Labor Making a Stand at LAX

Leaders of the nation’s largest labor unions, eager to boost membership and test their growing political clout, are launching a major campaign at Los Angeles International Airport, using it as a centerpiece of a national effort to draw attention to the issue of the so-called living wage.

The stakes are high, not just for the region but for the nation. LAX is one of seven organizing sites slated for action by the national AFL-CIO, and labor’s effort at the airport will provide a measure of the union’s strength and toss a complication into the already tense and multifaceted standoff building around the airport operations.

“We’re trying to rebuild the culture of organizing,” said John J. Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO. “The LAX campaign is an integral part of our national effort.”

The LAX campaign is freighted with potential local political fallout as well, particularly for Mayor Richard Riordan. The mayor has tried to walk a fine line on the living-wage question, resisting efforts to make it the law of the city but simultaneously urging the airlines to comply with it voluntarily.

After nearly a year of behind-the-scenes efforts by the mayor, however, not one airline has moved to force its subcontractors to raise salaries for security guards, custodial workers and other minimum-wage LAX employees. That has frustrated many workers and union activists, and the new campaign in part reflects their impatience with Riordan’s efforts.

“We are hard-working people, and we do important jobs,” said Dionicia Robinson, who has worked at LAX for nine months as a wheelchair runner and who makes $5.75 an hour. If she’s sick, she loses a day’s pay and is forced to bring a note from a doctor or risk a suspension.

“These are slave wages,” she said. “I support two children. I deserve better wages.”

Robinson and many of her colleagues complain that persuasion does not appear to be working in the effort to get them more money. So they have turned to lobbying and organizing. Hundreds have signed a petition stating their intention to form a union, and scores more have joined demonstrations.

“This project will notch [the pressure] up,” said Leticia Salcedo, one of about 15 labor organizers already at work on what is informally known as the LAX campaign.

At the airport, the union activities are no secret.

On Tuesday, labor organizers from the Service Employees International Union marched alongside minimum-wage security workers to draw attention to their complaints of underpayment and intimidation. In late spring, national labor leaders joined with low-wage airport employees in a march directed at United Airlines and its security subcontractor. And through the summer and fall, demonstrations are likely to become a regular feature of airport life.

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Meanwhile, labor leaders are lobbying City Council members and airport commissioners with an eye toward convincing them to bring pressure on the airlines and other companies using the airport.

“Just the thing to tide us through the summer doldrums,” said one City Council aide opposed to the union organizing.

The airlines are no less dismayed.

United Airlines officials were angered when labor chose to target the carrier for one of the season’s first protests. Argenbright, a security company that employs many of the workers who operate metal detectors and provide other airport security, has not publicly commented on the mounting campaign, but has infuriated labor organizers by seeming to threaten workers who seek union representation.

Said one airline executive: “This is definitely something that we’re concerned about. It’s on our radar.”

Labor leaders say they intend to become increasingly strident this summer.

“You’ll see more demonstrations . . . leafleting of airport customers, marches with hundreds of participants,” Salcedo said. “We’ll keep at this until at least these workers have a living wage and protection in the workplace.”

Labor’s place at the LAX table these days is strengthened by the latest addition to the city’s Airport Commission. That board--which oversees LAX as well as airports in Palmdale, Van Nuys and Ontario--for the first time includes a representative of organized labor, Miguel Contreras, who heads the county’s labor federation.

Contreras was confirmed for a post on the Airport Commission last week. He said later in an interview that he does not see any conflict between his new post and his labor role.

“We currently have 18,000 union members at the airport,” Contreras said. “We have a right to be on that commission.”

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The problems for Riordan, meanwhile, seem likely to keep mounting.

Riordan favors the living wage as a matter of personal and religious conviction. He pays his staff at his downtown restaurant, the Pantry, far above the restaurant standard. But the mayor also opposes imposition of the living wage by ordinance, a move that runs counter to his free-market philosophy and determination to keep government intervention in business to a minimum.

At the same time, Riordan cherishes his relationship with organized labor and has used it to build support for airport expansion and other projects. What complicates matters for the mayor now is that his business and personal ideals are at odds, and he faces an impatient and angry group of workers whose support he risks losing if he refuses to compromise when it comes to enforcing the living-wage ordinance on some LAX employers.

Under the city’s living-wage law, passed last year over Riordan’s veto, employees who work for city contractors or leaseholders and who perform jobs that otherwise probably would be done by city workers are entitled to make a “living wage.” In Los Angeles, that means at least $7.39 an hour with health benefits or a little more than $8.50 an hour without.

Riordan’s opposition to the ordinance and its application to LAX has tested his relationship with organized labor and has raised new questions about the depth of support for expansion of the airport. If approved, the massive construction project--estimates range between $8 billion and $12 billion--would mean thousands of union jobs. The increased airport operations that would come from an expanded LAX would create thousands more.

But some labor organizers see little point in wasting political capital on the expansion if many of the jobs created by it will go to nonunion workers. And few observers believe Riordan will be able to convince the airlines and their subcontractors to raise salaries voluntarily.

Even Riordan acknowledges that it has been slow going with the airlines. In fact, the mayor said he welcomed labor’s decision to step up its activity at LAX, saying he hoped it would bring more pressure on the airlines and their subcontractors.

“I don’t think government should be dictating the living wage,” Riordan said. “But this may serve as the catalyst for the airlines to wake up and do the moral thing.”

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That type of talk irritates some airline officials, who have grown tired of Riordan urging them to spend billions of dollars on airport expansion and then accusing them of immoral business practices.

So far, the airlines show no sign of budging on the question of the living wage. They say it would cost their industry $3 million a year to boost the salaries of janitors, security workers and the like at LAX, and they are appealing a ruling by the city’s contract administration office in which officials concluded that the living-wage law should apply to those workers.

The airlines also are expected to oppose efforts by Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg to fine-tune some aspects of the ordinance in order to strengthen it and expand the number of workers to whom it applies.

Those moves anger union leaders, and have redoubled their commitment to making a national stand at the airport.

“For people to slink around and hide behind legal positions is missing the point,” said Andy Stern, international president of the Service Employees International Union, based in Washington. “It’s good business to pay decent wages, and it’s the right thing for a responsible employer to do.”

Sweeney, who is on good terms with Mayor Riordan, agreed. The labor leader stressed that although he believes Riordan has tried to sway the airlines, he holds out little hope that the mayor will succeed.

“The mayor’s heart and mind are in the right place,” Sweeney said. “But corporations today aren’t going to do it voluntarily. They’re too greedy.”