Are DEN Controllers Held Hostage?
I was reading a story in the Denver Post today about air traffic controllers in the Denver International Airport tower and what they currently are and are not allowed to do for lunch.
If air traffic controllers at Denver International Airport want to leave the tower for a lunch or dinner break, they have to go on vacation.
Or they can use accumulated personal time.
Otherwise, they have to stay in the 327-foot tower above Concourse C, where their menu choices are a bit limited. Just like airline passengers, controllers can’t bring liquids or semi solid food items through security checkpoints.
There are two issues displayed here, that of being able to leave the tower for lunch and that of bringing food and/or liquids through security to their workplace.
The latter one, bringing food through security, is just silly. These folks have security badges that allow them to bypass security and enter heavily restricted areas, and yet they aren’t allowed to bring liquids in because of the TSA rules. Could an intruder cause major havoc by doing something to the control tower? Yes. But certainly not to the level of doing so on an aircraft, which the rules are to protect. So they should be able to bring liquids/semi-solid foods into the tower for breaks and snacks. These guys are under enough stress already.
Now to the former – not being able to leave the tower for lunch unless they take personal time. At first, I was going to talk about how utterly stupid this was as well, until I read the article more carefully. Specifically this:
Coulter said the FAA is punishing controllers because the government was unsuccessful in extending employees’ workday to 8.5 hours, with an unpaid meal break, during recent labor talks.
So here’s the issue: The controllers are paid to work for eight hours, the same as most full-time employees. They refused, through their union, to be scheduled for more than eight hours, so that they would have at minimum a thirty-minute period of time during which they could take their lunch break. So now they want to be able to leave during their eight hour shift, apparently the maximum amount of time they want to be on the job site, so they can eat. I don’t feel sorry for them at all.
Yes, being an air traffic controller is a very stressful job that I would never want to do, but come on…they can at least realize that they need to keep up with the same schedule types that most everybody else works by. It’s just common sense.
