Airport Food Workers Say Plan May Cost 325 Jobs Labor: Outgoing vendors have given layoff notices to union employees. The workers say incoming upscale firms have not been hiring them and fear that new positions will have lower wages and benefits.: [Home Edition]

The flip side to the much-acclaimed advent of upscale food boutique vendors to LAX is this: Marlene Mendoza and 324 union workers like her have gotten pink slips from the outgoing vendors.

Mendoza and more than 200 of her co-workers went to City Hall on Wednesday to put a face on their plight-that, come May 20, they will lose their jobs as cooks, food servers, bartenders and utility workers when seven new vendors, including one owned by celebrity-chef Wolfgang Puck and a Rhino Chasers micro-brewery, take over approximately 40% of the food operations at Los Angeles International Airport.

For years, Mendoza and others have worked for Host Marriott and two smaller vendors who have dominated the food and beverage concessions at the airport.

The workers say that in an apparent effort to break their union, the new vendors seem disinclined to hire them.

"We have 325 people here who are paying the price of the boutique-ing of LAX," Jim Wood, head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, told City Council members. As he spoke, the affected workers, most of them Latinos wearing "Our Jobs, Our Lives" signs on their shirts and blouses, stood solemnly behind him.

Later on the steps of City Hall, the workers cheered loudly when...