A strike has been authorized by San Francisco hotel workers. More than 9000 hotel workers are represented by UNITE-Here local 2. Ninety-two point three percent of those workers voted in favor of strike authorization at 31 upscale hotels. According to the union the hotels are seeking to increase workloads by cutting shifts and combining jobs.

The hotels have also sought to shift more of the health care burden onto employees. Some of the hotel chains involved in the contract negotiations include Hyatt, Hilton, and Fairmont corporations. The next meeting scheduled between the union and the hotels is on set for November 4. The previous contract expired in August of this year. Workers previously struck hotels in San Francisco five years ago. At the time the workers were also hit with a 53-day lockout by the hotels.

via San Francisco Hotel Workers Vote to Strike | Workers Independent News.

There’s enough online about the way Hyatt’s and Hilton’s treat their workers that I don’t have to say any more. Well, okay I’ll just mention for example a Columbia-Sussex run Hilton. I just wonder if it’s just hotels in general that act this way?

From the Chicago Tribune dated September 25th, 2009

I first noticed a similar photo to this one on the AFL-CIO blog. Two hundred protesters were arrested in front of a Park Hyatt in Chicago. To me it is just a really powerful photo. Here you have all these people willing to fight, some interlocking their arms and on top of that they’re wearing shirts that read “I am not afraid.”

The fight against hotel corporations continue.

When the San Francisco hotel industry hits economic hard times, it means that management doesn’t make quite as much profit as the $200 billion they made over the past decade. But at the same time, they expect the workers who clean the bathrooms and make the beds to make “sacrifices” in their wages, pensions and health care benefits — which they could lose forever. “If I don’t have low-cost, high quality health care through my employer,” asked one worker, “who is going to pay for it? Will you?” Over 1,700 members of UNITE HERE Local 2 and community allies rallied in Union Square yesterday, as the union is locked in negotiations with some of the City’s largest hotel operators – including the Sterwood Corporation, Hyatt and the Blackstone Group. After a boisterous rally, the crowd marched to the Grand Hyatt and Westin St. Francis Hotels – where ninety-two were arrested for a nonviolent sit-in demanding a fair contract.

Whether its Columbia-Sussex, Hyatt, Sterwood Corporation or now the Blackstone Group, to me, they are all the same. The private equity firms like Blackstone Group appear to be the new villains on the scene however. Another incident involving private equity is the Stella D’oro workers fighting Brynwood Partners. No one appears to want to regulate these private equity firms either. I wonder if the NY AG Andrew Cuomo has ever thought of looking into the likes of Blackstone?

Disney of all corporations should be leading the charge in the current debate for reforming the nation’s dysfunctional healthcare system. Instead they’re asking their employees to foot the bill for healthcare insurance premiums. Why aren’t they organizing and going to town hall meetings to wage war with the likes of Cigna, Humana, GHI,  Aetna, UnitedHealthcare, Blue Cross and Blue Sheild and &c.?

The clash pits image-conscious Walt Disney Co. against Unite Here Local 11, an aggressive union known for its street-theater militancy. On Thursday, union supporters dressed as Snow White, Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters staged a mass “sick-in” while Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger was scheduled to speak inside the convention center.

Local 11 says the company, which took in $4.4 billion in net income last year, has betrayed Walt Disney’s family-friendly ethos by asking 2,100 employees of three hotels to pay a share of their premiums if they seek company healthcare.

I happened to see this on the PR Newswire and thought that even the smaller labor struggles need highlighting and as much attention as can be given to them.

Airport concessions workers and supporters, including New York City Councilwoman-Elect Julissa Ferraras, gathered at LaGuardia International Airport this afternoon to protest airport concessions company OTG’s failure to comply with a recent Port Authority policy for its operations in the new JetBlue terminal (Terminal 5) at John F.Kennedy International Airport.

