GS step increases occur more quickly early on and much more slowly later on, compared to ours being the same amount every year the whole time. In the end, everyone is at the top of the band, so saying our 1.6 doesn't "keep up" with GS raises isn't really correct. More heavily weighting the front end gets more mid-band money in your pocket sooner, though, which is nice.
The 1.6% isn't applicable to level upgrades or transfers to larger facilities. If you're "stuck" at a lower level facility for years it is entirely plausible you'd never come close to touching the top of your final pay band even if you have decades of government service.
You serious? People at the cap on base pay are making enough. It should be a privilege to be there. Anyone complaining they can’t raise the cap before getting anyone under it a raise can go fuck themselves.
Been at same facility going on 16 years….was in 6 band and then downgraded to a 5. It’s looking like it will take 17 years to hit the top with a downgrade on there. If stayed the same level then probably looking at 20+ years
I think you missed the point of my post. I don’t think we should wait for a cap raise either if it has no chance of passing.
This is an entirely different topic from what I was talking about, but yes we need to be able to keep our relative positions in the pay band when changing facility levels.
I always hear about these low level facilities that work tons of traffic and are underpaid and wonder if they are the exception not the rule. I live by a level 4 and they work 5 planes a day so why should they make more?
Everyone should make more. If one of us gets an increase in pay, everyone should. There is nothing wrong with wanting everyone to get paid more for our job.
Because they are still: responsible for people's lives on a daily basis, forced to be at work and medically capable of working for 40+ hours every week, and often have more TOP than busier facilities. Many people in low level facilities would like to be somewhere else but cannot transfer due to the current process. So we have a system where a new hire can make 170k+ in 3 years but some experienced controllers can barely break 100k in 10 years. "In solidarity" means that you can understand this struggle that another person is in and you're willing to accept a bit of compromise to ensure they're also treated right.
My brother in Christ, nobody is living comfortably right now
My guy, have you not been paying attention to inflation? The tenants in my 5th rental home can barely afford Scott's single-ply after paying rent.
This ^^ My level 5 might not run O'Hare levels of volume but we don't sit on our asses all day either. We are: still responsible for peoples lives, working more positions combined, work a 24 hr facility, have to protect bravo airspace, deal with winter ops, crappy schedules, training, the FAA, whatever BS sequence Tracon feels like dumping on us, etc. All of which is made better by the fact that we work an airfield that had one of the first paved runways in the U.S. so it's shoved in the middle of built up residential areas, none of the runway/ taxiway spacing is technically legal, there are no run-up areas, there's tower blind spots, and whatever ancient nav and lighting equipment we do still have that works the agency is actively working to decommission. And yes, we do spend more TOP than most of the big houses. Some days there is just a "clusterfuck" factor at a place like this that can't be replicated at a 10-12. We're all in this together.
Work a red sector with some gate swaps and massive weather deviations with severe turbulence and let’s chat about clusterfucks. The low level facilities do have their own challenges and stress periods, but objectively there is less traffic.
