SEIU: Airport Workers Who Helped Spark Fight for $15 Protest Alaska Airlines Shareholder Meeting

SEATTLE, May 7, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- After a first quarter in which Alaska Airlines (NYSE: ALK) enjoyed record profits, workers who helped provide those profits are protesting the company's annual shareholder meeting.

"Without the baggage handlers and without ramp agents, a huge part of Alaska's business doesn't get done," says Sophia Grzeskowiak-Amezguita, who works around 70 hours per week for Menzies Aviation, an Alaska subcontractor. "It's like a pyramid. If you don't have the bottom, you can't have the top."

The shareholder meeting comes on an important day for the Fight for $15 movement, which airport workers in Seattle and fast food workers in New York helped spark. Today Mario Cuomo is directing the New York labor commissioner to impanel a Wage Board to recommend a new standard for the state's fast-food industry.

Next week also marks the ten-year anniversary of Alaska's costly termination of 500 baggage handlers, fuelers, tow operators and others who on May 13, 2005 were replaced by employees of Menzies Aviation for roughly half the wage. A memorandum released today by California-based BAE Urban Economics estimates the cost in lost wages and economic activity to King County, Washington to have been $115 million. The human cost was also high. But today both replacement workers and the workers they replaced are standing together today in opposition to Alaska's policy and its public impact.

Airport jobs used to be good jobs. But many already lucrative airlines have chosen outsourcing to drive down wages and further boost profits. As airlines have encouraged contractors to compete on the basis of wages, pay for many jobs have dropped by as much as 45 percent in real terms. Today more than 1 in 3 cleaners and baggage workers at airports live in or near poverty. Like their counterparts at McDonald's, airport workers rely on public assistance at higher rates than workers in other industries. A full 13 percent of cleaners and baggage handlers qualify for health insurance through a public program and 15 percent report receiving food stamps within the last year.

Airport workers are part of the broad and growing Fight for $15 movement, which includes adjunct professors and home care, child care, industrial laundry, Walmart and fast-food workers. In 2013 workers and voters in the airport town of SeaTac helped ignite the movement by passing a referendum to raise wages to $15 an hour. Although in 2014 the top six U.S. airlines received over $150 billion in revenue and close to $7 billion in profit, Alaska Airlines and the lobbyist group Airlines for America—which includes Alaska, American, Delta, United and others—sued to block efforts by both SeaTac voters and the Port Authority to raise wages at Sea-Tac.

Thousands of terminal cleaners, cabin cleaners, skycaps, wheelchair agents, customer service agents, terminal security officers, ramp workers, and baggage handlers at major airports across the country are uniting for $15 or more and a union in order to lift up our economy, reduce turnover, and maximize airport safety. Today workers are taking public action in support of Alaska Airlines subcontracted workers in ten cities: Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New York, Newark, San Diego, and San Francisco.

Visit www.AirportWorkersUnited.org

SOURCE Service Employees International Union

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