Editorial
Hotel workers must reconsider timing
The timing is terrible for the threatened labor action by 5,000 hotel workers against six major Waikiki hotels.
Clearly the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union Local 5 believes it has seized upon a great moment to demonstrate its understandable impatience at working without a contract for more than a year — understandable even if a good part of the explanation is the leadership dispute at the top of their own union.
The union said it has asked its affected members not to report to work Monday so they can either vote on ratification of a new contract, if one should miraculously materialize by then, or take a strike vote, which if approved might begin Tuesday.
It's not important whether union leaders chose this particular moment to bring things to a head because their patience simply has run out or because they know that many of the delegates and officials attending the Asian Development Bank annual meeting, also beginning Monday, will be staying in affected hotels.
But we also note that Local 5 is an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, which has publicly supported demonstrations against ADB meetings, including this one.
Our point here has nothing to do with the pay and job security issues involved. We hope both sides will come to a win-win agreement.
What we wish to emphasize is that the pay of hotel and restaurant employees isn't going to improve if business in Waikiki doesn't improve. The convention center was built to bring precisely this kind of meeting trade into Waikiki when traditional tourism was running slack.
Anything the hotel workers do to reduce the quality of the ADB delegates' stay will directly reduce the chances for repeat business, not just from the ADB, but from the whole gamut of such international organizations. The state and city have worked long and hard to land meetings of this type.
In short, in damaging the hotel experience of ADB delegates — inadvertently or not — Local 5 workers are cutting off their noses to spite their faces.
Local 5 has made its point. Now it should do the wise thing, and postpone any stop-work action.
