Jimmy John's sandwich delivery..

[Nasruddin]

54. expectation barometer

It's a measure of hopes, dreams, & sometimes wishful thinking about future growth.

Just like nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expects the airline system to collapse.

[lovemydogs]

27. Maybe if the planes get interrupted people will finally get the idea

Someone posted here today about how in some parts people don't care about fed. workers suffering and support the shutdown.
They see government as the enemy.
It does not bother them.
It's all abstract.

Maybe when things like plane flights are stopped and everyday people who don't care get a taste of what the shut down really means and that it will hit everyone at some point, people will start to get mad and maybe support the workers.

[CrispyQ]

28. This is what happens when people vote for candidates who have disdain for government.

They starve it, dismantle it, & then the citizens wonder why they have no services.

Here is a story about a small, mountain town where most of the residents cheer the shutdown. Stupid, stupid, stupid! When you get to the end of the story, they finally interview one of the few democrats in the town & you can finally read some reasonalbe comments about the state of things.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/01/20/trump-country-republicans-cheer-federal-shutdown/2549255002/

This is what 35+ years of unchallenged hate radio get you.

[Equinox Moon]

29. Maybe, the capitalists are planning on

swooping in to privatize everything that is now run by government.

[FakeNoose]

39. Yes they are hoping to do that - but I don't think they have a clue how to go about it

It would take years to accomplish something like that. Privatizing the TSA, the air traffic controllers, the National Parks, the Social Security etc. would take years to privatize, even with good planning and good management. And trying to do them all at the same time? Trying to do it while everything is shut down?

Forget about it - the GOP could never pull it off. All the Repukes can manage is how to destroy things.

[bdamomma]

44. and of course

they blame the Democratic party and we have to usually clean up after them.

This has got to end. McConnell and his posse are totally to blame for this. Not the Democrats.

[Equinox Moon]

65. Not all at once. I was thinking about the airports.

I think they have some private air traffic controllers now.

[LiberalArkie]

56. That's what happened with the Soviet Union and was praised in the U.S. as the rise of capitalism.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

31. Air travel is already privatized, with the single exception of air traffic control.

That is to say, airlines in the U.S. are and always have been private corporations and have never been government entities. And some of the smaller ATC towers are already private (have been for years), as are the flight service stations. I wouldn't want to see our ATC go private but that's not the immediate problem here. The problem is that Trump wants his way and doesn't care whom he hurts, even big airline companies. He obviously doesn't give a rat's ass about anybody's individual hardships. He's already heard from the pilots' union, ALPA, probably the only union in the U.S. whose members are mostly GOPers (I used to work with pilots, and I can tell you that a whole lot of them are ex-military and very conservative), but he doesn't even care about them. Trump is also unable to foresee consequences; when something bad happens you can be sure he'll blame someone else.

[Autumn]

32. That might be a good thing.

It might get people to act if it inconveniences them .

[Ilsa]

37. Why haven't the CEOs of airlines paid him a visit?

Or are they under Putin's thumb as well?

[UniteFightBack]

46. CEO's: We may have to threaten a shutdown of our own due to lack of personnel needed in order

to properly vet airline passengers.

[GoneOffShore]

41. Reaganism personified.

“The state,” he argues, “should not be seen to work. If the state is seen to work, we shall never be rid of it.”

From an Alan Bennett play I saw yesterday on the NHS.

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/jul/18/allelujah-review-alan-bennett-bridge-theatre

[Kashkakat v.2.0]

43. Some of yall still arent getting it. Trump would be nothing if it werent for the large no. of

republican party enablers - both the true believer extremists who really do want to drown govt in the proverbial bathtub, and the ones that are just going along to get along. And yes, there are some extremists who do not want the federal workers to come back and who do in fact want to turn over functions of govt to private, for profit entities and strip away all progressive legislation of the last 100 yrs.

The REPUBLICAN PARTy is breaking the country The Repub Party shutdown..

Maybe this is stating the obvious, but it bears repeating. Its clear to me that this fixation on trump is what got us into this mess in the first place - calling it for what it is would be a step in undoing it.

[Locrian]

50. absolutely spot on

trump is the symptom - the gop is destroying the country and using the distraction of trump to their advantage

[onlyadream]

47. My daugher is stuck in CA

she was supposed to fly to JFK on Saturday but her flight was cancelled. Her next available flight is Wednesday.
Since we didn't get snow, I don 't know why the flight was cancelled and why this is taking so long. I think waiting 4 days is extreme, and am wondering if the shutdown has anything to do with it.

[NCjack]

49. Trump is still getting cash flow into his businesses. Maybe we need to picket

his hotels, starting with the one in the Old Post Office, Wahington, DC. See how he likes not getting his checks.

[Grasswire2]

53. part and parcel of the plot to shutter America.

The STATED plot. They told us what the plan was.

This is one roll-out.

Weaken America and the Western Alliance. Disrupt commerce and trade. Sow chaos. Empty out government agencies. Appoint stooges and incompentents.

It's all coming together.

[triron]

57. No, it's Putin's shutdown. When will the media figure that out??

[doc03]

71. I can't plan my yearly trip to Flouda because of

that assholes's shut down. I suppose there are millions of others too. Going to hurt tourism bad.

[bdamomma]

73. Yup.

disgusting, this is going to hurt everyone and everybody.

[Cha]

74. KR!!!

[LastLiberal in PalmSprings]

78. Privatizing the air traffic control system has been a GOP goal for nearly 50 years.

I remember it being discussed when I got my license in 1970. Saint Ronnie took a swipe at it when he fired all the air traffic controllers -- which caused its own problems when the group of new controllers all retired at the same time.

The cost of flying will go up for everyone -- airline passengers, corporate aircraft, private pilots. And Putin will have achieved another of his goals to disassemble the United States from the inside.

Fuck Trump and the Russia-loving Republicans who support him. If you want to know their names, look at the GOP senators who voted to lift the sanctions on Trump's favorite oligarch.