Thousands of US hotel workers strike as contract negotiations stall

New York
CNN
—

More than 10,000 hotel workers at 24 hotels from Boston to the West Coast to Hawaii went on strike early Sunday morning, disrupting traffic during the busy Labor Day weekend.

The hotels are reportedly still open, but guests are being left with a skeleton staff unable to provide full services. UNITE HERE, the union representing the striking workers, says they are not only striking for better pay, but also for better working conditions, including the return of automated daily room cleaning, which many hotels have abandoned during the pandemic.

“We are striking because the hotel industry has gone off track,” UNITE HERE International President Gwen Mills said in a statement Sunday morning. “During Covid, everyone suffered, but now the hotel industry is making record profits while workers and guests are left behind. Too many hotels have still not restored the standard of service that guests deserve. Workers are not earning enough to support their families. Many can no longer afford to live in the cities where they welcome guests.”

Aissata Seck, a waitress who has worked at Boston’s Hilton Park Plaza for 18 years, said her rent has gone up from $1,900 to $2,900 in the past five years. “My salary only covers my rent,” she told CNN. She now works as an Uber driver to make ends meet.

Apple Ratanabunsrithang, a chef at the Hilton Union Square in San Francisco, told CNN’s Gloria Pazmino that she “has to work two jobs to survive in the city,” and while wages are important, so is maintaining health care benefits. “The majority of people who are working and are in the union are long-established — they’ve worked 10, 20, 30 years. So their whole lives they’ve been working in a hotel, which is physical work, so health care is very important,” she said.

Mills told CNN that the lack of daily cleaning is not only costing jobs to her union members (the number of cleaners is down nearly 40 percent), but it is also increasing the workload of cleaning staff, who are having to clean rooms that haven’t been cleaned in days.

The hotel chains facing striking workers include Hilton, Hyatt and Marriott. The hotels have a combined 23,000 rooms in the cities of Boston, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Honolulu and Kauai in Hawaii, and Greenwich, Connecticut, the union said.

The union is threatening to expand the strike to as many as 65 hotels in 12 different cities, potentially including hotels in Baltimore; Oakland, California; and Providence, Rhode Island; and New Haven, Connecticut. Hilton and Hyatt spokespeople told CNN on Friday that they are committed to reaching agreements with the union but will continue to serve customers during any work stoppage.

Hyatt said in a statement that it was disappointed by the union’s decision to strike. “We look forward to continuing to negotiate fair contracts and recognizing the contributions of Hyatt employees,” said Michael D’Angelo, Hyatt’s chief labor relations officer.

Last year, the same union’s 15,000 members went on strike during the July 4 holiday weekend at 65 hotels in Los Angeles and Orange County in Southern California. They returned to work a few days later, but in the months that followed, they staged a series of ongoing strikes, sometimes tied to major tourist periods, such as the weekend of Taylor Swift concerts in Los Angeles.

These strikes are expected to end after three days, as happened during the Los Angeles work stoppage. The union has yet to determine whether they will return to a continuous basis, as happened last year in Southern California, Mills told CNN on Friday ahead of the strike deadline. A return to continuous strikes is not out of the question.

The union eventually reached agreements for all but three hotels it had targeted, but those agreements were not reached until earlier this year.

It was an exceptionally busy Labor Day weekend for travelers. AAA expects a 9% increase in domestic travel compared to last year, and the Transportation Security Administration expects record numbers of passenger screenings at U.S. airports.