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Over 1,000 Area Airport Concession Workers Laid Off Without Severance
By
Sophia Chang
Published Mar 19, 2020
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By
Sophia Chang
Published Mar 19, 2020
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Airport hospitality company OTG has abruptly laid off over a thousand of its concession employees who work at Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports in another economic casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to a memo issued by the company Wednesday, the employees will not receive any severance or benefits beyond health insurance, which ends on March 31st.
The company operates food and beverage stations like the ubiquitous CIBO stands at the three New York-area airports as well as a handful of other airports around the country.
Messages for OTG executives were not answered Thursday.
"It was the last thing we all expected. We were still hiring like hundreds of people up to Monday morning," said a woman who was laid off and did not want have her name published.
The total number of layoffs was not immediately available but believed to be between 1,100 to 2,000 employees between the three airports.
"The number of layoffs the company has currently reported to us across the three New York City airports is 1,100. We think that's likely significantly low-balled -- for every industry, but ours in particular, the sky is falling right now," said Arthur Phillips, spokesperson for Unite Here, the service employee union representing OTG employees.
The layoffs came with directives to file for unemployment with New York state.
"There is no severance. They are not paying wages and most importantly, from our perspective, is that they're not extending health benefits. So that has been the primary consistent demand on our part across all of our employers, which is that they extend health benefits for as long as they're temporarily closed as a result of the virus," Phillips said.
"We're calling on most employers to keep our workers on their payroll and to maintain their health insurance," he said. "The health insurance is so crucial because it's going to be hard for workers to get any alternative insurance if they're cut off from theirs right now, it'd be hard for them to afford anything on the marketplace, get enrolled in Medicaid...as well as getting enrolled in unemployment."
A request for comment to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was not immediately answered Thursday.
The airline industry has taken a massive hit in the global COVID-19 pandemic: the Airports Council International North America expects passenger traffic to drop by 49 percent in the first half of 2020, according to the Washington Post.
Nevertheless, the laid-off OTG employee said she was reassured as recently as last week that the company would perserve.
"Never saw this coming. Because up to about Thursday or Friday last week our CEO sent out a memo about just like 'we're all going to hang in there. We're family, blah, blah, blah,'" the former OTG employee said. "Haven't heard a single thing from him so far."
Tagged
COVID-19
airports
Sophia Chang
Sophia Chang is a former WNYC and Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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