Strike Force

The American Prospect
October 22, 2004



SAN FRANCISCO -- Socorro Carrillo, Junior Tejano, and
Davey Eng didn't really expect they'd be going back to
work. Nevertheless, at the start of their normal 7:30
a.m. shift, they presented themselves at the ornate
entrance to the Fairmount San Franciso Hotel, one of
San Francisco's classiest establishments, backed by
dozens of other workers, clergy, and public officials.
Confronted with all these people and hoping perhaps
that they'd go away, manager Mark Huntley waited half
an hour before meeting them in front of the doors. When
he did, despite their low expectations, the trio still
found his message upsetting.

The limited lockout, instituted by 10 hotels after
UNITE HERE's Local 2 struck four others, would be
continued indefinitely, Huntley said. The Fairmount was
one of the 10, and workers there had already gone
almost two weeks without paychecks. It wasn't economic
pain that upset the three workers, however. "They just
don't respect us," Tejano said.

After decades in the hotel, workers felt they were as
much a part of the business as the managers. Carrillo
had labored there for 33 years, turning down sheets and
washing toilet bowls. Tejano, a bell captain, had
probably hauled a hundred thousand suitcases through
the doors in 31 years. Eng's three decades were
measured out in similar labor. Now they were on the
outside.

One might think these workers would be dismayed by the
uncertainty, worried about when they'd be able to
return to their jobs. Instead, at the Sheraton Palace
down on Market Street, they seemed happy. Their
boisterous, noisy picket lines have been driving hotel
managers to tears, and at the hotel's insistence,
motorcycle cops last week even started handing out
tickets to passing drivers who were honking their horns
in support. Meanwhile, each person going in or out of
the polished glass doors was greeted with leaflets and
hoots from bullhorns. Some reacted with grace and
interest, while others spat insults as they quickly got
into waiting taxis or retreated down the sidewalk.
Meanwhile, through the lobby windows, picketers could
see managers pacing back and forth, mentally counting
up the canceled reservations.

There are many things about the San Francisco hotel
strike that might seem reminiscent of the agonizing
conflict that embroiled southern California grocery
workers for four and a half months last winter. It is a
local battle challenging powerful national
corporations. Like Safeway, Albertsons, and Ralph's,
the big San Francisco hotel chains -- Starwood (which
runs the Sheraton Palace and the St. Francis), Hilton,
Hyatt, and Intercontinental (which run the Mark Hopkins
and the Holiday Inns) -- have a mutual support
arrangement. A strike against any member of the Multi-
Employer Group, they agreed long ago, would bring a
lockout in the rest.

Yet, unlike the picket lines in the south, which had an
air of desperation after the first few weeks, San
Francisco strikers are nothing if not upbeat. In many
ways, this strike could be called the "ungrocery"
strike. Its objective is the elimination of the very
problem that brought such a bitter resolution to the
supermarket dispute. It is a strategic strike, a test
run for the kind of long-term planning advocated by
many voices now calling for reform and renovation in
the AFL-CIO itself.

Elena Duran, a locked-out housekeeper at the Sheraton
Palace, got angry at the announcement that hotel owners
would extend the lockout beyond the union's two-week,
limited strike. Facing a barrage of microphones at a
press conference in the union hall on Golden Gate
Avenue, surrounded by dozens of other Local 2 members,
she emphasized, "It's important for us to level the
playing field." She was clearly willing to make some
sacrifices to reach that goal; her husband, who also
works at the Sheraton, was locked out with her, giving
her family only strike benefits on which to survive.

For Duran, the playing field is uneven today because an
international corporation like Starwood can use its
profits from operating hotels around the world to
subsidize its losses during a local strike at one of
its franchises, like San Francisco's Sheraton Palace.
That's why southern California grocery workers were
able to empty stores of customers, while the market
chains used profits earned elsewhere to weather the
conflict. Ultimately, workers had to agree to big, new
payments for their health care, and lower wages for new
employees.

In San Francisco, the hotel chains have demanded the
same kind of increases, proposing that workers go from
paying $10 a month for insurance today to $273 five
years from now. "That would be a complete disaster for
us," says Linda Knighten, another Sheraton worker.
While Barbara French, the spokeswoman for the Multi-
Employer Group, notes carefully that this is just a
proposal and subject to negotiation, workers look at
Los Angeles supermarkets and see it's not just a
gambit. Employers in many industries, even highly
profitable ones, are making the same demands, as
health-insurance premiums skyrocket at about 15 percent
per year. The question is, who will pay the increase,
workers or employers?

