Anyone have any idea why both the third world countries I just visited offered excellent airport baggage service, while JFK took over an hour to offload my bag?
Update Alex Massie sends along this article on the full extent of the problem.
« What is poverty, she said, and washed her hands? | Main | Let us give thanks » Department of Invidious Comparison21 Nov 2007 01:06 pm Comments (48)
The emerging nations have: A) smaller incidence of labor union cartelization, B) fewer regulatory agents, c) less regulatory overhead, D) all of the above. 
Baggage handling is labor intensive and relatively unproductive. That means that the price of baggage handlers in the US relative to other uses of their labor is much higher than in developing countries, so airlines use fewer of them in the US than in developing countries.
Because the ones who got fired for being too slow emigrated. They're all at JFK now.
How long before somebody from the previous thread claims it's because of the skin color of the baggage handlers? Just wondering...
Another reason: The third world country airports you visited were probably final destinations for most people. JFK is probably a via-point. And luggage getting on connecting flights is probably a higher priority for the baggage handlers.
Commodification of US air travel and subsequent indifference to customer service unless you're an elite traveler. It will be their undoing.
How long before somebody from the previous thread claims it's because of the skin color of the baggage handlers? Most baggage handlers with furry skin are slow due to the lack of an opposable thumb.
The emerging nations have: A) smaller incidence of labor union cartelization, B) fewer regulatory agents, c) less regulatory overhead, D) all of the above. I'm sure you did the research to ensure that those things are, in fact, true. My own explanation: being a porter or baggage handler provides a relatively higher wage in developing economies than in the United States, making it a "better job" and one whose employees are more likely to work hard at. (Yes, I ended a sentence with a preposition.)
Rob,
I think baggage handling is a job that we could actually train monkeys to do. I mean, there are monkeys now capable of taking a frozen dinner out of the freezer, putting it in a microwave, cooking it, opening it, and presenting it to a person, it shouldn't be that much of a leap to get them toting bags. And wages? Capuchin monkeys have been observed selling prostitution services for a few grapes. (well, tokens redeemable for grapes) That translates to some pretty low costs. One drawback: if you "supsend convertibility" of the grape tokens, the monkeys WILL -- pardon the expression -- go apesh**.
I would also hypothesize you got a little lucky. I would guess that the variability at third world airports, both individually and collectively, is much higher (either superfantastic or non-existent) than the general level of 'eh' service you get at a US metro hub. (c.f. the same dynamic I think is in play in your air-conditioning observation)
I waited 45 minutes in Syracuse once. Nothing like paying passengers is going to interfere with breaks for baggage handlers.
It has nothing to do with homeland security either...
All of the above explanations may be partly valid, but they miss one of the most obvious ones: many (most?) luggage handlers at U.S. airports are blacks who have little or no work ethic and work at an excruciatingly slow pace. And since political correctness stops most people from stating the obvious, we can't even begin the process of finding a solution.
Uh, Jeff Klansman...the problem in many cases probably IS due to a lack of work ethic, but baggage handlers in the US come in a wide range of ethnicities. Try expanding your provincial outlook. A better explanation that says the exact same thing, but without the bigotted element, is that in the US, baggage handling is unprestigious, unrewarding manual labor that tends to attract unmotivated low-income earners whose attitude toward work has closed them out of most better options. That description may disproportionately capture blacks in regions where black poverty is a problem, but the ethnic correlation by no means implies a causation.
All of the above explanations may be partly valid, but they miss one of the most obvious ones: many (most?) luggage handlers at U.S. airports are blacks who have little or no work ethic and work at an excruciatingly slow pace. And since political correctness stops most people from stating the obvious, we can't even begin the process of finding a solution. Have you ever actually met and interacted with a black person? Like, ever? Is there no one at work? Nobody at your school? Do you really imagine every black person to be lazy, violent and stupid? Aren't there countless counter-examples? And, by the way, the notion that any large percentage of baggage handlers is black seems to me to be undone by simple demographics. Black people only make up 12% of our population, and shrinking. How can such a small portion of people cause all our problems? (I sometimes wish we actually could have a one-race society, just so all the racists can see that the totality of American problems don't spring from the presence of brown people.)
How can such a small portion of people cause all our problems? Obviously they're much smarter and better-organized than Jeff is giving them credit for. But I was sort of presuming Jeff was being sarcastic.
