Mayor Trying to Keep LAX Exempt From New Pay Law

Mayor Richard Riordan, whose opposition to the so-called living-wage ordinance was overcome by a determined Los Angeles City Council, is quietly working to prevent the law from being extended to thousands of workers at Los Angeles International Airport.

Riordan’s position puts him at odds with some supporters of the ordinance, and their dispute sets the stage for a critical test of the law’s reach--one that will affect an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 minimum-wage workers, including airport security employees assigned to screening bags for weapons.

Faced with sharply conflicting views, the city attorney’s office has yet to produce a final opinion on the matter. That has frustrated airlines, angered airport workers and left the city’s top politicians free to duke it out over interpretations of the law.

Council members and the mayor’s office are nudging the process along, but with different objectives. The council is trying to extend an ordinance it believes is good for workers, while the mayor’s staff is urging city administrators to limit the reach of a law it contends is bad for business.

Aides to the mayor said Wednesday that the proposed application to airport workers represents a costly, legally suspect expansion of the wage law, which requires city contractors and leaseholders to pay many workers at least $7.25 an hour with benefits or $8.50 an hour without benefits. But Madeline Janis-Aparicio, director of the Los Angeles Living Wage Coalition, countered by accusing the Riordan administration of ignoring the ordinance’s intent in order to clip the wings of a law the administration does not like.

“This is the mayor’s attempt to undermine the ordinance,” she said.

Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, the chief supporter of the law, said of the Riordan team’s efforts, “They have not discussed this with me, but it does not surprise me.”

The struggle to agree on a definition of the ordinance and to coherently implement it says much about the way business often is done in Los Angeles government--slowly, ineffectively and at cross-purposes, leaving almost no one involved in the process happy.

“When the newspapers said we got the living wage, everyone here was happy,” one airport security worker said this week, as several others nodded agreement. “Then we get told, ‘No, not for you.’ Now everyone is mad.”

John Ek, Western regional director of the Air Transport Assn. of America, said the members of his airline-company group are not much happier, particularly over what he called the long delay from the city attorney’s office in articulating an official stance for the city government.

“Somebody at the city needs to get off their duff and take a position,” Ek said. “It’s a terrible way to run a city.”

The legal issue is, most observers concede, a murky one. The ordinance was intended to force large companies that do business with the city to pay their employees the so-called living wage. The law applies to companies with city contracts. It also applies to some companies that hold city leases and hire workers to do jobs that “probably would otherwise be rendered by city employees.”

What makes matters complex in the case of the airport is that baggage handlers, wheelchair runners, security officers and a few others who perform jobs that might otherwise be filled by city workers are hired by contractors, not the airlines themselves. It is the airlines that hold the leases, and their workers do not perform a service that the city otherwise would carry out--namely, flying and servicing airplanes.

What’s more, the airlines’ obligation to hire security for the airport comes from the federal government, not the city of Los Angeles, so city workers cannot fill those jobs; they have to be filled by the airlines or their subcontractors. And finally, even the security and other services that are similar to city jobs in other areas have never been performed by city employees at the airport, so it is not clear whether the ordinance would require them to come under the living-wage rules even without the complicating questions of federal law and jurisdiction.

But when Goldberg set out to have the idea implemented in Los Angeles, her first pocket of targeted workers was the airport employees. Many council members, in fact, believed their vote for the living wage would help the very employees who now say they may have been left out.

“If you’re talking about legislative intent, this is exactly who we were after,” Goldberg said.

And many of those workers cheered the ordinance--some even testified before the council--precisely because they thought it would apply to them. Today, some of those same employees are bitter.

“They want a cheap service,” said Carlos Ponce, a screener who works at Terminal 1 and who provides for a family of four on his minimum-wage salary. “They don’t care about people.”

Juana Zatarain, who has worked for three years screening bags at the airport, agreed. “We have a lot of pressure in the job,” she said. “But . . . we don’t get respect.”

As the debate over the reach of the living-wage ordinance has quietly proceeded at City Hall, Riordan administration officials have been among the most vocal in arguing that there is no justification for extending it to the airport.

Among others, Assistant Deputy Mayor Steve Rubin has strongly urged airport and contract administration officials not to apply the ordinance to airport security workers and others. Rubin has told the officials that the language of the law does not permit it and that doing so would represent an expensive, unjustified tampering with the ordinance as approved by the council.

“The proponents have been a little bit disingenuous,” Rubin said Wednesday. “They went to great lengths to minimize the cost to taxpayers, businesses and the city itself. . . . Now, all of a sudden, the scope is expanding.”

In addition, Rubin said, a decision to cover workers at the airport would open the floodgates to broader interpretation of the law elsewhere, such as the city harbor, where other leaseholders would surely protest any attempt to force pay increases for their employees.

“The concern of the mayor is the impact to taxpayers and the city,” said Noelia Rodriguez, Riordan’s press secretary. “This, in essence, is an additional tax on businesses.”

But proponents counter that the time for arguments about the merits of the living-wage ordinance has passed. Despite Riordan’s objections, the law was approved by the council, which eventually overrode the mayor’s veto 11-1, and now is being put into effect, they note.

“The mayor argued his position,” the Living Wage Coalition’s Janis-Aparicio said. “He lost.”

While politicians try to sort the matter out, workers and their employers wait.

As of today, most of the men and women who operate X-ray machines and metal detectors intended to keep bombs and guns off airplanes take home $5.15 an hour, the federal minimum wage. They get no paid holidays, no sick days and no health benefits. Most are required to stand up during their entire shifts, and despite the role they play in protecting public safety, they make less than some airport janitors and food concession workers.

Responding to a recent slip-up by airport security, police officials have asked that those same workers be tapped to play an even larger role in helping to spot suspicious people at the airport. The airlines, which enjoy strong political support in Washington, so far have made no move to boost their pay.

In fact, some workers who were tempted to get their hopes up that the living-wage ordinance might deliver them a pay hike got a sharply worded reminder recently in the form of a memo from one of the airport security companies.

“The L.A. Living-Wage Ordinance affects only those companies that have a contract, subcontract or concession with the city of Los Angeles,” the memo said. “Our services at LAX are provided under agreements negotiated with the airlines and other companies.”

The bottom line: no buckling under to living-wage proponents. And, at least for now, no raises.

That angers some city officials. Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, whose district includes the airport and whose committee is investigating ways to toughen security there, said the resistance by the airlines is unfair to workers and puts travelers at risk by placing security in the hands of underpaid, overworked employees.

“Frankly, I’m appalled that the airlines would resist paying their employees a living wage,” Galanter said. “We’re stuck doing business with a bunch of corporations who literally think that they are above it all.”