SeaTac wage experiment could be over before it begins

SEATTLE — At Sea-Tac International Airport just south of Seattle, “rampers” are the guys who heave baggage off planes and into trucks, in the baking sun and the freezing cold and rain, amid the roar of jet engines, as passengers look on from their portholes. They’re on a tight schedule, with not many people to handle the constant stream of traffic. Throwing out your back or pulling a muscle requires days off work without pay. High turnover means new people are constantly being trained and making mistakes, heightening the anxiety of an already brutal job.

“See those little slaves running around out there?” said Kalolo Aukusitino, 21, who’s worked the job for a little less than a year. “That’s us.”

It’s just a ramper joke, he said in between drags on a cigarette while on a break on the Monday before Christmas, his eyes almost disappearing in a big smile. It’s also why, for a few short months, Aukusitino felt as if he’d won the lottery.

Tall and bearlike, his broad frame topped by a cloud of frizzy black hair, Aukusitino left his native Hawaii after high school and landed a job at Menzies Aviation, one of the many companies that contract with Sea-Tac’s airlines. In November, the voters of the city of SeaTac — the community of 27,000 around the airport — approved a ballot measure that would have raised his hourly wage from $10.88 ($1.69 above the state’s legal minimum) to $15 an hour.

“Hell yes!” Aukusitino burst out when asked if he was looking forward to the wage hike kicking in. “It means a car in about six months.” Not to mention the ability to get a better-paying job somewhere else — he’s working toward a degree in communications from a community college in nearby Tacoma, but he wants to go to a four-year institution soon. Other workers spoke of plans for the impending windfall: an apartment of their own, the ability to save for their kids’ education or just more time to spend with their families.

Now, though, those lottery winnings may not come through. On Friday, in response to a lawsuit backed by the airlines and the restaurant industry, the King County Superior Court ruled that the measure could apply only to the 1,600 people who work at hotels and car services outside the airport. That cuts out 4,700 people who work within the airport itself, which is technically a separate jurisdiction belonging to the Port of Seattle and not subject to the voters’ desires.

The $15 wage’s proponents have promised to appeal the decision. But if it’s upheld, it could mean the end of one of labor’s most promising experiments: raising wages, city by city, through the power of popular will.

Working at Sea-Tac wasn’t always such a hard way to make a living. Just ask Ahmed Jama, 26, who says he started in fast-food restaurants there when he was 16.

Like most workers at the airport, he holds multiple jobs, since most employers don’t give anybody full-time work. So for about 30 hours a week, he’s a dispatcher for the aviation services firm Huntleigh USA, coordinating wheelchair pushers who arrive to meet disabled people at their gates. After 10 years, he still makes $10.05 an hour, and feels as if he’s going backward. He wants to go to school to become a medical technician, but working 60 hours a week between two jobs doesn’t leave time for class.

Here’s what happened to make planning for the future impossible: The airlines have contracted out more and more of the jobs for which they used to pay people decent salaries with benefits. While Alaska Airlines employees overall make an average of $73,500 per year, those of the airlines’ contractors make an estimated $20,176.

“That’s the new hustle, subcontract everything. Cut the salary, cut the benefits and CEO pay goes up,” Jama said, taking a break from his spreadsheets and walkie-talkie in Sea-Tac’s airy lobby. “And you see all these companies come underbid each other. So companies that used to pay vacation pay, or parking, a new company will come in and say, ‘We don’t pay anybody anything, give me the contract.’ And they’ll get the contract, and it’s a steep decline in working conditions and morale.”

The subcontracting trend also presented unions with a tough challenge. Because of a quirk of federal labor law that pertains to the aviation industry, they have to organize contractors nationwide, rather than workplace by workplace. So earlier this year, a coalition of community groups backed by the Service Employees International Union and the Teamsters launched a campaign for the SeaTac ballot measure to force all employers to raise their wage floor.

There are a couple of reasons it makes sense to target a jurisdiction with an airport as its dominant employer. First of all, it’s difficult for the businesses to leave, or to lay off workers. Airlines winnowed their staffs down to the bone during the recession, and can’t cut further without serious consequences. That’s why the ballot measure’s proponents don’t worry about a higher wage having an adverse effect on employment over the long term, as it might if imposed on a wider scale: Higher wages have been linked to lower turnover rates, which lessens the cost of training new workers, and establishing a higher floor for everyone would mean contractors wouldn’t need to compete by paying their workers next to nothing.

