PrimeFlight Aviation Services to Layoff 64 and 276

The odds are good that, unless you happen to work in the aviation industry you have only heard the name PrimeFlight Aviation Services in association with some seriously underhanded business practices with its employee’s wages. Last year the company was accused of putting pressure on its workers to report more income then they actually made in the form of tips. This kind of misreporting would have allowed the company to add in less money for their workers pay to meet with federal and state minimum wage laws. It also would have left its employees with less than a minimum wage take home pay for their hours at work.

Now the company is getting ready to layoff 64 workers in one location and a whopping  276 in another. The 64 workers to be cut will come from the San Antonio International Airport and the 276 jobs to be slashed will come from Bush Intercontinental Airport, which for those of you not in the know is in the city of Houston Texas. Each of these incidences will be enough to qualify as a mass layoff action, as each of the sites job cuts will be more than 50 workers at an individual site.

The 64 workers from the San Antonio International Airport will be out of a job at the end of the month, when the company loses a handling contract with Delta Airlines. The 276 workers who will be cut from operation at the Bush Intercontinental Airport will be let go when a contact with United Airlines is cut, and they are  being replaced by a different baggage handling company. They will be out of a job as of the 15^th of May.

For now the company, which is still under investigation after last year’s allegations of wage reporting fraud, is not making comment about either the investigation or the cuts that they are making to their staff. While a good number of these contract losses are likely to be related to the current scrutiny that the company is under the airline industry as a whole has taken some serious hits in the current economy and with airlines themselves cutting back both on staff and overall number of flights it is not surprising that the need for baggage personnel is going down as well.

For those of you who have not been following our coverage of the airline cuts here is a look at our coverage of  a recent announcement by American Airlines to cut 1,200 jobs, just weeks after cutting 20,000 workers:

“It looks like American Airlines is at it again. As a part of its recovery plan after filing  for bankruptcy the company is getting ready to cut another 1,200 people from their payrolls. The jobs to be cut are going to be primarily in the areas of airport baggage handlers and cargo management jobs. This second wave of layoffs is slamming into the company staffing this year, and if things continue on this way then they will not be the last layoffs that American Airlines perpetrates on its employees in a bid to stay in business.

The job cuts will impact all of the positions at nine facilities. Seven on those facilities will be in the U.S. and the remaining two are in Canada. The company expects to outsource its baggage handling and cargo operations.  The airports that are expected to be impacted by the job cuts and outsourcing include the following: Columbus, Ohio; Memphis, Tennessee; Hartford, Connecticut; Sacramento, California; Portland, Oregon; Reno, Nevada; Calgary and Vancouver.”