To avoid the fate of their supermarket counterparts,
hotel workers are trying to strengthen their union and
increase its bargaining power. Over the last few years,
Local 2 and its parent union have made several changes
in this direction, and the current hotel lockout
revolves around one in particular. The union's locals
want to synchronize their contracts with large
corporations so that in many cities they'll end in the
same year, 2006. Eight cities -- New York; Chicago;
Honolulu, Hawaii; Monterey, California; Toronto;
Detroit; Boston; and Sacramento, California -- have
already achieved this goal. Although bargaining, to
begin with, would still take place for separate
contracts in each area, the union would be able to make
similar demands, and possibly even strike or take job
action in multiple locations at the same time.

Until recently, the chains may have been caught
napping, but that's changed. Contracts have expired in
three of the country's largest hotel markets (San
Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.). The same
demands are on the table in each area, and this time,
the companies are refusing to budge. While French
emphasizes the convenience of negotiating only once
every five years, the problem isn't really the duration
of future contracts. It's whether there will be
simultaneous negotiations in 18 months.

The San Francisco strike, therefore, may soon spread to
Los Angeles and the nation's capital. If it does, it
will preview on a smaller scale the kind of multicity
union coordination that the companies find so
disadvantageous. On their side, therefore, the hotels
have raised the stakes, first turning a four-hotel
strike into a14-hotel dispute involving 4,000 workers,
and now making a two-week lockout indefinite.

The plan for increasing union strength hasn't just
concentrated on coordinated bargaining, though. A
strike threat is an empty one unless workers are able
to carry it through. Until recently, the Local 2 strike
fund only held $3 million. For families like the
Durans, who now depend on the $200 weekly strike-
benefit checks to buy food and avoid eviction, the fund
was dangerously inadequate. For every 1,000 workers on
strike, $200,000 is needed a week. In a prolonged,
wider strike, the fund wouldn't last long. But on July
4, the old Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees (HERE)
union merged with the former Union of Needletrades,
Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) to create the
new UNITE HERE.

UNITE has been devastated by massive relocation of
clothing production to low-wage countries around the
world. San Francisco's own union Koret and Levi's
plants all closed during the last two decades. Still,
after years of investing in New York real estate and a
labor bank, the garment union has huge financial
resources. Furthermore, it also has members in laundry
plants around the country, those often wash the
tablecloths and sheets from the hotels. By merging the
two unions, the new entity gained the ability to
weather much longer strikes and brought together two
parts of the same industrial workforce.

UNITE HERE was also the union that initiated the
Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride a year ago, which
brought caravans of immigrant workers and their
supporters to Washington and New York. The cross-
country action promoted the kind of immigration reform
that would make it easier for immigrant workers to join
unions, go on strike, and advocate for their labor
rights. For a decade, Local 2 in San Francisco and
Local 11 in Los Angeles have proposed and won language
in their contracts protecting members from
discrimination and firing because of immigration
status.

On San Francisco picket lines, one hears voices with
accents from Mexico and Central America, the Caribbean,
China, the Philippines, and a host of other countries.
In big cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New
York, immigrants today make up a majority of the hotel
workforce (and therefore the union). But the Immigrant
Workers Freedom Ride, in its conscious use of the
language of the civil-rights movement, highlighted
growing efforts by UNITE HERE to find common ground
between African American and immigrant communities,
which are often pitted against one another for jobs in
hotels and other service industries.

This year the union added new language to its existing
proposal on immigrant rights, asking hotels to set up a
diversity committee and hire an ombudsman to begin
increasing the percentage of African American workers.
The Sheraton Palace, where Duran and Knighten work, was
the scene of the most famous civil-rights demonstration
in San Francisco history. In 1963, civil-rights
activists staged a sit-in and were arrested in the
hotel lobby as they demanded that management hire
African Americans for jobs in visible, front-of-the-
house locations, where the color line had kept them
out.

Richard Lee Mason, an African American banquet waiter
at the St. Francis, remembers, "African Americans had
been kept in the back of the house for far too long.
People wanted to be in the front of the house, and
rightly so." The day after the arrests, thousands of
people ringed the entire block, picketing and chanting
for hours. Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who
finally retired last year, launched his political
career as a lawyer for the demonstrators.

But while employment prospects got better for black
workers for some years afterward, the situation changed
by the 1980s and '90s. Hotels hired increasing
percentages of immigrants in a move they hoped would
create a less demanding and expensive workforce. Mason
moved from New York to San Francisco at the end of the
1970s, and says that already by then the percentages of
black workers had fallen.

