Originally Posted by
beachmouse
The ramp worker situation was screwed up enough at VPS this summer that we actually had a station manager come on the pa by the baggage carousel and ask for grace because she only had 3 of the ramp workers she needed that night when 17 was her ‘fully staffed’ level as she reminded everyone to make their Bags On Time claim. Bags eventually came to belt 45 minutes after the door chime. As you don’t normally get someone in charge admitting that kind of labor issue to customers, it was like a plea for help that we were, I dunno, write Delta and ask them to up pay so they could authorize pay somehow to at least hit half staffing levels on a regular basis.
This makes it even weirder because VPS is contract under the wing (and I suspect over the wing as well) she as encouraging people to take an action that was actually costing the contacting company money.
Not weird at all. Unifi workers are paid by the hour. They have no profit sharing and no incentive to perform, deliver bags on time, etc. At my airport they know they can't meet the bags on time threshold so now they just scan all the bags planeside and leave them for awhile until they have time to actually deliver to the claim. Chronically understaffed.
It does worry me a bit that these bottom of the barrel contractors aren't just throwing bags but also performing safety critical functions like de-icing. Frontier recently had a near disaster with that.