THE REAL ISSUE WITH FEWER CABIN CREW Sudoku or safety THE REAL ISSUE WITH FEWER CABIN CREW:Sudoku or safety 13 JUN 2013: While CUPE and others (naturally) fight the change in cabin crew numbers from one for 40 to one per 50, it shouldn’t be lost in the discussion how much has changed in the role of the modern-day flight attendant. It’s a little bit like the time it takes to get through a university degree course. Just think how technology has changed a student’s campus life. Once upon a not so distant time, to research a paper the student would have to get out of bed, dress (showers were optional), walk or bike to the library, find the appropriate reference book(s), sit down and find the relevant pages, make copious handwritten notes, and then transcribe it into a thesis. Nowadays the same student can turn over in bed, fire up the iPad or similar e-gizmo, Google the subject matter, instantly access a plethora of information, cut and paste or print it out and then get up and make breakfast. What was once a half-day adventure, can now be done much more efficiently in a matter of minutes - and without the need to even get out of bed! Why then, one might ask, is a degree course still as long as it always was? Are students doing so much more with all the time that technology saves them, are they being better educated than in the pre-internet era, or are they just able to go on cruise control and have a much more laid-back experience in the same four years that has always been the norm? Cutting a year out of most four-year courses must surely be something that is highly achievable. To do that of course might mean trimming back a little on those long summer and other breaks, but where is it written in stone that educators and ‘educatees’ are entitled to have almost half the year off? Needless to say, cutting back on the amount of faculty vacation days while simultaneously speeding the required time to get that degree is something that educators and their unions will fight tooth and nail because (screw the tuition cost to the parents and time to the kids), this is about their jobs! Sound at all familiar? On a recent Air Canada early evening flight from Toronto to Calgary I couldn’t help but ruminate on how much the amount of time the cabin crew spends in the aisle has changed over the years. After takeoff – about 30-minutes after takeoff – the crew finally appeared in the aisle with a buy-on-board snack and drinks service. As soon as that was done they retreated to their galley chatter, Sudoku, crosswords and coffee. To my amazement they did not do another bar run or appear in the aisle until it was time for cabin cleanup and safety checks on final approach to YYC. I surmised that the lack of a second drinks cart service was for fear that there would be more uptake on the free soft drinks than there would be liquor sales, so easier to just stay out of sight. One way or another, the crew was conspicuous by its absence for the bulk of the trip. Now compare this same trip to how it would have looked from a cabin crew perspective ten years ago. They would have been handing out ‘free’ (which really means you’d paid for it whether you chose to consume it or not) hot meals and drinks to almost every passenger on board. In the days when airline food was a no charge item, most passengers would accept the offered chicken or steak in a dog dish and either eat it or more often than not just kind of poke at it. Same thing with ‘free’ drinks. If there’s a five-dollar charge, maybe 20% will buy one, but if it’s free, everybody wants one. So the crew would be kept busy dishing all this stuff out and collecting the debris afterwards. In between times they would usually do another bar run, but they were certainly kept on their feet for a much more significant percentage of the trip than they ever are today. Even lesser duties like the sale of headsets has pretty much gone by the bye as most passengers now bring their own IFE systems (aka iPads) on board with them. So when the flight attendant associations and unions start to whine that a reduction in their on-board headcount is not something they can support on the basis of safety concerns, please just turn a deaf ear – something that many of their number are very good at doing during their less frequent sojourns through the cabin! Safety does of course come first but if the fifty-per figure is considered a safe enough global standard by ICAO, should we really have to subsidize a different CUPE-dictated standard in Canada? Besides, if there were a genuine safety issue here Transport Canada would never agree to such a change – this is about job security and absolutely nothing else. Secondly, imagine what a cockpit might still look like if things hadn’t moved with the times there. In addition to a pilot and first officer we’d still see a flight engineer, navigator and radio operator. Similarly in the passenger cabin, when you go from a full on-board service to a ‘lesser service’ (which is the nicest way I can think to word it) then you really don’t need to retain full service crewing. Oh yes, one other minor point – permitting outmoded mandatory standards such as this to change is not, “pandering to airline profits at the expense of safety” as CUPE likes to position it. In a well-run airline there is a distinct connection between costs and ticket prices. So, rather like that extra year of tuition fees to protect faculty summer breaks, paying higher fares to improve the Sudoku skills of flight attendants really was overdue for a rethink. JustTravelDeals.ca
Posted on: Thu, 13 Jun 2013 12:28:35 +0000
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