Features » April 19, 2006
Hotel Workers Rising Tide (cont’d)
Actor Danny Glover speaks at a UNTE HERE rally on February 16, in Los Angeles.
Unions can still shift the distribution of power and wealth. A housekeeper in San Francisco, where about 90 percent of hotel workers are unionized, makes $15 an hour, compared with Boston and Chicago, where 50 to 60 percent are in unions and the average wage is $12 to $13 an hour, or Atlanta or Phoenix, where very few are unionized and wages are $8 to $9 an hour. The room rates are similar at every Hilton or Sheraton. The difference lies in the degree of unionization.
“The greatest anti-poverty program in American history is the organized labor movement,” Edwards told the cheering hotel workers in Chicago, significantly revising the venerable Democratic applause line that the best anti-poverty program is a job. An unofficial presidential aspirant, Edwards called for “real labor law reform,” swift and severe punishment of labor law violators and neutrality on the part of employers so workers can “decide without interference” on whether to join a union.
That’s where the second part of Hotel Workers Rising enters. In the past five years, UNITE HERE has organized more than 12,000 new workers, mostly in full-service, big city hotels, where the union is strongest. But even once a majority of workers had signed membership cards, it still took hard fights to pressure hotel managers to recognize the union. Yet in an industry with 1.4 million workers, where less than 10 percent of all hotel and motel workers are unionized, UNITE HERE wants to organize faster and on a much greater scale.
Union strategists have long indicated that this year they would like to win national agreements from hotel chains to remain neutral and simply check union cards for recognition. The hotel industry has geared up to fight for elections as more democratic than card check.
UNITE HERE has persuaded hotel operators to be neutral in a variety of ways. In both San Francisco and Boston, for example, hotels have agreed to neutrality in certain new developments or after acquisition of properties, and in many cities, UNITE HERE has managed to make neutrality a condition for operators of hotels built as part of publicly subsidized projects.
Wilhelm now says, “We’re not especially concerned about the details of the process, but we do strongly believe that workers should not be subjected to harassment and intimidation if they want to join a union.”
In a presentation to a group of Wall Street analysts, Wilhelm emphasized that the union wanted above all to establish a cooperative relationship with the Hiltons and Starwoods of the industry, but their top executives wouldn’t even meet with him. “There is more money to be saved on cooperative undertakings in health care, worker compensation and training than to be won by either side in adversarial collective bargaining,” he argued.
He also told analysts that a cooperative relationship was necessary to deliver the customer service that the luxury hotels see as essential for winning upscale business and leisure customers. “The hotel industry, led by Starwood, has changed from an industry selling beds and meals to one selling an emotional experience,” Wilhelm said. “It can’t deliver or extract the charges it wants without involving workers. A luxury lifestyle can’t be delivered by people in poverty.”
But many of the hotel giants show little interest in cooperation, especially Hilton. “We have to be particularly persuasive or find other ways to make them recognize it’s the smart thing to do,” says Chicago local union president Henry Tamarin. “We say we want to be partners, but that doesn’t mean they’ll leap into our arms. Negotiations are not won by rationality of arguments. This has to do with the balance of power.”
This year, the union’s efforts to link union and non-union workers could help tip the balance in its favor. In Los Angeles, organizing campaigns at five major hotels, including two Hiltons, have gone public. Seventy to 90 percent of workers in these hotels have signed petitions calling for a new strategy for the industry, including a fair process for union recognition. The union has mobilized community and political supporters, who see better pay for hotel workers as crucial for both economic development and social justice. And it has enlisted union workers fighting for a new contract in the work of organizing new workers. The drive is drawing high-profile supporters; at the February launch of the Hotel Workers Rising campaign in Los Angeles, Wihelm, actor Danny Glover and Los Angeles city attorney Rocky Delgadillo walked through the LAX Hilton, talking with employees and then rallying in the cafeteria.
But, fundamentally, “the link is between workers,” says Los Angeles organizing director Kurt Petersen. “Housekeepers in one Hilton property clean three more rooms than another; one has health insurance, and the other doesn’t. The link becomes clearer when they talk one-on-one. There’s this consciousness that as one Hilton worker does better, we all do better.”
As the contract fight progresses, other organizing drives will go public, boosting both the contract fights and organizing drives. “This strengthens our union’s commitment to turn this into a movement,” says San Francisco union president Mike Casey. “Unless the industry understands … we’re becoming a movement of hotel workers across North America, we’re not going to be able to deliver improvements for our members and workers outside the union.”
Although key items like wages, benefits and work rules will be negotiated locally, the union hopes to engage top corporate executives in discussions about crucial policies. For example, Wilhelm wants hotels not to dismiss immigrant workers while the workers are trying to resolve immigration issues. At the same time, UNITE HERE is backing the Kennedy-McCain immigration reform bill that is also supported by the hotel industry. But UNITE HERE also wants the hotel industry to commit to hiring more African-American workers, so they can take advantage of worker gains in the industry. Other national topics could include union rights beyond employer neutrality in organizing, such as the right to honor picket lines or to play a role in selecting uniform and laundry companies (which could help UNITE HERE in its drive to organize industrial laundries, especially the giant Cintas).
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Ultimately the union’s campaign will only reach full potential if it becomes a broader movement that challenges the growing inequality in American society. Such a movement must give force to the widely shared sense that everyone who works is entitled to a life that reflects the wealth of this country—a comfortable home, universal health care, high quality public education from child care through college, secure retirement and, most important, a “living wage.” Although the union campaign’s top priority is uniting all hotel workers, Casey argues, it “should extend well beyond our sector of the economy.”
Hotel Workers Rising feeds into local movements for a living wage and state campaigns for a higher minimum wage, including initiatives in at least six states this election year. With the support from the mayors of San Francisco and Los Angeles and presidential hopeful Edwards, UNITE HERE hopes to push economic inequality more toward the center stage of American politics, making economics a moral issue, not just a technical matter to be sorted out by the marketplace.
The hotel worker campaign faces some formidable obstacles. Take wages: Unions were able to raise manufacturing wages—until they were undercut by globalization—partly because manufacturers could invest in new technology to boost productivity. But in the services sector, there are fewer opportunities for increasing productivity. As a result, service unions will need to rely less on contracts with employers to create the middle class American dream for their workers and more on the creation of universal social programs, like national health insurance and strengthened public pensions. And those new programs will have to be financed with taxes that explicitly redistribute more equitably the growth of the American economy without regard to a specific job or employer. But for this to succeed in the era of globalization, all of organized labor will have to head in that direction.
Emmanuel Asare, a 39-year old immigrant from Ghana who works two full-time hotel jobs to support his family, understands the concept of broader solidarity very well. “It’s very important for me to organize more hotel workers so we can come together as a big union, a united union, so we can stand up,” says Asare, a Chicago union member. “Without that, the companies don’t offer anything.”
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Appeared in the April 2006 Issue
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