So in mid-March 1991, I report in to Seattle Air Route Traffic Control Center, aka "ZSE", located in Auburn, Washington. My dad was still working there at the time, as a staff manager. Fortunately, the
FAA's rules on nepotism allow family members to work in the same facility, so long as they are not in a direct line of supervision with each other.
ZSE has long been one of the FAA's best facilities. Period. Our error rate is typically less than half that of other centers, even those that run traffic levels closer to ours; pilots from all across the nation comment positively on our service and dedication to the user; throughout the 80s and 90s we led the way as first site for many of the equipment upgrades the agency installed into enroute control centers (which serve as the backbone, brain, and heart of the ATC system); and our traffic management techniques, worked in conjunction with the controller workforce, are innovative and save great deals of money.
Our labor-management relations, until recently anyway, have typically been among the best in the agency as well. Despite the fact that the regional office for several states is just up the road in Renton and that we have a revolving door on the chief's office, we managed to keep things sane and comfortable for a long, long time.
NATCA (the air traffic controllers' union) and the FAA actually worked together at ZSE well before that became fashionable in the FAA. We did so because it made things better, for both the agency as a whole and for the workforce in general. For example, my father (who, despite having me as a son, has turned fairly anti-union these days- we just agree to disagree) once got a call from a manager in Cleveland.
"How did you get your asbestos abatement project past NATCA?" the manager wanted to know.
"Well, I have a NATCA guy detailed to my office a day a week", Dad replied, "and he was the one I used to coordinate the project. He set up the air testing protocols, the levels we'd stop work at, did the research on EPA and OSHA regulations, and basically set it all up so that everyone was comfortable they could live with the precautions being taken to protect everyone's health."
That blew the Cleveland guy's mind, because (like most of the FAA) he just couldn't imagine working with NATCA like that. But to us, that was second nature, because it just made sense.
As a new controller, you are issued an ID badge, a parking lot sticker for your car, and are put into a little room where you will draw your map over, and over, and over, and when you're done with it you'll do it again.
In my original area at ZSE, the area low-altitude map has over 600 different bits of data that you have to memorize. Yikes. For someone who struggles a bit with memory, that's tough, but I managed. (What's worse, I've done it twice, since I later transferred to a different area and had to learn a new map.)
New air traffic controllers have 60 days to join the union without paying an initiation fee (which is a year's dues- no small fee at 1.5% of your annual salary.) I didn't join, because of my experience with PATCO and the strike. I was naive enough to think that the agency didn't need a union and that it was just a bunch of troublemakers.
NATCA has one of the highest, if not the highest, percentage of people belonging to the union in federal service. In the federal workforce, unions cannot compel people to join or pay dues; there's not even the thing where they can make them pay an equivalent amount of money to a charity or whatever that some states have.
In return, the union is granted "official time"; union facility representatives (FacReps) are like shop stewards, and they are given some time in each pay period to be off their regular ATC duties and work strictly on union business. This time varies by the # of employees that they are representing.
This setup sounds like a scam, but the theory behind the federal labor-management law is that by having a natural tension between labor and management, with each side having some power, things won't swing too far in terms of one side or the other running roughshod. This will eventually work out to a stasis and the taxpayers will be better served in the long run.
Within about a year, I joined the union when they had an "open season". Why would I do that? What switched me around, from actively telling my fellow new-hire trainees that joining was a bad idea and that the union was uneccessary?
Simple. I worked for the FAA for a year.
Seriously. The level of crap that our managers send down the pipe (and I'm talking from the FAA HQ and regional offices here) is amazing. Even locally we had some terrible managers and supervisors who would do or say things that were so completely illogical that your head would hurt just thinking about them.
As a new trainee, you pay a lot of attention to how other trainees are progressing through the program. You tell yourself that they're just dumb if they're on the verge of washing out, and that it's not going to happen to you.
The reality is that you're just covering up in your own head, because you know perfectly well that training to be an air traffic controller is extremely demanding. You're going to have the lives of thousands of people in your heads (and head, and voice, and quick wit) every single day.
Remember how less than 10% of the people taking the initial civil service test are offered a slot at the academy, where another half or so were washed out?
Well, historically, only about two-thirds of those that make it through all THAT (and then report to an enroute facility) go on to get signed off as a journeyman air traffic controller.
(Right now, in fact, we're doing even worse- only about 50% of our brand-new trainees are making it to full performance level.)
So there we were, the new hires, sitting in the classroom and studying our maps furiously. The training specialist, a controller off the control room floor for a detail doing nothing but training, strongly encouraged us to join the union. And he wasn't even a member himself. Why would he say that?
Because he knew. He'd been around. And he felt that being union members would help give us protection and serve as a buffer between us and the bad supervisors.
Supes are pretty much everything to you as a trainee. They're the ones who assign you to an instructor- and since that instructor is going to be breathing down your neck for the next several months, either telling you what you need to know to become a controller or letting you rot and wash out, you want a damn good instructor.
The supe is also the person who decides when it's time for you to get a "checkride" on the position you're training on. They're the one who decides whether to sign you off, give you more hours of training, or wash you out.
Yes, the supe is important. And as a trainee, I saw supervisors try and bully students. I saw them demand respect (as opposed to earning it) by throwing their weight around, treating students like crap, and generally demeaning them on a daily basis.
I also saw good supes (and fortunately, that was most of them) who worked WITH their students, who encouraged them, who cared about them as a person no matter how well (or poorly) the student was doing in the training program.
NATCA made a difference. I'm convinced of that. I saw one example of a supe who was really brow-beating a student, just generally treating him like crap, because the supe didn't like him. The student hadn't joined the union initially, but did during the open season. The area rep then had a little meeting with the supe and said "look, you gotta lay off this guy"... and it happened.
I managed to scrape my way through the training program and get signed off. It took about three and a half years from the day I started at OKC until I was "full performance level" (FPL) as a controller. I can honestly say that it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The stress of being a trainee and knowing that if you don't make it (and lots didn't) you would be out of a job is pretty amazing.
At the same time, the challenge was great. For the first time in my life, I really felt like I had to work hard at something that was going to have a worthwhile payout at the end of it- I was going to become an air traffic controller. I "push tin". I move airplanes and keep people safe, working with only my wits and my voice.
I had to study, study, study. Memorize tons of stuff. Figure out how to put it into practice, learn how to get along with people I might not really like when they're sitting literally bumping elbows with me as we thread airplanes through each other.
In ATC, we have early retirement available, and many of us don't ever move from the first facility we wind up at (at least in the enroute option; terminal people move around much more frequently). So I figured I'd be at ZSE, the same work location, for the next 25 years. Plainly air traffic controller is NOT an entry-level position!
Within a few years of getting signed off, I was not only a union member... I was the vice president of ZSE's local, consisting of a couple hundred people. And that's where Part IV will begin!
This is a multi-part series cross-posted from my blog, A Blue Eyed Buddhist
You can also read the other parts here on DailyKos:
Part I
Part II, which was featured as a diary rescue! Thanks!
Part III
Part IV
or by going to my blog and clicking on the "FAA/NATCA" category.