By Matthew Hirsch

Mayor Gavin Newsom's walk on the picket line Oct. 26 caught much of this city off guard, not least of all the locked-out hotel workers at the Westin St. Francis.

It came as a shock to hotel operators, who expected Newsom to stay neutral in the dispute, and set the union, UNITE HERE Local 2, abuzz with excitement. Yet there's nothing all that unusual about a Democratic politician showing solidarity with the workers' struggle. John Edwards visited the line before Newsom. So did Cruz Bustamante and several members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

But Newsom's appearance at the iconic Union Square hotel was anything but your typical picket line photo-op. It surpassed even the drama of a politically moderate, business-backed mayor telling his core constituents it's wrong to deny workers their livelihood.

By standing with Local 2 and calling a boycott against the hotels that locked out 4,300 workers Oct. 13, Newsom drew attention to the galling imbalance of power between workers and their bosses in this, one of the strongest labor towns in the country. He gave meaning to a message labor leader Josie Mooney delivered in a recent appeal to the Board of Supervisors: "Solidarity is not enough."

Given his speech that Tuesday – both his words and his resolute tone – Newsom seemed to realize that acting as a neutral mediator wasn't going to end the standoff and that playing the disinterested referee was inadvertently playing right into the hotel operators' game plan.

The owners want to break the workers' resolve with an extended lockout, while Newsom wanted a cooling-off period that would get people back to work during the holidays, a request the union quickly agreed to but the owners refused. So Newsom threw down.

"I'm not taking on the hotel industry. Fourteen hotels have taken on San Francisco," Newsom told the reporters who asked him about taking sides. "The hotels decided they wanted me standing here today. They chose."

"Solidarity is not enough" has become a recurring theme in the labor movement, which has struggled to match the power of global corporations that no longer wish to play by the rules. It was evident at the onset of the new economy in the early '90s, and it remained just as much a problem last year during the southern California supermarket strike.

In each of these cases, federal labor laws that were set up in 1935 to protect a worker's right to organize and bargain collectively proved horribly ineffective. And the National Labor Relations Board, which decides if a company or union has broken these laws during a strike or lockout, can take years to resolve a single complaint.

This works to the strong advantage of the corporation, which can afford to wait out a decision from the labor board as the union runs out of support funds. Veteran Chicago Tribune journalist Steve Franklin watched this happen three times as he covered three strikes in the mid-'90s. He described the inability of the NLRB to resolve disputes this way: "Unions and companies might as well stand in the middle of a field for several years and then pelt each other with flowers."

So Local 2 has adjusted. As union president Mike Casey told the Bay Guardian, "We have a comprehensive strategy, and that means a corporate campaign, an ongoing customer contact strategy, street action, and a legal strategy. And all those things together combine to get these 'corporados' to make a smart business decision."

Newsom also framed the issue in business terms: "These business owners are making a bad business decision that is hurting the city." So he decided to use the city's own bargaining clout to hurt business at the renegade hotels until they're ready to end the lockout.

In the past week Local 2 has aggressively moved forward on its first three strategies with immediate success. Morale at the picket lines remains high (in part because of Newsom), while the union said it's managed to get several large conferences and conventions – including Charles Schwab, Solar Power 2004, and the San Francisco Trial Lawyers Association – to honor the picket line, thereby costing the hotels a huge chunk of expected revenues. The workers got a boost Oct. 28 when the state awarded them unemployment benefits, and the next day the union set up picket lines at Starwood hotels in Waikiki, which were sending replacement workers to the Westin and the Palace Hotel.

Not surprisingly, the one place there's been very little progress is at the labor board, which is controlled by Bush administration appointees, although Peter Saltzman, the lawyer representing Local 2, said that's not for lack of a case. The union has filed four NLRB charges against the hotel operators to date, including one that alleges the lockout illegally discriminates against union members, a violation that could force the hotels to pay back wages if it's proved to have merit.

"In order to make a lockout lawful an employer has to make very clear to its employees that it is to pursue legitimate bargaining objectives. Here, that's not what they've done," Saltzman told us. Attorneys for the hotel operators didn't return calls seeking comment.

Newsom has taken heat for his stand, in the mainstream dailies that played up business community criticisms and particularly from the once-supportive Hotel Council, which wrote a letter asking, "Who's mayor are you, Mayor Newsom?"

But Newsom had already answered that question on the picket line: "I'm showing my solidarity with the workers of Local 2. I'm showing my solidarity with the people of San Francisco." And 48 hours later, when the owners finally made a better health plan offer to the unions, there was the first sign that Newsom's solidarity and his threat to the hotels' bottom line might have evened the playing field just a bit.

Steven T. Jones contributed to this report.

E-mail Matthew Hirsch at matthew@sfbg.com.