Here is the latest:

WASHINGTON – The air traffic controller who handled Flight 1549 thought ditching in the Hudson River amounted to a death sentence for all aboard. Now the veteran pilot who pulled off the ditching safely says harsh pay cuts are driving experienced pilots from the cockpit.

“People don’t survive landings on the Hudson River,” 10-year veteran controller Patrick Harten told a House subcommittee Tuesday in his first public description of how he tried to land the jetliner that lost power in both jets when it hit Canada geese after takeoff from New York’s LaGuardia Airport.

“I thought it was his own death sentence,” Harten said of the moment when US Airways pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger radioed that he was going into the river. Defying the odds, Sullenberger safely glided the Airbus A320 down and all 155 people aboard survived the Jan. 15 water landing.

Sullenberger, a 58-year-old who joined a US Airways predecessor in 1980, told the House aviation subcommittee that his pay has been cut 40 percent in recent years and his pension has been terminated and replaced with a promise “worth pennies on the dollar” from the federally created Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. These cuts followed a wave of airline bankruptcies after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks compounded by the current recession, he said.

“The bankruptcies were used by some as a fishing expedition to get what they could not get in normal times,” Sullenberger said of the airlines. He said the problems began with the deregulation of the industry in the 1970s.

The reduced compensation has placed “pilots and their families in an untenable financial situation,” Sullenberger said. “I do not know a single professional airline pilot who wants his or her children to follow in their footsteps.”

The subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee heard from the crew of Flight 1549, the air traffic controller who handled the flight and aviation experts to examine what safety lessons could be learned from the accident.

Sullenberger’s copilot Jeffrey B. Skiles said unless federal laws are revised to improve labor-management relations “experienced crews in the cockpit will be a thing of the past.” And Sullenberger added that without experienced pilots “we will see negative consequences to the flying public.”

Sullenberger himself has started a consulting business to help make ends meet. Skiles added, “For the last six years, I have worked seven days a week between my two jobs just to maintain a middle class standard of living.”

Controller Harten riveted the hearing with his account of the 3.5 minutes during which he spoke with the crippled jetliner after the bird strike at an altitute of 2,750 feet.

When Sullenberger said he couldn’t make it either back to LaGuardia or to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey and would ditch in the the Hudson River that separates New York and New Jersey, Harten testified, “I believed at that moment I was going to be the last person to talk to anyone on that plane alive.”

But Sullenberger delicately glided the jetliner into the river in one piece near ferry boats that picked the passengers off the planes wings before it sank in the icy waters.

Harten, who has spent his entire career at the radar facility in Westbury, N.Y., that handles air traffic within 40 miles of three major airports, struggled vainly to help get the airliner safely to a landing strip.

Making lightning-quick decisions, Harten communicated with 14 other entities in the three minutes after the bird strike as he diverted other aircraft and advised controllers elsewhere to hold aircraft and clear runways for 1549.

First, Harten tried to return the plane to LaGuardia Airport, asking the airport’s tower to clear runway 13. But Sullenberger calmly reported: “We’re unable.”

Then Harten offered another LaGuardia runway. Again, Sullenberger reported, “Unable.” He said he might be able to make Teterboro Airport in New Jersey.

But when Harten directed Sullenberger to turn onto a heading for Teterboro, the pilot responded: “We can’t do it …. We’re going to be in the Hudson.”

“I asked him to repeat himself even though I heard him just fine,” said Harten. “I simply could not wrap my mind around those words.”

At that moment, Harten said he lost radio contact with flight and was certain it “had gone down.”

Afterward, Harten said he told his wife, “I felt like I had been hit by a bus.”

FYI — The pilots for Colgan Air are non-union.

Because without unions airlines would have no interest in safety and good pilots? Give me a break. It would be about as fair for me to say it was the fault of unions that your union brother plowed a plane into a house killing 40 people a couple weeks ago due to “pilot error”.

Though as a side note: incredibly high skill/high pay groups such a airline pilots strike me as one of the worst possible cases for organizing. Low skill or no skill workers there’s at least some justification. But workers who take years to train and make over 100k are just getting greedy to organize.

