Sept. 17—Nearly 10,000 hotel workers, mostly immigrants and people of color in three major travel destinations—Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.—are seeking employer-paid health benefits, fair workloads, improved wages, improved pensions and immigrant rights—and are poised to walk out if negotiations with hotel owners fail to produce a fair contract.
“For the first time, thousands of hotel workers in three cities have stood together and voted with massive participation overwhelmingly to authorize a strike,” UNITE HERE President Bruce Raynor said at a Sept.15 press conference in Washington, D.C.
By huge margins, the members of Local 11 in Los Angeles (83 percent), Local 2 in San Francisco (97 percent) and Local 25 in Washington, D.C. (94 percent) voted Sept. 14–15 to authorize union leaders to call strikes if negotiations break down. The contracts in Los Angeles expired April 15, in San Francisco Sept. 14 and in Washington, D.C., Sept. 15.
Health care is a key issue for Aurolyn Rush, a switchboard operator at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco. “We must ensure that we continue to have good health care benefits,” she says. “I was diagnosed with cancer in 1996, six months after I started my job, and I had a reoccurrence last year. If the hotels’ current proposal had been in effect, I would not have gotten the care I need.”
Workers Say Hotel Management Scare Tactics Won’t Work
The workers are fighting for an equal footing at the bargaining table with such giant global hotel chains as Marriott and Hilton to ensure employers seriously address issues such as health care and working conditions. They are seeking two-year contracts that would expire at about the same time in 2006, the same year many large hotel contracts in key cities are set to expire, including pacts in Boston, Chicago, New York City and Toronto. This will give hotel workers in the three cities equality with the global hotel industry.
“Most of us are people of color and immigrants,” Donald Wilson, a banquet chef at the Westin Century Plaza Hotel & Spa in Los Angeles and a member of Local 11, said at the Sept. 15 press conference. “Maybe we work in the back of the house, but we deserve respect. To get it, we have to be equal with the hotel companies at the bargaining table. Otherwise, they divide us city-by-city. We are like ducks in a pond being picked off one by one.”
The hotel chains have strong bargaining power because a handful of corporations own the majority of the hotel rooms in major cities, the union says. In the 15 top hotel markets, global companies own 75 percent of the rooms. The four largest hotel chains—Marriott, Hilton, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide and Hyatt—account for 22 percent of all sales in the industry.
“Management keeps saying they want to negotiate a fair contract with us, but they’re not acting like it,” says Sandy Beckham, a housekeeper at the Renaissance Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., who attended some of the negotiations. “They had security guards follow me around on the floor while I was trying to get my rooms cleaned after the first week of negotiations. They tried to intimidate me, but I’m not scared. Our managers are afraid of the power we’ll have if we are united with other hotel workers in other cities. We are ready to fight for what we all deserve.”
Building Community Support
Community and civil rights leaders are backing the hotel workers’ struggle for a fair contract. Kweisi Mfume, president of the NAACP, compared the hotel workers’ struggle with the nation’s fight for civil rights.
“The hotel corporations are saying, in effect, that their employees can be separate but equal. Many of us have heard these same words from segregationists. We know from history that separate can never be equal.”
Cecilia Munoz, vice president of the National Council of LaRaza, says the key issue in this struggle is whether workers will be able to bargain equally with the hotel companies.
Meanwhile, another 17,000 hotel and casino workers will decide today whether to strike or continue talks with 11 hotels and casinos in Atlantic City, N.J., one day before the finals of the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. Some 10,000 workers rallied for a fair contract Sept. 16 outside Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, site of the pageant. The major issue between the workers, represented by Local 54, and the casinos is the increasing moves by hotels to hire nonunion subcontractors. The Tropicana Casino and Resort announced plans to subcontract space to nonunion restaurants as part of a $245 million expansion project that opens next month.
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