More than 10,000 US hotel workers strike during Labor Day weekend

New York (CNN) — More than 10,000 hotel workers at 24 hotels stretching from Boston to the West Coast to Hawaii went on strike early Sunday morning, disrupting travel during a busy Labor Day weekend.

The hotels are reportedly still open but guests will deal with a skeleton staff unable to provide full services. UNITE HERE, the union representing the striking workers, says they are striking not just for better pay but also better working conditions, including the return of automatic daily room cleaning that many hotels dropped during the pandemic.

“We’re on strike because the hotel industry has gotten off track,” Gwen Mills, International President of UNITE HERE, said in a statement Sunday morning. “During Covid, everyone suffered, but now the hotel industry is making record profits while workers and guests are left behind. Too many hotels still haven’t restored standard services that guests deserve. Workers aren’t making enough to support their families. Many can no longer afford to live in the cities that they welcome guests to.”

Aissata Seck, a banquet food server who has worked at Hilton Park Plaza in Boston for 18 years, said her rent has increased from $1,900 to $2,900 in the last five years. “My pay only covers my rent,” she told CNN. She is now working as an Uber driver to make ends meet.

Apple Ratanabunsrithang, a cook at Hilton Union Square in San Francisco, told CNN’s Gloria Pazmino that she “has to work two jobs to survive in the city,” and while wages are important, so is keeping health care benefits. “The majority of people that work and are in the union are long established — they’ve worked 10, 20, 30 years. So their whole life is working at a hotel, which is physical work, so the health care is very important,” she said.

Mills told CNN that the lack of daily room cleaning not only costs jobs for her union’s members — reducing housekeeping employment by nearly 40% — but it also increases a cleaning staff’s workload, since it requires tending to rooms that haven’t been cleaned for a number of days.

The hotel chains facing striking workers include Hilton, Hyatt and Marriott. The hotels have 23,000 rooms between them in the cities of Boston, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, as well as Honolulu and Kauai in Hawaii, and Greenwich, Connecticut, according to the union.

The union is threatening to possibly expand the strike to as many as 65 hotels in 12 different cities, possibly adding hotels in Baltimore, Oakland, California, as well as Providence, Rhode Island, and New Haven, Connecticut. Spokespeople for Hilton and Hyatt told CNN on Friday they are committed to reaching deals with the union, but they also will continue to serve customers during any work stoppage.

Hyatt said in a statement it is disappointed by the union’s decision to strike. “We look forward to continuing to negotiate fair contracts and recognize the contributions of Hyatt employees,” said Michael D’Angelo, head of labor relations at Hyatt.

Last year, the 15,000 members of the same union went on strike during the Fourth of July holiday weekend at 65 hotels in Los Angeles and Orange counties in Southern California. They returned to work a few days later but staged a series of rolling strikes in the months that followed, sometimes tied to major tourist periods, such as the weekend of Taylor Swift concerts in Los Angeles.

These strikes are set to end after three days, as occurred in Los Angeles’ work stoppage. The union has yet to determine whether or not they will return on a rolling basis as they did in Southern California last year, Mills told CNN on Friday ahead of the strike deadline. A return of rolling strikes has not been ruled out.

The union eventually reached deals for all but three of the hotels they had targeted, but those agreements weren’t reached until earlier this year.

This has been a particularly busy Labor Day weekend for travel with AAA expecting a 9% increase in domestic travel compared to last year and the Transportation Security Administration expecting record passenger screenings at US airports.

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