Miami Airport Workers Protest for Sick Days, Better Pay

For greater than a decade, Maria Bogarín has labored as a contracted cabin cleaner at Miami International Airport, scrubbing down planes and hauling heavy carts of cleansing provides to and from the plane. She’s additionally chipped in as a driver, chauffeuring her fellow crew members and their gear across the runway between cleanings.

Lately, Bogarín, 37, has struggled with debilitating sciatic nerve ache, which travels from her again down every of her legs.

At one level, it turned so extreme that she may not stroll, she says. She recollects having to show her 7-year-old daughter methods to prepare dinner her personal meals and take care of her toddler brother. She was out of labor for a whole week.

However, as a result of she, like lots of her co-workers, doesn’t have sick days, she did not obtain any pay throughout her day without work.

She calls it a “nightmare.”

“As a single mother, it is absolute chaos not with the ability to have paid sick days,” Bogarín tells New Times. “If you take a number of unpaid days from work, it creates a monetary burden that it’s important to get better from.”

Today, simply earlier than the bustling vacation journey season, Bogarín and her co-workers — contracted cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, cargo employees, and different service employees — will be a part of labor teams gathering at greater than 15 airports throughout the nation to name on Congress to cross the Good Jobs for Good Airports Act. The invoice is geared toward guaranteeing airport service employees obtain livable wages and cheap advantages resembling paid sick days.

According to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), airport service employees’ jobs have change into particularly demanding in recent times amid staffing shortages and different points arising from COVID-19. Despite the hardship, the overwhelming majority of contracted service employees at Miami International Airport should not have paid sick days, the union says.

Bogarín tells New Times that when she is severely in poor health, she has to make use of up her trip days simply to get by.

“But if I exploit my trip when I’m sick, then I will not have time to spend with my children or take them anyplace,” Bogarín says. “So it is a battle.”

Introduced over the summer time by Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, the Good Jobs for Good Airports Act would require airports that obtain federal mission grants to pay their airport service employees not less than $15 an hour with fringe advantages that meet prevailing neighborhood requirements.

The invoice was referred to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in June.

Aircraft cabin cleaners make on common $15 an hour nationwide, in accordance with a ZipRecruiter evaluate. Roughly sixteen p.c of them make lower than $10.10 an hour, equating to a wage of $15,500 to $20,900.

Helene O’Brien, director of SEIU, Local 32BJ — the union that represents contracted airline employees at Miami International Airport — explains that airport service employees have been as soon as employed straight by airways. But since deregulation within the Nineteen Seventies, airways have outsourced a lot of their work, securing laborers by firms that the airways choose by way of a aggressive bidding course of.

O’Brien notes that the airways typically rent the most cost effective firms.

“If there is no form of minimal customary set, not solely round pay, but in addition round paid day without work or different advantages, we have seen over the previous two decade that the underside falls out economically for these jobs,” O’Brien says. “And so this invoice is a option to repair that.”

Bogarín says that for her and her co-workers, lots of whom served greater than two years in a pandemic and fell in poor health with COVID-19 from on-the-job publicity, the passage of this invoice is significant not just for their funds, however for morale.

“There are many employees like me who’ve labored on the airport for very lengthy. They are additionally struggling, they’re additionally experiencing ache of their backs and their legs from the entire years of heavy work that they’ve accomplished,” Bogarín says. “And we wish to really feel supported for the work that we do.”

In Februrary 2021, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava ended a contract between the county and Eulen America, an organization that subcontracted service workers for American Airlines, Delta, and different airways at Miami International Airport. This adopted years of reviews of abusive working situations, together with claims of workers being compelled to work when sick, and going through retaliation towards for talking out.

Eulen had subcontracted workers to wash airplane cabins and deal with baggage for the airline firms, amongst different duties.

According to the Service Employees International Union, Eulen and different contractors have made strides in enhancing office situations and elevating wages, however the lack of employment protections on a federal degree stays an issue.

“We are calling for a nationwide customary in order that we are able to guarantee each airport employee throughout the nation has good wages and lifesaving advantages, which may also alleviate labor shortages,” O’Brien says.