LAX Security Staff Begins Union Drive

Security workers at Los Angeles International Airport, unhappy with their wages and tired of waiting for Mayor Richard Riordan to persuade their employers to grant a pay hike, have begun union organizing, and they say their employers already are threatening to retaliate.

About 450 airport workers submitted a petition this week announcing their intention to form a union and complaining about their treatment. “The work we do keeps the airport safe and running--but for all our hard work we receive poverty wages, unaffordable benefits, unfair policies and little if any respect on the job,” the petition says.

In a letter to Argenbright Security Inc.--which provides security services for United, Delta and other airlines--a union organizer complained that workers have been warned that their activities could cost them their jobs.

“Employees have been told in the presence of a union organizer that Delta is a nonunion company and that, if the organizing persists, Argenbright could lose its contract with Delta,” wrote Mike Garcia, president of the local chapter of the Service Employees International Union.

The union organizing at LAX, which kicked off in earnest this week, represents the latest development in an increasingly contentious and complex set of issues gripping management of the airport and city. Already engaged in a struggle with the adjacent community and its councilwoman--Ruth Galanter--over proposed expansion of the facility, Riordan and his airport allies are facing a growing and increasingly assertive labor effort aimed at securing “living wages” for security, custodial and other minimum-wage workers.

The main battleground in that fight is over an interpretation of the city’s living wage law, passed last year by the City Council and enacted over Riordan’s veto. Some advocates of the law--which requires large companies under contract with the city to pay their employees $7.25 an hour with benefits or $8.50 an hour without--say it should be applied to LAX employees performing custodial, security and other non-flight operations.

Opponents counter that the airlines and their subcontractors should be beyond the law’s reach for a variety of reasons. The airlines argue that they are required by federal law to provide security, so the security jobs would never be done by city workers. In addition, although the airlines hold leases at the airport, they do not employ security and custodial workers; they hire subcontractors.

Riordan has agreed with the airlines’ legal position, but also has urged them to comply with the ordinance voluntarily--saying it is good for business and morally important. That approach seems to have had little effect, however. Workers still are making minimum wage, and some airline officials privately complain about what they see as Riordan’s sanctimony.

While Riordan tries to elbow the airlines into action, airport workers say they are tired of waiting.

Maria Luisa Mosqueda has worked for Argenbright for more than a year. In that time, she has gone from being paid $5.75 an hour to $5.90 an hour. Her job is to escort passengers who are traveling without U.S. visas and have a stopover at the airport.

“My job is a very important job,” she said. “But the money I get, we get, is not enough to support a family, especially living right here in L.A.”

Mosqueda gets no paid vacation or sick days, no insurance coverage, no medical benefits. And she, like other workers, complains that the company has lashed back at workers who are trying to organize.

Karla Zombro, a lead organizer for the service union, agreed, calling Argenbright “very, very unfriendly to the idea” of a union.

Zombro and other organizers said they have heard numerous complaints about intimidation, ranging from supervisors pulling workers into meetings where they warn of potential fallout from the organizing effort to outright threats of firing for workers who pass or sign petitions. A common refrain, according to union leaders, is that Argenbright officials tell workers that the effort to organize a union will anger the airlines that hire Argenbright and cause the company to lose its contracts, costing workers their jobs.

One particularly testy point of contention has been Argenbright’s employee manual, which says that the company opposes unionization by “every proper means.”

“It has not been necessary in the past, and it is not ever going to be necessary in the future, for our employees to belong to any labor union,” the company manual states.

Brian Neimeyer, an Argenbright vice president, did not respond to a request for comment.