By Tim Redmond and Matthew Hirsch

The hotel lockout has ended, but union leaders remain angry at a local cooking school, which they say helped the hotels by allowing them to recruit replacement workers through the school's Web site.

Leaders from UNITE HERE Local 2, the hotel and restaurant employees union, say they're going to push to end the tacit agreement that allows students at the California Culinary Academy to train at the big hotels.

CCA officials say they were just doing what they always do – posting available jobs as a service to students. But the long-term impact of the controversy could be detrimental to future trainees from the academy.

Mike DeJulio, a banquet cook at the Argent Hotel and a CCA graduate who is on the Local 2 executive committee, told the Bay Guardian that union members approached CCA director Eeva Deshon in September and asked her to help keep the hotels from using students as replacement workers in the event of a strike or lockout.

That's exactly how San Francisco City College responded: its cooking school refused to let the hotels recruit students or post job notices on campus.

But Deshon told us hotel representatives also approached her before the lockout and asked if they would be able to use the school's job-referral Web site to post notices seeking replacement workers, and she agreed with the hotels: "We don't ask employers why you have a job opening," she told us.

The job postings appeared soon after the lockout began, and before long, students wearing CCA uniforms were crossing the picket lines, finding themselves in the middle of an emotionally charged labor dispute.

Valerie Lapin, a spokesperson for Local 2, said the academy should have done more to help the students understand the situation. "Educating the students should go beyond teaching them how to cook," she told us. "They should provide them with the tools to have a better understanding of the realities of the workplace and the value that labor unions provide, insuring that cooks have a decent standard of living and safe working conditions on the job."

Besides, it was CCA's decision to provide the hotels with access to its students, noted Sue Donahue, who works the sauté station at the San Francisco Hilton.

This might all go down as just a minor footnote to a bitter labor battle, except for the fact that a lot of CCA students (Deshon wouldn't tell us exactly how many) wind up working in training programs at the big hotels under what labor leaders describe as a long-standing if unwritten rule: the union allows students – who aren't union members – to take hotel jobs as part of their required school externships. The unionized staff helps teach the fledgling chefs the ropes and gives them hands-on experience in the kitchens. For students, the hotel training is considered a plum job.

Students we interviewed said they didn't agonize over their role in the lockout. "You have culinary students looking for jobs," Steven Catalano, a student in the CCA Cordon Bleu program, told us. "Of course people are going to cross the picket line."

Fernando Oliveira, an 18-year-old who lives with his parents in San Leandro, said he didn't think much about the politics of the strike at all. "I just thought since people weren't working over there, I figured they'd be hiring," he told us.

Catalano said he passed up a job in the hotels because he didn't know if he could keep it once the lockout was over or whether it would jeopardize his career in the industry. But the union wasn't effective in communicating with students, he said.

On Nov. 17, union activists crashed a CCA luncheon and passed out leaflets criticizing the school's role in the lockout. Catalano said the union should have started much earlier and been more informative.

"If they had more solid evidence of how this hurts the students coming out of CCA, I'm sure a lot more [of them] wouldn't do it," Catalano said.

But now, DeJulio told us, the union cooks are going to push for work rules that would threaten that relationship – and make it harder for future CCA students to get those coveted externships. The final determination will come as part of the ongoing contract negotiations, which will focus first on wages, benefits, and the length of the contract. But the Local 2 members who work in the hotel kitchens say they have unfinished business with CCA and they aren't going to let it drop.

"Even if the union wanted to reestablish this relationship," DeJulio said, "we wouldn't stand for it."

E-mail Tim Redmond and Matthew Hirsch