Hotel workers lock arms in civil disobedience outside of Chicago's Park Hyatt hotel.   (Photo courtesy Hotel Workers Rising)

By Michelle Chen

The recession has driven massive layoffs around the country, so when the Hyatt decided to sack 98 housekeepers in a few Boston-area hotels at the end of August, there was little reason to think anyone would notice.

Today, the workers have made headlines nationwide and become a symbol of the hospitality industry's inhospitable attitude toward labor.

As we reported last week, housekeeping workers at the Hyatt Regency Boston, Hyatt Regency Cambridge, and Hyatt Harborside Hotel abruptly learned they were to be terminated and replaced with workers supplied by an outside contractor. (Workers have also charged that, adding insult to injury, the hotel had ordered them to train their replacements.)

Then the housekeepers took to the streets and showed that a little direct action goes a long way. Their protests drew widespread support, culminating in Governor Deval Patrick's call for a state boycott, and helped galvanize a nationwide direct-action campaign.

The action reverberated in Chicago last Thursday; hundreds of hotel workers and supporters descended on the Park Hyatt in a solidarity rally, leading to about 200 arrests:

Some 6,000 unionized hotel employees in the area have been working without a contract since the end of August.

A statement from UNITE HERE, which is leading the nationwide “Hotel Workers Rising” campaign, highlighted frustrated workers at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, which shed nearly 200 staff members between November 2008 and March 2009:

"I have been scheduled to work overtime, while my daughter has spent months on layoff,” says Adela Guzman, a housekeeper at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, whose daughter Daniela Guzman also works in Hyatt housekeeping department. “Housekeeping is such hard work, and I live in pain because I’m doing the job of two people. I’m fighting, because the company is profiting from my family’s misfortune.”

Meanwhile in San Francisco, hundreds of local hospitality workers in the midst of contract talks turned out for a demonstration on Thursday. The civil disobedience resulted in a slew of arrests, capping longstanding labor-management tensions in the sector. The workers fear employers will stave off financial losses by squeezing hard-fought union benefits, reports KTVU:

"They are using the economy as an excuse not to pay people's heath care," said [union president Mike] Casey. "We are talking about men and women making $40,000 a year and requiring us to pay for health care as these guys have made billions of dollars in profits over the last several years."

Hotel workers have sparked similar protest actions in Los Angeles, Anchorage and San Diego.

Back in Boston, the housekeepers' hard luck comes at a strangely opportune moment. They've captured national attention in part because they, like most other American workers, lack the union representation that gives employees collective security. (They were earning around $15 an hour with some benefits, but their would-be replacements would be paid about half as much with no benefits.) The very ordinariness of their plight has made the housekeepers a powerful emblem for labor, and made Hyatt a symbol of corporate cruelty.

As Harvard Business Review's Paul Michelman noted, the housekeeper controversy “went viral. And now Hyatt... has a nice big black eye.”

Hyatt recently pledged to give the housekeepers new jobs, but, not surprisingly, UNITE HERE blasted the move as a “smokescreen designed to trick people into thinking Hyatt is doing the right thing.” The campaign isn't about compensating individual workers or targeting bad managers, but exposing the exploitation throughout the hotel sector.

UNITE HERE's announcement on the Chicago action challenged an industry that in many ways embodies the country's wealth divide:

While companies like Chicago‐based Hyatt have taken home record profits in the last decade, many people who work for them are living in poverty. Now hospitality companies are using the economy as an excuse to further squeeze workers and communities—eliminating jobs, trying to roll back benefits, and getting a smaller pool of workers to risk injury by working harder and faster. Today in Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco—workers are fighting back.

Whether they're cutting staff in Boston or cutting health benefits in a citywide contract, the next time the giant hotels try to shortchange workers and blame it on the economy, unions will be quick to remind them that it's not just a local affair.

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