San Francisco Airport Labor Fight Hits City Hall This Week

Service workers at San Francisco’s airport called for a $30 an hour minimum wage and other improved benefits during a Board of Supervisors hearing on Thursday.

Workers at San Francisco International Airport who clean airplane cabins, handle baggage, work security, push wheelchairs and more currently make about $22 per hour. This translates to a little over $45,000, before taxes, for a 40-hour work week — well below the poverty line in San Francisco.

Nestor Dolde, 73, said he works two separate jobs at the airport — totalling 16 hours a day — to earn enough for his family of four to survive.

“I sacrifice the health and safety of myself just to give a decent living [to] my family because the transportation now is so expensive … I don’t sleep too much,” Dolde said at the hearing.

The hearing comes days after a May Day protest at the airport over the labor fight ended in arrests of Supervisors Rafael Mandelman and Connie Chan, and state Sen. Josh Becker, D-San Mateo, along with around 20 others.

The officials had gathered with dozens of janitors, security officers and airport workers with Service Employees International Union United Service Workers West, who said at the rally that their stagnant pay could not keep up with the high cost of living in the Bay Area.

Mandelman scheduled Thursday’s hearing in April to check on the lengthy contract negotiations between nearly 2,000 SFO employees represented by SEIU-USWW and a group of multi-national corporate contractors that employ them, including G2/Menzies, PrimeFlight, Unifi, ABM and Compass/Flix.

The protest and the hearing follow a year of fruitless negotiations with the airport contractors, union representatives said. They also said that the airport contractors have not yet offered a full response to workers’demands.

None of the five contractors involved in the negotiations sent a representative to the hearing, nor did they respond to KQED’s requests for comment.

Throughout the hearing, airport workers shared emotional stories about struggling to make enough to survive in the Bay Area — doing everything from taking on second jobs to subsisting on diets of rice and oatmeal.

And yet, the employees displayed immense pride in their work, sporting T-shirts with the slogan “We Make SFO Fly” splashed across the back.

Noyra Gonzalez, a wheelchair agent who spends her days helping people get to and from their gates, told KQED: “At the end of the day, it’s a very fulfilling job because we’re helping people that actually need the help.”

Gonzalez said that she cannot afford her own apartment and only recently upgraded from her aunt’s couch to a room in a shared home.

“I had to sleep on a couch in order to make ends meet … Many of my co-workers sleep at the parking lot in their cars, and some others sleep in the airport because they have two or three jobs, so they basically live at the airport,” Gonzalez said.

Last year, airport workers in Los Angeles won a $30 an hour wage, to be phased in by 2028. There, a coalition of airlines — along with other industry groups that employ service workers — tried to force a citywide vote on the new laws, claiming they would lead to layoffs and deliver a fresh blow to the tourism industry, after COVID-19 led to major losses, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Sanjay Garla, first vice president of SEIU-USWW, a 50,000-person union that fought for the gains in Los Angeles, said that the low wages are ultimately the airline’s responsibility. The airlines, which set the overall contracting prices, have pushed to keep them low despite record profits, Garla said.

A report by Airport Workers United, a national airport workers union, shared ahead of the meeting, stated that every individual domestic airline in the “Big Four” — American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines — saw record revenues in 2025 and net profits of about $39.5 billion.

“It is just such a contrast between the evident wealth of that airport and the working conditions of the lowest wage workers at the airport,” Mandelman told KQED after the hearing.

He confirmed that the board could step in, saying, “We have legislated around the airport in the past, and we could do it again.”

KQED’s Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman contributed to this report.