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Essay on Future for Organized Labor in the Commercial Aviation Industry
This paper is on “What does the Future hold for organized labor in the commercial aviation industry”. The impact of organized labor on the transportation industry varies widely among each of the major modes. Labor more often than not represents the highest operating cost in each sector and often becomes the top target for cost reduction. Organized labor continues to change as the industry itself changes, and affects how firms operate and the flexibility they have to transform, modernize, and remain competitive.
Organized labor no longer plays a prominent role in the pipeline or trucking sector with less than 6 percent of motor carriers represented by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. This is in contrast to the railroad industry where almost 75 percent of railroad transportation workers are members of unions, garnering relatively high wages. Airline labor represents a significant cost variable in a sector that has endured over 200 company failures since deregulation in 1978. Compensation for pilots – often due to lucrative contracts awarded in the airline boom of the mid 1990s – fail to adjust to rapidly changing market conditions. Today, the airline financial crisis is driving a fundamental reform in the industry’s labor cost structure and overall business model.
Air travel in the United States has seen spectacular improvements in safety in the past 50 years. All the way through the cooperative efforts of manufacturers, airlines, governments, and others, pilots are better trained with the help of increasingly sophisticated flight simulators, aircraft are more reliable, navigational aids are improved, and flights operate with more in-depth and timely weather information. More recent evidence, however, suggests that the rate of progress in aviation safety has slowed or possibly stopped. The accident rate for jet carriers, which had improved steadily since jets were introduced, essentially leveled out during the 1980s and 1990s.......
