Thursday, January 26, 2006

Daily News (New York), January 22, 2005, Sunday

Daily News, January 22, 2006, Sunday
Sunday Opinions, Page 37

Who Says Labor’s Dead? A Landmark Campaign By Hotel Workers Could Show That Unions Still Have Muscle
BY KEN MARGOLIES

An extraordinary campaign called Hotel Workers Rising has the potential to be a historic
turning point for the labor movement in America.

At a time when many are writing off labor, citing fractured leadership and plunging
membership levels, a union is launching a powerful nationwide movement to raise
awareness of the cost to society of low-wage jobs and to secure better wages and benefits
for its workers.

UNITE HERE, the union running the campaign, has spent years aligning the expiration
dates of contracts they have with hotels in American and Canadian cities, including
New York; Boston; Chicago; Honolulu; Monterey, Calif.; Sacramento, Calif.; Seattle;
Toronto; Detroit; San Francisco and Los Angeles.
More than 60,000 UNITE HERE members--housekeepers, bell men, phone operators, food servers, mostly minority and immigrant women — are involved.

As a strike threat looms, the union says average hourly wages for nonunion hotel workers are $7 an hour compared with $15 for union workers. In New York, where nearly all hotels are union and the membership has a long tradition of fighting for good contracts, wages for room cleaners are $21 per hour with full medical and pension benefits.

Still, the Hotel Trades Council representing 28,000 workers in six unions that represent
hotel workers in 150 hotels and motels in N.Y. — says that even in New York there are companies that continually violate their contract by disciplining workers unfairly or maintaining unhealthy environments in the “back of the house.” An issue the union is highlighting is workload. As bedding in hotels gets heavier and more extensive
it takes room cleaners more time to finish a room.

In unionized hotels the workers have a way to negotiate fair changes in expectations, but
their nonunion brothers and sisters have to work that much harder or fear dismissal.

The showdown with the giant corporate stakeholders in the hospitality industry such
as Hilton, Sheraton, Marriott and Hyatt, will come during the height of the tourism season this summer, but the campaign to frame the issue for this potential clash is happening now.

For the union, the upcoming negotiations are not just about getting more dollars in members’ paychecks from employers making high profi ts. They are about setting standards for everyone, reducing poverty and saving the middle class.

As the recent transit strike in New York City highlighted, the benefits the middle class once took for granted are under attack. That strike, which successfully resisted cuts in retirement benefits for those not yet hired, generated a slew of articles about pensions in peril. Right on cue, IBM announced a freezing of its pension plan and showed this is not just a “blue collar” union issue, but something even the men and women in the gray flannel suits need to worry about.

Given this backdrop, UNITE HERE will be educating the public on the ripple effect of
higher wages, decent benefits and humane work rules. People will be asked if they are better off when their hardworking neighbors have decent pay or when they have little time and money to spend in their communities.

The pressures of competition between union and nonunion businesses already put
tremendous downward pressure on those unionized “islands” of good paying jobs, like
New York. To turn this around, unions must have strategies to set standards for compensation and working conditions in whole industries so no employer
has an unfair advantage. The upcoming hotel negotiations will be a major unfolding
of such a strategy.

If UNITE HERE’s public education campaign succeeds, this summer’s negotiations will be a referendum on what kind of jobs and economy we want to leave to the next generations. It will be a tremendously important test of organized labor’s ability to become a people’s movement again and not just a vehicle for a shrinking share of
the workforce. And we all have a stake in the outcome.

Margolies is on the extension faculty of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University.