"Alaska Airlines alone made $157,000,000 in the last three months, in part by outsourcing good paying jobs," Sergio Salinas, the president of SEIU Local 6, said at a press conference in SeaTac earlier today. Salinas was announcing that supporters of the $15-an-hour minimum wage initiative are filing a petition to appeal Friday's ruling that the proposition did not apply to airport workers.

"People work here [at SeaTac] for decades and the only raise they get is when the miminum wage goes up," Salinas said. He introduced Alex Hoopes, a man who's worked at SeaTac for twenty years. When he was laid off by Alaska Airlines in 2005, Hoopes said he made $21 an hour. Now he makes $9.50 an hour for doing a similar job at a different airline. "With that, I cannot afford to have a nice car, I cannot afford to have...a mortgage" or to save for retirement.

"It is ridiculous, it is absurd, it is preposterous that I work with multi-million-dollar equipment," a worker named Joshua Ortega said, but "even after working here at this airport for about nine months, I still can't make enough...I still need public assistance just to feed my wife and just to feed my son."

You can read the petition to the court as a PDF here. I've embedded video of the press conference below the jump to pacify those of you who still cling to Internet Explorer as a web-browsing option; I know autoplay is an issue for you two.

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