Wage war takes flight at Pearson

Protest calls for airport workers to be paid at least $15 an hour

Of the 40,000 people who work at Pearson — an airport that is effectively a small city — about 100 were gathered outside the automatic sliding doors of Terminal 1, holding union flags and cardboard placards.

Joined by a busload of protesters from downtown earlier this month, they were calling for a $15 minimum wage. Savithri Alahari, a mother of two living in Malton, was among the demonstrators; she makes $13 an hour working as a Pearson security guard — the same wage, she says, that she has earned for the last decade and a half.

Looking at a Union Pearson Express train idling on the tracks, she said, “Oh my God, that’s a luxury, that’s not for us.”

The airport is rich, Alahari went on — it should be able to afford better pay for its workers.

“I don’t know why they can’t have $15 minimum,” she said.

The same question is being asked across North America. In recent years, the fight against inequality has honed in on airports, important economic hubs and often flush with cash — but also, critics say, hotbeds of labour trends that have driven down wages and made job security more precarious.

American cities such as Seattle and Los Angeles have seen baggage handlers and flight attendants successfully fight for higher pay. Pearson workers are trying to follow suit.

At the airport rally, check-in staff and customs officials mingled together, carrying a half-dozen union flags, energized by the whistle-blasts of two dancing women and a boom box playing Top 40 songs.

“This is the beginning of the struggle,” said Sean Smith, spokesman for the Toronto Airport Council of Unions.

In the United States, airport workers have been demanding and securing their own minimum wage for more than a decade.

“It’s sad to say, but we’re behind the U.S. right now.” SEAN SMITH SPOKESMAN FOR THE TORONTO AIRPORT COUNCIL OF UNIONS

In 2000, San Francisco Interna- tional Airport set the base pay for workers performing safety and security functions at $12.93 an hour, on the grounds that people with lives in their hands should earn enough to subsist on just one job and so arrive at work rested.

Since then, a handful of airports have set relatively generous minimum wages, ranging from about $13 to $16. “It’s sad to say, but we’re behind the U.S. right now,” said Smith.

The American labour movement has focused on airports, in part, because of their sheer size; air transit hubs like Chicago’s O’Hare can have workforces in the tens of thousands. And because terminals are tethered to the places they serve, higher wages do not have the effect of displacing employers, the way higher factory wages might.

“Unless we develop teleporters, we cannot export our airport location to China,” said Steven Tufts, a professor of geography and labour at York University who sits on Pearson’s Consultative Committee.

Higher wages are also unlikely to dramatically increase airfare prices for consumers, advocates say, since labour costs are such a small proportion of air travel’s costs. A report on the proposed wage increase at the Seattle-Tacoma airport — now tied up in the courts — suggested that passengers would pay just $1.78 more per flight, on average.

Rampant contracting out of positions like security guards and wheelchair attendants has driven down wages and weakened job security, says Ken Jacobs, chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center. Real hourly wages for U.S. baggage porters cratered in the last decade, from $19 to $10.60 in 2012, according to a report Jacobs co-authored.

Sean Smith says the same thing has happened at Pearson, estimating that thousands of his colleagues are paid the minimum wage or only slightly more. “The trend is downhill,” he said. At Pearson, 40,000 employees are divided between a handful of unions — Unifor, CUPE, the Teamsters, PSAC — which can sometimes work at cross purposes. Another potential obstacle to increasing wages at Pearson is the airport’s leadership.

Whereas U.S. airports are often run my local governments that are susceptible to public pressure, Pearson is run by the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA), whose directors are appointed or hired through a search process. “Over time, just like a lot of things in society, governance has been increasingly corporatized,” said Tufts.