By Don McIntosh, Associate Editor
On Aug. 20 — after he spent four years and one day maintaining the baggage handling system at Portland International Airport — ABM Onsite Service employee Greg Morris was called into the office and fired.
“I’ve never been terminated before in my life,” says Morris, who was making $12.92 an hour, full-time.
Morris, 25, says he was given no reason for the firing. It took place at the hands of ABM regional manager Robert Allen, in the presence of his supervisor. When Morris pressed for an explanation, Allen told him “the client” had requested it.
ABM Onsite Services is a division of the gigantic facility contractor ABM, which has over 100,000 employees. In this case, its client is Portland Airlines Consortium (PAC) — a special purpose company formed by 13 airlines doing business at PDX. And PAC’s sole employee is general manager John Imlay. His job is to manage the contract for operating the baggage handling system, and a contract for janitorial services in areas leased by the airlines.
Morris says he’s never met Imlay. So it’s a mystery what grounds Imlay would have had to fire him.
Could union involvement have had something to do with it? Machinists District Lodge W24 organizer Will Lukens thinks so. In an April 2 election administered by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), ABM workers voted 15-6 to join Machinists Lodge 1005. Morris was active in the union campaign, and became a shop steward on ABM’s swing shift crew.
But ABM has refused to recognize or bargain with the union. Its lawyers have argued that the NLRB doesn’t have jurisdiction over these workers, because they’re airline workers, and thus fall under the National Railway Labor Act, a law that makes it much harder to unionize. An NLRB judge considered that argument, and rejected it — in part on the grounds that the airline client — PAC — doesn’t fire the ABM employees, and thus isn’t their real employer.
In the NLRB hearing, ABM pointed to its contract, which says “PAC reserves the right to request of the contractor, removal of any of the contractor’s employee(s), should the employee’s behavior, appearance, and professional, ethical, credential or licensing etc., not meet those requirements of PAC.”
But the judge found that in practice, PAC never did that — it didn’t exercise day-to-day operational control over the contractor’s workers, and at times wasn’t even in the loop when ABM workers were fired.
ABM appealed the judge’s finding to the NLRB’s top body — its five-member board in Washington, D.C., and lost there too, on Aug. 26.
Was Morris fired for no other reason than to show that PAC could fire an ABM employee — so ABM could prove its case that these workers were airline workers?
Imlay, reached by phone, confirmed that he asked ABM to terminate an employee, and said it was for a reason, but not because of union involvement. Imlay said it’s for ABM to tell the reason.
ABM will have several opportunities to present an alibi: If it contests Morris’ unemployment insurance claim, it may have to show there was a reason for the termination. The same might apply if ABM appeals the NLRB ruling in federal court.
The union is planning to protest the firing with a public demonstration at the airport.
