“When the Pilot Is a Mom: Accommodating New Motherhood at 30,000 Feet” (nytimes) is about women who want paid maternity leaves:
At Delta, a group of women pilots have banded together through a private Facebook page and have approached their union with formal proposals for paid maternity leave — unheard-of at the major airlines — because they say they would like to stay home to breast-feed their babies.
Airlines have always compensated crew members per flight hour, which includes time spent on the ground after the door is closed. This is why pilots and flight attendants are so happy when the door is closed and the plane is pushed back from the gate. Now they are getting paid. If the result is sitting on a taxiway for three hours while thunderstorms clear that works out a lot better from the crew’s perspective than sitting in the comfortably air-conditioned terminal.
As few men will be able to quality for “maternity leave” (but perhaps some will in our age of flexible gender?), the result of this change would be that women would be paid more than men for doing the same amount of flying. (A friend points out that women are already paid more in most jobs because, in addition to being paid for more time off work (maternity leave, sick days), they also receive the expected value from filing a gender discrimination lawsuit.) For a given level of experience, airlines already do pay women more. A woman can be hired if she meets the FAA minimums for hours of flight time; a man will have to compete with other men and may require an additional 1,000 hours of flying experience (2-3 years) in order to be hired.
My favorite part of the article:
Consider what it took for First Officer Brandy Beck, a 41-year-old Frontier Airlines pilot, to pump breast milk. Once the plane was at cruising altitude and in autopilot mode, she would seek the agreement of her captain to take a break. In keeping with Frontier policy, the remaining pilot was required to put on an oxygen mask.
Next a flight attendant — to prevent passengers from approaching the lavatory — would barricade the aisle with a beverage cart. Then the attendant would join the captain in the cockpit, in keeping with rules that require at least two people in an airline cockpit at all times.
Only then could Ms. Beck slip into the lavatory for a 20-minute pumping session.
“It’s by far not my favorite place to make my child’s next meal,” Ms. Beck said. “But it’s a sacrifice I knew I would have to accept because I came back to work.”
In other words, it is not the fellow pilot who sacrifices by being forced to wear an oxygen mask for 20 minutes. Nor is it the passengers who sacrifice because they can’t use the bathroom, because they have to wait longer for assistance from flight attendants, or because if there is an emergency they won’t have as good a chance of getting out of the plane alive.
[Currently there is at least one way for a woman to get an airline paycheck in exchange for maternity. If she has sex with a senior captain, for example, she’ll be entitled to $40,000 per year in tax-free child support for 23 years under the Massachusetts guidelines (see the chapter on Massachusetts for a woman who did just that… three times). This will comfortably exceed after-tax compensation for a junior airline pilot (see “Professional Pilot Salary Survey 2016” and also this sample of first-year airline pilot salaries) and does not require investing $100,000 in flight training, working 22 days/month, 16 hours/day, or sleeping in Hilton Garden Inns (except perhaps once).]
Separately, Facebook apparently values workers who identify as “white, male” more than workers who identify as non-white, non-male, or both. “Facebook’s Point System Fails to Close Diversity Gap” (WSJ) tells the story:
Two years ago, Facebook Inc. offered its in-house recruiters an incentive to help diversify its largely white, largely male workforce.
Previously, recruiters were awarded one point for every new hire. Under the new system, they could earn 1.5 points for a so-called “diversity hire”—a black, Hispanic or female engineer—according to people familiar with the matter. More points can lead to a stronger performance review for recruiters and, potentially, a larger bonus, the people said.
When the numbers didn’t move, Facebook sweetened the deal. Starting last year, recruiters earned two points for a minority hire, or twice as much as for white or Asian males, who already were well-represented within its technical ranks.
Even so, Facebook has shown little progress. Last month, the company said 4% of its U.S. employees were Hispanic and 2% were black, the same as the two prior years. Women made up 33% of its global workforce, up from 31% in 2014.
Intel Corp. has paid its employees double referral bonuses for women, minorities and veterans. Other companies take into account how many women top managers hire when calculating their bonuses.
Why wouldn’t the company simply pay the desired workers more? Would it be illegal for Facebook to offer higher pay to the workers that it wants to hire and who have a higher value to the company than white male workers?
Also, in our transgender age, why wouldn’t recruiters game the system by asking interviewees to identify as female? (See this Sacramento Bee article for how California National Guard recruiters responded to financial incentives by helping themselves to “an estimated $100 million in dubious or illegal payments.”)
