Attitude is the deciding factor.
They marched Downtown last week in the cold, on the day the nation remembered the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
And they wore the “I Am A Man” placards carried by Memphis sanitation workers in the 1968 strike — an event the civil rights leader had come to support as part of a “Poor People’s Campaign” he was waging when murdered.
African-American food and beverage workers at O’Hare Airport, members of the Unite Here Local 1 union, said they chose the somber date to highlight their allegations of discriminatory treatment by city of Chicago concessions contractor HMSHost.
HMSHost denies those allegations, primarily inequity in hiring and promotion of African-American workers into tipped positions. The union says African-American workers, on average, earn 51.8 cents for every dollar earned by white employees in wages and tips. That’s based on fiscal year 2016 data, the most recent full-year statistics available.
The figures were derived from total earnings divided by total hours for both groups. In third quarter 2017, HMSHost reported 338 tipped positions, consisting of servers and bartenders. Of those positions, 48.8 percent were held by whites; 32.5 percent by Latinos; 10.7 percent by African-Americans; and 7.4 percent by Asians.
Overall, whites were 18.4 percent of the 1,270-member workforce; Latinos, 37.6 percent; African-Americans, 28.1 percent; and Asians, 15.3 percent.[…]
The company provided data showing current average hourly rates by ethnic group: Latinos, $13.01 an hour; Asian-Americans, $12.81; African-Americans, $12.24; and whites, $10.46.