Hotel workers to rally in San Francisco

By Emmett Berg, Bay City News Service

July 26, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) - Hotel workers and their supporters plan to gather Thursday in Union Square for a march designed to signal determination to resolve their nearly two year-old labor dispute in their favor.

Although recent talks with the San Francisco Multi-Employer Group, the entity representing 14 local hotels, have yet to yield a breakthrough, the march takes place at a critical time for hotels and union workers in other big cities around the nation.

New York City hotels recently came to contract terms with their unionized workers. In Chicago, the union representing hotel workers changed tactics to begin separate, rather than collective, negotiations with at least two hotel chains, Hilton and Hyatt.

According to a published report, Chicago hotel workers took the new direction because many were concerned they would be locked out of their jobs if negotiations failed, a scenario that occurred in San Francisco in 2004 following a two-week strike at four hotels.

Hoteliers in three other cities -- Boston, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles -- also are negotiating new contracts for union employees.

A spokesperson for the San Francisco Multi-Employer Group, Noah Griffin, said today the hotels' contract proposals have been generous. He said the impasse stems less from the hotels' salary and benefit proposal and more from organizing tactics union leaders want to enshrine in contractual language.

A representative of the Unite Here Local 2 union was not immediately available for comment today. In a statement earlier this week, union leaders said their members were fighting for wage, benefit and safety improvements, as well as "the right of workers at new San Francisco and San Mateo hotels to choose to join the union if they wish to without being threatened, intimidated or fired.''

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