Overtaxed and unpaid air traffic controllers are resigning “every day” due to stress from the government shutdown.
“Controllers are resigning every day now because of the prolonged nature of the shutdown,” Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, told CNN.
“We hadn’t seen that before. And we’re also 400 controllers short—shorter than we were in the 2019 shutdown.”
Air traffic controllers are federal workers, which means they are part of the approximately 730,000 federal employees working without pay since the shutdown began on Oct. 1.
Ahh Reagan, he may not be the only one that caused us to get to where we are, but he did a phenomenal job teaching the next generation how to fuck up everything for everyone.
He’s pretty much directly responsible for the atc problems. Their union went on strike during his presidency and he did mass firings and union busting. It takes years to fully train and qualify an atc and the job has an incredible amount of stress. They aren’t easy to recruit and train. We’ve had a national shortage of atc since his firings. If he had negotiated with them in good faith we wouldn’t have had a sudden shortage that we couldn’t catch up from then and their working conditions would have improved making them easier to recruit and train.
So to be fair, it was illegal for them to strike. No government worker, federal, state, or local, is allowed to strike. This is why blue outs (originally police all calling sick at the same time but now applied to all government workers) are a thing.
So many of today’s problems are because of the Confederate Party, and the kinds of things they did and the things they schemed about since Nixon and since Ronnie Raygun especially.
They were thoroughly outraged that Nixon had to resign in complete disgrace and vowed to combat that in the media space at least. Ronnie Raygun’s maladministration helped to enable that with the dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine…