On Sept. 24, 200 hospitality workers and community supporters in Chicago, along with nearly 100 in San Francisco, were arrested in coordinated acts of civil disobedience in the two cities.
 Hotel workers engage stage a sit-in outside the Hyatt hotel in Chicago. |
The demonstrations, organized by UNITE HERE and attended by 900 in Chicago and 1,700 in San Francisco, were the dramatic culmination of a month of pickets due to stalled contract negotiations with industry giants Starwood, Blackstone Group and Hyatt Hotels. The contracts of about 10,000 hotel, food service and casino workers in Chicago, along with another 9,000 in San Francisco, expired in August.
These militant and well-organized demonstrations have served to elevate the union’s struggle around contract negotiations at a time when the hotel giants are using the economic crisis as a means to strip gains won in the past.
The hotel industry as a whole raked in $200 billion in profits between 2002 and 2008, and many companies even showed generous profits in the first two quarters of 2009. The corporate bosses, however, are looking to squeeze even bigger profits out of those who have been hit the hardest by the economic crisis—the workers.
Workers in UNITE HERE Local 1 in Chicago and Local 2 in San Francisco know this all too well. They are struggling to keep hard-fought industry standards, such as 100 percent employer-paid health premiums, from being rolled back.
Their demonstration Sept. 24, however, took on a qualitatively different character than a protest to just maintain collective bargaining standards in already unionized shops. UNITE HERE members and organizers understand the strength that is realized in building a nationwide struggle against the major conglomerates that dominate the hotel industry. They are therefore using their power to help the struggle of hotel workers in non-union shops as well.
Hotel bosses on the offensive
On Aug. 31, Hyatt Hotels abruptly fired the entire housekeeping staff—now known as the Hyatt 100—at three non-union Boston area locations. Many of the housekeepers worked for Hyatt for more than 20 years.
The company contracted out the work to Hospitality Staffing Solutions, whose employees have taken up double the workload at half the hourly wage of the fired housekeepers. The racism and sexism underlying the super-exploitation by both Hyatt and Hospitality Staffing Solutions is evident: The housekeepers at the three hotels, much like all housekeepers across the nation, are mostly immigrant women.
Hyatt’s alleged financial hardship amid the economic crisis is nothing but an opportunistic lie. According to UNITE HERE, the company saw $1.3 billion in profits between 2004 and 2008, and is sitting on a $1.2 billion mountain of cash and cash equivalents as of August.
UNITE HERE has since launched a national campaign to bring back the Hyatt 100 that has garnered a considerable amount of support. The Boston Taxi Drivers Association sent a letter to the Hyatt stating that they will not service their Boston locations until the workers are reinstated. The Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has initiated a boycott of Hyatt by state workers in an election season move.
A Sept. 23 delegation led by Angela Norena, one of the fired Hyatt workers, and 20 Chicago-area housekeepers confronted Hyatt Hotels Director Penny Pritzker at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers, where she was giving an address. Out of either arrogance or fear—or perhaps a combination of the two—she refused to listen to Norena’s concerns.
Billionare Pritzker, whose family owns 85 percent of Hyatt Hotels, was the national finance chair of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and was thought to be his top choice for commerce secretary.
Unrelenting struggle forces Hyatt to step back
The nearly month-long barrage against the Hyatt reached a fever pitch when UNITE HERE’s civil disobedience actions in Chicago and San Francisco on Sept. 24 raised the cause of the workers in Boston. Both demonstrations took place in front of Hyatt hotels.
The day after the dramatic arrests of the 300 demonstrators, Hyatt was forced to take a significant step when they announced that they would facilitate the re-employment process of the Hyatt 100 through another subcontractor and would continue to pay their full salaries, along with benefits, until 2010.
These are half measures that the union is rightfully refusing to accept. Nonetheless, it is significant that a multi-billion-dollar giant like Hyatt was forced to take them in three non-unionized hotels because of the actions of its unionized employees in cities thousands of miles away.
The workers in Chicago and San Francisco are heroically willing to risk arrest not just to preserve their own contracts, but also to help organize non-union workers. Through unity and solidarity, they are showing the way forward in the struggle against the bosses in this period of economic crisis.
Corporate bosses are seeking to turn the economic crisis into a club with which to beat back the gains won in generations of labor struggles. It is time for working people to rise up in a unified struggle against the capitalist class—nothing but parasitical profiteers—and take control.
