SAN FRANCISCO – Airline service workers at San Francisco International Airport voted overwhelmingly yesterday to authorize a strike at one of the busiest airports in the country. Workers who came out to vote on Thursday said that they were fighting against declining standards of service and security at the airports. Poverty-level wages and lack of access to affordable family health care are causing record turnover rates among workers and driving a race to the bottom in service and safety standards.

Workers called on airline giants such as American, Cathay Pacific and United to take a leadership role in calling for higher standards for service and security.

Workers employed by contractors Prime Flight and G2 Secure Staff voted yesterday to authorize a strike. Employees of a third contractor, Air Serv, are also in negotiations at the airport.

CRISIS IN AIRLINE SERVICE INDUSTRY

Low wages and lack of healthcare are driving a turnover rate among airport service workers that is as high as 50% per year in some jobs. This negatively impacts service and security at California airports. High turnover in the industry prevents security officers and other passenger service workers from getting the experience and training they need to adequately protect and provide quality services to airline passengers.

At SFO, airline service workers such as security officers, janitors, passenger service workers, cabin cleaners, ramp and cargo crew, on average, earn less than $12.00 an hour, putting them well below the $54,000 per year that the Economic Policy Institute says is necessary for a family of four to survive in California. In addition, none of the service workers have access to affordable family health care.

“We are the face of the airlines. We are the people that passengers see every day,” said Patrick Jack, who provides skycap services for American Airlines through his employer G2 Secure Staff and has worked at the airport for 19 years. “We are taking a stand for better service, better airport security, and for quality jobs.”

CHICAGO, IL – Senator Barack Obama issued the following statement today in support of passenger service workers at airports throughout California:

“I stand with the airline service workers who temporarily went on strike at Los Angeles International Airport last week. The demands they’re fighting for aren’t unreasonable – access to health care, adequate training, proper equipment, wages that can support a family – they’re what America’s workers deserve. Their efforts send a strong signal that it’s not good for workers, passengers, or the industry when business fails to live up to its end of the bargain.

“By supporting the security personnel who don’t have the staffing or training to ensure passenger safety or deal with high turnover rates, the crewmembers in dangerous conditions who can’t afford health care, and the service workers who after more than a decade on the job still don’t earn a living wage that makes ends meet, we all benefit.

“For the airline industry, meeting these demands is inextricably tied to passenger safety, quality service, and the health of our economy. Our airlines have a responsibility to their workers and passengers to come back to the bargaining table so that union members can go back to work.”

To read Senator Obama’s plan to continue fighting for America’s workers, click HERE.

Airline service workers representing the 2,500 employees who provide passenger services at LAX walked off the job on August 28 at 1:30 PM in response to contractors’ civil rights abuses and failure to bargain in good faith.

Service contractors who provide cleaning, security, wheelchair assistance, and baggage handling services for airlines at LAX have refused to provide the quality jobs with access to affordable health care needed to ensure the highest quality services and security for airline passengers.

At a bargaining session today near LAX, the companies – G2 Secure Staff, Air Serv, Aviation Safeguards, and Aero Port Services again refused to make a proposal to the workers about improvements in training or wage and benefit increases, despite months of negotiations and the presence of a federal mediator at this week’s talks.

“No one wants to have to strike, but they have given us no other choice,” says Jose Hernandez, a wheelchair assistance worker with Aero Port Services and member of the airport workers’ bargaining committee. “We’re proud to take care of the passengers who need it most – but we also need to be able to take care of our families. Good jobs and good service for passengers go hand in hand.”

Click HERE to send a fax to the CEOs of major airlines and tell them IT’S TIME FOR DIGNITY AND RESPECT!

“I make the state’s minimum wage and was forced into homelessness for most of last year,” Dwayne Green, a subcontracted airline service worker based in San Jose, California, said. “Most people wouldn’t believe me when I tell them I was homeless while working full time providing service for a major airline, but it’s the truth.”

“Without the right equipment, my job is more difficult, dangerous and the airplane is not going to be as clean as it should for the passengers,” said Guadalupe Rivas, a contracted airplane cleaner at LAX.