A union also give the employees a forum to deal with the question of if the boss is going to hire people working at 80% productivity, are the rest of us supposed to pick up the slack for no additional pay? (You have not quite explained that in your scenario)

Well, I didn’t explain it because in my experience unions always protect the 80% productivity workers, and indeed often the 50% productivity workers. My father ended up having to do the department secretary’s job for free at the community college he worked for because the state employees union which both he and she belonged to had ruled that it was unacceptable for her to be dismissed because she couldn’t figure out how to use a computer (except to read various newspapers online for a couple hours each morning). After all, she could use a typewriter!

I suppose the beauty of unions is that had he filed a complaint they would have ruled he didn’t have to cover for her, but the thing is that he actually cared about his department being able to function — something which she as an enthusiastic union member was not encumbered with. (And her story was more endemic than unique in regards to the union situations Dad dealt with.) Working with a lot of Michigan refugees, all the stories about working in union environments involve workers who cared far more about their smoke breaks than about whether their products were any good or their companies succeeded.

At issue here, though, is this basic concern: Price is generally an important piece of information about what a product or service is worth to others. As such, a union which successfully freezes wages at far above market levels effectively fools people into thinking that their work is far more valuable to other people than it actually is — which works fine so long as an industry is dominant (as Detroit was in the 60s) but is a recipe for personal and economic disaster when reality kicks in.

I know of about 155 people who are grateful that my union brother Capt. Sullenberger was not laid off so his employer could hire a less skilled person at a lower wage rate.

If your point is just that if unions were out of the way, corporate CEOs with the hearts of a social workers would be providing all of these job opportunities to poor schleps that just need a break and a chance to prove themselves, I think you would be sadly mistaken.

On the general issue of supporting opportunities for new entrants in the workforce or into a particular craft, I think labor has a better record than management’s feeble actions here (though the building trades unions in the 1970s, sadly almost wholly made up of Catholics, are a disappointing exception). If you want to explore this further, can we start with Westinghouse as a case study?

But if there is an honest need to the situation you reference, easy solutions in a union shop exist. Create a Machinist Grade I and a Machinist Grade II position. A union contract could also give the Grade I Machinist some objective standards that once met lead to a promotion to Grade II as opposed to the all too common situation in an unorganized shop of “I was promised….” (If I had a nickel for every one of those stories). A union also give the employees a forum to deal with the question of if the boss is going to hire people working at 80% productivity, are the rest of us supposed to pick up the slack for no additional pay? (You have not quite explained that in your scenario)

In this instance, I meant workers in the more general sense — particularly the less skilled and experienced sort who find themselves totally excluded from consideration once the wages have been fixed nice and high.

I think it is very attractive to job applicants that their future employment would include wage security, workplace health and safety standards, and negotiated equal employment opportunity rights.

Oh, it can be attractive all right. I’m just not always sure it’s a good idea. Example: Back in college when I was working in a call center in West Virginia, one of the callers who was currently both in college and on the waiting list for a union job in the local steel mill was explaining to me how if he came up to the top of the list and secured a union job he would quit college since it would take him years to make as much with a college degree working elsewhere as he’s make as a steelworker. Of course, the part he wasn’t taking into account in this plan was that steel mills had been closing up and down the Ohio River for years, and the high wages were just a relic of union negotiations years before when the industry was healthy.

Essentially, those high union wages (and false security) were giving bad messages — making it look like these were high skilled jobs in a healthy industry. So while the union negotiated terms were certainly attractive, they were encouraging people to make bad decisions.

It can be negotiated if that is an concern for management. I’ve never known management to ask for more than two weeks notice. And then there are very common no strike agreements.

I would imagine that’s because most companies don’t think they can successfully get a worker to do good work when making him serve out a long notice period. (Keep in mind, 90 days notice would effectively keep you from being able to take most other jobs — so the worker would be encouraged to just get himself fired once he found another job.) A business contract which requires a long notice/reverence period for breaking the contract outside of its usual renewal cycle would allow you to sue the other company for a significant amount — perhaps the rest of the contract term’s worth of value. It works between companies because companies are larger and flusher.

