Solidarity of low-paid workers
Immigrants join hotel workers' picket line
By Beth Semmer
Chicago
A standing-room-only crowd of immigrant
workers and their supporters rallied at the Merle Reskin
Theatre in Chicago on Aug. 9 in preparation for an upcoming
Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. Many speakers at the rally drew
comparisons with the historic freedom rides of the civil rights
movement.
This new freedom ride gets underway in late September with
contingents from nine major U.S. cities and is calling for
sweeping immigration reform.
The demands include: the right to apply for citizenship
regardless of status; the right to reunify with families; the
right to form unions, and civil rights and liberties for all
immigrant workers, whether documented or undocumented. The Immi
grant Workers Freedom Ride will culminate in a mass rally in
New York on Saturday, Oct. 4.
At the end of the rally here, over 1,500 participants
marched two blocks to the Congress Plaza Hotel and Convention
Center to join a picket line in support of striking members of
Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees, Local 1. HERE mem
bers at the Congress Hotel have been on strike since June 15. A
spirited picket line has been going 24/7 since then. With the
addition of the noisy and enthusiastic rally participants, the
picket line stretched completely around the block for over an
hour.
Last year HERE Local 1, in negotiations with neighboring
Chicago hotels, was able to win an incredible victory: a
54-percent total package increase, including a pay raise,
health care and paid time off. The Congress Plaza Hotel and
Convention Cen ter was the one major downtown hotel that
refused to sign the negotiated contract.
The employees at the Congress have been working without a
contract since Jan. 1. On May 12, the hotel management declared
an impasse in negotiations and implemented their final offer,
including a 7-percent wage cut and refusal to pay the required
health care insurance and pension premiums, effectively
eliminating those benefits.
Prior to the wage cut, the average pay of a Congress Plaza
Hotel room attendant was $8.83 an hour. This is 13.25 percent
less than other downtown Chicago hotels pay their Local 1
employees.
The strikers, who hail from El Salvador, Guatemala, Ghana,
India, Iran and Mex ico as well as the U.S., were encouraged by
the added support. Henry Miller, a Congress Plaza Hotel
striker, said, "For 25 years I worked shoulder to shoulder with
people born all over the world, and now I'm picketing shoulder
to shoulder with them. In a strike you find out who are your
friends and who is the enemy. And let me tell you, the enemy is
not my immigrant brothers and sisters. The enemy is the boss
who would make us all slaves."
Reprinted from the Aug. 21, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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