About 50 employees of Hudson News and their supporters carried signs and chanted “No justice, no peace!” outside BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport yesterday, part of a one-day strike.

The only unionized workplace at the airport, Hudson News and its employees “are in the midst of seven months of negotiations that have just been very frustrating,” said organizer Meghan Cohorst, of Unite Here Local 7, which began its representation of BWI Hudson workers in 2007 and currently represents 60 of them.

Cohorst said the contract has expired and workers have been stymied in their efforts to get the company to improve on its offer of a 15-cent raise.

“The company also wants to reduce the pension contributions and contribute less to benefits,” Cohorst said. “That’s just unacceptable. The employees feel like everything they’ve negotiated in the past is in jeopardy.”

Cohorst said management has “come down pretty hard on employees” and told some they would be fired following their vote last week to stage the one-day strike action.

A corporate spokeswoman declined The Brew’s offer to respond to the action or Cohorst’s comments.

“We don’t have any comment,” said Laura Samuels, vice president of corporate communications for The Hudson Group of East Rutherford, N.J., a wholly-owned subsidiary of duty-free travel retailer Dufry AG of Basel, Switzerland.

Two Jobs, but Still Cash Strapped

Workers, who were joined yesterday by activists and clergy, stepped away from the line outside Pier C to talk about why they were there.

Cheryl Foster, who has worked for the company for three months, said she was supporting her fellow employees.

“It’s not right that we are working with no overtime pay. We’re told to go home so they don’t have to pay us overtime,” Foster said. Meanwhile employees who remain on the job are stressed by overwork because the place is short staffed.

“If you get a bathroom break, you’re lucky. We’ve had people who have had accidents because of this,” she said. “We’re short-handed. There’s no one to relieve you.”

The 33-year-old said she is divorced, supporting two young children on her own and holds down two jobs to make ends meet. She lives with her mother in Laurel and, until she passed a probationary period and got a parking pass, had to pay $8 a day to park at BWI.

“It was like ‘I can’t eat today. I’ve got to pay for parking!’” she said.

A fellow employee, Jolita Berry, of Parkville, said she was walking the line “to send a message to the ones that are too scared to be here that we need to stand up for fair wages.”

Berry said she makes $10 an hour, but some fellow employees make less. Managers who are not represented by the union are also struggling with working conditions at Hudson. She said managers often end up staying on the job on their own time, after they are made to clock out, in order to help get the work done and support the staff.

“We all work hard, come to work on time, work extra-long hours,” Berry said. “But it’s still so hard to pay the bills. And so, with 15 cents more, what bills do we pay with that?”

Labor Unrest at BWI

The airport has been the scene of multiple labor actions in the past two years.

At the same time that Hudson News workers were staging their strike at Pier C yesterday, concessions workers employed by HMSHost walked their own picket line at Pier A, the latest action in ongoing effort to unionize as well.

“They want to ensure a fair process. With a union, they would have the right to be on strike like this,” Cohorst said. HMSHost employs workers at several airport restaurants, including Starbucks and Phillips Seafood.

Unite Here has also been pressing Maryland officials on behalf of the approximately 800 food and retail workers at the airport who are employed by AirMall USA.

A union survey found the median wage among AirMall employees at BWI is $8.50-an-hour.

Workers say their situation has worsened since Pittsburgh-based AirMall took over airport concessions through a contract hammered out during the Ehrlich administration.

Disputing the union’s findings, AirMall says median pay is $15-an-hour and that workers are paid adequately and treated with respect. Unite Here has staged protests at BWI and in Annapolis at the Statehouse, where 14 of them were arrested in March.

Protest Against Veolia

Also protesting working conditions at BWI are the SuperShuttle van drivers, who say they “franchise” contracts they work under make for impossibly low pay and intolerable working conditions.

Organized by United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1994, they have staged protests at the airport and in front of the offices of corporate parent Veolia Transportation (whose corporate parent is, in turn, Paris-based Veolia Environment SA).

Veolia Transportation Vice President Dwight Kines took issue with the union’s numbers earlier this year. He said that drivers “are able to make a good living.”