Ahead of the busy holiday travel season, airport ground crew workers at LaGuardia Airport and JFK Airport say their employer, Alliance Ground International (AGI), is continuing to violate federal worker safety laws.
In August, workers organizing with the union 32BJ SEIU, which is attempting to improve their labor standards, submitted a formal request to AGI to release a log of worker-related injuries, a record that is required by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Specifically, federal regulations require that employers of establishments with at least 20 workers submit the safety log — called the OSHA 300 form — to OSHA annually, which includes detailed data regarding workplace injuries.
According to OSHA’s regulations, an employer must provide workers with the data within one business day of a request. However, AGI has still not released the data to the workers, according to New York airport grounds crew workers and the union.
“Three months ago, I requested the OSHA 300 safety logs from my employer AGI,” said Josh Edwin, a baggage room worker with AGI, in a statement shared with Documented. “I still haven’t heard back. Now, it’s the busiest time of the year, and I am even more concerned about the health and safety of myself and my co-workers.”
AGI is a Miami-based airport ground-handling company that employs over 12,000 workers across 62 airports in the United States and Canada. It’s also among the fastest-growing ground-handling companies in North America. The company is contracted by Spirit Airlines among others to load and unload planes as well as clean the inside of the planes between flights.
A previous investigation by Documented in August, reviewing publicly available data from OSHA, showed that AGI failed to submit OSHA 300 logs for dozens of its worksites across the country, including LaGuardia Airport, over the past three years. Employers who fail to file their injury report to OSHA can face a penalty of $16,550 per violation.
When asked why they failed to submit data to OSHA, AGI did not respond to Documented.
It’s not the first time that AGI has been accused of violating workers’ safety laws. In July, the company was also accused of violating federal labor law for failing to pay over 100 workers at Newark Airport $2 million in benefits supplements. The company has also been cited by OSHA in numerous incidents of unsafe work sites. From 2016 to 2024, OSHA cited AGI with 18 workplace safety citations across multiple states, totaling $338,881 in penalties, which were later reduced to $169,440.
Although federal law requires that employers submit the OSHA 300 form, it’s not uncommon for employers to violate the law. A 2021 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that more than 50% of eligible employers failed to report OSHA 300 data for the years 2016 to 2018.
As Documented previously reported, the GAO study found that OSHA had a limited ability to encourage employer compliance with the law. Of the 220,000 employers OSHA found to have failed to report in 2019, the agency only cited 255 employers for failure to report their data from mid-December 2017 through September 2019.
As holiday travel kicks into high gear, an estimated 17.3 million passengers are expected to travel by plane during the week of Thanksgiving — requiring a herculean grounds-crew effort. In turn, Rob Hill, 32BJ SEIU Executive Vice President and head of the Airports Division, says that AGI needs to release any documentation of injuries so that the union can better advocate for improved safety measures for airport workers.
“Now, during the busiest travel time, the health and safety of our essential airport workers is more important than ever,” he said in a statement to Documented. “We will continue to stand with AGI’s essential airport workers in demanding rightful access to the workplace health and safety logs and in fighting for safe and fair working conditions.”
