
American Airlines Mechanics Intentionally Delayed My Flight - georgecmu
https://onemileatatime.com/american-mechanics-delaying-flights/
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RcouF1uZ4gsC
A worker intentionally delaying something vs a worker stopping being a "hero"
can be hard for an outsider to discern and they should withhold judgement
unless they know the full story.

Here is a software analogy. Suppose you have a team of developers with crappy
management. They are constantly changing requirements, not giving enough
resources etc. Yet your team has made this work by working extra, maybe coming
in on weekends when you don't have to, being available to work on vacation
even though you don't have to, etc.

Eventually, you get tired of being treated like crap, and you decide that you
are going to work according to what your company states is your contract.
Instead of working on nights and weekends, you put in a normal days work
through the week. Your team stops working on vacations and takes true
vacations. While working, you work hard and smart, but you do not bring your
work home.

Now the company can accuse you of deliberately slowing down the pace of
software development. However, what you are doing is entirely reasonable.

In the same way, maybe the mechanics were resorting to heroics beyond what
their contract actually required so that the flights were not delayed. Maybe
after being crapped on by management, they decided that they would stop doing
heroics and just do what was required by their contracts. If that was the
case, I personally can find no fault in their behavior. It is stupid and wrong
to expect employees to go above and beyond for a company when that level of
dedication is not reciprocated by the company.

I am not saying that the above is the case, but due to my knowledge of how
corporate management works, I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to
the workers.

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em-bee
planes don't get taken out of service by non-action. that takes deliberate
action. this is not workers refusing to do overtime, but doing extra work to
spite the company.

the equivalent would be to file, discuss and work on irrelevant bugs.
declaring unimportant issues as blockers, intentionally derailing meetings
with bikeshed arguments, etc...

i am not saying that the employees have no reason for their action. if the
work conditions are bad, then their action may be justified. (though
personally i believe that being adversarial is not helping to achieve positive
change, but that is a different topic)

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cwyers
I really hate stuff like this. Bad things happen some percentage of the time
when you're doing any thing complicated. And the sort of paradox is that in a
large enough sample, rare events happen all the time.

Air travel is pretty close to commodotized now. Yes, Spirit is "worse" than
the rest (although I admire their fee structure and their transparency around
it, honestly) and Southwest is probably the best (information that does me no
good on most of the routes I fly, unfortunately). But past that, differences
between airlines are incredibly marginal. And yet, people find patterns in the
noise, and if they've had a bad experience with an airline, they tend to
dislike them, no matter that most airlines have roughly the same level of
delays and cancellations, and all of them have the same awful customer
service.

Plus, if you're not flying between two hub cities, you're likely flying on a
regional carrier that has American Airline livery on the planes but is a
separate company:

[https://www.aa.com/i18n/customer-service/about-
us/american-a...](https://www.aa.com/i18n/customer-service/about-us/american-
airlines-group.jsp)

~~~
et2o
Well put

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capkutay
I only flew American once in my adult life. Just rude/grumpy people at the
gate. I fly almost on a weekly basis and they made me check the carry-on that
always fits fine on United/Alaska/Southwest claiming it was too big. And they
were not polite about it.

Out of the Bay Area it seems like Alaska is the best domestic option, then
United. AA is probably the last airline I'd fly after that experience.

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lazylizard
So american management(amd shareholders) chose to continue with the delays
instead of paying their mechanics better?

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kthejoker2
Applying a reductionist approach to labor relations is a fool's errand.

