To the Editor,

The situation at the Rhode Island Airport Corporation has turned from bad to worse.

Now, T. F. Green service union people are muzzled from speaking at RIAC board meetings. These are the “little people,” the service workers at Rhode Island T. F. Green International Airport. 

Airport service workers, union people, would show up at RIAC board meetings to ask for raises, having struggled for years through the wee hours to get from their Cranston and Providence homes to the airport.  Here they'd set up the coffee machines for us crack-of-dawn travelers. Cars were and continue to be expensive for them.

After more than 250 open monthly RIAC board meetings spanning a period of more than 25 years in which T. F. Green workers and the public came in to board meetings with their problems and suggestions, the system has spoken and the curtain has fallen. 

Interested parties have been silenced and relegated to the back of the board room, diagonally across from the board members. We can’t even see their name tags. There's no way of knowing when or why some quit.  We sit behind seats marked with “reserved” tags, seats which remain empty because invited guests never seem to show up.

What we do see are service people, vendors with over 25 years' history of RIAC service, and concerned citizens now being tossed aside in strange procurement moves; public officials who show up to speak may also be muzzled. Could these repressive moves, just a few days after the election of a new president – one who promises massive changes to the way public programs are financed – be coincidental?  

Grievance? Yes, you bet. Union grievances. At least four of them. RIAC management has chosen to investigate the RIAC union and fire its president, the RIAC fire chief.

In the old days, the General Assembly set up boards with union representation. The RIAC board has one, a former coach and mayor with over 50 years of union activity. He has just been elected to the Cranston City Council.  But will he speak up now for the people before the RIAC board? As a union official, will he attempt to straighten out the mess at T.F. Green?

Yes, I too am being muzzled, along with the mayor and Rep. Joseph M. McNamara, who worked with the governor to get a City of Warwick agreed-to member on the board. House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi worked to that end as well, along with Senators Mark P. McKenney and Matthew L. LaMountain.

But the governor refused to work with the Warwick delegation. Instead, in what our mayor describes as an eleventh-hour deal with no one informing him of the hearing on the matter, the governor presented Deb Thomas, a recently retired Fortune 500 executive who made $7.8 million in compensation in 2023.

Ms. Thomas is clearly qualified to serve on the RIAC board. She had done so for many years before leaving the board in 2023. But things are different now. RIAC management is going through a crisis of its own making – the firing of its union president. Some say that this crazy move is an effort to privatize fire and security services at T.F. Green.

Ms. Thomas knows that 21% of T.F. Green’s operating expenses go to security, police and fire services. Last year, it was $7.3 million. And she knows that RIAC is refusing to fix and replace broken union tools, leaving the workers with nothing to do while RIAC management brings in private contractors in a deal that flouts Rhode Island laws protecting state employees. How soon will the RIAC board try to privatize fire services at T.F. Green?

Cranston has its member on the RIAC board – the former mayor and newly elected City Council member.

But where is the Warwick rep? We actually have one. He is John Giusto, who served on the RIAC board from 2013 to 2015 and was put back on the board last year to replace Ms. Thomas. Then she came back when another Fortune 500 executive with connections to corporate hangars at T.F. Green slowly faded away. He was a pilot flying out of Quonset. He is well respected among the flying community.

Ironically, Mr. Giusto made his fortune as chairman of National DCP, a $2-billion supply-chain management company serving the franchisees of Dunkin' Donuts.

Dunkin' Donuts booths are where some of the union people who used to speak to the RIAC board work.

This rousing saga reminds me of the song “Get Together": Come on, people, now – smile on your brother / Everybody get together / Try to love one another right now!"   

Super-wealthy RIAC board members would do well to look back at the teachings of Theodore Francis Green and his principled family, who brought Rhode Island out of the dismal swamps of British rule.  Let's stand with the common man who looks over our state and airport.

Richard Langseth
Warwick