SF hotel workers rally against corporate cutbacksBy Cecile Lepage and Megan Rawlins
“What do we want? Contract!
When do we want it? Now!”
It was to the beat of this straightforward chant that close to 1,700 hotel workers marched through downtown San Francisco on Friday, Aug. 14, the day their union contract officially expired. “Today, I’m here to fight for a fair new contract, said Elita Judge, a 10-year housekeeper at the Hotel Vitale. “We want to maintain the high quality health care that we’re enjoying right now.”
Friday’s parade was organized to send a message to the hotel management companies: Unite Here Local 2 union members – who make up 90 percent of the industry employees – are determined to uphold their living standards as negotiations for a new contract are launched.
The cheerful multicultural crowd of room cleaners, cooks, and bussers “paid a visit” to their employers by walking in front of the upscale Union Square hotels-the Four Seasons, the Parc 55, the Hilton, and the Sir Francis Drake – where they work. They ended up sitting on the stairs that lead to the Grand Hyatt, as if posing for a family portrait picture.
During this round of negotiations, which will bring together the managers of 62 hotels in the city and the 123 individuals from the Local 2 bargaining team, health care coverage is going to be a central issue.
“The employers are using a lot of euphemisms like “cost containment” and “cost control,” said Mike Casey, president of Local 2. “The bottom line is that they’re looking for fewer people to do more work, and for our members to pick up the burden of health care which would ultimately result in either lower quality of care or fewer people with coverage, and neither one of those are acceptable options to us.”
Currently, Local 2’s 9,000 members, their families and retirees, have access to fully paid coverage that is free for singles and $10 a month for families. “We pay very little, thank goodness,” said Linda Khighten, a cook at the Omni Hotel. “Most of us make between $30,000 to 40,000 a year, and we live in the Bay Area. We are struggling. My son’s tuition just went up 25 percent. I couldn’t afford to pay $200 a month for health care. I just couldn’t afford it.”
Addressing the crowd, the raspy voiced Casey pointed out that there was no way they should let corporations that still make hundreds of millions in profit use the excuse of the economy against them. “Just in the last six months, the Marriott, the Starwood, and the InterContinental chains made $340 million in profit!” he said.
Representatives for those three hotel chains did not return Guardian calls and neither did the Hotel Council of San Francisco. But Joe D’Alessandro, president and CEO of the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau, said tourism is an important industry that has fallen on hard times.
“Tourism is the number one industry in San Francisco,” he said. The local economy hinges on it. It brings in over $8 billion annually, $500 million of which are taxes that go directly to the city, and employs 76,000 people.
Corporate profit or no, he said that locally, business and revenue for hotels is down – way down, 24 percent down over this time last year, according to figures from the city’s comptroller. “Business sucks,” D’Alessandro said. “We’re in the throes of one of the worst worldwide recessions, and the hospitality business has been hit the worst because it is discretionary spending.”
Occupancy is down; revenue is down. Hotels are offering discounts and promotions to bring in customers, but D’Alessandro said even these won’t stop revenue from continuing to drop. “The projection is that we will stay at this bad level through 2010 with some recovery in 2011, but we’ll be no where near 2008 levels,” he said.
The recession and downturn have drastically cut into hotels’ bottom lines, causing some high-profile hotels to default on loans, D’Alessandro said. Without some cost-cutting measures, hotels will continue to suffer and more defaults may come in the future. But the hotel workers aren’t in any better of a position during these tough economic times.
President of the Board of Supervisors David Chiu joined Local 2’s Casey on the demonstration’s makeshift stage and spoke to the workers: “You are the beautiful mosaic that is San Francisco. You are Local 2! You perform the most backbreaking work in the hospitality industry. You lift beds, you lift luggage, you wash dishes everyday. Without you, the tourism industry would be crippled. All I would ask of our hotels is fairness.”
Cherri Chiesa, Unite Here’s secretary treasurer, was there to assure the crowd that their union was right now settling contracts all over the country and that everybody was keeping their benefits: “There’s no reason why the San Francisco hotel bosses can’t do the same. Because they owe it to you.”
The grueling last round of negotiations for the previous contract, which dragged on for two years before being resolved in 2006, is still on everybody’s mind. Yet, Friday’s gathering was a way to signal that, if the hotel managers have been preparing for this new battle, so have their employees.
digg •
del.icio.us •
sphere •
google
•
Comments (3)
Its interesting how the progressive mind works, they tax, fee and fine anyone who produces any wealth, and then whine about down town special interests, who they try and find new ways to extort from.
Then they speak at a union event making common cause with the union special interest, although progressives think they are far more moral than the rest of us peasants.
And of course the Bay Guardian has been going through cost cutting of its own and laying people off over the last few years, but that's OK cutting back because we need them to tell us peasants how to think.
Posted by glen matlock | August 19, 2009 12:20 AM
Here's the difference, Glen. We're not a multi-national corporation that is socking away millions of dollars in profits while cutting the wages, number, and benefits of workers. We're a locally owned small business that has to meet a payroll every month while struggling against unfair and illegal corporate competition (that was the conclusion of the jury that ordered SF Weekly and its corporate owner to pay us more than $15 million in damages for their illegal predatory pricing scheme, which has indeed hurt us, although their elaborate corporate shell structure has made collecting very difficult).
I'm not sure how your mind works, with its penchant to always defending the rich against the poor, but the progressive mind is concerned when is ponders a country where the rich have been getting steadily richer, and the working class steadily poorer, with all the seething discontent that breeds.
Posted by Steven T. Jones | August 19, 2009 10:57 AM
Oh dear Steve, I don't defend the rich against the poor, I just know bullshit when I see it.
I would be just as disgusted if a politician spoke to the hotel owners and told them to stick the screws to the union members. In Michael Moore's movie with Bush ranting about his elites was pretty awful don't you think?
You see I find it awesome that progressives have this amazing double standard, and rub this double standard in people's faces. If us peasants don't agree we are racist, anti-poor or in your case, the subject of an ad=homonym strawman.
Its odd that post modernism like reasoning with its obvious failings is so popular with the well educated and self appointed progressives.
Willie Brown was bad because he schlepped around with the down town special interests and its good that the progressives are union ass kissers?
I don't know here, but did these shallow supervisors get elected by the citizens of the city or the unions?
Also the Guardian is for open borders, when there is competition for jobs the wages go down, The Guardian is hardly for the "working class" with this mentality.
Real working class people don't have time for this crazy idiocy, real working class people are mocked by the Bay Guardian on a regular basis.
Progressives should spend less time on how we should all live to their self righteous standards and more in reality.
Posted by glen matlcok | August 19, 2009 09:56 PM