Dozens of area flight attendants plan to rally on Wednesday in front of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s Downtown Orlando office to demand Senate action on a COVID-19 relief package.
Flight attendants, airline industry workers and supporters will gather at 9 a.m. in front of Rubio’s Seaside Plaza headquarters on S. Orange Avenue to raise awareness to their current economic plight.
Airline workers are currently receiving financial support through the CARES Act’s Payroll Support Program, but with air travel at historic lows amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the lifeline of economic relief is more important than every.
Indeed, these Payroll Support Program benefits are set to expire on Sept. 30, and major carriers like Untied and American Airlines have already warned that they would have to let many tens of thousands of employees go come October, after the benefits expire.
Though the cuts would be national, the effects would be particularly painful in Orlando, with scores left jobless in an already teetering local economy.
A Moody’s report from August suggested that the airline industry might not fully recover until 2023. so the options of waiting things out legislatively or clapping harder for a vaccine are just not viable.
Time is of the essence.
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This article appears in Sep 2-8, 2020.