Alaska Airlines Invites You to Fly the Phlegmy Skies
A coalition of airlines are suing Washington state because they claim keeping track of employee sick time is too much trouble. Do their arguments have wings?
Last night, the Associated Press reported that a group of airlines including Alaska, JetBlue, and United are suing Washington state over our new paid sick leave law. The law, which was approved by Washington voters two years ago and went into effect on January 1st of this year. The group, named Airlines for America, issued a statement claiming that “Airlines cannot operate their nationwide systems properly if flight crews are subject to the employment laws of every state in which they are based, live, or pass through.”
This isn’t the first time airlines have sued to roll back progress for workers. In 2016, Alaska Airlines lost a suit they filed after SeaTac voters approved the first-in-the-nation $15 minimum wage. (Note that in the two years since Alaska Airlines lost that suit, they have not fired all their workers or raised the price of tickets by a noticeable amount in order to compensate for the $15 minimum wage.)
This latest lawsuit is frankly insulting. Washington’s paid sick leave law is not onerous, and Airlines for America has not identified one reasonable complaint against it. Let’s look at their arguments, one by one.
Will paying sick leave be financially prohibitive for the airlines? It seems doubtful, given that—as I previously noted—they absorbed a $15 minimum wage with no noticeable effect on their profit margins or customer service. Bradley Tilden, the CEO of Alaska Airlines, took home $3,886,411 in total compensation in 2016, including just shy of a million dollars in bonuses and incentives. And since Alaska Airlines paid over two and a half billion dollars to buy Virgin Airlines back in 2016, I’m going to suggest that maybe the airline isn’t having trouble drumming up cash.
Airlines for America also claimed that since they employ people from a number of different states, and since they deal with interstate travel as a matter of course, it would be too complex to keep track of every employee’s sick time. Given that the airlines in question successfully manage thousands of passenger layovers per hour every day of the year, and given that they can coordinate fleets of jumbo jets flying over the 3.8 million square miles of the United States with all the grace and efficiency of a ballet, I think their computers can manage to keep track of where their employees live.
Does Alaska Airlines remove state taxes from the paychecks of employees who live in states with income taxes? Then it’s impossible to argue that they can’t keep track of six and a half measly sick days a year per full time employee.
And finally, Airlines for America says that if they pay for sick leave time, their employees will call out sick more often. Which, uh, is kind of the point of the law. Does Alaska Airlines want their flight attendants coughing, sniffling, and sneezing their way down the aisles of planes? Why wouldn’t airlines want their workers to be able to take the time to get well? Why would they incentivize employees to work through their cold or flu, thereby imperiling the health of dozens of passengers and literally spreading their illness around the country?
As our friends at Working Washington pointed out, Airlines for America spokespeople just assured the New York Times earlier this week that customers shouldn’t fear getting sick on their flights. “The safety, security and well-being of our passengers and crew is always our highest priority,” Alison McAfee told the Times just a couple of days before her employer sued for the right to force their employees to come to work while sick.
Hmmmm.
It sounds to me like Alaska Airlines and their friends simply don’t want to pay for sick time. And it seems like they’re willing to put the health and well-being of their employees—and therefore the health and well-being of their customers—at risk to save a few bucks.
I have every faith that this lawsuit will end the same way Alaska’s anti-$15 suit ended: with a judge reminding the airlines that they can’t have it both ways.
Alaska Airlines chose to make Seattle its home. They’re all-in on Washington state. They enjoy the benefits of our booming, world-class economy. But in a high-quality economy like Washington state, employers must compensate their workforce well enough that workers can participate in the economy themselves. By paying their employees enough that they can afford to pay for flights—and by making sure their employees are not actively spreading disease to their customers—Alaska Airlines will enjoy the profits generated from a growing, and healthy, economy.
