Two women strikers from Ladies Tailors union on picket line during the "Uprising of the 20,000," garment workers strike, New York City. (Source: Bain News Service, February 5, 1910
On this Labor Day weekend, about ten thousand hotel workers around the United States went on strike for higher pay, and an end to pandemic-era service and staffing cuts. The hotel workers are represented by their union, UNITE HERE. The union has more than 250,000 members in the United States and Canada, and is the main union representing hospitality workers in many large American cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Baltimore, Honolulu, Greenwich, New Haven, Providence, San Jose, and Seattle. The majority of the union members are women, people of color, and immigrants. The majority of the represented hotel workers voted to strike because, while the hospitality industry is booming post-Covid, the workers say their wages aren’t enough to cover the cost of living, and many have to work two jobs to make ends meet. The union says that many hotels took advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to cut staffing and guest services that were never restored, causing workers to lose jobs and income, and creating harsh working conditions for those who carry the increased workload.
Room rates are at record highs, and the U.S. hotel industry has made over $100 billion in gross operating profit since 2022. But hotel staffing per occupied room was down 13% from 2019 to 2022.
On the other side of the table, per the New York Times, “Michael D’Angelo, Hyatt’s head of labor relations for the Americas, said in a statement on Sunday that the company was “disappointed that UNITE HERE has chosen to strike while Hyatt remains willing to negotiate.” He said the company had contingency plans in place to mitigate the impact of the strike.
“A Hilton spokesperson said that Hilton was “committed to negotiating in good faith to reach fair and reasonable agreements” and that its “hotels have contingency plans in place to ensure operations continue to run as smoothly as possible” for customers.”
UNITE HERE notes that negotiations between the hotels and the union have been ongoing since May for new four-year contracts.
Labor and employers in this hemisphere have been at odds since the early 1600’s, and the happy news about the hotel workers’ strike is that to date, nobody on the workers’ or on the owners’ side has experienced arson, midnight raids on families, destruction of property, armed strikebreakers, mob violence, breaking and entering, unlawful arrest and conviction for conspiracy, murder, or the rest of the brutal violence that has characterized American labor history. (For those who are eager to learn a bit about labor history, this Wikipedia article is a good start.)
Let’s look at the 2004 hotel workers’ strike in San Francisco.
Photo uncredited, In These Times, https://inthesetimes.com/article/lockout-kod.
The five-week San Francisco hotel lockout was fought by workers who wanted to “level the playing field,” in the words of Elena Duran, a room cleaner at the city’s Hilton. The key issue was Local 2’s proposal that a new agreement expire in 2006, part of an effort to form a common front of workers in major urban hotel markets.
The idea was “a non-starter,” says Barbara French, speaking for the Multi-Employer Group (MEG), which bargains for 14 of the city’s largest establishments, including Hilton, Intercontinental, Starwood and Hyatt that manage hotel properties around the country and the world.
When workers wouldn’t take the demand off the table, MEG said they couldn’t come back to work until they did.
From In These Times:
In September the union launched a limited two-week strike against four MEG member hotels. The hotel operators then locked the workers out of their other 10 hotels and announced they’d extend the lockout beyond the strike’s end, so long as the expiration date was on the table.
The 4,300 locked-out laborers mounted large, boisterous picket lines. Bullhorns blasted picketers’ chants into the streets, and up into the hotel rooms, from early morning until after midnight. Union members ate on the lines, often bringing their children with them. Some conventions pulled out of picketed hotels, while guests at others complained about disruption inside, or just refused to cross the lines.
When operators brought in strikebreakers from hotels in other cities, the union extended its picket lines to Chicago, Honolulu and Monterey, California, provoking one-day shutdowns that foreshadowed what a multi-city campaign in 2006 might mean.
Finally, the union turned to the city itself. The Board of Supervisors held a hearing in which hundreds of workers overflowed City Hall. Despite the fact the Local 2 had endorsed his opponent in last year’s election, Mayor Gavin Newsom decided to try to settle the dispute. But when he asked the hotels to end the lockout, they turned him down flat, and then criticized him publicly. Matt Adams, head of MEG, wondered aloud to the San Francisco Chronicle why the candidate, whose campaign they’d financed, was not taking their side without question.
Newsom pulled city business from the hotels. As complaints mounted from businesses surrounding the noisy picket lines, he also pulled the police away, pointing out that the operators could end the ruckus any time they liked. As the workers’ health insurance was set to expire, the city hospital union, SEIU Local 250, convinced the workers’ HMO to extend it. The state announced that since Local 2 members were locked out, they’d receive unemployment benefits.
After five weeks, the operators finally let the workers return to their jobs, with no agreement on their demand that they give up the 2006 contract expiration date. When workers learned about the decision, many were even reluctant to take the lines down, since they’d proven so effective.
Finally, the union took another strike vote on August 24, 2006. A week later, at the end of a noisy march through the tourist district, over sixty members and supporters were arrested for blocking the entrance to the Palace Hotel on Market Street. Managers could envision the possible return of the labor war of two years before. In the shifting alliances inside the Multi-Employer Group, Hilton and its allies succeeded in convincing a majority of the other operators that they could live with card check in San Francisco.
Note to hotel operators: probably that 2004 playbook doesn’t work today. Also: probably best not to bite on bait. Your “contingency plans in place to mitigate the impact of the strike” seems to convey “we have strikebreakers.” Those who do not learn from history. . .
Solidarity! Forever!