The head of the air traffic controllers union said Friday that some members were resigning from their jobs due to the stress inflicted by the government shutdown, worsening the already troubling staffing situation at airports.
“We’re seeing air traffic controllers resign,” Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, told CNN.
“We didn’t see that in 2019,” Daniels went on. “We are 400 less controllers today than we were in the 2019 shutdown. And now they’ve been stretched so thin for so long, with so much going on, so much pressure on their backs, that they’re actually resigning from the profession.”
Daniels added that ending the shutdown is “not just about coming back to work — it’s about keeping the very ones that we have.”
The government has been shut down for 37 days, leaving federal employees with no sign of when they’ll be paid. Democrats, who have enough seats in the Senate to filibuster a spending bill, are insisting that any deal includes an extension of federal subsidies for people who get their health care through the Affordable Care Act. President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have not relented.
The Transportation Department, which includes the Federal Aviation Administration, has said they’ve seen an uptick in air traffic controllers calling in sick. The Trump administration, in turn, has started curbing air traffic at 40 airports around the country to ease congestion — what Democrats see as an attempt to raise pressure on them to cave in negotiations.
Hundreds of flights across the country were canceled on Friday.
HuffPost asked the FAA on Friday how many air traffic controllers had resigned since the shutdown began, but an auto-reply stated that the agency was not responding to media inquiries due to the shutdown.
“As Secretary [Sean] Duffy has said, there have been increased staffing shortages across the system,” the email said. “When that happens, the FAA slows traffic into some airports to ensure safe operations.”
Duffy told reporters at Reagan National Airport in Northern Virginia on Friday that most controllers were still showing up for work but “another group” has a “longer record of not showing up.”
He acknowledged that workers feel squeezed as the weeks pass by without paychecks.
“Let’s not lie about the pressure,” he said.
“The ones who do come to work, they’re the ones that are working six days a week, 10 hours a day,” he went on. “You can do that for a couple weeks, but at one point, you’re going to get burned out. You’re going to get burned out, and that’s what we’re seeing. Now, there’s a higher level of fatigue with the controllers.”
When large groups of workers call out sick in an organized manner, it’s known as a “sickout,” and there’s no evidence at this point that that’s what’s going on here. Although callouts by air traffic controllers are widely believed to help bring an end to the 2019 shutdown, Daniels said Friday that the current absences were being “misconstrued.”
“People aren’t calling in sick. They’re either fit for duty or they’re not,” he said.
Daniels said the loss of paychecks has made it hard for many controllers to make it work.
“Especially our new employees that are just training or starting out in this career … they’re calling their employer and saying, ‘I have no gas today. I cannot pay for my child care. Can I bring my children to work?’” Daniels said. “These are real situations…. They’re already racking up their credit cards, are taking out every loan that they can.”