Jeff Goldman that is it.. blacks are bad luggage handlers! something in their genes pushes a button once they enter the American continent and suddenly they are slower than in other 3rd world countries? anony-mouse is right that it is about workers' compensation and social context. if they get paid by the hour - is it high enough to attract high work ethics? It might well be that being a luggage handler at an airport in the 3rd world is a high-wage job compared to the average income and therefore highly desired and fought for. It might well be that luggage handlers in NY earn less than the local average and... Paying workers per luggage item handled could change things but how do you monitor all that? Better IT could achieve that.. but you would change the nature of the job into one that requires physical fitness? First Class, in theory, offers preferential treatment of all sorts but it also costs.
A consequence of Baumol's Cost Disease? Do SE Asian orchestra also give you a better bang (or toot, whistle, clash, etc.) for the buck?
Commodification of US air travel and subsequent indifference to customer service unless you're an elite traveler. It will be their undoing.
Short summary: Goobermint employees with no motivation.
Ahaaaah!!!!! People in Third World countries have fewer personal possessions, so they tend to mostly carry-on!
Upon just a cursory consideration, I would say the fact that there is significantly less business in the third world airports. Before we embark on explanations to Megan's query, I suggest we ascertain whether or not it's a first world vs. third world issue, or is it a USA vs. other countries issue. How does Switzerland do with baggage? What about Japan, Singapore, Israel, Finland? It wouldn't shock me to learn that the rich United States suffers from poorer baggage handling services at airports than both lots of poor and rich countries.
Ummmm, today is the day before Thanksgiving. That, just possibly, might factor into this particular equation.
I've seen a lot of different levels of baggage handling, and without fail, the best, fastest and most reliable are the planes where you put the bags on and take them off yourself. Next come those where you put your bags on a trailer, which is driven out to the plane and loaded, and take them off the trailer yourself too. Worst of all are ones where it is all unloaded and loaded several times so that it ends up on a conveyor belt and the actual passenger never suffers the indignity of seeing how it all works. They never suffer the indignity of seeing their bag again either. The more service, the worse service.
Query for caveat bettor and "jeff goldman" (if he exists and is not a parody): Is there any problem in the world that can't be solved by breaking the unions, abolishing income taxes, and exterminating the negroes? What about the crazed Mohammedans? Just curious.
And it's brad for the win.
American service workers don't like self-important, whiny entitlement freaks who think the world revolves around their privileged posterior.
While Baumol's Cost Disease is a good bit of the explanation, the simpler (and more correct) answer is that you flew into JFK, unquestionably one of the worst airports in the world. They're bad at nearly everything. If you luggage gets through quicker in, say, Singapore, Amsterdam and Hong Kong than in Laguardia, Heathrow or Paris CDG, this is more a function of idiot-run airports than anything else. Consider the massive increase in air travel to NY since the last time there was any substantial increase in capacity in that city. (Philadelphia is also pretty bad, though that's a function of USAir as much as it is of the airport).
I believe the problem is government regulation of airports. The airlines don't even try to compete on service because they're prevented from building the facilities that would permit it. In third world countries it is possible, either through absence of regulation, or bribery of local officials. Volume of air travel isn't the issue. The skin colour or union membership of the baggage handlers isn't the issue. Get the government out of the airport business. It worked for phones.
It's a lovely story... which pretty much defines the term "anecdotal evidence" and doesn't, necessarily, mean much. My friend Red has horror stories about bad flights and lost bags during her last trip to Chile and Brazil, so I don't know that there's a consistent theme here. I've really never had bag troubles anywhere - including the Caribbean and back repeated times - but for my money Lgan in Boston is the worst, slowest airport for bags (though Philly comes pretty close. Kennedy, more than most, I think, varies by carrier; Jet Blue there has been fine for me, American less so (but NY was better than Miami by a longshot), BA was great. My only point being... there's really no point here. One person says she had a good bag experience overseas, and trouble at Kennedy. Your own trip may differ.
I have had extremely bad service in Germany, too. It could be that the job can attract better people in poorer countries while it attracts the lowest tier in rich countries. I'd also like to know how unionized they are, too.