Related:
Kind of ironic to watch the feminist goals 30 years ago being employment in male jobs like doctors & lawyers. Now, after the crisis of latchkey kids, school shootings, & nature over nurture making them incapable of the 60 hour workweeks of male jobs, they’re fighting to get men to provide income for them to stay home again. We’ve come full circle.
How is this different from any other job that will have maternity leave? Let’s say that a female programmer will have 90 days maternity leave, she will be paid for sitting home with the baby while male programmers will continue working.
Ie I don’t see how this has anything more to do with pilots. I get that they are paid for ‘flying time’ – but most people are expected to show up to work for a certain number of hours in order to be paid for it.
Thus your post seems to be directed at the entire concept of maternity leave, right? I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with the premise, just clarifying.
Vic: It is different in that it has been a straight hourly job in which every employee has exactly the same productivity. You could argue that a salaried employee, male or female (or “none of the above”?), who gets paid parental leave will either work longer hours (without extra pay) or be more productive somehow outside of that leave. For an airline pilot, however, this would not be possible.
Do people argue that workers who receive [mp]aternity benefits make up for that lost productivity elsewhere?
Let’s think about this. Three months of paid leave, 2.5x in a lifetime, is worth…a bit less than 2% of a 40 year career. This could be recovered by working an average of 45 minutes extra per day over the same career. Or by being 2% more productive in some other way for the same period.
I don’t think there’s anyone who could not be 2% more productive than they are. But I’ve never heard that as a justification for granting maternity leave.
Now, so, Xaternity leave is a gender neutral privilege these days. But it favors the childbearing (or adopting). There’s no natural reason that the employer who lucks into an employee’s fruitful years should bear the full cost of that federally mandated vacation. I can imagine some businesses that employ larger-than-average proportions of workers aged ~25-40 are more adversely affected than those with older employees. (Am I overestimating the lower age range of the childbearing graph bump?)
So we accept that kids are our most precious resource, the glue that holds families together, our immortality, our future, our procreative purpose, the reason we fight for our freedoms, etc. So childbearers get special privileges. While they might never recover their 2% productivity hit, they are engaged in work that has greater benefit to society.
But I know people who would exchange a pre-child vasectomy or tubal ligation for the right to go home early every day. Such operations are reversible for the most part, but maybe once your card is punched, you aren’t eligible for Xaternity leave?
You buried the lede that a 41 year old woman is breast feeding in the first place.
You forgot to include my favorite part of the article so I am pasting it here.
Plus, some members oppose the proposals, citing the costs. One local union leader told several women in an email: “Having a child is a personal choice and asking the rest of us to fund your choice will be a difficult sell to the pilot group.” The leader declined to be interviewed for this article; the union said he was not an authorized spokesman.
Wait a sec there Mr. Are you telling me that an idiot got in the way of an emergency exit to do whatever? and it is admitted and in writing? Really, someone blocking a corridor in a plane. Nothing can justify this action. The whole crew should be fired to send a robust message: your job is to keep planes airborne and people safe. Nothing should get in the way of this goal.
Andrew: For a unionized U.S. airline it is not the employer that pays for the time off. It is the other employees. See http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines for how unions are able to negotiate for a share of an airline’s revenue (usually sufficient to put the airline, eventually, into bankruptcy). The union then divides that money up among its members. Adding paid maternity leave, as proposed by some of the pilots quoted in the article, will reduce the income available to the union members who don’t get maternity leave. (That’s not to say that it would be a bad result, but one cannot pretend that it will come out of management’s or the shareholders’ hides. If there were extra cash to be extracted from those sources the union would have already extracted it.)
Thus the situation serves as a direct means of evaluating to what extent one group of workers is willing to subsidize another (see the quote from the article cited by Toucan Sam, above).
Federico: If you are okay with one pilot and either one or two flight attendants (one in the cockpit, one guarding the bathroom) taking a 20-minute break out of every regional jet flight (average length: 1 hour?), why not offer that 20-minute break to all crew members, e.g., both men and women? And if that closed bathroom had no value to you as a passenger, shouldn’t the airlines reconfigure all of their planes to have one fewer bathroom? They could then get more passengers in and therefore more revenue per operation.
Who wants to pump in the toilet? Yuck. Although pretending this will be the procedure is a nice fig leaf, in practice I’d think most women would just throw a bit of modesty to the winds and pump in the cockpit. Assuming they’re allowed. Which leads me to ask: are they? And if so, does the other pilot in the cockpit have to be okay with it?
