Hope from the governor

The drive to end the exploitative underpayment of 12,000 workers at New York area’s three major airports gained force as Gov. Cuomo set a moral example by searching for strategies to push salaries up. Specifically, the governor ordered his representatives at the Port Authority, the bistate agency that runs Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports, to submit “recommendations on what they can do” in the next few days.

“I want to see what we can do in the Port Authority,” Cuomo said Wednesday, meeting with the Daily News Editorial Board just t days after The News began highlighting the minimum-wage hell that entraps porters, cleaners, security personnel and others at the travel gateways.

The downward track of their wages and denial of all benefits exemplifies how jobs that once afforded at least the basics of life are being transformed into below-subsistence-level positions.

An economywide trend, the winnowing has been especially severe at the airports, as airlines off-loaded functions like cleaning, curbside baggage-handling and unarmed security to companies that compete for contracts.

The News today compares the salaries and benefits of two workers who toil as unarmed security agents at the airport.

Dolores Holman is employed by a company that provides services directly to the Port Authority, which sets basic wage standards for its contractors. Holman is paid $17.43 an hour and gets 15 days’ paid vacation, medical and dental coverage, plus a 401(k) retirement savings plan.

Prince Jackson is on the payroll of a company with an airline contract. He gets the $8-an-hour minimum wage, five days’ vacation and lives in near poverty.

Yet attempting to unionize would be doom. If workers did so, a new nonunion company paying minimum wage would step in to steal their e employer’s contract from the airlines.

Only government can even the scales. For example, if New York City retains a company to provide unarmed security guards, the firm must pay $15.60 an hour, plus $5.02 an hour in benefits, plus eight paid holidays, 10 vacation days and one sick day for every six months worked. Laudably, de Mayor Blasio has also called for Port Authority action. He can urge; Cuomo can order. There has to be a way. And the governor should pay no mind to the likelihood airlines will scream that, in his words, “It’s more expensive to fly into New York than anywhere else.”

Perhaps so, but no one with a conscience could justify holding the line on costs by grinding workers into poverty.