By Ethen Lieser
They are recent immigrants, mostly elderly, speaking little English, and paid minimum wages. Like most service workers, they are nothing more than a shadow of a passer-by’s glimpse. These are airport workers, security guards and luggage handlers.
But that all changed on Sept. 11, when four hijacked American commercial airliners blasted into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.
Now, many are noticing who these people are: the ones double checking, even triple checking a flight passenger’s bag; the ones patting passengers down for concealed weapons; the ones loading the airplanes.
Suddenly, their jobs are important — jobs that deals directly with national security. With that, questions are rising faster than the smoke that billowed from the downed World Trade Center three weeks ago. Are these people fit to do the job? Will passengers ever feel safe again? Will they have to check in at the airport two hours in advance five years from now?
With new federal security measures that seek to replace airport workers with armed military guards, the large Asian Pacific Islander American workforce at Bay Area airports may be a group that will suffer.
“[The new security measures] are good for the airports, but not good for us,” said a middle-aged South Asian woman who did not want to be identified. She works at Starbucks in the San Francisco International Airport.
President George W. Bush has outlined several plans to deal with this problem. In one plan, the government might deploy National Guard troops to all major airports. In another, armed marshals would ride with passengers on flights. There has even been talk of supplying pilots with stun guns. But with all this talk, the finger-pointing is still directed at the airport security workers.
“The incidents of Sept. 11 are not the fault of the people who work these jobs,” said Lillian Galedo, the director of nonprofit community organization Filipinos for Affirmative Action. “Those people were basically doing their jobs.”
Added to the immense pressure of not letting another terrorist on a plane, these workers still have to worry about supporting their families and themselves. Galedo said airport security workers have a high turnover rate because of poor pay and no benefits. She even went on to say that the airport subcontractors, who hire the security guards, have been targeting recent immigrants, especially Filipino Americans, for years.
“I think it is an interesting phenomenon that there are so many Filipinos in those jobs,” Galedo said. “I think a lot of it has to do with them being recent immigrants and being willing to work in whatever job one can get. It’s a job that exploits, so I think they intentionally look to the immigrant population.”
If President Bush does use federal employees to take over security guard jobs, possibly thousands could be out of work.
“If we concentrate on regulations, it really shouldn’t threaten people’s jobs,” Galedo said. “They should look at those jobs and value them more than they had in the past. There should be some stability in the workforce. It shouldn’t mean these people should lose their jobs. It should mean they become eligible for those [new] jobs and get reclassified to be federal employees.”
Ron Wilson, the director of community affairs at the San Francisco International Airport, said the presence of federal employees could offer benefits in enforcing stricter security measures and easing the minds of frightened passengers.
“[Hiring federal employees] could be helpful,” Wilson said. “Having law-enforcement type people in those areas and anything to beef up security in the minds of the traveling public could help out a lot.”
No matter what decisions President Bush will make, Steve Luckenbauch, the community media relations manager at the San Jose International Airport, said they will conform to the guidelines set forth in Washington.
“We support President Bush’s security directives,” he said. “We have supported [them] for a long time in having airport or the government oversee the security checkpoint.”
Luisa Blue, of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, organizes workers at airports in the Bay Area. Last year, her work at the San Francisco International Airport was fruitful in forming a union, which successfully campaigned to bump up hourly wages from $6 to $9, including benefits. Airport workers in San Jose and Oakland are trying to follow suit.
“If we think these jobs are important enough in the first line of defense for security, then issues of salary and benefits have to be addressed,” Blue said.
Said Wilson, who has been satisfied with the unionized workers at SFO: “The workers are more proficient now and the turnover rate has decreased. So [conditions] have improved because they don’t need three jobs now to survive.”
Reach Ethen Lieser at elieser@asianweek.com.
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