I'm sure that the poor quality of American menial labor has something to do with it, but there's also an obvious issue of management failure to deploy the right technology. According to the article, the airlines' bar code baggage tags read accurately only 90% of the time. Supermarkets and Walmarts would collapse if their checkout scanners had a similar rate of failure. There are two ways a barcode scan can fail: it can give you no reading (that is, a reading that was rejected as incomplete or failing the checksum), or it can give you an incorrect reading. Store barcodes have a fairly high rate of the first failure, but it is almost always correctable by re-scanning at a different angle; I think store clerks have to use the backup approach of keying the code in manually for less than 5% of the items, or about half as often as the airports - and this is with smaller codes, printed on all sorts of different backgrounds and packaging materials, as compared with the airlines' large baggage tags printed on cardboard selected just for that purpose. Type 2 errors are far more serious, but imy experience, store scanners never have type 2 errors. Have any of you ever had an item scan but come up as the wrong stock number?(That's different from a database entry error where the number scans in correctly but the computer has the wrong description or price linked to it.) And yet according to this article, the baggage system has a 2% rate of these errors, where the tags apparently scan but the number is wrong, so the bag goes in the wrong pile. It's not rocket science. You just add a sufficiently effective error-detection code to the bar codes. Or add a few more characters and get error detection and correction; small errors get corrected from redundant information in the code, larger ones are detected so the scan result is rejected. Communication systems and computer disk drives have been using these techniques for over 50 years. Using them in bar codes is much easier - you've got tenths of a second to for the computations, as compared to nanoseconds or less for computers and communication backbones. And yet airlines and airports picked a system with poor or no error detection to start with, and have not changed it. That's a massive management failure. The second management failure: they won't pay $0.20 apiece for RFID tags to replace the bar code tags. It's not just that I expect that anyone who pays several hundred dollars for a ticket wouldn't at all mind an extra $0.40 to be sure your two bags arrive with you, but also I think the RFID system would soon pay for itself. RFID tags would often read even if the bag was laying on top of the tag, so there'd be labor saved to flip the bags over and find the tags. RFID tags would be more accurate (assuming they used any standard system with error-checking built in rather than idiotically rolling their own inferior system.) More accuracy means less labor wasted on sending back bags that went to the wrong pile, dealing with irate customers, and finally getting the bags to them later.
Why? Lean and Hungry vs. Fat and Complacent. You think JFK's bad, try Heathrow (or don't if you have any sense).
In 3rd world countries it's probably a decent and respectable job. Here it is similar to being a garbage collector. That has to be a factor. Who would actually aspire to do this for a career? Also, since it's unionized, it's difficult to get out of once you're in. That must contribute to the disgruntlement and bad work ethics.
It's the lack of competition. Airports are run by governmental entities, they are monopolies. The bad service you receive is indicative of an enterprise that has no fear of competition, they'll get paid whether you, or millions of your friends, fly or not. The only real solution is to put them in charge of health care.
Probably non union.
For all the folks slammin 'da guv'mint' for hiring slackers - wrong thread. Baggage handlers are employees of the individual airlines. And yeah, a degree from MIT isn't a requirement for employment as a baggage handler. Having actually slung bags (the year I got outta HS, back in the 70's) - it's a pretty suck job - or can be. Out in the weather, noisy environment, and equipment that, well, the FAA doesn't exactly inspect on a regular basis to make sure it functions. Usually not the highest paying gig around, although, for the union types, it can be a living wage. As for the technology invested in tracking the bags - making sure they end up correctly at their final destination is only part of the story, these days. With the requirement to associate every bag with a ticketed passenger that actually gets on the plane, ANY question about which bags go where is 'less than optimal'. But, sigh, just one more (set of) example(s) where companies operating in an extremely thin or no margin environment are willing to cut expenses past the bone, at least until it becomes obvious they've screwed up. And yep, my opinion of the entire subject isn't helped by the thought of some Delta jerkwad riding around on his motorcycle near Atlanta with the spiffy Air Force helmet he found in the A3 bag that got 'lost' during a transfer through the mandatory nexus to hell that is air travel in the Southeastern US.
