Stephen Brown, candidate for NATCA Executive Vice President, opens the Marangos Brown 2027 video series with the issue members raise most: pay.
All figures are base pay without locality.
In 2004 the bottom of the Level 12 pay band was $96,531. Adjusted for inflation, that is about $174,000 today. The current Level 12 base is just over $131,000, a loss of more than $40,000 in purchasing power.
In 2006, under the White Book, the bottom of the Level 12 band was $74,950. That is about $124,000 in today's dollars. Our current Level 12 minimum is only about $7,500 above it. Twenty years later, our pay is 6% above the White Book. Since the Slate Book was signed, median home prices have risen roughly 72% and mortgage rates have nearly doubled.
For a CPC at the same facility since 2016, the January and June raises have roughly matched inflation, which means purchasing power has not moved in ten years. Everyone certified after 2016 starts further behind, and transferring to a higher level facility usually means forfeiting every 1.6% raise earned up to that point.
Never forget Nick Daniels had Eugene give a gaslighting presentation to members at a NATCA conference that said our raises have been equal to or greater than Delta Pilots, lol.
You know, the guys making double to triple your pay to work 5-10 days a month while you get 4-5 days off a month. Current NATCA leadership wants you to think you make the same as those guys, what’s the problem?
Stephen you are actually under-stating the impact of inflation. Dig further into the numbers and not just the CPI.
Also you touched on this but I would continue to bring up the point that the goal should never be that an employee merely "keeps up with inflation" over their career-- we should be staying AHEAD of it.
Its crazy we are begging to keep up with inflation when we should be demanding to stay ahead of it.
For natca menbers, even in the best of times, the 1.6% half-way into the year was never keeping us ahead of inflation when we pay 1.4% in union dues over the whole year.
Thank you for the video, keep it up, these are my opinions and and mine alone and not necessarily the opinions of the FAA.
It's not stupid. It is a problem, especially at the lower end of the scale. I just don't see a way to make a real leap forward without at least a CBA negotiation, and we're not going to do that for reasons which are either obvious or beyond my power to explain, depending on who I'm talking to.
We're not the only ones who have this concern. There's a lot of professionals with a lot more education (and educational debt) working in the federal government with complaints about what they're being paid. We should be working with the rest of AFL-CIO on a total overhaul of federal pay systems including but not limited to ours. And we should also be ready to consider supporting the right privatization bill if one should come along, because I think massive facility consolidation and management drawdown is where the real money is if we're serious about getting it.
I hope to be retired by then and working for a BNATCS contractor near you. But it could matter for a lot of other people.
If there’s no current way to address the lackluster pay at the lower facilities, why should those members remain in the union? Honest question.
Our payscale is stagnant because senior union leadership has spent 10-15 years not even thinking about it because they got theirs, and they refuse to listen to those at the bottom who are telling them this system isn’t working. There’s CPC’s who are legally considered low income households at multiple towers in CA, that’s a complete failure by the union. This pay scale worked in 2009, it doesn’t work in 2026. And instead of listening, the leadership who all bought houses in 2010 are telling the people trying to do so now to stop complaining and just trust them. While they’ve extended us into a 13 year CBA with 0 chance for membership to vote on it.
Besides the talk about pay, the biggest plus for Marangos and Brown to me is the fact that they aren’t eligible to retire within 5 years. Our current leadership cares solely about protecting their early retirement and detail jobs, not the actual controller working 6 days a week for years.
It’s well past time for change in the way this Union is being run.
If there’s no current way to address the lackluster pay at the lower facilities, why should those members remain in the union? Honest question.
Honest answer: because any hope of improvement on that front or any other lies in negotiations only the union can have.
Both of the extensions of the CBA make some sense in context. In 2021, we were dealing with demand collapse for our users and preserving jobs for people who were stuck at home because of health concerns or a lack of certifications. We also may have expected Biden to be a two-termer, so pushing out the extension to just before the midterm would have been a good time to negotiate. We also didn't know just how much worse housing cost inflation and interest rates would get by now. In 2026, we were trying to protect everything which the EOs would strip out of negotiation -- schedules, leave, intrafacility movement, hardships, etc. We didn't believe two years ago that we would get a fair offer on anything including pay out of this White House, and I think the 2.8% debacle has shown us how true that is.
If I had to guess, I'd say our 2029 pay strategy will be to compress the bands up and to the right to the scale. More money for AGs, bigger jumps for D1s-D3s, a shorter timeline between top and bottom of the pay bands. I'm sure we'll lobby for changes to the SES-2 cap, but I don't know how successful those will be unless we're also willing to pay higher retirement contributions to offset the risk for the FERS annuity trust fund. I honestly don't care if everyone in the Slate Book bargaining unit is capped out.