Second, most of the costs can be passed on to travelers, making the wage hike essentially a cash transfer to the SeaTac area from the rest of the world. According to an analysis by the community group Puget Sound Sage, visitors account for 68 percent of the revenues of companies subject to the ballot measure. The $40 million in extra wages could be covered by increasing fees between 0.5 percent and 1.5 percent.

Besides, Sea-Tac isn’t breaking new ground here. Most of California’s major airports have already improved wages and working conditions — the Los Angeles City Council, for example, in 2009 extended a minimum wage of $15.37 to all airport workers, plus 12 paid days off. That’s also given unions leverage to bargain for better working conditions. And the SeaTac ballot initiative would add even more, with a provision that allows employers to waive requirements if they sign a collective bargaining agreement.

About 1,500 workers in Sea-Tac are already unionized, and there’s a clear divide in quality of life between those with representation and those without. At the unionized janitorial contractor ABM Services, for example, workers start at $12.40 an hour, with full medical coverage and a 401(k). After working at the airport since 2000, Ahmed Yusuf, 33, has worked his way up to being a foreman. His wife works cleaning cabins for Delta, they live a few minutes away from the airport, and they are able to cover costs for their two kids in grade school.

“I like working for this company. It’s janitorial, but they’re good to their employees,” he said. “You show up to work, guaranteed nothing can happen to you. You have people here working 15 years, 18 years. This company has a different standard. It’s up here,” he said, holding his hand above his head before dropping it to signify the nonunion contractors, “and nothing.”

A dramatically higher minimum wage, however, isn’t entirely risk-free. Despite the comparative inflexibility of the airport’s labor needs, there’s still a lingering worry that employers there will find ways to cut positions and hours if labor costs jump. Sea-Tac has 24 food and retail concessionaires, who collectively employ about 1,600 workers. Several have vocally opposed the wage hike, and some say it might not be worth their while to re-sign contracts.

“If we had to pay $15, we would go out of business so quick. I think it’s absolutely ridiculous,” said Brianna McCoy, 22, whose mother owns Diva Espresso, a local cafe chain with an outlet in the baggage-claim area. She works there now as a barista but plans to take over the business eventually, and she said they’ll have to lay off one person to make payroll. “It’s a good business, but it’s not enough to pay that.”

Fifteen dollars wasn’t an entirely arbitrary number. Heather Weiner, a spokeswoman for Yes for SeaTac, said that’s what baggage handlers made back in 2005, before outsourcing started in earnest. Also, it’s a symbolic figure that attracted national and international attention at a time when fast-food workers around the country were striking for the same thing. “It’s because of the number 15,” Weiner said. “Fifteen captures people’s imaginations. I think this has become the litmus test in this fight on inequality nationally.”

And yet, the extreme reaction from people like McCoy — at businesses that might have been covered by the new law — has wheelchair pusher Sydney McKenzie wondering whether it might have been a better idea to ask for $11, or maybe $12. Something that the companies might’ve been more likely to accept.

“I always thought it was unrealistic,” McKenzie said the day after the county court gutted the ballot measure. “If it happened, it would be great, but I just didn’t see how it would work, from the standpoint of how the companies would deal with that. It’s such a large increase so quickly.”

McKenzie, tall and white-haired with big gold-rimmed glasses, never finished high school growing up in nearby Everett, and couldn’t ever quite break out of a string of low-wage jobs. After 10 years of shuttling the old and infirm from their gates to the curb, he still makes just $9.19 an hour, plus tips. One amazing day, he got $50 in tips, which he used to buy a new pair of black New Balances. But that’s rare. Now 55, McKenzie lives alone, and spends his free time scrounging for deals on food and used clothing. He stays off public assistance out of pride, but occasionally has to take food from a food bank. “My friends are my lifeline,” McKenzie said.

As for retirement, there’s no backup plan. “Um,” he said when asked what he’d do when he’s too old to work. “It’s something that I can’t do anything about.”