CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Some Charlotte, N.C., airport workers sleep in their cars. Others bed down in U-Hauls. Some doze off at night on the airport’s own seats. They can’t afford rent on a one-bedroom apartment. A gray-haired older woman barely can, but only by cutting down on her food and medicine.
Welcome to what workers who toil for two American Airlines subcontractors at the company’s busy North Carolina hub call poverty wages—pay so low they’ve had to stage one-day strikes three times in the last 14 months to call attention to their plight.
The workers are 800 airplane cleaners, members of Service Employees Local 32BJ’s Southern District, and employed by subcontractors ABM and Prospect Airport Services. Their latest walkout, for an entire day, was on Nov. 25 at the start of the busy Thanksgiving holiday travel season.
Prior walkouts were on Memorial Day—also a busy travel day—and the middle of last September. Then, the airport called the cops, who arrested five of the workers for blocking traffic.
Pay is the key issue, but benefits are rock-bottom, too, and working conditions leave a lot to be desired. The workers told Charlotte media they earn $12.50-$19 an hour to haul trash out of the planes, clean aircraft interiors, and push wheelchair-borne passengers to and from gates. They add they live paycheck to paycheck—and the paychecks don’t go far enough.
Wheelchair attendant Timothy Lowe II said at the rally of strikers that at the end of his shifts he must figure out where to sleep.
“At the job, I can’t afford to get into an actual one- or two-bedroom…I know a lot of people, they bring their cars or U-Hauls. I got friends who live in U-Hauls,” Lowe tweeted. “Some workers are forced to live in storage units or cars. This is the cost of corporate greed.”
“We just want to be able to have everything that’s a necessity paid for by the job that hired us to do a great job so they can make billions,” Lowe told the Associated Press.
Left unsaid on the picket line is the contrast between the corporate greed of American Airlines and its two subcontractors, and the workers’ pay. Using federal figures, the AFL-CIO’s Executive Pay Watch reports American CEO Robert Isom earned $31,438,162 last year, most of it in stock options. ABM Industries CEO Scott Salmirs earned $8,253,602. The pay for Prospect’s CEO was not listed.
“We cannot live on the wages that we are being paid,” ABM cabin cleaner Priscilla Hoyle said. “I can honestly say it’s hard every single day with my children, working a full-time job but having to look my kids in the eyes and sit there and say, ‘I don’t know if we’re going to have a home today.’”
Gray-haired Maribel McBeath added the low pay “personally impacted me in a way that I have to cut down on my medication, cut down on my food, to be able to pay rent, to pay my light bill and water and all that.”
“We got homeless workers who sleep in their cars, who sleep on the street because they can’t afford their own place to stay. It’s sad,” ABM trash trucker LaShondra Barber told WSOC-TV. Personally, she found herself hauling heavy bags of garbage in 95-degree summer heat with no water available. She was one of the five arrested the previous September for their peaceful sit-in.
“We’re voting on our strike because we’re not treated fairly, we’re not paid fairly,” ABM worker Dorothy Griffin said before the strike authorization vote. She added she can’t pay for car repairs. “We’re not respected in our jobs. We just want higher and more wages and a little respect.”
Besides, “If we stop working, the airport is going to stop. The planes can’t go.”
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