One thing missing from union ‘ Day of Disruption’

If you’re going to bill something as a “Day of Disruption” to show your strength, then you probably ought to disrupt something other than traffic.

Anybody willing to stand in the middle of the street can do that.

From that perspective, I’m sorry to report, Monday’s multi front labor protest organized by the Service Employees International Union and its allies was a bit of a letdown.

At O’Hare Airport, where 500 workers ostensibly committed to engage in a one- day strike, a noisy midday rally on a little- used stretch of departure level sidewalk was the only outward sign of disruption.

Both major airlines reported no impact on operations, and if there were problems behind the scenes in maintaining passenger services, they remained very much behind the scenes.

The story was similar outside Northwestern Memorial Hospital and McDonald’s corporate offices, the site of additional demonstrations by workers demanding $ 15- an- hour minimum pay and union rights.

The resulting traffic headaches at McDonald’s led to a few arrests. But if anybody in Chicago missed out on their Big Mac or hospital procedure because of a missing employee who chose to participate in the protests, I’m afraid it went undetected.

When I say I’m sorry to report this, I truly am, because I only want to be supportive of workers willing to stand up for themselves as these people are doing.

It takes a lot of courage for any worker to fight for his or her rights at this time in our history, which security workers at O’Hare learned the hard way following previous demonstrations.

As I reported over the summer, at least six of eight security worker union leaders were fired in blatant retaliation by Universal Security Inc. after participating in earlier airport job actions.

On Monday, the remaining security workers chose not to join in the one- day strike, and I certainly can’t blame them for being more cautious. Just the same, I find it alarming that it’s so easy for a company to fend off a union by firing workers on a pretext.

Labor organizing is already something that’s in short supply in our country right now, and it only promises to be more difficult over the next four years with expected headwinds out of Washington from Donald Trump’s administration.

While we’re waiting for the Trumpmiracle to restore our high- paid manufacturing jobs and lead us all to prosperity, remember that these airport jobs are the kinds of service jobs that people have to rely upon right now to feed their families— and probably will continue to rely upon in the near future.

The passenger service jobs at issue at the airport are private sector jobs: janitors, cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, security guards and more, an estimated 2,000 in all.

As SEIU Local 1 President Tom Balanoff explained, most of these very same positions were held not that long ago by direct employees of the airlines who received decent wages and benefits.

Now the airlines have sloughed the work onto subcontractors, who pay at or near minimum wage with no benefits.

When called out over the injustice of paying workers so little that they still qualify for food stamps and housing subsidies, the airlines hide behind their subcontractors while the Emanuel administration hides behind the airlines.

SEIU’s Balanoff said Tuesday’s protest in front of a phalanx of television cameras raised the workers’ concerns to a broader audience, as he downplayed the Day of Disruption theme.

“I don’t know howmuch disruption we caused,” he said. “I suspect we caused some. It was not designed to shut down the airport. It was designed to get the attention of everybody, and I think we’ve accomplished that.”

Maybe the next time they just should call it what it is: A Day to Get Attention. They’d still be deserving of whatever attention they received.

It takes a lot of courage for any worker to fight for his or her rights at this time in our history.