Hotel Workers Launch Nationwide ‘Hope for Housekeepers’ Tour

by James Parks, Sep 30, 2009

Hundreds of students from four Chicago-area universities joined UNITE HERE members in a peaceful disobedience demonstration last week.

They clean our hotel rooms—some as many as 30 times a day—with few benefits. Now the housekeepers at some of the nation’s top hotel chains are joining with women’s rights, student, community and clergy leaders to shine a light on the abuses in the hotel industry.

On Sept. 30, more than 350 people will launch a seven-city nationwide “Hope for Housekeepers” tour. The tour kicks off in Long Beach, Calif., where workers will carry a seven-foot by 60-foot “Hope Quilt” on a mile-long pilgrimage from the Hilton Long Beach to the Hyatt Regency Long Beach to symbolize their struggle for decent working conditions.

“Hope for Housekeepers” is a national movement of women, founded by Hyatt housekeepers across the country to stop the abuse of women in the hotel industry and bring a message of hope to Hyatt housekeepers and women working as housekeepers across the globe. Starting out from Long Beach, the tour will travel to San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Antonio, Boston, Indianapolis and Chicago.

The “Hope Quilt,” which will be the centerpiece of the tour, stitches together the stories of Hyatt housekeepers and the struggles they endure every day just to provide for their families. Each patch symbolizes a story of pain, injury and even death or miscarriage brought upon by the heavy burden of their workloads.

In each city, Hyatt housekeepers will hold public events to share stories of hardship and their hopes for a better life for their families. Hyatt housekeepers often clean as many as 30 hotel rooms a day in just eight hours, and many forgo health insurance for their families because of the high cost, according to UNITE HERE, which represents some of the housekeepers.

In a survey of more than 600 housekeepers by UNITE HERE, some 91 percent of respondents say they have suffered work-related pain. Of those who reported pain in the survey, two-thirds took pain medication to get through their daily quota.

Yet, despite their hard work, Hyatt fired 98 housekeepers at its Boston hotel last month, many of them veteran employees who made $15 an hour. They were replaced with $8-an-hour “temporary” workers provided by Hospitality Staffing Solutions, an outsourcing company in Atlanta.

Last week, Hyatt offered the housekeepers new temporary jobs through the staffing agency at their old wages, but did not say where or what the jobs would be. The workers rejected that offer. For more information and to help the Boston Hyatt workers, click here.

Meanwhile, UNITE HERE contracts covering some 7,500 workers at 37 hotels in Chicago and 9,000 at 32 San Francisco hotels expired in August. Talks are continuing with the largest employers in each city, including Hyatt Hotels Corp., the Blackstone Group and Starwood Hotels and Resorts, all of which operate properties under several different banners.

In San Francisco, some 1,700 UNITE HERE members from the hotels and other employers took part in the demonstrations and 92 were arrested, while 700 union members participated in a Chicago protest that resulted in 200 arrests.

In San Antonio, workers are asking the city’s mayor to intervene in a dispute with the Grand Hyatt hotel there. The union says management is using anti-union tactics such as intimidation and firings to thwart workers’ freedom to join a union. The Grand Hyatt received some $200 million from the city of San Antonio to get started and build the hotel.

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