Certainly not everyone in the ground service provider industry earns the minimum wage. But time and again we often hear the lament – heard more than once most recently during sessions held at the recent IATA International Ground Handling Conference in Malaysia – that the backbone of the industry is comprised of ramp agents “who make the least, where turnover is the highest and day after day drive equipment in close proximity to multimillion-dollar aircraft.”
With that in mind, we couldn’t help but notice the news that Seattle announced a business-labor deal to progressively raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour – just one day after a Senate filibuster blocked President Obama’s proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10.
Interesting, since you may recall that the tiny Seattle suburb of Seatac, WA home turf to Seatac Airport voted an increase in pay last November to a minimum of $15 for, in part, airport workers. That pay raise is still tied up in litigation and a judge ruled after the ballot initiative that the municipality couldn’t tell the airport authority how to do its business. The state Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments in June.
OUTSIDE VENDORS
Even more interesting is that hand-in-hand with the Seattle news came the announcement by Alaska Airlines that it would pay its contract cabin cleaners, bagged handlers and refuelers at Seatac Airport a minimum of $12. As of April, starting pay for about 800 workers at ground service vendors serving Alaska Airlines flight increased between 68 cents and $2.68 to the new hourly rate. For some entry-level workers, the increase amounted to a 28 percent increase.
Finally, yet even more interesting is the fact that the airliner will reimburse its vendors, such as ASIG, Menzies and Delta Global Services for their additional labor costs.
Seatac-based Alaska said it decided to give its vendors employees a pay raise after reviewing wages in Seattle and South King County and determining that the higher rates would “more accurately” reflect the local market, said an airline press release.
As with ad editorial we wrote earlier on the subject of the minimum wage (“Happy New Year To The ‘Minimumly’ Wage,” December 2013/January 2014) we won’t debate merits of raising the minimum wage.
However, we will point out that the recent news does portend that we will see more and more of this at the grassroots level.
CLOSER LOOK
Take a closer look, for example, at the Seattle news. The mayor appointed a committee of citizens to develop the proposal for $15. Eric Lui was one of those citizens. He wrote recently on The Atlantic’s dot-com site says members, which included business owners and union chiefs, gathered data, looked at studies and negotiated the deal that won the support of 21 of 24 members.
“The deal is nobody’s picture of perfect,” he writes. “It’s a compromise.” The deal phases in the rate over a number of years determined by the size of each business.
But step back and it’s easy to see that this is a big deal.
“It’s not just the $15 figure … ,” Lui states. “It’s the fact that a broad coalition with significant business support made it happen.”
Call it what Lui does: networked localism. Whatever the name, the news is Seattle highlights a shift is the politics that has ground so much national action from Washington D.C. to a halt.
“The last century rewarded political leaders like LBJ who knew how to centralize the local into the national,” Lui concludes. “This century may belong to those who can decentralize the national – but into a new kind of national. Call it the United Cities of America.”
