i've been deployed for months working on a busy flightline 12hrs a day. 6 Days a week. It usually ends up being 14 Hr days. It's not worth the money at all. I still get paid 33500$ a yr. fml
Ok, so that begs the question, how many weeks are you usually deployed, and what's the break like between those weeks?
If you're doing 14 hours a day, 6 days a week 52 weeks a year then that's 4368 hours a year, and means that your hourly pay is $7.66 (convert to British and that's £4.90 an hour, almost half the MINIMUM wage in this country).
But if you're only working 10 weeks a year, then that's only 840 hours a year and $39 an hour (£25 an hour), a much healthier hourly wage.
The best example I can find, (and since it was brought up earlier,) is teachers.
You'll often hear people say, I wish I were a teacher and had nice long breaks, huge summer holidays, short hours of classroom time.
When you hear someone say this in the presence of a teacher, you'll often hear the sound of blood boiling before a lecture on how many hours they work overtime and unpaid. working really long hours in the evenings just to be able to get their work done.
But lets break this down.
We'll set the benchmark for the average working day as 9am - 6pm with 1 hour unpaid lunch break.
That means that there are 8 working hours in a day.
worked 5 days a week (mon- fri).
50 weeks a year.
Yearly total hours = 2000.
Now lets compare a teachers day to the average day.
Teacher gets up at 7am (as does regular worker)
Eats breakfast, prepares work for the day (e.g. packs pens into briefcase the same as any other worker) then leaves for work, arriving on work premesis at ~8:30 ready to start at nine.
Now assuming that the teacher doesn't have the duty of watching the playground, or waiting for buses (usually shared across all staff, on a rota anyway) then they can go get a coffee. this is the same as any other regular worker, where starting at nine means at your post at nine, not just walking through the door! if you want coffee before you start, then you need to be there earlier.
A teacher will then work from 9 - 4, with an hour for lunch.
So their working "contact" time is 6 hours.
A teacher then goes home (getting home at 5), prepares and eats dinner until 6, then spends the rest of the evening, (we'll say until 10) marking books and preparing lesson plans.
This in the teachers eyes is 4 hours overtime, each and every day. (and they say unpaid overtime!)
So we have a total working hours day of a teacher of 10 hours a day.
Now lets look at the working days (mon - fri), and the amount of weeks worked in a year.
well there is a 6 week summer break.
a 2 week christmas break.
a 2 week easter break.
and the three terms have a 1 week half term break in the middle, so that's 13 weeks spent not working each year. (39 weeks working).
So teachers work 10 x 5 x 39 = 1950 hours.
Which you'll notice is 50 hours (over a week!) less than the average person.
So yes, teachers have to work long days in order that they are able to get all their work done. But this is more than offset by the amount of time that schools spend not in session.
Now also teachers say that they aren't paid well, but on the other hand...
Teachers, leave school early enough that they can happily pick up any children that they have from school, they don't work in school holiday times, so a teacher should never have to arrange childcare, (or have that expense that a regular person would have to cover).
Teachers have 13 weeks of paid holiday.
Where they can, if they want, take a second job doing part time work to boost their income.
Sure, I don't want to work 10 hour days, but clearly there is a reason that teachers do.
given the opportunity to compress a full year into 4/5ths of a year, then spend the rest of the year sat at home, I'd seriously consider it!
I'm not saying that teachers get it easy. what I am saying is that they get it just as hard as the rest of us, and we get it just as hard as them.