Pro Bono - Case in Point

On Tuesday morning, I recieved the following email from work.

To All Flight Instructors:

Because of instructor abuses regarding pre and post flight briefing charges,
effective immediately only 0.5 pre and 0.5  post flight briefing will be
allowed once per mission.  This applies for all regular training missions
unless previously approved by the Director of Training, Chief Flight
Instructor or Program Manager.  

-Director of Training

Remember the post about Pro Bono that I made last week? Well, here's a real world example from my own life. This company deleted our salaries and switched us to an hourly wage pay scale because they said that we werent working enough. Now that we are hourly, people have been working eighty to one hundred hour work weeks getting lots of overtime while complying with the boss's directive to get our hours up. Well, they're up. Now the managers upstairs are actually limiting our hours by not paying for the time that we are out preflighting with our students. I sent this reply- the names of the persons involved and of the flight school have been replaced.

[Sir],

I am confident that I can freely speak my mind about this new policy without the risk of retribution from my superiors.

I don't feel that I have abused the ground briefing times- to the contrary, I always put exactly the time that I was with my students from first sitting down with them until the prop starts turning. This time includes preflight briefing and the preflight itself (which includes waiting for fuel, dealing with maintenance delays, etc) I want it to be clear that all this time is spent doing something useful for the students. I always spend the down time waiting for the fuel truck or the A&Ps by teaching my students about non-instrument related little extras like wing washout, cowl flaps, dihedral, vortex generators, the discontinuous leading edge wings on the SR20, the different forms of landing gear struts... anything I can do to make that time valuable to their education. This time typically exceeds the .5 limitation placed by our management. Am I to believe my extra efforts to teach beyond the syllabus are worth nothing to my company?

As one having managerial experience, I could understand [the president's] decision to move to a wage system. A company cannot survive paying for work that goes undone. I'll admit that I was a little upset at first, but after that meeting last month I put myself in [the president's] shoes and I had to agree that the hourly system was a necessity. That being said, this decision to limit how much the company is willing to pay for the valuable ground training that I give my students strikes me as nothing less than atrocious (while in the interest of fairness, I must concur that a CFI who teaches his student nothing for an hour and bills for it is equally so) and the message that it sends to the rank and file CFI's like myself is that my efforts to prepare the student for the flight are of little worth to my superiors. When I was hired, I was told that we were expected to arrive no less than half an hour early for each flight to get the ground content done for that lesson. Every single day, my students and I arrive thirty minutes early to cover the ground lesson content in detail and to get the preflight weight and balance completed to that we can start the engine as closely as possible to the beginning of our block time. This time from first meeting the students for the ground portion to engine start is typically as long as 45 minutes to an hour and a half in some extreme cases where maintenance or aircraft tardiness are involved. Shall I arrive at work only fifteen minutes prior to the block time so that I do not exceed the .5 cap? Shall I only briefly skim over the items to be covered in the syllabus before each flight in lieu of teaching in detail from my Jeppesen manual? Shall I sit inside while my students perform the preflight instead of being with them like I have been? I find myself shifting priorities here- I was trying to comply with [the director of training's] directive to find ways to keep our billable hours up, but now I feel that I need to find ways to scale back the billable hours and stick to the bare minimums. I'm sure that you understand my confusion.

Another issue. How can we call ourselves a 24/7 operation if the students' ability to get to and from the airport is not likewise 24/7? Since the company schedules me to fly at 1am, I have had to pick my students up and drop them off at home again for their lessons. Since this takes my time and gas and their transportation to the airport is a critical business necessity for [the academy], I bill for it. I will no longer give my students rides neither to nor from the airport unless I am free to bill each student in my car for this time.

May I propose an alternative. Instead of limiting our hours, let's start holding CFI's accountable for the work that they bill for. Include a portion in the small invoice sheets at dispatch for the CFI to write down the ground lesson content that he administered during the hour and a half that he is billing for. Let's teach the students to take responsibility for their training and to only sign off on material that was actually covered during their ground lesson.

My students have given me great feedback on my ground lessons and I assure you that I am wasting no one's time or money.

Respectfully,
[JB]

The flight academy where I work has a bus transit system to transport students from home, to the airport, then back again during normal business hours. However, since the company took over our schedules last month, we have been getting slated to fly at all hours of the night. Nobody on top put any thought into extending the bus system's hours of operation to cover the new need for 24/7 transportation. It is not uncommon for a CFI to begin at 10pm and end at 6am one day, then begin at 6am and end at 2:30pm the next day. That's not so much of a problem- what is is the transportation of the students who depend on the school's shuttle to get them to the airport. Since they have no ride in the middle of the night, the CFIs have had to pick them up from home and drop them back off again, which we always billed for... until now. The company forbade us to bill for that time. So naturally, most of the CFIs at work are leaving their students stranded at the airport until the morning shuttle picks them up some hours later. 

Pro Bono

Work for free.

Actually the term stems from the Latin meaning "for the good," which means that you give of your skills free of charge for someone else's benefit. For attorneys, pro bono services are optional and are seen as a charitable donation to a party in need, but not so for airmen.

For decades now, airlines have paid their pilots hourly wages instead of the salaries that they deserve. Wages begin from around $16 to $24 an hour for entry-level positions at the regional airlines. Don't let these wages fool you, my educated reader. $24 dollars per hour may sound very lucrative for any line of work, but we're not talking about just any line of work, are we? I'm going to teach you a little bit about "duty hours" and how they differ from "billable hours." I hope you're sitting down for this.

