Maintenance?!?
We don' need no steenking maintenance!!
Seriously, this is heading in a really bad direction. On another forum I frequent, a guy who works for a maintenance provider in Texas posted this. The issue that sparked his rant was that some super-duper imported "mechanics" working on a 757 hadn't chocked the aircraft and it rolled a couple hundred feet across the apron.
-Once again, not me. Someone who works in Texas;
I work at a large MRO. My employer sends teams out on recruiting trips to fun places like Panama, The Philippines, and Mexico. We have entire crews of mechs who cant speak any english. (In all honesty the Filipinos are kick ass mechs. The Panamanians are effing morons.) For that matter we have entire crews of uncertificated mechanics. Our FAA says it's all legal too (the bastards). Only the leads are required to have tickets and be able to read and write english...and most of them only have repairman's tickets. These guys work under the repair station's umbrella, not their A&P because they dont have one. They have nothing to loose. The whole situation stinks.
My employer BS'd the State Department and got these guys H1-B Visas (dont ask me how). It's all crap. They are mechanics not engineers or scientists. AA is about to dump a couple thousand more into the market but my employer doesn't pay **** so it's hard for an ex-union mech to stomach coming to a place like this to work for the peanuts they offer.
I'm in QC, I shouldn't complain about my wage. I have an old friend in QC with SWA up at Love Field. His base pay is more than I make on OT. And dont get me started on UPS mech wages. Sheesh!!!
If you think about it, it makes sense for an operator to farm out his C checks. Instead of maintaining a hangar full of prima-donna union mechanics, you send your c-checks to a third-party maintenance operation in Texas or Panama or Singapore or China. You only send a few reps to babysit the birds and scream about hours bid on non-routine cards. It's a win for the operator but a huge kick in the huevos for American workers.
And the f**king FAA could give a damn.