With its customer satisfaction ratings lingering at all-time lows and its workers struggling with inadequate training and compensation to deliver quality services, the airline industry clearly has a problem.

Dwayne Green and Guadalupe Rivas are part of a coalition of airline service workers, passengers, communities, clergy and political leaders that are calling on airlines to improve standards for workers and passengers alike. The Reaching Higher Coalition is demanding that American, United, Southwest, and other airlines take leadership and commit to standards for effective service, improved security, and quality jobs.

Many airline passengers depend on airlines’ front-line service workers throughout their flying experience. These workers, who are subcontracted by the airlines, often receive inadequate training and little compensation to either raise a family on or to stay in their job for long. The high turnover rate, workers say, is another factor contributing to the lackluster performance with both service and security, as inexperienced and ill-trained newcomers constantly replace older, more experienced ones.

Join Dwayne and Guadalupe and let the airlines know that passengers and workers deserve dignity and respect NOW! Click HERE to send a fax to the CEOs of major airlines.

Airline service workers at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) voted overwhelmingly yesterday to authorize a strike at the nation’s fifth busiest airport. Workers said that they were fed up with declining standards of service and security at the airports. According to the workers, inadequate training, lack of proper equipment, poverty-level wages and lack of access to family health care are causing record turnover rates among workers and driving a race to the bottom in service and safety standards.

The LA Times reports:

[Union spokesperson] Chavez said workers are paid an average of $10 an hour and 97% have no family healthcare. As a result, job turnover rate has gone up to 50% in some cases, he said.

“It’s really driving a race to the bottom in terms of service and safety standards,” he said.

The 95% approval vote gives union negotiators the go-ahead to call a strike at any time, Chavez said. The workers union has been in talks with airline subcontractors, who hire for the service jobs, since July, Chavez said.

While workers expressed anger at their employers who have stalled negotiations and threatened workers who show support for the union, they also called on airline giants such as United, American and Southwest to take a leadership role in calling for higher standards for service, security.

“The airlines can do a lot better to improve services to their airline passengers and airport security, while at the same time make these good jobs for our families and our communities,” said Fanny Fuentes, who provides wheelchair assistance to passengers with disabilities and seniors at Northwest Airlines. Fuentes, like most airport service workers, earns only $10 an hour and does not have adequate individual or family healthcare.

In a recent survey of airport workers by the Los Angeles Alliance for New Economy, 75 percent of wheelchair attendants surveyed reported problems with broken or malfunctioning wheelchairs and nearly a third reported that a passenger has been in danger due to equipment problems or lack of training.

Improvements to training, proper equipment, a livable wage and family health care coverage could be implemented for a cost barely noticeable to passengers. Less than 25 cents per ticket would improve passenger service and airline security. Despite raising ticket prices by an average of $200 and instituting a range of new fees, airlines have been unwilling to make this minor investment in the workers who directly impact overall travel-experience of their passengers.

Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1877 represents about 5,000 airport service workers in California. SEIU is currently in negotiations with subcontractors including ABM, Aero Port Services, Air Serv, , Aviation Safeguards, G2 Secure Staff, Lee’s Maintenance, One Source, Primeflight, Service Performance Company, and World Service West. These subcontractors service American, United, Southwest and other airlines and perform the majority of the security, janitorial and passenger service work at LAX,
SFO, San Jose and Oakland airports.

You have probably seen the latest United Airlines commercial at the 2008 Beijing Olympics: a woman says goodbye to her husband for a business trip, leaves her heart behind as a token of her love, only to be reunited with her husband, all thanks to United Airlines.

That’s nice.

Anita Cabral’s real-life, horrific story of a family reunion with United Airlines, on the other hand, is heart-breaking.

According to a San Diego Union-Tribune report, Ms. Cabral had hoped to reunite her grown children and her terminally-ill ex-husband:

Cabral had meticulously planned this vacation, built around a family reunion in Hawaii and a chance for her grown children to see their father, Cabral’s ex, who was in a hospice dying of cancer.

Eight people were making the trip: Cabral, her husband, her brother, her son, her daughter and her daughter’s husband and two children.