Before becoming a CFI, I worked full time at a telephone call center in Salt Lake City. My department specialized in giving support and guidance to the elderly about their health care coverage and how to benefit from Medicare. I was in my early twenties, single, and making $9 an hour. Working 40 hours a week, that means I was living on $720 per two-week pay period before taxes. Not bad for a college kid. The job was pretty challenging, so we had a six week training course on everything medicare/medicaid before we were allowed onto the call floor to assist the customers. The only pre-requisite for the job was a high-school diploma. We got two fifteen minute paid breaks and one thirty minute unpaid lunch. On the busier days, we had hundreds of callers in queue so there was no dead time between callers- as soon as one call ended, another began. On the slower days, there was time between calls to chat with the co-workers, read books, do homework and so on. Regardless of the call volume, we all still got paid a flat $9 an hour from the time we logged into our stations till the time we logged off to go home with the exception of our lunch break. Just the way its supposed to be.

Now imagine that same call center job, but with the pay program of an airline:

I walk into work an hour and a half early for my daily employee safety briefing which even includes a meteorological briefing on the office temperature. After the briefing ends, I get dispatched to my computer terminal, which I carefully inspect to insure that they will perform to the highest standard during the day's business. Afterwards, I take my seat and go through the boot-up checklists. By the time I am due to take my first caller, I am all set. The time clock starts when the phone rings. I assist the customer, providing the highest standard of service, accuracy, and timeliness until the end of the call. Unfortunately, today is a slow day, so there aren't any more callers waiting in the queue. As soon as the call ends, the time clock stops. During the lull of activity, I disposition the notes of the previous caller, and wait for the next one. Finally, the phone rings.
I answer, and then the time clock starts ticking again.

The time passes. Despite being at work for four hours, the time clock only shows two and a half. Those fifteen minute breaks I took, the unplanned trips to the bathroom, even that time that I spent in the boss' office getting my performance evaluation all went unpaid because those hours were not spent in direct contact with the customers. Would you want to work at an office like that?

"Oh, but wait!" stammers my boss, "don't quit so soon, I'll make you a deal. I'll pay you your hourly $9.00 while you're on the phone, and to sweeten the deal, I'll pay you five and a half cents an hour for all the time spent in between calls! How does that sound?"

Pause. Let's revisit our word of the day, pro bono. Does this situation sound like you are giving freely of your skills for the benefit of another person? I think so. But in this scenario, that other person is hardly in need of your charity, quite the contrary. At the end of the day, you drive home in your station wagon while the boss takes off in his jag.

One of my CFI co-workers, whom i will refer to as Andy, put the pay system this way:

"JB, we're slaves." He told me one afternoon. I thought he was just trying to make a joke, so I agreed with a chuckle. "No," he continued "you, me, all of us CFI's are slaves, now ask me how I know."
"Okay, how do you know, Andy?"
"Tell me what the definition of a slave is," he said.
"Okay," I thought for a moment. "A slave is someone who is owned by another person and works at the behest of his master for no compensation."
"Wrong." Andy said, shaking his head. "A slave is someone who works for another person for no compensation, other than for food and shelter."
I had to admit, he had me there. From the plantations of the south to the ghoulags of Siberia, slave labor forces had always been provided with these two necessities of life.
Andy continued. "JB, I'm at work twelve hours a day and I only get paid for a fraction of those hours that I spend here. My paychecks total up to just barely enough to pay for my groceries and my rent. All those little extras, I pay for with my second job and my wife's income. The only compensation I get is literally food and shelter. Therefore, I am a slave."

I realized that he was right. My meager paychecks amounted to just barely enough to pay for our tiny apartment and the groceries. This particular employer charged my students $35 an hour for the time that I was instructing them, but only paid me $14 an hour. That means that I only took home forty percent of what my students were actually paying for my services. Slavery meets sharecropping, perhaps? On top of all this, the company refused to pay overtime because then it would be forced to recognize us as full-time employees- meaning benefits, sick-time, vacation time, etc., so we were always reprimanded for exceeding 38 hours per pay period and even threatened with immediate termination should we exceed that cap.

Most airline pilots are paid from the time that the cockpit door closes to the time that it opens at the destination. That means that the preflight, safety briefing, weather briefing, flight data entry into the FMS, and assisting passengers to their seats (the cabin crew's responsibility) all goes unpaid. Think about that next time you hold up the line to cram your bags into the overhead bins.

In preparation for this post, I spoke about this issue with a friend of mine who works at SkyWest Airlines. He said "...in a recent message from UAL management, which was passed on to us SKYW low-lifes, we were told that UAL was over-paying SKYW millions of dollars a quarter due to a violation of our contract with them (can you say B.S.?) that stated we get paid from the time the aircraft moves either by its own power or for pushback, until the aircraft comes to rest at its destination. Uh, did I miss something here? So now, ALL SKYW flights are paid from brakes released to brakes set, also known as block times. Hmmm. Not what I signed up for." SkyWest pays its pilots $1.65 an hour for all duty hours spent away from home, this is known as "per diem" pay... meant to fill in the gaps during layovers and between flights.

What this all boils down to is that my friend, whose contract says he gets paid $19.50 an hour, actually gets paid about $10.00 an hour after you adjust his income to match his duty time. Also worth mentioning is this notion of "premium pay" where many airlines will pay you one hour for every two hours (50%) spent on duty after you complete twelve or so hours of duty time. So if you work really really hard, management will do you the dignity of recognizing you as only half a man.