I don’t get it, why do they have to block off the aisle? Do they do that when someone goes into the lavatory to do other things? (The door still locks, right?)
Phil,
I am not ok, and most importantly I am not ok with an action that block a corridor, whatever the reason. I think any crew that blocks a corridor on purpose should be fired for a breach of safety of the passengers. A pilot kids and their meal is far less important than the principle that once entrusted with the safety of passengers the crew must prioritise it above all else.
I think they have to block the aisle because of the FA in the cockpit, who ordinarily would monitor the aisle to prevent a passenger from attacking the cockpit door. They also do it when a pilot leaves the cockpit for other reasons.
I’m not really sure it’s fair to characterize what is being proposed as paying women more than men. What is being proposed is that the union support a social purpose by paying some of their members for non-piloting work toward that purpose. It is similar to the union negotiating for pay to some pilots conducting union business. Those pilots aren’t being paid “more”, just being paid for different work.
Union members without children are already subsidizing those with children. Childless union members receive a reduced health insurance benefit compared to union members with children (whose coverage will include their children). Childless union members pay higher taxes so that union members (and residents of the U.S. in general) with children can receive tax exemptions and credits. Childless union members pay higher taxes so that residents of the U.S. who don’t work but who have obtained custody of at least one child can (a) get a free house, (b) get free health care for any children and themselves (through Medicaid and/or Obamacare), (c) get free food, etc.
You could argue that this proposal would just be an increase in the subsidies already provided but I don’t think you can say it is for supporting the social purpose of parenting and/or producing children because the proposed benefit is limited to women (“maternity leave” rather than “parental leave” or “paternity leave”).
I don’t understand why the female airline pilot didn’t just have sex with or marry a pilot and use the profits to fly on a leisured/private/fun basis. Then she could have gotten the joys of being a pilot without the work part and had ample time to nurse her baby in between flights.
Really, all of them could have done that and gotten their maternity leave the fun and easy way.
The Practical Conservative: https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2014/04/04/sun-n-fun/ contains a quote from a woman whose divorce lawsuit was the key to her flying: “With a full-time job and kids there was just no way to carve out time for lessons. After I got divorced, though, I had every other weekend free and the child support was enough to pay for a factory-new airplane.”
(I talked to her after the panel discussion ended. She had purchased a Cirrus SR22, then and now the most popular personal certified airplane being manufactured. I didn’t find out exactly how large her child support profits were, but I am going to guess that she couldn’t pay the entire (roughly) $700,000 cost from just one year.)
@The Practical Conservative
Let me spell it out for you: A mother asking to be paid for staying home and caring for her newborn is not asking to be paid “more than men”. She is asking to be paid for non-piloting work. Yes, she is asking to be paid more per flight hour, but the post headline didn’t read “more per flight hour than men”, it read “more than men”.
Is it a good idea to provide this particular subsidy to mothers? Is it fair that the proposal does not include pilot fathers who might also like to be paid for caring for their newborn children? Is the proposal fair to non-parent pilots who might like to be paid for some other non-piloting work which they think serves just as important a social purpose as caring for a newborn? Is it fair that parents who get no such subsidy themselves could end up paying for a pilot’s maternity leave through higher ticket prices? Are there different policies which might address the difficulties faced by pilots who are also parents, mothers, or nursing mothers more fairly than maternity leave? All good questions, but not what my comment was about.
Of course, the headline was intended to be provocative, but that does not mean it isn’t problematic. The headline frames the discussion by making it sound like the people proposing the policy are asking for something entirely illegitimate. This makes it easier for readers to reject not only the proposed policy but also the underlying concerns which inspired the policy proposal. “Female airline pilots fight to get paid more than men” provides a different frame than “Female airline pilots fight to get paid for nursing their newborn infants instead of flying”. Even if you don’t believe maternity leave would be a good idea, it’s harder to think about the second headline as completely illegitimate. I think the framing provided by the original headline makes it more difficult for readers to understand the applicable questions (see previous paragraph) and come up with answers to those questions. Pointing out that this framing rests on a questionable use of language is not “stupid”.
Neal- ‘“Female airline pilots fight to get paid more than men” provides a different frame than “Female airline pilots fight to get paid for nursing their newborn infants instead of flying”. Even if you don’t believe maternity leave would be a good idea, it’s harder to think about the second headline as completely illegitimate.’
No, not for me. Equally illegitimate. Actually, the second frame sounds less legitimate since it directly states women should be paid by the airline industry for ‘work’ unrelated to airlines, whereas the first frame simply states women want more money.