Joy Behar Bizarrely Blames Reagan in 1981 for Sleeping Air Traffic Controllers in 2011

NewsBusters ^ | 14 Apr 2011 | Scott Whitlock

[mandaladon]

Sleeping air traffic controllers in 2011 are the fault of Ronald Reagan firing striking workers in 1981, according to liberal comedienne Joy Behar. The View co-host on Thursday managed to blame the late President while talking about a recent series of napping air traffic controllers.

The left-wing comic bizarrely compared, "[Reagan] busted the union, the air controllers' union. And they probably would have been strict about having two people there, because the main thing about the unions is they want more people to work."

Fellow co-host Whoopi Goldberg joined in, complaining, "It sort of started with the- Ronald Reagan saying, you know, you guys asking for too much money. He fired everybody. He cleaned them all out."

[Bob]

I think rotating shift work is pretty hard on the body.

How frequently do they rotate your brother's shifts?

Many years ago, I taught an on-site course at Teletype Corp in Skokie, Illinois. The class was half non-union engineers and half union technicians.

The techs griped that their shift rotation kept them from going to college classes because their shifts changed, IIRC, every six weeks. None of them seemed to realize that, by doing that, the union could keep them as members since they couldn't get an engineering degree to advance. (Of course, they blamed "greedy management" for forcing the shift rotation on them.)

I have never seen such spiteful us-against-them attitudes in my life.

[JoeFromSidney]

In one sense, Reagan is (at least remotely) responsible. More directly responsible was whoever was in charge of FAA (I've forgotten the name).

The problem was structural. The vast majority of FAA employees were air traffic controllers. Not aircraft inspectors, not those seeing to testing of pilots, not those dealing with licensing, or anything else. The air traffic control tail was wagging the FAA dog.

The controllers went on strike. Reagan fired them. At that point the FAA had a clean slate. It could have privatized the traffic control function, as many European countries had already done, or taken some other approach. At the time I wrote a letter to the FAA Administrator urging him not to simply reconstruct the failed organization (not that there was much chance he'd pay attention to me). What the FAA did, though, was simply reconstruct the old organization, but with new controllers. It should be no surprise, then, that the same problems have recurred with the resurrection of the old organizational form.

Old bureaucracies never die. They just get re-animated.

[vpintheak]

Ding-ding-ding! We have a winner!

[brytlea]

I can’t tell you exactly but it’s more like a few days and then some nights and then mids, it’s all mixed up. It’s not like he works a few weeks even of the same shift. I never even know when to call him to know when he’ll be home. Here, read down to the middle of this article, it gives examples of their scheduling:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/04/15/air.traffic.controller.job/index.html

They’re paid well, I’m not complaining for them (they can do that for themselves). I’m only saying, that for safety sake, this is probably NOT optimum and the flying public should probably know about it.

[twister881]

Q: How does a government employee wink?

A: He opens one eye.

[Cyclone59]

IMHO they need to put in some sort of simple alarm that starts sounding the moment the plane is within miles of the airport.

VERY GOOD POINT, but you have to remember one thing. This is the government, and just as I teach my students, the govt doesn’t do anything efficiently or effectively. Early in the space program, our crews had a hard time with the ball point pens not working in zero gravity - we spent millions attempting to fix it, where the Russians simply took a pack of pencils and a sharpener....