Restaurant Workers Strike for 2nd Day at San Francisco International Airport
Fast-food workers at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) are on strike. Restaurant workers will continue their strike on Tuesday as some flight attendants are also set to picket.
The strike includes a thousand workers at restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and lounges at SFO. The majority make $17.05 per hour and have not seen a raise in three years.
The Unite Here Local 2 union said in a press release that travelers should plan to bring their own food, as workers are on strike at virtually every food and beverage outlet within the airport.
Workers have compared their wages to the price of popular menu items in viral social media videos, emphasizing that hourly pay is often less than the price of a single meal at SFO. They are calling on travelers to boycott the airport’s food and beverage outlets.
“Nobody can pay their bills or feed their kids on $17 an hour,” said Anand Singh, President of UNITE HERE Local 2. “Working at SFO used to mean you had a good job, but most of the airport’s fast-food workers haven’t seen a raise in three years. The hamburger or burrito an airport worker serves often costs more than what she makes in an entire hour. Nine months of negotiations got us nowhere, and SFO’s food service workers are tired of working two or even three jobs just to survive.”
The open-ended strike includes cashiers, baristas, cooks, dishwashers, bartenders, servers, and lounge attendants with 30 different employers at 84 food and beverage outlets throughout the airport. The employers are bargaining as a collective.
Airport food service workers voted by 99.7 percent to authorize the strike through a vote held in August.
The union members have also held ongoing demonstrations since Friday, September 16, including a traffic interruption that resulted in a mass police citation.
The San Francisco International Airport also advised travelers that “a labor action by airport food workers is impacting staffing restaurants and lounges”.
“Some food and beverage outlets are closed, while others remain open with limited hours and offerings. Staffing at newsstands is not currently affected, and these outlets will continue to offer grab-and-go food and beverages. Full-service meal availability may be limited. SFO apologizes for any inconvenience this causes. SFO will provide updates on the status of airport restaurants at flySFO.com and social media channels.”
Lower Spend - Chase Ink Business Preferred® 100K!
Chase Ink Business Preferred® is a powerful card that earns 3X Ultimate Rewards points in a broad range of business categories on the first $150K in spend per year. Right now earn 100K Chase Ultimate Rewards points after Learn more about this card and its features!
Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities.
Maybe get some education or job training. You’re unskilled labor. Literally anyone can do your job. Most people do your job as a teenager or student. Grow up. If you think it’s supposed to be a lifelong career then you can’t be helped. Your poor life planning skills should not be the burden of the general public, who will pay the price of your artificially inflated wages. Also, talk to your politicians about how their absurd policies such as rent control, environmental regulations and high taxes increase the cost of housing.
How are they supposed to go to school, etc when they have to work 2-3 jobs to survive or support family (kids, parents, who knows?) Maybe a LIVING WAGE would help enough to where people COULD go to school as well as work. Man, what a cold and unfeeling comment. I am glad you are privileged enough to be like that.
You can’t reason with aholes like that. They want people to be poor, overworked & disenfranchised.
A living wage would exist if 40 million illegals didn’t oversupply labor markets and depress wages for these non skilled jobs. Open borders and not enough deportations is why these jobs don’t pay what they should. Taxes whether sales, income, excise, telephone/cable, or property tax (paid through higher rents) also hurt these workers. The 400 billion spent on housing/feeding/schooling the kids of illegals would go a long way to paying tax cuts so businesses could raise wages. Wages did go up significantly between 2017-2021. Bank of America and other companies put in a $20 an hour minimum wage for any job. Inflation since late 2021 has unfortunately eaten away at wage gains. High gas prices don’t help.
Having kids you can’t afford to give a decent life to is a big no no. Can’t blame abortion restrictions and birth control access as states like California and New York have no abortion restrictions and birth control costs $10 at Walmart for a 30 day supply.
It should be pointed out that education is why many are poor. There will only be a certain percentage of jobs for which a degree is required and makes sense. 50 million people going to college who didn’t need to loads them up with debt when they really won’t make enough to make it back. Before having kids, a man and woman getting married and sharing a household is how people can afford things. Manufacturing was pushed to China by environmentalists so a lot of the jobs where only one member of the household had to work don’t exist.
There aren’t “40 million illegals”. And before you disagree with me, I am a 23 year veteran of the US Border Patrol and I know what I am talking about.
Yes, there are a lot of folks who might not have needed education they were told they did need, but that does not cancel the fact that wages have NOT, since 1973, kept up with inflation.
The unemployment rate is at 3.7%
Corporate profits and worker productivity have far outpaced wage gains for workers, especially the unskilled.
While I’m sure it’s happened somehow, it’s pretty tough to get a job at an airport without passing a background check and supplying valid identification/records. I’m going to guess the number of illegals/undocumented in those jobs is pretty low.
The same states that want to criminalize abortion are also largely in favor of restricting access to contraception & sex ed, thereby exacerbating the problem.
I don’t expect you to acknowledge any of these statements, being angry about the border problem and pointing at the failings of states with democrat state governments is just par for the course.
Good for them! I hope they get serious raises and considerations from the companies making bank off them there. Food prices at US airports is almost always outrageously priced, even with the added expenses of bringing stuff in.