Workers Launch Global Hyatt Boycott

(1)

Workers Launch Global Hyatt Boycott, Hundreds
Picket at Union Square

By Yael Chanoff
Bay Guaardian
July 27, 2012

    A picket line outside the Grand Hyatt yesterday
    drew more than 300 people Vikdeo:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCbsAl4bQwM&feature=player_embedded

San Francisco

As shoppers scurried around Union Square
yesterday, a picket that drew more than 300 people
could be heard for blocks. The grand-scale noise-
making was in front of the Grand Hyatt, where
workers and supporters demonstrated against what
they say is unsafe and unfair treatment of hotel
workers.

UNITE HERE Local 2 has been supporting a boycott
of a couple Hyatt locations in San Francisco for
years now. But this week the national union, along
with a broad coalition of supporters, has called for a
worldwide boycott of the hotel chain.

Read on:
http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2012/07/27/workers-launch-global-hyatt-boycott-hundreds-picket-union-square

(2)


Hotel Workers Tell Hyatt to Feel Their Pain as
Boycott Grows

By Jenny Brown
Labor Notes
July 28, 2012

http://labornotes.org/2012/07/hotel-workers-tell-hyatt-feel-their-pain-boycott-grows

Hotel workers in 20 cities are planning pickets, civil
disobedience, and other actions to this week to
protest relentless efforts by Hyatt to drive workers
harder and replace permanent jobs with temporary,
lower-paid ones.

Most union Hyatt workers have been without a
contract for three years, fighting concession and
workload demands, while workers in unorganized
hotels are facing a relentless speedup leading to an
epidemic of injuries. Hyatt has already faced strikes
and a boycott campaign by UNITE HERE, the hotel
union. Now the boycott is expanding.

"They're going to temp all of us out eventually," said
Denise Sidbury, a 12-year worker at the non-union
Baltimore Hyatt Regency. She said she's watched
the hotel's permanent housekeeping staff dwindle to
nine while temps fill 25 of the positions.

"I don't mind working hard, but I do mind being
abused," said Cathy Youngblood, a housekeeper at
the Hyatt Andaz in Hollywood. She said that many
of her coworkers take pain medication to deal with
the muscle strain from shoving king-size flat sheets
under heavy mattresses more than a hundred times
a day.

Since contracts started to expire, union workers
have engaged in dozens of short strikes at various
Hyatts in the U.S. and Canada, and the union
calculates that targeted boycotts have diverted at
least $25 million away from Hyatt properties.

Annemarie Strassel of UNITE HERE in Chicago said
the union is insisting on stable hotel jobs but is
meeting a dug-in position from Hyatt. "We are stuck
around the issues of subcontracting and making
working conditions safer for housekeepers," she
said.

On Monday, the union dropped "Hyatt Hurts"
banners in several cities and held a Washington,
D.C. press conference with supportive groups,
including the NFL Players Association and the
National Organization for Women. Plans this week
call for everything from clergy delegations to the
boss, to marches and civil disobedience.

GOING GLOBAL

After years of boycotting selected Hyatts for their
mistreatment of workers and refusals to negotiate,
UNITE HERE announced Monday that it is
expanding its boycott to all Hyatt properties
worldwide, with the exception of the dozen that have
signed union contracts.

The international food and hotel workers federation,
IUF, has signed on to the global boycott,
representing 12 million hotel and food service
workers in 120 countries. Indian workers fighting
subcontracting in their hotel industry have joined
in, picketing hotels in three states to support the
boycott. British and Filipino workers have also
picketed Hyatts in support of U.S. workers.

The expanded boycott aims to hit Hyatt overseas,
where it's growing. While the U.S. market is
saturated, according to the union, Hyatt has 56
hotels in development in India alone.

UNITE HERE has also launched an online campaign
to further dent Hyatt's brand, asking supporters to
vote Hyatt the worst hotel employer.

