US: Dulles and National Airport workers turn fight for better wages to $ Airports Authority

A year after joining a national campaign for better pay and benefits, workers at Reagan National and Dulles International airports are shifting their fight to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. The low-wage workers who hold critical service jobs — keeping terminals and plane cabins clean, moving bags and transporting people with disabilities, are pressuring the airports’ governing body to require that firms doing business at the region’s two commercial airports pay their workers a minimum of $15 per hour. “We hope that soon our fight will be coming to an end,” Legesse Z. Woldearegay, a security officer at National, said in a letter to be delivered Wednesday to MWAA leaders, along with a signed petition. “And that our light will shine on the dome of MWAA headquarters and that our voices will be heard in the board of directors’ office.” After a rally Wednesday afternoon at National’s Terminal A, dozens of workers and their supporters walked to the MWAA office to hand over a petition with more than 1,000 signatures urging it to extend its living wage to all contracted airport workers. MWAA, which oversees National and Dulles, has a living-wage policy that applies to airport contracts but not to companies that contract directly with individual airlines. There are more than 2,000 workers at National and as many as 4,200 at Dulles who work for such companies. Some of those workers are paid as little as $6 per hour, in addition to “unreliable tips,” according to the Service Employees International Union, which is organizing the workers.<br/>