United Airlines Announces Record Profit, Workers Protest Low Wages

Are United Airlines’ record-setting profits trickling down to its employees?

On Thursday, United Continental Holdings announced that United Airlines (UAL) had reached a “record fourth quarter profit” of $934 million for 2015.

The airline reported a full-year net income of $4.5 billion excluding special items.

According to a company news release, its employees “earned a record $698 million in profit sharing for 2015.”

“We have great momentum as we head into 2016 and are committed to continuously earning the trust of our customers and employees,” said Brett Hart, UAL’s acting chief executive officer.

However, many of the airline’s employees and contracted workers aren’t sharing in the company’s good fortune, labor union activists claim.

Prior to the 2015 holiday travel season, United Airlines flight attendants marched at nearly 20 airports across the nation in an attempt to bring attention to what they termed “severe delays by management in contract negotiations.”

“United continues to make record profits,” AFL-CIO organizers wrote in a December blog. “The share price has increased 204 percent since flight attendant joint contract negotiations began. When the airline struggled, flight attendants were forced to make extraordinary personal sacrifice with the promise that ‘shared sacrifice would equal shared reward.’”

“It’s been five years, and now five holiday seasons since United Airlines initiated the merger [of United/Continental/Continental Micronesia],” Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) International President Sara Nelson stated at the time. “But United flight attendants are still without a joint contract and work another holiday season without sharing in the profits they help create.”

In addition to the flight attendant union, workers with United Airlines-contracted service providers such as PrimeFlight, Prospect and McGinn Security have organized actions this winter to protest wages that reach as low as $10.10 per hour.

• See related article: Nationwide Airport Strike Hits Newark Airport, Others

A recent NJ.com editorial blasted United’s alleged “corporate dodge” when it comes to their contracted workers’ salaries:

“These airport workers are subcontractors employed by PrimeFlight; they clean planes and handle bags and work the terminals and get paid $10.10 per hour without benefits, and somehow United Airlines still maintains that it can’t be involved in frivolous matters like their contractor’s employees at Newark Airport, even as they teeter on the razor’s edge of the sustenance level.”

The editorial continued:

“United says this isn’t their fight, which is a common and deplorable corporate dodge: These companies typically assign cleaning or food service jobs to contractors (such as PrimeFlight) who bid low to win these contracts. And the vendors who win the contracts flout wage and hour laws to keep their overhead low, leading to degraded workplace standards and employee mistreatment… So they will continue to live as paupers as long as United, which is making record profits, tolerates PrimeFlight’s low standards.”

One worker at Newark Airport, Demetrius DeBaise, recently started an online petition to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey – which operates Newark Liberty, JFK and LaGuardia – to raise workers’ wages at the airports.

See his petition here.

“Every day I lift overweight bags for hours on end for just $8.25 an hour,” DeBaise wrote. “The stress of trying to provide for my family on so little income has nearly broken me.”

• See related article: Newark Airport Workers Plan To Strike, Will Join Others Nationwide

File photo by Jim Larrison via Flickr Commons