NEW YORK, Sept 2 (NNN-AGENCIES) — More than 10,000 hotel workers at 24 hotels stretching from Boston to the West Coast to Hawaii went on strike early Sunday morning, disrupting travel during a busy Labor Day weekend.
The hotels are reportedly still open but guests will deal with a skeleton staff unable to provide full services. UNITE HERE, the union representing the striking workers, says they are striking not just for better pay but also better working conditions, including the return of automatic daily room cleaning that many hotels dropped during the pandemic.
“We’re on strike because the hotel industry has gotten off track,” Gwen Mills, International President of UNITE HERE, 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 still haven’t restored standard services that guests deserve. Workers aren’t making enough to support their families. Many can no longer afford to live in the cities that they welcome guests to.”
Mills said that the lack of daily room cleaning not only costs jobs for her union’s members — reducing housekeeping employment by nearly 40% — but it also increases a cleaning staff’s workload, since it requires tending to rooms that haven’t been cleaned for a number of days.
The hotel chains facing striking workers include Hilton, Hyatt and Marriott. The hotels have 23,000 rooms between them in the cities of Boston, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, as well as Honolulu and Kauai in Hawaii, and Greenwich, Connecticut, according to the union.
The union is threatening to possibly expand the strike to as many as 65 hotels in 12 different cities, possibly adding hotels in Baltimore, Oakland, California, as well as Providence, Rhode Island, and New Haven, Connecticut.
Hyatt said in a statement it is disappointed by the union’s decision to strike. “We look forward to continuing to negotiate fair contracts and recognize the contributions of Hyatt employees,” said Michael D’Angelo, head of labor relations at Hyatt.
Last year, the 15,000 members of the same union went on strike during the Fourth of July holiday weekend at 65 hotels in Los Angeles and Orange counties in Southern California. They returned to work a few days later but staged a series of rolling strikes in the months that followed, sometimes tied to major tourist periods, such as the weekend of Taylor Swift concerts in Los Angeles.
These strikes are set to end after three days, as occurred in Los Angeles’ work stoppage. The union has yet to determine whether or not they will return on a rolling basis as they did in Southern California last year, Mills said on Friday ahead of the strike deadline. A return of rolling strikes has not been ruled out.
The union eventually reached deals for all but three of the hotels they had targeted, but those agreements weren’t reached until earlier this year.
This has been a particularly busy Labor Day weekend for travel with AAA expecting a 9% increase in domestic travel compared to last year and the Transportation Security Administration expecting record passenger screenings at US airports. — NNN-AGENCIES
