Airlines swim in cash, leave airport workers high and dry
Low pay is common for contract employees often at lowest bidder.
After losing more than $50 billion in the decade following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, U.S. airlines have been enjoying some financially robust times of late.
On t h e f r o n t l i n e s , a i r l i n e employees are reaping billions of dollars in wage and benefit increases, plus profit-sharing plans that spell record payouts amid record income. At almost $81,000, average airline worker salaries last year were 38 percent above other U.S. private sector jobs, according to the airlines’ trade group, Airlines for America. Carriers’ wages rose 29 percent between 2010 and 2015, more than double the national average.
Yet this largesse hasn’t been spread equally. If your job is to push a wheelchair through a United terminal or to check boarding passes for travelers headed to a Delta flight, your pay has been generally unaffected by the industry’s cash boom.
“If we really want to make America great again, our airports are a good place to start,” Oliwia Pac, a wheelchair attendant at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, said in an allusion to the president-elect’s campaign slogan. “These jobs used to be good ones that supported a family, but now they’re closer to what you’d find at McDonald’s.”
Pac and thousands of others protested at several large U.S. airports this week in a national Fight for $15 campaign to boost service workers’ hourly wages — and to advance unionization efforts for a variety of fields where low pay is common.
At airports, these low-paid positions include baggage handlers, wheelchair attendants, skycaps and aircraft cabin cleaners. Such contract laborers perform work that ostensibly serves the airlines, but they’re employed by companies the carriers hire amid bidding contests that typically hinge on which vendor offers the lowest price.
“The appropriate way to address wages is at the statewide or national level, so that wage scales apply to all workers equally, regardless of industry sector or geographic location,” Jennings wrote in an email. Elizabeth Wolf, a spokeswoman for Delta Air Lines, which isn’t part of the trade group, said only that the carrier “supports the rights of individuals to respectfully make their voices heard.”
And the pay disparity is likely to widen. On Thursday, Delta’s 13,000 pilots ratified a new contract offering 30 percent raises over four years. That deal will also raise pay for pilots at United Continental Holdings, since they negotiated a clause in their own contract to align with Delta’s pay rates.
Outsourced airport jobs “represent the failures of a political and economic system geared towards the wealthy few and corporate profits at any cost,” say organizers of the wage fight led by the Service Employees International Union. The union says 64 million Americans earn below $15 an hour, or less than $2,400 per month for full-time employment.