One year out, they wrote a five-figure check to reserve a five-bedroom, five-bathroom beach house. They bought their tickets from United six months early. They booked a jungle excursion, a luau, a trip in a glass-bottom boat.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and they had a big investment in it, emotionally and financially. They even had it insured.

And all that planning unraveled in just a few hours.

On the eve before their big trip, according to the report, some members of Ms. Cabral’s family could not check in using United’s website. After making excuses, United finally confessed: they had been bumped from the flight and their seats had been sold to other people. Gerry Braun of the San Diego Union-Tribune wrote:

United – after holding their money for six months and bumping them from the flight on the eve of takeoff – had no plan to help Anita Cabral and her family.

Alternative flights were proposed. But they separated the party of eight into pairs, and staggered their arrivals over several days, and sent them to different islands (leaving them to fend for themselves).

[Ms. Cabral's] 7-year-old [granddaughter] has special needs and had not flown before. Both of her parents wanted to be with her. But that counted for nothing.

In the end, the best United could offer was a flight that arrived five days into their weeklong vacation.

Click HERE to read what happened to the Cabral family.

On Wednesday, 2,500 service workers at LAX will vote to determine whether to go on strike.

The workers, who have been negotiating their contract since May, are employed by airline subcontractors to provide passenger services to several major airlines, such as United, American, and Southwest. A Los Angeles Times story reports:

The union members include service workers employed at both the airport terminals and on planes in jobs such as security, wheelchair assistance and airplane cabin cleaning. The union is pushing for higher wages, improved medical coverage and more training, equipment and staff support, said Mike Chavez, a union spokesman.

He said although workers are employed by contractors, the responsibility lies with the airlines that hire the contractors.

“The airlines need to take some leadership,” Chavez said. “They have a role in saying what their contractors should be doing.”

Click HERE to read the report.

As the U.S. airline industry attempts to use “oil speculators” to draw attention away from the chronically low passenger satisfaction rates and an array of new fees, a new online source, www.TheAirlineOilSpin.com was launched today to encourage the public to see through the industry’s spin on the issue.

The site is a project of the Reaching Higher Coalition, a growing alliance of community groups, passenger rights organizations, clergy, elected leaders, and airport workers who are committed to improving standards in the U.S. airline industry. TheAirlineOilSpin.com will function as an information source and forum to discuss and learn about the airline industry’s role in exacerbating their oil-related dilemmas, while at the same time benefiting from massive public subsidies.

While the airline industry has promoted multiple pieces of legislation that would place limits on some types of oil speculation, many of the bills supported by the industry include loopholes that allow the airlines themselves to continue speculating. At the same time, the industry has benefited from more than $8.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies since 2001, according to a recent report, Shortchanged, while passenger satisfaction levels and job quality standards for airline service workers have remained low.

The site also discusses the ways in which the airlines have failed to prepare for increasing oil prices by continuing to fly older, less fuel efficient planes, unlike many of their competitors in other parts of the world.

In the coming days, the site will ask visitors to send a message to Congressional Leaders, urging them to tie additional support for the airline industry to improved standards for airline passengers and workers.

“J.D. Power and Associates reported that airline passenger service is at a 3 year low and it is no wonder when airlines are creating a ‘race to the bottom’ for front-line service workers who perform critical safety, security and service roles,” said Lily Wang with the Reaching Higher Coalition. “Whether we’re talking about carrying their legislation or doling out more subsidies, Congress shouldn’t be doing any more favors for an airline industry that appears to show such contempt for the American public.”

TheAirlineOilSpin.com will provide news and commentary on the airline industry’s position on oil speculation and what the industry has failed to do to minimize the effects of high fuel costs on passengers and industry workers. Information about the site will be sent to subscribers and contributors of www.HowWasYourFlight.com, an online source for passengers aimed at raising awareness and improving standards within the airline industry.

The Wall Street Journal, in an August 12th piece by Heidi N. Moore, sums up the real problems in the airline industry succinctly. And if you guessed rising oil prices, you’re only seeing part of the picture.

