More than 1,000 security officers, baggage handlers and wheelchair attendants at New York’s LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy International Airports voted unanimously to authorize a strike starting Wednesday night.
The contract workers will walk off the job at JFK’s Terminal 7, home to British Airways, United Airlines and Cathay Pacific Airways, at 10 p.m. The strike will continue through July 23 at JFK and LaGuardia, said Amity Paye, a spokeswoman for Service Employees International Union’s Local 32BJ.
“While the airlines have been making record profits and the Port Authority has approved billions of dollars to modernize LaGuardia airport, the airport workers who make these profits possible are struggling to survive,” said a news release from SEIU 32BJ.
The non-union contract workers are employed by Aviation Safeguards, a division of Herndon, Virginia-based Command Security Corp. Most of the employees set to strike work for Delta Airlines Inc. Others work for British Airways and United, a unit of United Continental Holdings Inc., according to Paye.
“Delta will be taking measures to ensure that our more than 35,000 customers booked through LaGuardia on Thursday are not affected,” spokeswoman Elizabeth Wolf said in an e-mail.
Delta has a 26 percent share of passengers at Kennedy and 22 percent at LaGuardia, according to Department of Transportation data.
Read more at BLOOMBERG.
{Matzav.com Newscenter}