There are plenty of reasons to believe Hyatt
qualifies. High room quotas mean housekeepers
work so fast their muscles do not have time to
recover, a major cause of debilitating repetitive
strain injuries affecting their arms, backs,
shoulders, and hands.

In response, California hotel workers have been
trying to get a law passed to provide housekeepers
with fitted sheets and long-handled mops. The tools
are aimed at decreasing on-the-job injuries after an
occupational health study found that housekeepers
have high injury rates. Hyatt hotels were the worst
among those studied.

Youngblood testified at the hearings on the new law,
saying fitted sheets "would save our backs." She
said Hyatt was the only major company to speak
against the proposal publicly.

A Hyatt lobbyist told them "we were probably just
injuring ourselves dancing," said Youngblood,
adding, "Honey, after working at Hyatt all day we're
lucky to just stand up, let alone dance."

Along with the low wages, Hyatt's speedup includes
outright wage theft, according to Wanda Rosario,
who worked at a Boston Hyatt. "If you didn't finish
by 4:30 you had to punch out and go back and
finish the rooms for free," she recalled.

The housekeepers said nearly all their co-workers
are taking painkillers to get through their work day.

SLOW-MOTION JOB DESTRUCTION

Rosario was fired by Hyatt in Boston along with
nearly 100 other full-time housekeepers three years
ago. They were all replaced with temps. "We were so
loyal to Hyatt and they treated us like trash, like
garbage," she said. "Why did I spend my time and
my soul in this place when they don't treat me like a
human being?"

Hyatt officials in Chicago later admitted to a
delegation of concerned clergy that the problem they
saw with the mass firing was that it was so abrupt.
Now, workers like Sidbury are seeing full-time staff
picked off and replaced by temps slowly, one by one.

At her non-union workplace in Baltimore, the temps
are required to clean between 24 and 27 rooms a
day, while permanent staff clean 18.

"Some of them have worked here just as long as I
have," she said. "Why aren't they full time?" Temps
make just over minimum wage, Sidbury said,
although with a union drive underway at her hotel,
she said their pay may have risen recently.

Just talking union makes a difference, Sidbury said.
Last year, managers tried to impose a 30 room per
day quota on all housekeepers, "but they heard the
word `union,' and they brought it back down for us."

Because Hyatt is so determined to undermine
strength in union hotels, UNITE HERE has been
trying to negotiate guarantees that Hyatt won't
convert permanent jobs to temporary positions.
They're also aiming for contracts that allow workers
to take actions on behalf of Hyatt workers at non-
union hotels, from pickets to boycotts and strikes.

NO ESCAPE

Temps who want to become permanent face
managers determined to keep them powerless and
underpaid. In Indianapolis, hotel workers
discovered that their temp agency, Hospitality
Staffing Services, had signed secret agreements with
hotel managers to turn down temp workers who
applied for permanent positions at any downtown
hotel. Hotel workers flooded city hearings and
convinced the city council to pass a regulation
against such blacklisting agreements, but the mayor
vetoed it last week.

In Providence, hotel workers did get the city council
to require city-subsidized hotels to pay current
workers a severance package of six months' pay and
benefits if their jobs are outsourced. In Long Beach,
California, the hotel union is working to pass a
measure to raise the wage floor for hotel workers
and guarantee them sick days.

Sidbury said that when housekeepers dared to ask
about working at Baltimore Hyatt full time, the temp
agency found a way to get rid of them, in one case
citing a background check that only became
relevant when the worker spoke up.

Subcontracting also allows Hyatt to lie about the
working conditions in its hotels, said Cleve Jones, a
gay rights activist who works with the union. The
company markets itself to the gay community, he
said, touting corporate anti-discrimination policies.

"No matter what Hyatt says their commitment to
non-discrimination and diversity is, they can say
they're giving health care, but none of that matters if
your job is through a temp agency that doesn't have
any of those benefits," said Jones.

___________________________________________

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