Kenny had it right --- "I would also hypothesize you got a little lucky" The baggage wait at JFK is usually 2 - 3 hours. Count you blessings that you got your bag in only an hour and it wasn't broken into
As with most service-related complaints, the answer is "all of the above". More fundamentally, though facilely, the answer is "under 5% unemployment". Bag service is lousy because there aren't enough competent people manning the system, and the automation isn't good enough to make up the difference. Baggage handling isn't all that low in prestige, but it is low enough that there's a tendency for the more-competent to go elsewhere. This is an aspect of service jobs generally. The pervasive attitude that everyone should go to college and get a "professional" white-collar job that's out of the wind and doesn't involve physical labor discourages people from seeking such work and makes the ones who do take it somewhat resentful and therefore lacking in motivation to do the job itself. Non-wage barriers -- Union work rules, elaborate regulations, taxes on employment, "affirmative action" quota systems, and a myriad others -- simply add to employers' natural reluctance to increase cost by either hiring more people or increasing wages to attract the more competent. On the other side, there has not been nearly enough investment in automation of the system, and much of the investment that has been made is not giving a return because of poor conceptualizing and design, penny-squeezing, and stopgap workarounds put in place to cope with rapid change that can't be simply shut down and replaced because of the workload. The bar codes, mentioned above, are an example -- implemented hurriedly and on the cheap, and too embedded to just yank them and start over -- but the whole infrastructure of carts, conveyors, etc. is 'way inadequate for the load that's being put on it. In many cases the system is badly designed, either because of some Utopian concept on the part of the designers that can't be implemented in reality (DIA, q.v.) or because it has to be shoehorned into a place where the original design almost precludes success (DFW, JFK). In that connection, Donald Carty should be regarded in retrospect as a villain. The whole is exacerbated by deregulation of the demand side without correspondingly freeing up the supply. There are not enough airports to allow everybody in the US to take a daily plane ride, the antiquated ATC system wouldn't accommodate the load if there were, and that's not counting the regulatory barriers to setting up to carry paying passengers. (Market fetishists take note: that should result in higher prices and lower demand. The reverse has occurred, at least in the short term. Discuss.) It won't be easy, simple, fast, or cheap to fix the problem. Most of the money being spent on infrastructure is unproductive from a service point of view, being devoted to the various Potemkin security schemes being put in place, and hiring the necessary workforce is probably impossible -- the people simply don't exist at any price anybody can afford, including air travelers. My recommendation is to realize that clothes are cheap and cosmetic items are available everywhere. Leave it at home, get your carryon down to the absolute bare minimum of survival articles, and buy new underwear when you get to your destination. Regards,
Hey, we flew into New Orleans yesterday, and they had the bags right out (of course, this begs the question whether MSY qualifies as first or third world).
There's probably a little truth in all of the repsonses here, but the biggest reason is still the same reason Boise and Rapid City have much better baggage service than JFK.
Ah, this one's right up my alley (pilot, avition entrepreneur, long-time aviation journalist). You see, all the major jam-ups all happen not in the air but at the airport. Airline travel is inverse to old train travel, where the trains came from one or two tracks into a station with many tracks. Instead, airplanes come from the wide sky onto an aerodrome that has anywhere from one to six runways, as well as a finite number of gates, baggage-handling trams and personnel, baggage carousels, etc. The airport has a limited throughput, in other words. So does each gate, each carousel, and -- this is most important, because it is the primary cause of flight delays -- each runway. For example, the FAA has created a fur-ball in NYC by trying to cap the max capacity of La Guardia at (IIRC) eighty-one departures an hour. Their reasons are twofold: first, safety demands a certain minimum separation between planes (measures in time or in miles), and second, the airlines, who have created the delay problem, blame the FAA for it. The airlines oppose any cap, as do NYC business interests. Logical scheduling would meter the arrivals and departures so that the facilities were not ever overloaded. But the airlines want to fly when their customers do, logically enough. This means: morning rush hour and evening rush hour. Gridlock. So the lines schedule many more airplanes than they can physically fit into the airport. There are no disincentives to this for the lines. They don't pay anything for arrival and departure slots. They don't pay anything for the customer dissatisfaction caused by overpeak scheduling -- customers mumble and grumble but in the end, the lines have realized, they go to Priceline or Orbits and buy whatever's cheapest. In a way, it's a tragedy of the commons, with airport bandwidth being the common good. Each line loses if it doesn't grab and maximize its piece of the morning-rush and evening-rush bandwidth. But all lines together lose when this results in controllers delaying planes to keep them safely separated in the air. If travelers really cared about on-time arrival or convenient boarding and baggage handling, they'd pay for it. And they don't. Same thing with service, meals, legroom, etc. They bitch about not getting it, but they want it "free." Well, TANSTAAFL. On the airlines, in coach, you see Priceline shoppers like the family that WILL travel despite three kids having the flu; the teenagers experimenting with alcohol their first time away from adult supervision; the 400-lb Jabba the Hutt who's profanely offended at being told he's gotta buy two seats. These types of passengers also take longer to board and debark. But the schedule has no slack for Mr Creosote to get unstuck from his seat, or for them to bring Granny's wheelchair. The time-sensitive last-minute business traveler is discovering that, with the airline now the domain of the Priceline crowd and indifferent to on-time arrival, the $1000 business class fare goes a long way towards a charter, which goes when the customer wants, where the customer wants, and usually picks him or her up closer to home and drops him or her off closer to destination. The ugly secret of the business is that a 170-mph Cirrus can beat a 500-mph jet between most departure/destination pairs. Indeed, airport ground and intermodal drill has become so grim that a 60-mph car beats the jet door-to-door between many pairs. The airline now starts making sense at about 400 miles. A proliferation of small jet travel companies like Linear Air and DayJet are going to peel those cashed-up business travelers right away from the airlines. That's why the airlines are trying to blame small jets for the delays. But they haven't even gotten started on the small jets yet... and the little guys don't fly to the big airports (who would want the hassle of going into JFK or LGA when for most real destinations in greater NYC, you can go to Westchester, Teterboro, Farmingdale, etc.? In Boston you have Bedford, Norwood and Beverly, which get you closer to the Route 128 technology belt than Logan, with its nightmare roads, does. In Denver, you can still take your charter into near-downtown Centennial while the airline masses are effectively quarantined an hour out of town. This leaves business and first-class seats filled with non-revenue (i.e. deadheading crew) or upgraded frequent fliers -- so the lines aren't getting their pound of flesh for these seats, either. Megan, your Atlantic colleague James Fallows has written an entire book on some aspects of this. Like most everything he writes, it's worth reading. By the way, Ric Locke is right about security -- the stuff is there to intimidate YOU and make you feel all comfortably watched over. It's not a serious deterrent to terrorists. But that's a different subject which would require me to put on a different hat.
I'd have to agree with one of the other posters. Baggage handling in the US is a dead end job. In 3rd world countries it's a good job.
Well, I can say that my checked baggage gets through VERY QUICKLY whenever I travel to Hong Kong Airport, Singapore Changi or Tokyo Narita. All of these are first world airports to first world cities. And all of them usually have my baggage on the carousel (Changi had my bags on the floor, off the belt!!) by the time I cleared passport control. Out of the three, Singapore Changi is usually the fastest. The most time I've ever spent in line at passport control is 6 minutes. Even when I've flown into Hanoi, it took no more than 15 minutes for me to go through passport control, get my bags and go through customs. Hell, I got a warmer welcome there than when I returned to SFO where baggage handling is also very slow. Why does JFK suck? UNIONS and a very inflated sense of entitlement. The same in SFO too.
This:"It won't be easy, simple, fast, or cheap to fix the problem. Most of the money being spent on infrastructure is unproductive from a service point of view, being devoted to the various Potemkin security schemes being put in place, and hiring the necessary workforce is probably impossible -- the people simply don't exist at any price anybody can afford, including air travelers. My recommendation is to realize that clothes are cheap and cosmetic items are available everywhere. Leave it at home, get your carryon down to the absolute bare minimum of survival articles, and buy new underwear when you get to your destination." by Ric Locke, coupled with markm's post and 'hognose''s specific insight, could be fashioned into a reliable template to describe the literal state of affairs in the vast majority of Industry/Infrastructure verticals throughout the U.S., from coast-to-coast-to-coast... this art should start your thinking:
Well, I've traveled extensively in the third world, and all I can say is that it's luck of the draw. There is no consistent pattern. Sometimes the bags come quickly, sometimes they take a long time. Several factors that come into play are 1. How big was the flight? More passengers means more time to offload. 2. How busy is the airport? A bunch of flights arriving at the same times means slower bags. 3. How big is the airport? An airport that is small and gets only a few flights a day will process bags much more quickly as they don't have as far to travel, and it's harder to send them to the wrong carousel (if there's only one). On the other hand, if they only have one small cart and a burro, it may take a while. I've gotten bags quickly in the States, and had to wait ages the last time I flew to Ukraine. Than again, I've waited ages in London, and had them arrive promptly in Ethiopia. And then there was the time my bag was accidentally(?) tagged incorrectly and offloaded in my connecting city in Bolivia; it arrived the next day, locks intact, with all my expensive camping gear gone.
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Upon just a cursory consideration, I would say the fact that there is significantly less business in the third world airports. More customers, more outgoing/incoming flights probably contributes to a longer wait. Though I am sure there is some convoluted set of economic and cultural factors that I'm neglecting to take into account.
Posted by Peter | November 21, 2007 1:14 PM