Airline Food Workers Push for Higher Wages, Better Health Care
Francisco Perez wakes up most mornings at 3:45 for his shift at the sanitation department at LSG Sky Chefs, a subcontractor that handles airline catering. On his shift, he says, he cleans up worm-infested food carts, washes dishes and carries ice to aircraft at John F. Kennedy Airport.
And after his 10-hour shift, he hands out flyers to passengers, detailing what he describes as the poverty wages and unaffordable health insurance plans he has faced for 15 years.
“The sanitation department is the basis of the company, yet it’s where people are mistreated the most,” Perez said.
Perez, 60, is one of roughly 1,200 workers in New York and New Jersey represented by the labor union UNITE HERE!, which voted in June to strike if it can’t reach an agreement with SkyChefs on health insurance and wages. The union’s representatives said that all of the 1,200 votes cast in the region were in favor of going on strike.
These New Yorkers are part of a national effort in which 11,000 Sky Chefs workers in 28 cities have voted for a labor stoppage.
Airline kitchen workers are covered by the Railway Labor Act, passed in 1926 to resolve labor disputes and avoid interruptions in transportation industries. This is why the union has to request permission from the National Mediation Board to strike.
Sussie Lozada, political director for UNITE HERE! Local 100, the union’s New York and New Jersey chapter, said this is the first time that workers for LSG Sky Chefs in the region have voted to strike. But it remains unclear if the National Mediation Board will release airline catering workers from federal mediation and allow the strike, or when they will reach a decision, she said.
“Union members will keep doing congressional visits, they will get support from their communities, their elected officials, allied unions. They are ready,” Lozada said.
In an emailed statement to Transit New York, Sky Chefs said that its team and a federal mediator have been working since May to negotiate with the union.
The company has offered better wages and is discussing other issues covered by their collective bargaining agreement, the statement said.
“We remain committed to negotiating in good faith and we hope that union members will act lawfully as they exercise their right to demonstrate or protest,” the statement said.
Liesl Orenic, a labor historian at Dominican University in Illinois who has studied airport workers, told the New York Times that a small mishap or interruption of any kind of service can ripple out.
“If a plane doesn’t get catered, it can interrupt all the people getting on that plane and all the other flights that plane has to do,” she said.
Perez is a cancer survivor who said he makes $15 an hour, the minimum wage in New York. Workers in Miami make even less than the county-mandated living wage paid to other workers at Miami International Airport, the Miami Herald has reported.
When he was diagnosed with cancer, Perez could not afford Sky Chefs’ health insurance plan, which offers family premiums of over $500 a month. He was able to get another plan outside of the Sky Chefs contract.
“We don’t have enough money. I need to get checked at the urologist every three months. I have to pay rent, I have to pay for my car. They say it’s a luxury to have a car, but it isn’t. I have to get to work,” Perez said.
Asked what would impact a strike would have upon the airports in New York, Lozada made a dire forecast.
“If they go on strike, there is no food, no water,” she said. “No flight.”