"I suspect that, because the industry had had a great
struggle with African Americans, they thought we were
too aggressive," he speculates. "A lot of us had come
out of the civil-rights movement, and we were willing
to fight for higher wages and to make sure we were
treated fairly." Steven Pitts, an economist at the
Center for Labor Research and Education at the
University of California, Berkeley, says Mason's
experience was not uncommon. "This perception by
employers of African American workers is true
nationwide," he says. "Blacks aren't perceived as
compliant, and therefore when many employers make
hiring decisions, they simply don't hire them."

If the hotel industry hoped its new immigrant workforce
would be more compliant, however, those hopes were not
realized. Immigrants proved to be as militant as the
workers who came before: The city's hotels were struck
in 1980, and smaller strikes took place in the
following two decades. But one lasting consequence of
the turnover was a fall in the percentage of African
American workers, who now make up less than 6 percent
of the San Francisco hotel workforce.

The union's civil-rights proposal "is an important
first step," according to Pitts. "But one of the
lessons of the civil-rights movement is the need for
structural change. We need structures in communities,
including the black community, that can bring residents
into the hotels and make sure they progress."

Achieving that kind of structural reform, essentially
reinstituting the old affirmative-action consent
decrees, would take a lot of bargaining power (itself
an argument for multicity negotiations). But by putting
the demand on the table in San Francisco and Los
Angeles, the union is moving beyond simply taking a
good position, even if the goal is still a long way
off. That can help gain it the support, even in the
current strike, of African American and other
communities that feel excluded from hotel employment.

These internal changes inside the hotel union and in
its community relations are as strategic as lining up
common contract-expiration dates. They reflect elements
of a new reform program advocated by UNITE HERE and
three other unions, called the New Unity Partnership.
Last August, another of those unions, the Service
Employees International Union (SEIU), held its
convention in San Francisco. Its president, Andy Stern,
made national headlines when he announced that if the
AFL-CIO didn't adopt some of these suggested changes,
these unions might leave the federation.

Significantly, all of the unions involved, which also
include the Laborers International Union of North
America and United Brotherhood of Carpenters and
Joiners unions, have been vocal advocates for immigrant
rights and helped the AFL-CIO adopt a new, pro-
immigrant policy in 2000. Their program calls for
merging smaller unions into larger ones, devoting more
resources to organizing new workers, and developing a
strategic plan for increasing union power in the
industries they represent. Unions around the country
are looking at the San Francisco hotel strike (and its
possible spread to Los Angeles and Washington) as an
effort to put these ideas into practice.

Some of these ideas are hardly new. Coordinated
bargaining with hotels itself is just a step toward
having a single contract with each chain, and perhaps
eventually for the entire industry. The gains of San
Francisco's dockworkers' union, the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union, demonstrate the
potential results. Longshoremen were considered bums
and derelicts through the 1920s. But after the West
Coast maritime strike (and San Francisco General
Strike) of 1934, they won the ability to negotiate a
single contract with all the shipping companies on the
West Coast, covering all the ports. As a result,
longshoremen's wages are now among the highest of U.S.
industrial workers. At the end of World War II, workers
had similar industry-wide contracts in auto, steel,
meatpacking, and other industries as well.

If hotel workers achieve the same kind of bargaining,
they can begin to challenge one of the most basic
assumptions about the U.S. workplace: that service
workers, and immigrants, are destined by nature to get
wages at the bottom. Yet the reason why room cleaners
get paid less than dockworkers has little to do with
the exhausting nature of each form of labor, or of the
nationality or skin color of the person performing it.
It is a function of bargaining power. The current
strike, intended as a step toward stronger unions with
more bargaining power, could begin to end this second-
class status. That would certainly make unions more
attractive to unorganized workers, and help the labor
movement start to grow again, instead of shrinking
steadily every year.

That gives hotels a big reason to resist. But Mike
Casey, Local 2's president, points to other occasions
in the past where employers put up a similar fight.
"They said we'd never get successorship [the right of
workers to keep their jobs and contract when a hotel
changes owners] in 1996, but we got it," he recalls.
"They said we'd never get a ban on outsourcing the jobs
in food service, but we got that. We can win this one,
too."

David Bacon, associate editor at Pacific News Service,
is a San Francisco-based writer and photographer. His
book on the ten-year impact of free trade on the
US/Mexico border, The Children of NAFTA, was published
by University of California Press this spring.

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