AMMAN: International Airport workers sue airplane food company for wage theft. Leon often works 13 hours a day at Los Angeles International Airport making pate and cauliflower mousse for first-class passengers.“What I get paid is not enough to make ends meet,” he said. “You have to work at least five hours of overtime daily to provide for your family.”
At $10.25 an hour, Leon is making $5.59 less than the $15.84-an-hour wage guaranteed by Los Angeles’ Living Wage Ordinance, which requires companies with ties to the city to provide minimum salaries and health insurance.
Leon is one of nine workers who have filed a class-action lawsuit against Flying Food Group Pacific, an in-flight food service with operations at LAX, for wage and health insurance theft that could amount to nearly $15 million in damages.
Flying Food provides meals to major airlines, including Air France-KLM, Etihad and British Airways, China Southern and Japan Airlines.A spokeswoman for Flying Food did not respond to a request for comment.
While minimum wage laws apply to all workers, living wage laws only extend protections to city contractors (such as trash collectors), lessees (such as airlines) and concessionaires on city land (such as an ice cream vendor at a city park).
The rationale for ensuring higher wages is that these companies benefit from their relationship with the city through business contracts and tax exemptions.
Most businesses at LAX comply with the regulation, according to Matt Furshong, deputy director of research at the labor union Unite Here, which is helping bring the case against Flyaway Food.
But for outliers like Flying Food, Furshong said, it’s important for workers to come forward and speak up about injustice in the workplace.
“Perhaps it will make companies think twice about doing it,” he said. “It also makes other workers realize that they too can speak up.”
A UCLA labor study from 2010 found that nearly 30 percent of L.A. workers were paid less than the $9-an-hour minimum wage in the week prior to filling out the survey. More than 20 percent of respondents had worked more than 40 hours in the previous week, but nearly 80 percent of those workers did not receive over-time pay.
A lack of enforcement resources is part of the reason so many companies violate wage laws, said Miranda Dietz, a research analyst at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. Worker education also is an issue, since many workers do not know their rights. Fear of retaliation often keeps workers silent.
“It’s a real risk for a worker to speak up for their rights,” she said.
Leon started working for Flying Food in 2013. He was making $8.50 as a food packer in a refrigerated facility until he got sick and requested to be transferred to the kitchen. He started to suspect that he was being underpaid when his sister, who works at a deli inside the airport, told him she was making more than $15 an hour.
Then Unite Here contacted him about joining the class-action lawsuit.
“When they approached me, I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m willing,’ ” he said. “Because this isn’t fair.”
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