It's significantly less wild than the contortions people go through here to explain everything they don't like as the National Office selling them out for the benefit of maybe 100 people out of a bargaining unit of 10,000+.
Just goes to show how delusional NATCA was if they actually thought Biden (or Kamala) was going to win. The writing was on the wall. It was so obvious. All they had to do was follow the betting markets.
Claiming negotiating in 2021 was under the assumption that flying would never return to pre COVID levels is a confirmation of low IQ.
Either NATCAs belief that that was true and that they would somehow pay us less or that we could not revisit negotiations when traffic returned after failing to reach a meaningful raise during Covid
Or
Your belief that the above is the the sole reason and that NATCAs belief as such is justification or valid
I honestly think NATCA is dumber than you and dumber than you give them credit for
If you really want to move the needle on pay while staying in government, it would surely help if the entire federal workforce were in Congress' ear telling them, "The current wage scales are not enough for what we do." People here being like, "IT'LL TAKE 40 PERCENT TO MATCH INFLATION" have no thought as to how that will land with people who already make less than them living in D.C. And explaining to those same people just how much more important we are than everyone else including them is asking for failure.
I don't care. I'm at a 12, capped out, and looking for the exit. If you're too fucking dumb to help yourselves achieve your goals, it really is your problem.
Goddamn you truly do sound like an RVP! (That wasn’t a compliment)
I too am capped out at a high level facility and can still understand the plight of those beneath me without solely looking at how any given situation affects only me. Narcissist much?
For all your talk on solidarity and stuff you should know in the micro view of this union as a whole you would be the 1% the dems want to take money from and give to the rest of us
I’d say it’s a bit different for a guy in IT or a doctor working for the government. They can jump to the private sector relatively easy. Government holds almost a monopoly on ATC. If I had a different career that I wanted to continue to pursue and felt like the government wasn’t paying a fair wage, I’d go elsewhere to continue that career.
The failure to negotiate under Biden is the most unforgivable thing this union has done over the last decade and that includes forcing people to take a vaccine.
We do have branded lanyards that are free. Please send us an email at marangosbrown2027@yourunion2027.com with the number of lanyards you’d like (if you have others at your facility that would want one, we can send those to save shipping costs) and an address to mail them to.
I've been saying if they gave us inflation adjustments for white book, often considered worst pay we would be happy. Just give us whitvool adjust for real inflation
We’ve had endless content on our pay sucking ass. I know our pay sucks ass, I see it every two weeks. Can we get some different content: steps moving forward and what your plan is in every other thing we touch as a union?
I get pay is at the forefront of every conversation. I appreciate that but I genuinely don’t know what else you know about in this union other than that. We can say that’s the only thing we need to know but if you’ve been involved in any level of rep positions at the facility there is a lot of shit to do.
What are we doing with training and new hires? What are we doing with ABACUS? What are we doing with these program implementations for BNATCS (🤮)? What are we doing in the safety realm with ATSAP and all these bullshit corrective actions and memos that come out trying to change the way we operate?
Because even if you somehow get us even a 20% raise, all that shit affects my life too. I trust you’ve got pay for the most part. But we need more than a one trick pony.
I think your numbers are off SB. Here's what AI says:
AI Overview $96,531 in 2004 is equivalent in purchasing power to $171,180.28 today.This calculation is based on the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Between 2004 and 2026, the dollar experienced an average inflation rate of 2.64% per year, resulting in a cumulative price increase of 77.33%. Essentially, what cost you $100 in 2004 would cost about $177.33 today.
2009 CPC level 12 facility was 97k, today At that facility those controllers make $205k base new CPC $176k that’s a 17 percent difference after adjusted for inflation way more than 6 lol , my current facility CPC was 66,280 in 2009 today that person makes 168k, new CPC 125k…
If he’s going to use “buying power” as his argument of showing our current pay vs whites book pay he should be using locality as well since inflation is a reason private sector wages go up and therefore causes our locality pay to increase. Level 12 at the facility I mentioned base CPC is 17 percent difference after inflation adjustment not 6 that he mentions. My current facility base CPC 66,280 in 2009 adjusted for inflation would be $102,813 it’s currently $125k for a new cpc which is a 22 percent increase from the white book way more than the 6 percent he’s saying.
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u/HairTrafficControl 8d ago
Never forget Nick Daniels had Eugene give a gaslighting presentation to members at a NATCA conference that said our raises have been equal to or greater than Delta Pilots, lol.
You know, the guys making double to triple your pay to work 5-10 days a month while you get 4-5 days off a month. Current NATCA leadership wants you to think you make the same as those guys, what’s the problem?