Airline workers fume as pay, benefits nosedive
By Adam Geller
Associated Press
DES PLAINES, Ill. — The phone line in Dave Meyers' third-floor walkup has been turned off to save cash, and the brown velour sofas, bought second-hand, are bare in a few spots. Still, the modest apartment is about what you'd expect for a single guy who spends most of what he earns.
Jeff Roberson • Associated Press
The problem for Meyers — a United Airlines ramp worker whose pay has been cut twice in the past two years — is that he consistently spends more. Child support is nearly $700 a month, deducted from his paycheck. Of the remaining $1,600 in take-home pay, rent claims another $700, and is unpaid although it's the 11th of the month. His checking account is overdrawn.
"We're just going backwards," says United Airlines ramp worker Dave Meyers, whose pay has been cut twice in the past two years.
The financial juggling has Meyers fuming. This is not what he expected when he went to work at United 7 1/2 years ago, trading the headaches of running his own contracting business for the security of working for someone else. The rules were clear, he says, feverishly paging through an old union contract for the language to prove it.
That contract, however, was written for a company, UAL Corp. and an industry very different from the one workers find themselves in today. It is a reality that Meyers and many others, demoralized by pay and benefit cuts, remain reluctant to accept.
"Everything keeps going up, man," says Meyers, leaning forward from one of the sofas. "And we're just going backwards."
The airline industry — battered by record fuel prices, low-cost competition, the lingering effects of the Sept. 11 attacks and other problems — is squeezing workers long accustomed to generous union-negotiated pay, robust pensions and enviable job security.
Analysts say the workers have no choice but to adjust. They note that industries from steel to telecommunications are also cutting benefits, a trend that will likely continue.
Airline workers tell similar stories of their start in the business, and the romance and prestige and financial rewards that came with the job. But that was before the industry launched into a maelstrom of cost-cutting.
Most of those cuts have been directed at the labor costs that now account for nearly a third of airlines' operating costs. United baggage handlers, ramp workers and others shouldered an 11.5 percent pay cut in January, temporary until April and further negotiations. That is on top of an 18 percent cut two years ago. At USAirways Group Inc., flight attendants agreed to pay cuts of about 9 percent late last year, their third cut in 2 1/2 years.
The average US Airways flight attendant now makes about $34,000 a year, compared to a range of $45,000 to $52,000 a few years ago, union officials say.
Some airline employees, like lead ramp workers at United, still earn close to $20 an hour after the cuts — better than $41,000 a year before overtime pay — and acknowledge they'd be hard-pressed to find a comparable job in the current economy.
The next generation of workers are unlikely to approach such pay. When US Airways held a job fair this month outside Philadelphia to sign up new ramp workers, it was offering pay of $9.59 an hour.
The cuts are a painful side effect of efforts by established carriers, known in the industry as legacy airlines, to make themselves more like JetBlue and other low-cost upstarts, industry analysts.
Workers, many who have logged years with the airlines and intended to stay until retirement, say they can't just ditch the mortgages, tuition bills and other expenses based on yesterday's paychecks.
Consider the monthly budgeting worries of Eileen Zolinas, a 16-year flight attendant for US Airways whose husband, a mechanic for the airline, died in 1993.
Without enough seniority, Zolinas flies "on reserve" — airline speak for whenever she's called — and gets paid for 71 hours of flight time monthly, though she usually flies less. She figures that she needs to work at least 95 hours a month to pay the bills.
The limited hours and lower hourly wages have pared her annual earnings from about $40,000 a few years ago to about $31,000 last year. With the newest pay cut, she expects them to drop to about $26,000.
For years, Zolinas and her children, now 21 and 23, were covered without cost under her deceased husband's medical benefits. When the airline stopped providing those, Zolinas enrolled in the company plan on her own, but that costs about $200 a month.
For Meyers, the United ramp worker, the new airline economics is more about losing the chance for bigger paychecks that were just around the corner.
He started at $8.98 an hour with United. But the contract spelled out frequent raises, the promise of a healthy pension, generous health insurance for his family and after five years, a jump to a higher wage scale promising pay nearly as good as he had doing contracting.
He reached that point in 2003, when his pay nearly doubled from $13.51 an hour to $25.06 an hour, equal to roughly $52,000 before overtime. It lasted for one paycheck.
In a new contract agreed to by the union, Meyers saw his hourly pay slide to $20.66 an hour — about $43,000 a year. Last month, workers saw their pay pared again, leaving Meyers at $18.41 an hour — about $38,000.
Airlines acknowledge the cuts are difficult for workers, but say they are necessary sacrifice to keep companies afloat — and the workers' jobs intact.
"We had a choice to make: be competitive or not. The only way to be competitive is to have a competitive cost structure," said Dave Castelveter, a spokesman for US Airways.
"We know this is difficult. All the work we've been doing is difficult, but it's necessary," said Jean Medina, a United spokeswoman. "We do think there's a new reality."
