u/LENNYa21

Next week, we will receive our annual 1.6% “raise.” However, no amount of mental gymnastics can change the reality of our economic condition. 1.6% is not a raise. Not when we observe what has happened to our pay over the past two decades.

For years we have been told to be patient. Trust the process. Collaboration will deliver results. We must extend. If we aren’t at the table, we’ll be on the menu. No amount of platitudes, clichés, or self-congratulatory messaging can change the undeniable truth:

This profession is moving backward.

There was a time when air traffic control was widely recognized as one of the premier careers in the country. It was a job that provided financial security, upward mobility, and the ability to build a comfortable life for your family. Today, that reality is slipping away. Controllers hired within the last decade face higher costs, diminished purchasing power, and fewer economic opportunities than the generation that preceded them. If you were hired within the last ten years, you are not standing on the shoulders of those who came before you.

You are standing ten feet behind them. 

For brevity, all values listed below are without locality:

In 2004, a CPC at the bottom of the level 12 ATSPP band was making $96,531 under the Green Book. Had that pay kept up with inflation, the same controller would be making $173,579 today. The bottom of the 2026 level 12 ATSPP pay band currently sits at $131,514.

A level 12 controller today is making over $40,000 less than would be required to simply maintain the same purchasing power that existed 22 years ago.

The situation is just as dire at the other end of the spectrum. Had our pay kept up with the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a CPC at the bottom of the level 5 band today would have a base pay of $91,607. It is currently $69,408.

To take it a step further: The median home price since the inception of the Slate Book has risen by roughly 72%, increasing from $235,500 in 2016 to $405,000 today.

And that isn’t even the worst of it.

In 2006, the FAA imposed the infamous White Book. A Level 12 CPC under the White Book had a minimum base pay of $74,950. Adjusted for inflation, that figure would be $123,016 today.

Twenty years after the White Book imposition, after countless promises that collaboration would restore what was lost, the minimum pay at a Level 12 facility is only $8,498 higher than the inflation-adjusted pay the FAA imposed on controllers during one of the darkest periods in our profession's history - 6.9% above the imposed pay bands.

We are currently living under White Book 2.0 pay, and you are being criminally under compensated.

After two decades, we should not be measuring our success against the White Book. Yet here we are.

Inflation has crushed our purchasing power. Housing costs have exploded. Healthcare costs have exploded. Childcare costs have exploded.

Virtually every major cost category that defines middle-class life has dramatically outpaced controller pay growth since 2004, yet leadership has extended our current contract twice without a vote.

Do not be fooled by the myth that locality increases, January raises, and June raises since 2016 have sufficed. They did not create substantial real wage growth relative to inflation, housing, or overall economic productivity, and don’t come anywhere close to getting us back to where we were over twenty years ago.

This profession is becoming harder to recruit for, harder to retain for, and increasingly unsustainable for the very people the system depends on.

Every day, air traffic controllers manage the flow of an aviation system that – according to the FAA’s own numbers - supports 9.4 million jobs, $1.8 trillion in economic activity, and drives 4% of U.S. GDP. The American economy recognizes the value of aviation.

Yet the men and women who make that system possible have spent the last two decades watching the career they were promised become less capable of providing the life it once guaranteed - a good home, financial security, and the confidence that hard work would leave the next generation better off than the last.

The current path is not sustainable.

Controllers are tired of watching the value of this profession erode while leadership continues defending the very strategy that is allowing it to happen.

We must fight for the pay we deserve. We must achieve real pay reform via legislative action. And we must deliver a modern contract that members will be proud to vote for.

Nicholas & Stephen

Asked what his top three accomplishments were he says the new CRWG numbers and getting more controllers into the workforce. Also how he plans on moving that further to even more. Well looks like he’s down to two accomplishments now, time to go east

Let’s take a reread of nicks victory email. Try and find all the lies it’s a fun game.

Let’s keep all those arguments up about how other people running don’t have experience though.

If this is what experience gets us give me someone straight out of the academy running this union.

I don’t understand how this is an update.

Also 4-6 weeks is now we don’t know what the ask
Is of when it will be proposed.