Last week’s one day walkout by workers who clean airplanes for Delta Air Lines at LaGuardia got significant media attention although the motive for the bold job action was misrepresented.

News outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg News and the New York Daily News reported that employees of Air Serv went on “strike” to protest insufficient protection from infectious diseases, explicitly invoking Ebola. Since any news connected with the Ebola scare is automatic buzz at the moment, both the media and the labor union backing the workers recklessly allowed the tenuous connection between Ebola and domestic air travel to become the lead paragraph and headline of the coverage.

But that’s not the real story here.

Air Serv is a third-party vendor corporation that offers manpower to perform airline work at costs significantly cheaper than that of an air carrier’s rank-and-file workforce. Most airlines now use outfits like Air Serv to perform cleaning functions including lavatory tank dumps and trash removal and spruce-ups in both the airplanes and gate areas.

What happened outside of Delta’s Terminal D at LaGuardia last Thursday wasn’t motivated by rational fear of contracting Ebola. It was about a group of workers tired of being paid shit to do an unpleasant, difficult work task with no real hope of seeing anything resembling a fair wage going forward.

The Service Employees International Union (local 32BJ) is the organized force behind the hundred or so Air Serv employees who displayed serious courage to man a picket line last week. The union is seeking to represent and collect dues from those workers and helped spin the Ebola angle. Really though, the oppressive plight of those workers is enough on its own to merit outrage without dragging Ebola into it.

Up until the late 90’s, my employer used in-house workers wearing the company uniform to clean airplanes and perform most of the functions associated with preparing a flight for departure. Piece by piece, much of that work has been farmed out. Outside vendors bid for that work and pay their employees less than half the going rate for mainline airline workers. The airline and vendor pocket the difference while job-starved members of the lower rungs of the labor pool get shitty pay for doing work that is not pleasant.

It’s warped tradition that these workers are pretty much voiceless which leads to the types of complaints we saw from the strikers last week: They lack basic protection from the waste they’re constantly working around. Since greed is the foundation of their arrangement to begin with, it’s only consistent that these vendors (with blind eye indifference from the airlines) often lack the proper tools to do their job effectively and safely. The SEIU deserves credit for shining light on this arrangement and enlisting help from OSHA and the airport operator. But stirring up the Ebola frenzy does a disservice to their push. Their fight is should be about a fair, living wage with safe working conditions which can be aided by effective and honest union representation.