LOCAL
Join FED UP airline food workers at Sea-Tac Airport on Feb. 26
The following is from UNITE HERE Local 8:
SEATAC — Please join us at the Port of Seattle Commission meeting to demand equality for airline catering workers on Tuesday, Feb. 26 at noon at Sea-Tac International Airport on the south end of the Mezzanine Level.
As U.S. airlines continue to enjoy years of soaring profits, airline food workers aren’t earning our fair share of this success despite our integral role in the industry. We’re FED UP with lousy wages and substandard health care. Across the country, nearly 20,000 airline food workers are joining together in national negotiations for better union contracts. We’re ready to do whatever it takes to get what we deserve!
Here by Sea-Tac Airport, more than 900 of us union members work at LSG Skychefs and Gate Gourmet. We make the food that is served to Delta, Alaska, and other airline passengers. The majority of us are immigrants and refugees from all over the world. While job quality at our airport has risen in recent years, airline catering workers have been left off of the SeaTac $15 minimum wage. Some of us are paid less than $13 an hour. In addition, we don’t have affordable and quality union health insurance or union pension like other Local 8 members in SeaTac.
“My work helps the airlines make so much money, yet I can barely scrape by,” said Catherine Penera, an airline food worker supplying meals at Sea-Tac Airport. That’s why my co-workers and I are coming together to demand one simple thing: equality.”
We’re fighting back. In December 2018, we took action at the airport.
We work hard to safely provide quality meals for Sea-Tac Airport passengers. We deserve EQUALITY with other Sea-Tac Airport workers. We deserve THE SAME minimum wage that other employers at Sea-Tac Airport are required to pay. We want the $15 minimum wage in the City of SeaTac to apply to airline catering workers, and the Port of Seattle could do that.
Please join us at the Port of Seattle Commission meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 26 at noon at SeaTac Airport Mezzanine Level on the South end.