Early on Sunday morning, more than 10,000 hotel employees at 24 hotels throughout the United States, ranging from Boston to the West Coast to Hawaii, went on strike, which caused travel disruptions over the normally busy Labor Day weekend.

It has been stated that the hotels are still operational; however, visitors will have to contend with a depleted workforce that is unable to deliver full services. They are striking not just for higher pay but also for improved working conditions, including the reintroduction of automated daily room cleaning, which many hotels abandoned during the epidemic. The organization that represents the striking workers is called UNITE HERE, and they claim that they are striking for all of these reasons.

 

In a statement released early on Sunday morning, Gwen Mills, the International President of UNITE HERE, gave the following explanation: “We are on strike because the hotel industry has gotten off track.” No one was spared during the Covid outbreak; nonetheless, the hospitality business is now seeing unprecedented profits, while employees and customers are being left behind. In far too many hotels, the usual services that visitors have come to expect have not yet been restored. The wages that workers earn are not sufficient to provide for their families. There are many people who are unable to afford to live in the cities that they often invite visitors to visit.

According to Aissata Seck, who has been working as a banquet food server at the Hilton Park Plaza in Boston for the last 18 years, her rent has jumped from $1,900 to $2,900 over the course of the course of the past five years. CNN reported that she said, “My pay only covers my rent.” For the time being, she is making ends meet by working as a driver for Uber.

In an interview with Gloria Pazmino of CNN, Apple Ratanabunsrithang, a chef at the Hilton Union Square in San Francisco, said that she “has to work two jobs to survive in the city.” She also stated that maintaining health care coverage is just as vital as maintaining pay. “The vast majority of individuals who are employed and members of the union have been in their positions for more than ten, twenty, or thirty years. As a result, they spend their whole lives working at a hotel, which is a physically demanding job, thus the health care is of utmost significance,” she said.

Mills said to CNN that the absence of daily room cleaning not only results in a loss of employment opportunities for the members of her union, which resulted in a reduction of roughly forty percent in the number of housekeeping positions, but it also results in an increase in the burden of a cleaning crew, as it needs them to attend to rooms that have not been cleaned for a number of days.

Hilton, Hyatt, and Marriott are among the hotel brands that are now dealing with striking employees. According to the union, the hotels have a combined total of 23,000 rooms with locations in the cities of Boston, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle. Additionally, the hotels are located in Honolulu and Kauai in Hawaii, as well as Greenwich, Connecticut.

It is possible that the union may extend the strike to as many as sixty-five hotels in twelve different cities. These hotels might include those in Baltimore, Oakland, California, Providence, Rhode Island, and New Haven, Connecticut. The union is potentially expanding the strike to include other hotels. According to statements made by representatives of Hilton and Hyatt to CNN on Friday, the companies are dedicated to reaching agreements with the union, but they will also continue to provide service to consumers in the event of a work stoppage.

Hyatt has issued a statement expressing its dissatisfaction with the decision of the union to go on strike. According to Michael D’Angelo, who is the director of labor relations at Hyatt, “We look forward to continuing to negotiate fair contracts and recognize the contributions of Hyatt employees.”

During the holiday weekend of the Fourth of July in 2017, the 15,000 members of the same union went on strike at 65 hotels located in the counties of Los Angeles and Orange in Southern California. They went back to work a few days later, but in the months that followed, they staged a series of rolling strikes. These strikes were occasionally related to key tourist periods, such as the weekend of Taylor Swift concerts in Los Angeles.

These strikes are scheduled to come to an end after three days, much as the work stoppage that took place in Los Angeles. Mills told CNN on Friday, before to the deadline for the walkout, that the union has not yet decided whether or not they would return on a rolling basis, like they did in Southern California the previous year. A resumption of rolling strikes is not completely out of the question.

Eventually, the union was able to make agreements with all of the hotels that they had targeted, with the exception of three of them. However, these agreements were not achieved until early this year.

This Labor Day weekend has been unusually busy for travel, with the American Automobile Association (AAA) anticipating a nine percent increase in domestic travel in comparison to the previous year and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) anticipating record passenger inspections at airports in the United States.

Source: cnn.com