Charlotte airport workers strike over low wages as busy Thanksgiving travel week begins

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Service workers at Charlotte Douglas International Airport have gone on strike during a busy week of Thanksgiving travel to protest what they say are unlivable wages.

Employees of ABM and Prospect Airport Services cast ballots Friday to authorize the work stoppage in North Carolina, which a spokesperson said began Monday morning.

Officials with Service Employees International Union announced the impending strike in a statement early Monday, saying the workers would demand “an end to poverty wages and respect on the job during the holiday travel season.”

ABM and Prospect Airport Services contract with American Airlines to provide services including cleaning airplane interiors, removing trash and escorting passengers in wheelchairs.

Workers say they previously raised the alarm about their growing inability to afford basic necessities, including food and housing. They described living paycheck to paycheck, unable to cover expenses like car repairs while performing jobs that keep countless planes running on schedule.

“We’re on strike today because this is our last resort. We can’t keep living like this,” ABM cabin cleaner Priscilla Hoyle said in a statement. “We’re taking action because our families can’t survive.”

Several hundred workers were expected to walk off the job and continue the work stoppage throughout Monday.

Most of them earn between $12.50 and $19 an hour, which is well below the living wage for a single person with no children in the Charlotte area, union officials said.

Charlotte Douglas International Airport officials have said this holiday travel season is expected to be the busiest on record, with an estimated 1.02 million passengers departing the airport between last Thursday and the Monday after Thanksgiving.

In addition to walking off the job, striking workers plan to hold a late-morning rally and a “Strikesgiving” lunch “in place of the Thanksgiving meal that many of the workers won’t be able to afford later this week,” union officials said.

“Airport service workers make holiday travel possible by keeping airports safe, clean, and running,” the union said. “Despite their critical role in the profits that major corporations enjoy, many airport service workers must work two to three jobs to make ends meet.”

ABM said it would take steps to minimize disruptions from any demonstrations.

“At ABM, we appreciate the hard work our team members put in every day to support our clients and help keep spaces clean and people healthy,” the company said in a statement last week.

Prospect Airport Services said last week that the company recognizes the seriousness of the potential for a strike during the busy holiday travel season.

FILE - A view of Charlotte Douglas International Airport, Friday, Nov. 22, 2024, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Erik Verduzco, File)

An union ballot drop box is seen at Charlotte Douglas International Airport, Friday, Nov. 22, 2024, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Erik Verduzco)

Passengers walks past a union ballot drop box at Charlotte Douglas International Airport, Friday, Nov. 22, 2024, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Erik Verduzco)

An union ballot drop box is seen at Charlotte Douglas International Airport, Friday, Nov. 22, 2024, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Erik Verduzco)

LaQuanda Harvey, a Prospect airport service worker, votes in favor of a strike at Charlotte Douglas International Airport, Friday, Nov. 22, 2024, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Erik Verduzco)

NEW YORK (AP) — Barbara Taylor Bradford, a British journalist who became a publishing sensation in her 40s with the saga "A Woman of Substance" and wrote more than a dozen other novels that sold tens of millions of copies, has died. She was 91.

Bradford died Sunday at her home in New York City, a spokesperson said Monday.

Starting with "A Woman of Substance," published in 1979, Bradford averaged nearly a book a year as one of the world's most popular and wealthiest writers, her net worth estimated at more than $200 million and her fame so high that her image appeared on a postage stamp in 1999. In 2007, Queen Elizabeth II awarded her an OBE (The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire).

Her books were published in 40 languages and sold more than 90 million copies around the world.

With titles like “Breaking the Rules'' and ”Act of Will,'' she specialized in stories of women fighting for love and power in a man's world. Her favorite among her books was "The Women In His Life," inspired by her husband's escape from the Nazis

Bradford was married for 56 years to German-born film producer Robert Bradford, who died in 2019.

A native of Leeds, West Yorkshire, she was an only child in a working class family who loved books early. As a girl, she had a story published in a local magazine. By age 16, she left school against her parents' wishes to become a reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post. Over the next 30 years, she would work as fashion editor of Woman's Own Magazine, cover a variety of beats for the London Evening News and, in the United States, write a syndicated column about interior design.

Although she wrote children's stories and advice books, novels were her dream. "A Woman of Substance" was a multi-generational chronicle of the travails and triumphs of retail baron Emma Harte, who would be featured in several other Bradford novels. The book has sold more than 30 million copies and was the basis of a 1984 television miniseries starring Jenny Seagrove as a young Emma and Deborah Kerr as Emma late in life.

“And if you want to meet the real Emma, meet me,” Bradford told the Telegraph of London in 2009. "Emma had to be tough and ruthless at times: but then so am I. I have to be, as a businesswoman. And I'm a bloody good businesswoman."

Bradford and Emma Harte were linked by more than money: both had family secrets. As a young woman, Emma became pregnant by a man who refused to marry her and gave birth to a daughter. Years later, Bradford learned through her biographer that her own mother had been born out of wedlock. It is now believed that Bradford’s maternal grandfather was Frederick Oliver Robinson, the second Marquess of Ripon and the owner of the Studley Royal estate.

Seagrove, who became friends with Bradford after starring in the miniseries, described her as a “powerhouse of glamour and warmth” and a “force of nature” who stayed true to her roots.

“Success never diluted her warmth and humor or her ability to relate to everyone she met, whether a cleaner or a princess,” Seagrove said. "She never, ever forgot that she was just a girl from Yorkshire that worked hard and made good. RIP dear friend.”

Bradford had a strict writing routine: at work behind her IBM Lexmark typewriter by 6 a.m., break around 1 p.m., then back to writing until 6 p.m., at the latest. According to an authorized 2006 biography, Piers Dudgeon's "The Woman of Substance," Bradford more than adapted to her midlife fortune, living in a 5,300 square foot apartment overlooking Manhattan's East River, collecting Impressionist art and enjoying refills of pink champagne poured by her Moroccan butler. When the Bradfords put their apartment up for sale in 2010, the asking price was just under $19 million. (They sold it to Uma Thurman in 2013 for $10 million).

Over the years, she met many other celebrities. Bradford befriended Sean Connery before he appeared in his first James Bond movie and remembered advising him, thankfully in vain, that he should lose his Scottish accent if he wanted to succeed.

Around the same time, she met a fellow journalist at the Yorkshire Evening Post. He was “lanky and disheveled with acne,” and kept trying to talk to her even after she turned him down for a date at the movies.

He was Peter O'Toole.

"Years later, (Evening Post editor) Keith Waterhouse and I were at an event where the producer Sam Spiegel introduced the star of his new movie," she told The Guardian in 2021. “Out walked the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, dressed as Lawrence of Arabia. Keith said: ‘Don’t you wish you’d gone to the pictures with him now?’ I never got over Peter’s transformation.”

FILE - Author Barbara Taylor Bradford after she received her Most Excellent Order of the British Empire from Britain's Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, London, Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2007. (Steve Parsons/Pool Photo via AP, File)

FILE - Author Barbara Taylor Bradford arrives to the opening night of the play "Festen," on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre, Sunday, April 9, 2006 in New York. (AP Photo/Dima Gavrysh, File)

FILE - Author Barbara Taylor Bradford attends the Romantic Novelists Association's Romantic Novel of the Year awards at 1 Whitehall Place, in London, March 16, 2015, (Ian West/PA via AP, File)

This is an undated photo issued by Bradford Enterprises on Monday, Nov. 25, 2024 of author Barbara Taylor Bradford. (Caroll Taveras/Bradford Enterprises via AP)