Flight instructor pay and benefits are an integral component in creating a flight school faculty that reliably provides an education consistent with the investment made by the students they serve. Unfortunately, flight training is at the bitter end of the professional aviation economic food chain so a CFI’s only hope of making a living wage is advancing several links up the chain, after paying his or her requisite dues.
In labor history, many trades and professions have bargained for better pay, benefits, and working conditions by organizing. Airline pilots were among the first to achieve success in this effort. In the ongoing discussion about the declining pilot population and uneven quality of flight training in America today, several readers have suggested that CFIs might follow suit, inferring that such action might lead to improvement.
Plugging “flight instructor + union” into Google led me to the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers (IAM). It has 720,000 members, but no one could tell me how many CFIs were among its 150,000 aerospace workers. Searching IAM’s news archive revealed that Airline Training Center CFIs had recently negotiated a new contract with the Lufthansa school in Arizona, and work to merge Continental’s ground instructors with their unionized brethren at United was ongoing.
Sifting through decades of Google News for reports of organizing flight instructors returned no joy. It seems clear that organizing under a union’s banner can and has worked at a few training institutions, but joining a union to improve their lot is an idea instructors rarely consider. Why is anybody’s guess. Organizing takes some time and effort, and my estimate is that few CFIs teach long enough to see the process through.
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