If one employee is taking a lot of sick leave, that employee is having health issues. If a lot of employees are taking excessive sick leave there is a problem with your workplace. Sick leave is a measure of how much your employees value their workplace, low sick leave rates means employees are generally happy with the work and the conditions and pay. High sick rates mean the opposite, generally a sign that the mental well being of the employees is at risk and you are either working employees too much for too little, have a punitory system that inflicts stress on employees, or just simply employing the wrong type of people for the job. High sick leave usually combined with low morale, which means higher rate of company property damage, due to not caring, more toilet breaks, low productivity and care for schedules or deadlines, poor uniform/personal presentation, etc etc..... The next step is high rates of resignation for other workplaces or even leaving the industry.

A simple result of low morale is if a person does not like a particular shift they will call in sick for it rather than complain. The answer is to have a bidding system so that people get the shifts they would prefer. If you think that people should just 'toughen up' then expect a lot of sick leave.

If sick leave is affecting the company to the point that it is affecting productivity and possibly safety, then that is a company problem, not the employees....

If your company limits sick leave and makes it hard to take such leave, put in leave forms, request certificates, then they are trying to punish low morale, which is anti productive. It will cost way more to morale and lost productivity to chase this down rather than deal with the actual issues, which is usually something to do with working conditions, like duty hours or time away from home, worried about some punishment for non compliance, or stress due to not enough support and most likely a combination of all. Being hounded for sick leave will create more sickness....

It doesn't have to be. Just has to be enough. There's been a few network disruption notifications coming through with "due short notice staffing issues" as the cause.

If AA can't provide enough ATC for a given point in time, that's the result of poor planning and staffing levels at management level. You can not blame lack of staff for any particular day on sick leave, sick leave will just make any lack of staff worse. As I said above if lots of staff are taking sick leave at the same time that tells you something is rotten at a management level, even if they are genuinely sick, why didn't you segregate, implement controls and ensure the staff did not contract a disease all at once. Fair enough one weekend in a few years goes nuts and you have some disruptions, but this is regular, so entirely staffing/management related.

The thread seems to have morphed to sick leave being the reason for the network disruptions. A shift can be vacant for any number of reasons, examples being, sick leave (the obvious one), special leave (sick child, sick parents, domestic emergency like fire, flood, car crash), staff member used elsewhere, staff member stood-down due to an incident, perhaps the DAME / CASA didn't complete the renewal paperwork, project work, safety work. And sometimes part of a shift is vacant for the same or similar reasons, or because of Fatigue or Roster Rules. Working extra shifts is likely to mean that an individuals fatigue could be elevated on 1 or more shifts. Working tired isn't safe. Working sick isn't safe.

But most roster groups would have vacant shifts on them, that is, no-one was rostered for the 0600-1300 shifts on 1 November and 2 November, so they will need to be covered on Overtime. Some roster groups would have rostered Overtime. And then can be management initiated changes of shift where a controller works a shift tomorrow instead of working another shift later in the roster.

If no-one is able to cover the shift, or only covers part of a shift then there is the potential for network disruptions. ATCs are very good at making things work, moving shifts, or changing the start time of shifts to ensure sufficient coverage. In the larger Towers, e.g. Sydney, SMC is often is worked as a single position rather than the East / West split, so there is likely to be delays as a single controller is managing more traffic and with a wider span of control. Delays for pushback, delays holding short of a runway, delays holding at B8. In the Centres you would find multiple sector areas being controlled by a single controller, missed calls, delays for level changes, late frequency transfer, late application of speed control.

So the original question was "What's going on with ATC Shortage?" - lots and nothing. A poor performing ATC system that is under resourced, under valued and under paid, lacking in motivation to perform anywhere near their best. On most shifts the controllers are relived to be going home and not get a phone call whilst driving home can they cover a shift tomorrow!

We have the benefit of the wisdom of Australian property developer, Tim Gurner, to explain what's going on with the ATC shortage:

• We need to remind ATCers that they work for Airservices, not the other way around.
• There's been a systematic change where ATCers feel Airservices is extremely lucky to have them as opposed to the other way around. So it's a dynamic that has to change. Airservices has got to kill that attitude and that has to come through hurting the ATCers and air travellers.
• We need to see ATCer unemployment rise, ATCer unemployment has to jump 40, 50 per cent.

Hopefully Mr Gurner will get a gig as Qantas COO.

Indeed. Too many lurk merchants, lame ducks and doggo dodgers.

Property developer Tim Gurner has walked back comments he made about unemployment and productivity at a summit this week after sparking global outrage.

