Hotel workers poised to fight back

Hotel workers are some of the most impoverished workers in the U.S. The average hourly wage for a hotel housekeeper is $8.67 or approximately $17,000 a year. This is in exchange for doing the backbreaking work of keeping hotel rooms clean. These housekeepers along with bellhops who carry heavy luggage as well as food workers, servers, janitorial staff and desk receptionists who keep the hotels filled and running are often ignored, invisible and marginalized. They are about to be heard from.

UNITE-HERE,a union that represents U.S. and Canadian hotel workers, has announced a wage campaign to raise the wages of the poorest hotel workers who work in the Sunbelt states like Arizona and the South and make far less than their counterparts in Manhattan, New York or San Francisco who are unionized.

The union feels it is in a stronger position to accomplish this with contracts aligned to expire at similar times in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and Honolulu. This means that in more than 400 major hotels across the country, workers could be on strike. The New York and Chicago contracts are up this summer.

The hotel industry is now owned and operated by a handful of multi-billion dollar companies like Hilton, Starwood, Marriott, and Hyatt that have been buying up companies. Starwood owns the Sheraton, Westin, St. Regis, Four Points and W chains. UNITE-HERE hopes to use this as leverage aimed particularly at Hilton and Starwood to unionize the chains in their entirety.

—Sharon Black