Unions Fight to Lift Pay for LAX Workers

Fresh from success in their decade-long fight to represent 74,000 county home-care workers, Los Angeles labor leaders are hunkering down for what promises to be another long and hard-fought campaign, this time to sign up thousands of low-wage workers at Los Angeles International Airport.

The Respect at LAX campaign, spearheaded by two aggressive and fast-growing unions with help from community and religious leaders, and partially bankrolled by the AFL-CIO, aims to increase pay for about 8,000 security workers, food handlers, janitors and parking lot attendants who now earn below the city-sanctioned “living wage” of $7.39 an hour plus benefits.

Yet after nearly a year of effort and only a few modest victories, the campaign has run into stiff resistance from several employers and is moving slowly in negotiations with others. Only about 1,000 janitors and food concession workers, all of whom were already unionized, have received raises so far.

In an effort to jump-start those negotiations, and to underscore the national significance of the campaign, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney will meet with security and food concession workers at the airport Friday morning before leading a rally near the Airport Commission office.

If anyone understands the frustrations of slow-moving union drives, it is Sweeney. As president of the Service Employees International Union in the late 1980s, he was instrumental in launching the campaign for home-care workers, who care for homebound elderly and disabled clients.

The unionization of home-care workers under SEIU, achieved just last week, required county and state legislation and pulled in supporters from outside the labor movement with its message of economic justice.

It also took years of patient footwork. “That campaign is an indication of how organizing is not easy and how we’re in this for the long term,” Sweeney said Wednesday from his office in Washington. “The changes that we’re making now are really investments for the future. And you’re seeing that at the airport. It’s another example of a major center of organization.”

Since taking the helm of the umbrella AFL-CIO, Sweeney has pushed unions to devote more resources to organization drives, to reach out to women, ethnic minorities and immigrants, to network with other community groups and to capitalize on political victories they may have had a hand in. As a start, the AFL-CIO itself pledged a third of its budget--about $30 million a year--to organizing.

Few regions have taken Sweeney’s message to heart as enthusiastically as Los Angeles, where the County Federation of Labor--which itself is spending about $500,000 a year on organizing--estimates unions now employ about 250 professional field organizers.

A cornerstone of the efforts here is the airport campaign. In many ways, Respect at LAX mirrors the home-care drive. Focused on low-wage service workers, primarily Latino immigrants and African Americans, it has attracted a broad range of supporters, including public officials and religious leaders. And one of the unions leading the drive is SEIU; the other is the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union.

The effort also has built on legislation, in this case a city ordinance that set a “living wage” for employees of companies with city contracts or licenses. That wage is now set at $7.39 an hour plus benefits. The Los Angeles City Council in November explicitly included airport leases in the living wage requirement, and two weeks ago, the Airport Commission officially adopted it.

And yet about 8,000 workers still earn less than the living wage, said Vivian Rothstein, coordinator for the Respect for LAX campaign. “I think people heard about the ordinance and thought that was it. It was settled,” she said. “But we still have a lot of work ahead of us.”

Workers do not automatically gain the higher wage under the ordinance. Rather, it takes effect as leases and contracts come up for renewal. Some contracts, such as one covering workers in the Delta terminal, are not set to be renegotiated until 2025, said Rothstein.

In what has been the most contentious fight to date, about 800 pre-board screeners--security workers who check baggage for weapons--have asked to join the SEIU but have encountered resistance from Argenbright Inc., their Atlanta-based employer. The workers are now paid the $5.75 per hour minimum wage, with no benefits, sick days or vacation days. Sweeney is scheduled to meet with Argenbright workers before the rally.

They are just the sort of potential union members the national labor movement has been targeting.

“What we see on a national level seems to be telescoped in Los Angeles, where we have the capacity and the political will to do it, and a strategy to go after certain targets like LAX,” said Kirk Adams, AFL-CIO organizing director. “It really is a strategic part of the world. If you don’t do it in L.A., you ain’t gonna get it done.”