Ms. Moore explains:

Rising oil prices, of course, hurt the airline industry, but those stratospheric costs also provided a sort of cloud cover for the industry’s essential dysfunction. Intense competition, labor disputes, absentee parenthood from Washington regulators – all have combined to put the industry in a position that requires deeper thought.

In addition, the airline industry has a few fundamental issues it desperately needs to address. Various reports have found airlines’ service quality and passenger satisfaction levels to be plummeting. While receiving billions in taxpayer subsidies, airline companies continue to divest from its workforce and pursue outdated, shortsighted business strategies that are ill-prepared for today’s fuel conscious economy.

Ms. Moore, quoting an industry expert, sums it all up:

“No leadership, no policy, no strategy, everyone blaming the other… all circling Foggy Bottom while the industry goes down the Potomac.”

Click HERE to read the entire article.

photo credit: Cubbie_n_Vegas

Delta Flight 4 from LHR to JFK departing at 8:45 GMT arrived into JFK on 8/2 at 3:30. Below is the letter I wrote to Delta about the ordeal and their abysmal reply.

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August 3, 2008

Dear Delta,

Cannot tell you how disappointed I am with the way flight 4 on August 1 (moving to include August 2nd) has been mismanaged. Since we made the news, you may have heard about the 24 hour journey between LHR and JFK with an uninterrupted 20 hours of aircraft confinement at one point (between 7:45 am GMT or 2:45 am ET and 10PM ET, with a stay at Boston Logan until 2 am on 8/2 and ultimately arriving around 3:30 am into JFK).

Let me summarize the highlights:
3 mechanical problems
3 crew changes (2x with unavailable crews)
1 weather delay
2 refueling
1 diversion

It seemed to start out bad. We sat for three hours (8:45 to 11:45 GMT) on the tarmac at Heathrow (not including boarding time) awaiting repair of a mechanical problem and were offered nothing other than the
complimentary drink in business tarmac until 7pm ET (elapsed time excluding boarding 15.5 hours) waiting for a new crew to arrive and also food and drink which we had run out of hours earlier except for some left over bread from the business class breakfast and some ad hoc chips and a few odd chocolates that had been rescued from the lunch tray (some five hours earlier). We received very little communication from Delta except that we were not able to disembark because Boston could not allow us to clear customs. Around 7pm our second crew arrived and we moved to the runway and sat for an hour again without communication.
Meanwhile I had contacted my elderly parents and asked them to travel out from eastern Long Island to pick me up, because public transportation was no longer a reasonable option and taxis are cost prohibitive for a journey that long. At 8 pm (16.6 hours on the plane elapsed excluding boarding) we were told there was another mechanical delay and we were going back to the gate. The pilot of the second crew (the one who was very informative) said he was going to ask that the flight be cancelled, however we later learned that it would not be cancelled. I called my parents to abort the one way 75 mile journey (which would be 125 round trip because they were nearly at JFK) from eastern Long Island, that they could have avoided if Delta had been honest with us as to why we were still sitting on the tarmac (another mechanical problem). I also apologized for not being able to see them. I had purchased a separate ticket from JFK to SFO because I was stopping in New York to see my father who has a terminal illness, before returning to SFO. However with the 16 hour flight delay it no longer made any sense to head to Long Island for a visit that would not be more than 7 hours including time to sleep, so I lost a trip to New York on top of the absurdity of a 16 hour delay .

We continued to sit on the tarmac told that the plane would be fixed in about an hour. They were waiting on a part. We were getting use to Delta saying something would be done soon or in an hour and nothing happening for hours. The joke became that to Delta all time is flexible. We were told during this wait that the plane had actually experienced another mechanical/electrical failure while we were flying over the Atlantic. At this point, three mechanical/electrical failures later, we were not really interested in staying on this plane. None of that seemed to matter. Delta seemed hell bent on getting that plane to New York with the passengers. Finally at around 10 pm (19 hours elapsed time excluding boarding) we were told that we would be allowed off the plane to clear customs but we were to head back through security and over to gate A3 where there would be provisions and we would be departing within the hour.