Approximately 75 protesters, many members of airport concessions labor union UNITE HERE, chanted and leafleted passengers with a message to the public that OTG should obtain a labor peace agreement as the policy requires, and that OTG’s failure to do so has gone on too long.

So what is stopping OTG from getting this peace agreement? On their website they highlight all these awards they’ve received but fail to realize its the people they employ that have helped them to get these awards. It is not management alone that achieved their accolades.

UNITE HERE represents 2,000 airport concessions workers in the Port Authority airports, and first reached out to OTG about a labor peace agreement in May 2008. OTG’s operations in Terminal 5 opened in October, and the company has failed to obtain a labor peace agreement to date. Its first counterproposal was not made until March 2009, and failed to include most of the provisions contained in all other concessionaires’ labor peace agreements.

Bennie Farrar, a concessions worker at Newark airport, said, "Companies like OTG should not win any new business until they prove they can do the right thing."

If OTG continues noncompliance with this policy and fails to obtain a labor peace agreement, its JFK Terminal 5 airport operations are at risk of ongoing and escalating actions.

OTG is the only national concessionaire that has not yet complied with this Port Authority policy.

So what is the hold up all about OTG?

Economy Complicates Labor Dispute – NYTimes.com

The company, Propper International of St. Charles, Mo., has been making military uniforms for more than 25 years. It employs about 3,000 people at eight factories in Puerto Rico, and Tom Kellim, Propper’s chief executive, said in an interview that its pay and benefits were “equal to or better than the competition.”

So here we have a corporation knowingly and willingly breaking the law of Puerto Rico. Why are’nt the executives and board of directors being fined?

But others — like Gladys López and Albert Torres here in Adjuntas — accuse the company of using an oversupply of labor to sidestep a Puerto Rican law (known as Law 180) that grants full-time employees 12 paid sick days and 15 days of vacation per year. Ten years after the law passed, workers say, Propper still does not pay for sick days and allows only about a week of paid vacation.

Unite Here! Local 7 has been boycotting this Sheraton for a year now. Also, 2.2 million has been taken out of this hotel by customers.

This Sheraton is owned by a company called Columbia-Sussex, who bought it two years ago the same time their contract expired, and has refused to negotiate a new contract with the union. They have cut benefits, raised the cost of the workers’ health insurance to four times what it was before, and recently fired outspoken union supporters, who are now fighting to get their jobs back Bill Yung, the CEO, publicly declared that he would never negotiate with a union, but went back on his word this summer when he settled with UNITE HERE in Philadelphia. He’s facing boycotts and other labor disputes in Northern Virginia, Anchorage, and many other cities where workers are standing up for their rights. As the picketers declared on the 18th, they are determined to last out this struggle “one day longer” than their bosses. According to housekeeper Darlene Harrison, “We’re gonna pull through this and we’re gonna win!”

I’ve written about Columbia-Sussex before. They have issues dealing with the local at the Hilton in Crystal City (Arlington, VA) as well. They refuse to cooperate with the workers there. They are just plain hostile to the idea of workers organizing.

This is absolutely amazing.

A strong show of defiance, perhaps, but not nearly as impressive as the resolve exhibited daily by former Congress housekeepers Mercedes Ayvar, Imelda Martinez, Ofelia Rubio, Celia Salgado and Maria Sandoval. Each morning at 6 a.m., the five friends arrive at the picket line outside the Congress and march until 7:30 a.m., when they leave for their new jobs at the downtown Sheraton. From 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., the women clean 16 rooms each, then return to the Congress to picket from 5 p.m. to 8:40 p.m., before catching one of the final buses leaving downtown.

“There’s been a lot of walking,” a smiling Ayvar said at the rally. “I haven’t sat down in five years.”

The twinkle in her eye suggested she wasn’t planning to do so anytime soon.

If ever you’re in Chicago stay away from the Congress Hotel. It’s amazing that even after these workers went out on strike–after all these years–they never went back. Instead they chose to keep the strike alive at the Congress Hotel.

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