SAN FRANCISCO (Legal Newsline) – An air travel trade group is suing the city and county of San Francisco over a new law regarding health care benefits for airline employees.
Airlines for America filed its lawsuit March 31 in federal court through lawyers at Skadden Arps, seeking an injunction against San Francisco’s Healthy Airport Ordinance. The group says the HAO overrides and nullifies existing collective bargaining agreements between airlines and unions.
The HAO requires airlines to discontinue all health plans that do not meet a specific benefits structure and was passed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“With the HAO, San Francisco seeks to force airlines and airline workers to adopt the healthcare benefits plans the City thinks they should have, regardless of what workers want, regardless of the benefits for which airlines and airline workers collectively bargained, regardless of what tradeoffs the parties have chosen at the negotiating table, regardless of the healthcare benefits plans that airlines provide to all of their non-unionized domestic employees each year, and regardless of the impact on flights and services to SFO,” the lawsuit says.
If the benefits plans don’t meet San Francisco’s criteria, airlines can keep them if they pay a penalty of $9.50 an hour per employee into a city fund.
“But that ‘choice’—of paying into the City fund rather than changing their healthcare plans—is no choice at all, because it is prohibitively expensive, costing individual airlines as much as $100 million per year for just a single airport,” the suit says.
“For many airlines, this likely ensures that they cannot operate at a profit at SFO now or in the foreseeable future. Thus, any airline that chooses this ‘penalty’ option will do so only temporarily until it can find a way to change its healthcare plans in a way that complies with both the HAO and that airline’s collective bargaining agreements with its workers.”