Working in aviation has lost its glamor. It happened because the law gave carriers every advantage over their workforces\u2014and because we demanded lower airfare.<\/em><\/h3>\n

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\u2014 here’s how working for an airline lost its glamor<\/h2>\n

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Nobody wants to be a pilot anymore. As the airlines tell it, a so-called\u00a0pilot shortage\u00a0has made it impossible to staff their fleets, forcing them to\u00a0cancel flights\u00a0and park hundreds of airworthy planes in the desert.<\/p>\n

One airline ventured to blame its 2016 bankruptcy on its inability to hire enough pilots, and even at always-profitable and carefree Southwest Airlines, the challenge of recruiting millennial aviators keeps middle management awake at night. “The biggest problem,” a Southwest executive\u00a0told Bloomberg, “is a general lack of interest in folks pursuing this as a career anymore.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Airline execs tend to make the shortage seem more mysterious than it is, as if something in the contrails is fueling this “general lack of interest” in the profession. That’s evasive. Rather, the shortage is best understood as an obvious manifestation\u2014and perhaps the nadir\u2014of a long-term deprofessionalization of what was once a solidly middle-class career: We made the pilot occupation so unattractive, so tenuous and poorly paid, that people stopped wanting to do it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Flying, meanwhile, has also become unbearable for passengers. The airlines that survived the volatile decade following 9\/11 have since consolidated themselves into\u00a0a lucrative oligopoly, prompting questions about why smaller cities continue to lose service, why seats keep getting smaller, why fares have remained stubbornly high even as fuel prices dropped and profits soared, and why paying passengers are\u00a0being quasi-defenestrated from overbooked flights.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The degenerating passenger and pilot experiences aren’t separate phenomena but in fact are intimately related, both resulting from policy choices that have propelled a decadeslong, ongoing makeover of the national air-transit system. The difference, perhaps, is that we are more conscious that we, the passengers, are getting a raw deal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So are aviation workers, but there is more to the pilot shortage than just pay.\u00a0Industry representatives\u00a0are pushing Congress to address the rising cost of pilot training, which can exceed $100,000 after\u00a0requirements became more stringent in response to a 2009 crash. Competition for pilots has also gone global, causing many young pilots to leave the US to chase more exotic opportunities with Emirates and other Middle Eastern carriers. And there are class-conscious obstacles to recruitment\u2014flying has become less glamorous.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But at the regional airlines where the effects of the pilot shortage are most acute, even management seems to have finally acknowledged that pay matters, as evidenced by\u00a0their recent efforts to raise starting salaries\u00a0that paid first-year pilots\u00a0as little as $15,000 to $20,000. And although many jobs have gotten worse in the past few decades, pilot wage stagnation distinguishes itself in several respects.<\/p>\n

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The degenerating passenger and pilot experiences are not separate phenomena but in fact are intimately related.<\/strong><\/span><\/em><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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First, airline jobs appear to be caught in a steeper free fall. Before President Carter and a Democratic Congress deregulated the airlines in 1978, few industries paid higher wages. In the 1990s,\u00a0a number of studies\u00a0reviewed deregulation’s impact on airline wages, attributing decreases in the range of 10 to 20 percent for pilots, and more for flight attendants. While many observers hypothesized that wages would stabilize as the shakeout from deregulation attenuated, wages never managed to find a floor in the decade after 9\/11. According to a\u00a0Government Accountability Office analysis, pilots’ median weekly earnings fell another 9.5 percent from 2000 through 2012\u2014lower wage growth than 74 percent of the other professions included in the GAO’s review.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nor has this wage erosion been limited to pilots. Today, many flight attendants begin their careers making less than minimum wage\u2014as I did as a flight attendant for Pinnacle Airlines, where I was employed from 2011 to 2013. It’s even worse for those who work outside the aircraft.<\/p>\n

Average weekly wages for airport operations workers, a category that includes baggage handlers and other support staff, fell by 14 percent from 1991 to 2011\u2014a growth rate that was lower even than the low-wage retail and food service industries, according to\u00a0a 2013 study. Airline workers also work much harder than they did in the past; the industry had the second highest multifactor productivity growth from 1997 through 2014, according to\u00a0an analysis\u00a0by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Declining wages and inequality are sometimes described as an inevitable, deterministic outcome of abstract economic forces, but none of the usual suspects\u00a0seem to adequately explain what’s happening to airline jobs in the US\u2014not immigration (pilots and flight attendants must speak English), globalization (so-called cabotage laws have limited the scope of international outsourcing), automation (robots haven’t yet displaced pilots), or the decline of unions (union density remains high). How, then, could the airline industry have fared worse than most other industries?<\/p>\n