In a statement on Thursday afternoon, the multimillionaire property developer said he deeply regretted his comments at the Australian Financial Review property summit on Tuesday which included calling for higher unemployment and saying tradies had become lazy.

“I made some remarks about unemployment and productivity in Australia that I deeply regret and were wrong,” he said.

“There are clearly important conversations to have in this environment of high inflation, pricing pressures on housing and rentals due to a lack of supply, and other cost of living issues. My comments were deeply insensitive to employees, tradies and families across Australia who are affected by these cost-of-living pressures and job losses.”

To quote Mike Carlton:One can tell from, Airservices' corporate communications, that Airservices spends a hefty amount on "image gurus" and "reputation enhancers".

"We're there,like air"
except when we're not

I'm not saying unlimited sick leave is the base cause, but it would be a significant contributing factor. As a business, you know how many employees you need to provide X function, and you resource and budget for that accordingly. You know the defined things you have to cover such as Annual leave, training etc and yes, an estimated coverage for a known and defined amount of sick leave, These are the things you can control, and manage. You don't have excess resources just sitting around if you don't need them. You have some of course, to cover the unexpected, but you are managing risk there. Unused, expensive assets are a negative cost. If you have a situation where some employees needed to fulfil your base function, in excess of those recognised and available to cover the known and anticipated shortfalls, are suddenly not available, at random and in numbers, for indeterminate durations they, not you control, how the hell do you manage that, especially in an occupation/industry where you can't just have a generic employee sitting on a couch for the day because he wasn't needed that day, you need x number of highly skilled employees sitting idly on various couches because of the specialised and segregated nature of the job. You're still paying them, whether they're needed or not, as are you paying the absent staff for however long they feel they need to be absent (there's no financial imperative to return to work - that's what drives it usually). You can't suddenly train and pay more staff to be available because of the nature of the job, plus there is no end to the requirement, and if suddenly there was, what do you do with the excess staff you now have? They all have to be kept trained and current, even if there's nowhere to use them. It's a logistic and financial nightmare.

What do you think would have happened if the ANSP was still part of a Commonwealth department of state, freed of the entirely artificial legislative provisions about reasonable rates of return on assets and financial targets? Did ATSB have a logistic and financial nightmare during Covid, and have to punt a whole bunch of people who were sitting around twiddling their thumbs? Did CASA have a logistic and financial nightmare during Covid, and have to punt a whole bunch of people who were sitting around twiddling their thumbs?

Unlimited sick leave for ATC has been around for a while. Systemic TIBA, TRA and NOTAM'd reductions of services haven't. What's changed is that a tiny little third world ANSP has been made to pretend it's a heavy-hitting business enterprise.

TIBA is nothing new. There's threads on here going back nearly 20 years bemoaning ATC staffing in Aus re TiBA etc. Covid just pushed AsA further over the edge.

The extent and frequency of its use, and the concurrent number of reduction/absence of service NOTAMs, are what’s new.

Pass rate out of the college is only 50%, so should keep the TIBA NOTAM's in circulation for a bit longer!

Offering voluntary redundancy to all controllers over the age of 56 is what pushed staffing levels over the edge.
Some operational groups were getting rosters published with unfilled shifts (due to a lack of available staff) BEFORE over 100 controllers walked out the door with very attractive financial packages to do so.
I imagine that for a while, the remaining controllers stepped up and took extra shifts being constantly offered to them. It soon reaches a point where no amount of extra money in the pay slip makes up for the fatigue, frustration, low moral, and lack of social/family life.
This is when people start saying NO to bailing out the failings of a dysfunctional management, and hence the dramatic and regular increase in the number of NOTAMS that we are witnessing now.

That’s a very poor result. Has it always been so? You’d think there must be something wrong with either selection or the college or both to get that result.

Maybe they did. It's not all hugs and kisses there either.

C'mon, TIEW. You should be above that kind of nonsensical attempt at equivalence.

Disagree, it is not a logistical nor a financial nightmare. AsA operational staffing is reliant on ATCs working Overtime. No safety based system should be so reliant on their staff working Overtime.

Did someone say cheese?

"If you think safety is expensive, try an accident”.

Cloudee, 50%+/- is the way it's been for a long time. The difficulty is you can select trainees with various characteristics but it's not easy to tell if they can put it all together in the right way under pressure without running them through the training. My take is you don't have to be brilliant at any one thing but you have to be good at lots of things, and then be able to link the right skills in the right way. Just as an observation, in the past a good number of us had science/maths degrees but were a bit at loose ends before giving ATC or FS a go.

AsA Executive AFAIK this pipeline has never delivered as anticipated, yet AsA continue to put their house on it. All in black. Perhaps Head Office located next to a Casino isn't a good idea.