I was the first one to return through Security, following Customs. They had no knowledge of the diverted Delta flight and couldn’t imagine how I thought I could get through security with a boarding pass from LHR to JFK. I walked them through what was going on and they promptly verified it. (Shouldn’t Delta have done this?). After 30 minutes in the international terminal (E) at gate EA3 and not seeing anyone from Delta. I called the 800 Delta number. They told me I was in the wrong terminal and I needed to go to the A terminal and Gate 6. I ran over to this terminal. When I got to security the TSA person told me there were no more flight leaving from this terminal tonight. I went to the Delta counter who called a friend that informed us that I needed to go to Gate EB6. So I ran back. (It’s a good 1/2 mile between these terminals.) I got to EB6 and found that there were no provisions, no Delta agents and no notification of our flight. Indeed there was no one from Delta until around 12:30, when one fight attendant and someone else arrived with some pizzas, but still we had not one communication about what was going on. From time to time one of us would call Delta who would provide us with the erroneous information of the hour. At 12:30 I asked the lone flight attendant when we were leaving and she said that they only had half a crew and further the plane had still not been cleaned. Great we are now going to have an additional delay because the plane hasn’t been cleaned yet. We started boarding the plane around 1:30. It took a very long time because the agents were checking our names off on a paper manifest. We finally arrived into JFK at 3:30 am and were ushered to the fully manned Delta desk. I was fortunate to be in the front of the plane. It took about 20 minutes for them to issue me a few vouchers (none of the agents had instruction on how to create the Delta dollars voucher) and to give me my rebooking. I got to the hotel at 4:30 am in time to take a shower and change and head back to the airport, since I would no longer be visiting in NY.

So I spent 24 hours of pure misery and experiencing the apex of incompetence and missing a treasured visit to see my parents. The compensation you offered was $400 in travel vouchers, not even enough to compensate for the lost ticket to New York.

As several of your employees said during this ordeal, we aren’t proud of how Delta had treated you throughout this ordeal. You may want to consider offering an apology that more fairly represents this incredibly botched performance, not too mentioned in my case a completely missed stay. This one has left a long and lasting bad taste for how Delta feels about their passengers.

>From Delta

Thank you for your e-mail describing the inconvenience you experienced due to flight irregularities. We apologize for the difficulties you encountered.

Your time is valuable, and operating on schedule is equally important to us. In the process of providing air service over many different routes each day, we sometimes encounter mechanical problems, adverse weather, crew delay, and other unavoidable interruptions. These are situations faced by all airlines and no carrier can guarantee that all flights will depart and arrive as planned. We?re sorry you were inconvenienced.

We regret any inconvenience you experienced due to an unscheduled flight diversion. When your flight was dispatched, we expected it would be able to land at the destination as scheduled. Unfortunately, conditions
changed and it was necessary for the flight to divert to another city to ensure the safety of all onboard.

Our flight attendants are expected to always be responsive and offer accurate, thorough information and assistance. Our goal is to make sure your flight is enjoyable, and training is provided to our employees to
ensure a consistent and pleasant travel experience. We regret you were disappointed with the service you received.

Considerable importance is placed on offering the highest possible standard of service to our customers traveling in first or business class. We try to provide maximum comfort in seat and cabin design. Additionally, our flight attendants are expected to give more personal attention to each individual. We certainly want to make traveling in one of our premium cabins an enjoyable and relaxing experience, and it is unfortunate you were disappointed.

Our goal is to make your travel experience as smooth and enjoyable as possible, and we regret you didn?t receive the high level of service we strive to provide. Our airport representatives are expected to always be
responsive, and offer precise, complete information. It sounds like that didn’t happen in this case, and we will continue to make efforts to improve in this area.

Delta uses many factors to determine compensation for our passengers who have been inconvenienced through no fault of their own. Our information indicates you received the compensation we normally provide in circumstances of this kind. Consequently, we must respectfully decline
your request.

Dr. Brush, thank you again for giving us an opportunity to respond to your concern. We very much appreciate your Medallion loyalty to Delta and look forward to the privilege of serving you again soon.

Sincerely,

Nick M. Reeves
Manager
Customer Care

-Submitted by intek_management

photo credit: Andrei Dimofte