m3113n1a1

So it was just total sick calls? That can easily be skewed by higher number of total operations in the summer and around holidays. It needs to be graphed as a sick call percentage of total duty periods to be more useful. I'm not saying that you're not right.. I bet there is a slight uptick around holidays (although I personally wouldn't call out over a holiday unless I was actually sick, because I know Delta is crazy with their GFB calls), but I bet it's not THAT huge of an uptick.

theUpsideDown

If we are taking a vote, I would like this too

FangsF15

My recollection is that it was # of pilots who were out sick on any given day. There was a baseline with very little variation on all other days of the year. But every single holiday (and now that tennis brings it up, the month of May when folks are about to ‘rollover’ too) had a ‘spike’ several orders of magnitude above the baseline, and on the “big” holidays, several more orders of magnitude.

Have you ever read Freakonomics? I guarantee if you saw it, you would have grasped in an instant what was going on. It was quite obvious. I guess I’m not sure why some folks are finding it so hard to believe, and/or so easily dismiss that it was a thing. It was raw data, not processed or manipulated. Data is data. The likelihood that several orders of magnitude more pilots are legitimately sick, and that it’s only on holidays, is zero.


Im making no value judgement on what the company is doing about it. Only that there absolutely are pilots who are, in the aggregate, obviously cheating on at least some holiday sick calls.

ancman

To some extent, that’s absolutely the case. But name an airline where that doesn’t happen. For that matter, name another professional career field in which some workers don’t take occasional bogus sick days (in larger numbers around holiday periods when their kids are out of school). I’ve met pilots at every airline I’ve ever worked for who brag about it, as well as professionals in other career fields who do the same.

Sick call harassment doesn’t effectively eliminate or even reduce the problem. There are plenty of ways around it, even for the abusers. The GFB program is an absolute joke in terms of effectiveness. Incentives are the only effective way to protect the operation around the holidays.

Vsop

I swear I heard about a “night override” or something from several captains on some of my many all nighters. (West coast 73 owned the night). Sounded pretty good, but I was too tired to grasp the concept.

Khantahr

Many (most maybe?) other careers have PTO, not sick time, and you don't have to be sick to use it, nor is it considered vacation. That's what I want here.

chrisreedrules

There’s a reason we don’t have PTO. What if everyone wanted PTO over Christmas? Well they obviously can’t have that. So they have blackout dates where PTO can’t be used… So then pilots call sick if they want those dates off. That’s why we have a combination of vacation and sick. Pilots with enough seniority can bid for a particular holiday off if they want. The rest of us have sick time to use (if we’re sick *cough *cough).

The system is far from perfect but we have it for a reason. PTO doesn’t work for this type of job. What I’d like to see is Delta accept the fact that we’re adults, we generally make a good faith effort to work when we are supposed to, and to not harass us in any way if we call out unless I burn through every last hour in my sick bank. And even then it should be a, “hey is everything okay? Can we help in any way?” type of call.

PilotJ3

I had PtO at envoy for some time. It worked like a charm…

You could freeze the vacation PTO. You could use the PTO to cover dropped trips, sick, etc etc.

crewdawg

Well, like you say in a later post, the GFB calls are mostly ineffective. In fact, if they're out sick, it may take them another day or so to recover after having to go see the doc, thus making it worse. Wrt the graph you saw, I don't doubt any of that, it's human nature. The question is how to minimize it, you can choose the carrot or the stick, the company chooses the stick. Do you want to put money on which one works better?




They're trying to minimize usage of a contractual benefit. They wish we were all like a certain pilot who flew sick during his career, errr sorry, never called in sick. 🙄

chrisreedrules

My point is simply that PTO won’t work the way that 90% of the people asking for it want it to work.