For myself, I’ve dealt with business contracts which can only be ended on the annual anniversary or with 90 days notice, but I’d certainly never want to work under those terms. I’d much rather be able to leave whenever I want. And I suspect most workers worth having would feel the same.

I wish as a shareholder I had 1/10th of the democratic rights and opportunities I have as a union member. I just don’t buy the theory that democratic decision making is “imposing and decreeing” on the minority side (and generally a small minority at that. Most ratifications pass by overwhelming margins).

In a “dwarves are for the dwarves” kind of way, I see the attraction of this. However, it’s only attractive for the people on the inside, not for the people who are shut out because one has established control over certain elements of the labor market.

I think it is very attractive to job applicants that their future employment would include wage security, workplace health and safety standards, and negotiated equal employment opportunity rights.

There’s nothing to keep workers from having set contracts with their employers if both agree to it —

I know. It’s called trade unionism.

…but in the case of the lawn service the office park owner will almost certainly have it in there that the lawn service can’t quit in search of greener pastures without proper notice and severance. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know many workers who would want to provide 90 days notice or refund their last three months worth of wages when going to take a better job.

It can be negotiated if that is an concern for management. I’ve never known management to ask for more than two weeks notice. And then there are very common no strike agreements.

It’s certainly a two-way negotiation with the employer, but it’s imposing and decreeing when it comes to workers. Being a worker, that’s how I tend to think of things. But point taken and I’ll avoid it in future.

However, yes, one of the best selling points unions have is protection for workers (particularly those who make long term committments like taking out a mortgage) from being told to clean out their locker and leave the plant because the boss found someone ready to do their job for a nickel less an hour.

In a “dwarves are for the dwarves” kind of way, I see the attraction of this. However, it’s only attractive for the people on the inside, not for the people who are shut out because one has established control over certain elements of the labor market.

And in the long run, it can hurt the union members as well (as we’ve seen lately in a lot of unionized industries) since blocking the pricing mechanism from labor can allow people to think they have middle class occupations when they in fact are doing very low skill work which may vanish when the industry finally gets beat out by competition from elsewhere (or collapses under its own weight) thus leaving people to go through a very painful adjustment later in life.

Oddly, its just part of our economic system if a lawn service company negotiates a three year contract for a set amount of money and other terms and conditions with an office park owner, but, if the work was done in house, not okay for the lawn service workers to negotiate for themselves.

There’s nothing to keep workers from having set contracts with their employers if both agree to it — but in the case of the lawn service the office park owner will almost certainly have it in there that the lawn service can’t quit in search of greener pastures without proper notice and severance. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know many workers who would want to provide 90 days notice or refund their last three months worth of wages when going to take a better job.

I would just suggest by avoid inacurate and polemeical words like “decree” and “impose” when the reality is a two party negotiation, it would move the discussion along at a quicker speed.

However, yes, one of the best selling points unions have is protection for workers (particularly those who make long term committments like taking out a mortgage) from being told to clean out their locker and leave the plant because the boss found someone ready to do their job for a nickel less an hour.

Oddly, its just part of our economic system if a lawn service company negotiates a three year contract for a set amount of money and other terms and conditions with an office park owner, but, if the work was done in house, not okay for the lawn service workers to negotiate for themselves.

Capital may organize, but workers may not?

You’re a smart guy, so I have to think that you understand what I’m saying, though perhaps it’s not the way you’re used to thinking. The way that unions win increased wages is by setting up a situation in which no one can work for the company except through the union-negotiated terms.

Because this restrict the labor market and flattens the terms available, it has the result of keeping down the people who might otherwise make the most, and keeping out the people who might more marginally have filled a position (less experience, past problems, cultural barriers, etc.) and might have seemed worth hiring if they were willing to work for (and could have been offered) a few dollars less per hour while they ramped, but in a flat rate environment are not worth bothering with.

I have the feeling you and I have been over this before, so I won’t elaborate.