If you fly you are familiar with the beehive of activity that goes around each flight. Workers clean the planes, de-ice the wings, load baggage, inspect the plane, and perform maintenance to ensure that you get to your destination safely.
Kip Hedges was one of the people you saw loading baggage, a job he held for 26 years. I use the past tense of "held" because just a few weeks before Christmas, Kip was fired from his job. He was not fired for goofing off on the job, he never violated any safety rules, he was on time for work every day. He never punched out early. He was fired for saying "disparaging remarks about Delta".
Go to 1:37 in the video below the fold to hear Kip's disparaging remarks.
“A lot of the Delta workers make under $15 an hour. As a matter of fact, I would say probably close to half make under $15 an hour. So there’s a lot of them that understand how important this is. And a lot of the better-paid workers also understand that the bottom has to be raised otherwise the top is going to fall, as well.”
I looked up
disparaging in the
dictionary:
disparaging [dih-spar-i-jing] adjective
1. that disparages; tending to belittle or bring reproach upon
I have listened to what Hedges said several times, I have read the transcription multiple times and I cannot see that he said anything disparaging in what he stated. Had the baggage handlers voted in a union four years ago he would have been protected by a union contract; however, in 2010 Delta baggage handlers narrowly voted against unionization. Jay Parsley, a Delta employee based in Atlanta who organized the opposition to a union, stated at that
time:
[I am] opposed [to] unionization because pay for nonunion workers is better than the former Northwest workers who were under union contract. We wouldn't gain anything except having a pay cut by having dues.
A pretty short-sighted view for a few bucks. Unionization is far more than money in your wallet. It also protects workers from being fired for spurious reasons, like being canned for saying "disparaging" remarks that are not disparaging.
Hedges was not making an unreasonable request, especially when you consider that Richard Anderson, CEO of Delta, earned $14,375,903 in 2013. Delta baggage handlers don't earn anywhere close to that; as a matter of fact, the average baggage-handler salary at Delta is just a hair over $24,000 a year.
If Delta can afford to pay their CEO over $14 million a year, the company can afford to give us more leg room, not charge us for bringing luggage, and they can afford to pay their baggage handlers $15 an hour to handle our suitcases.