A cargo operator can add a freighter, expand a warehouse or expand ramp space in a span of months. Building an experienced workforce, however, takes longer, and the evidence shows what that costs.
“Recruitment and retention are a greater constraint than equipment or facilities,” says Vincent Bove, vice president of aviation and logistics at Andy Frain Services, which supplies screening and security personnel for cargo operations. “While equipment and infrastructure can generally be acquired or expanded through proper planning, developing a reliable workforce takes considerably more time.”
How wages got here
Pay in ground-based airport operations began to lag other sectors in the early 1980s, as the use of subcontractors increased to reduce labour costs and shrink the workforce during slow periods. Between 1990 and 2012, average weekly wages in airport operations fell 14 percent in real terms while rising 18 percent across all industries.
The reason sits in the economics of contracting. Ground labour is a small share of an airline’s costs but a large share of a contractor’s, and in the absence of regulation, contractors keep wages low enough to compete. Between 2015 and 2019, half of airport cleaners and more than a third of baggage handlers earned less than US$16.20 an hour, the federal contractor minimum.
What constraint looks like operationally
Before a screening or security employee can work independently, Bove says, they must clear background checks, state licensure, airport badging, regulatory and site-specific training, and in many cases specialised screening certifications.
“The challenge is not simply finding applicants,” he says. “It is attracting qualified candidates and retaining them after they are trained.” Turnover, he says, creates immediate operational impact through overtime, schedule gaps, increased training costs and added pressure on experienced employees and supervisors.
Older research points to the same mechanism at wider scale. A six-month study commissioned by the Port of Seattle in 2014, as summarised in the afforementioned UC Berkeley brief, found turnover at Seattle-Tacoma International ranging from 25 percent to 80 percent a year across employers, with newer workers eight percent more likely to receive citations for security violations than experienced ones. Workers were not staying long enough to achieve what the study referred to as mastery in their jobs.
How operators respond
Bove describes proactive recruiting, maintained candidate pipelines, cross-trained personnel, close monitoring of staffing and overtime trends, and hiring coordinated ahead of anticipated growth or contract transitions. Andy Frain’s national structure allows it to deploy experienced leaders and trained staff to new or challenged locations. Those measures, he says, help maintain service continuity while the business expands.
The industry’s collective response has largely mirrored that logic. IATA’s Ground Operations Training Passport, launched in 2023 with the Lufthansa Group as pioneer, lets qualified staff move between employers without redundant retraining. The rollout followed their own survey finding that 37 percent of ground handling professionals anticipated staffing shortages into 2023 and beyond, and 60 percent felt they lacked enough qualified staff for smooth operations.
The wage evidence
Twenty-six US airports now have labour standards policies, including 12 of the 20 busiest. The most studied is San Francisco International, which adopted a Quality Standards Program in 1999 mandating higher wages and uniform recruitment and training standards for workers whose jobs affect safety and security. An evaluation by Reich, Hall and Jacobs, published in Industrial Relations in 2005, found workers received an average pay increase of 22 percent in the two years after the policy took effect, with entry-level wages up 33 percent. Turnover fell 34 percent across all firms and 60 percent among those with wage increases of ten percent or more, with no evidence of employment decline.
New York and New Jersey followed the same logic at larger scale, and more recently. The Port Authority’s own analysis found that more than 30 percent of privately employed workers at its airports turned over every year, a rate that had risen 50 percent since 2010. In 2018 its board approved a policy raising the minimum wage for workers at JFK, LaGuardia and Newark Liberty to US$19 an hour by 2023. “We believe this substantially improved minimum wage for airport workers will greatly reduce turnover, improve morale and develop better trained workers as critical contributors to airport operations and security,” said executive director Rick Cotton at the time.
The policy is still expanding. The most recent increase took effect in January 2026, the last of three upfront raises the board approved in December 2024, with future adjustments now tied automatically to the regional cost of living.
The post What turnover costs American airfreight appeared first on Air Cargo Week.
Go to Source
Author: Edward Hardy
