Cleaners at hotels picket Local 5
By Susan Hooper
Advertiser Staff Writer
The owner of a cleaning company that has a contract with several Waikiki hotels is in a subcontracting dispute with the leader of the union representing his employees as well as the hotel workers.
Subcontracting also is a key issue in labor negotiations at Waikiki hotels.
Craig Parkin, president and owner of Team Clean Inc., has 110 employees who do subcontracted cleaning work at the Hilton Hawaiian Village and about 25 employees at the four Sheraton Waikiki hotels.
Parkin said yesterday that Eric Gill, financial secretary-treasurer of Local 5 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, wants the hotels to end their contract with Team Clean so the cleaning jobs can be done by hotel employees.
Local 5 is in contract talks with the Hilton Hawaiian Village and the four Waikiki Sheraton properties. The union represents about 1,500 Hilton employees and about 2,500 workers at the Waikiki Sheratons.
Gill said it is "patently untrue" that the union is trying to put Team Clean employees out of work. Instead, he said, he would like to bring that work back into the hotels and give the Team Clean workers "first crack" at getting those jobs.
The end result, he said, would be "much higher pay and much better benefits" for those workers. "Our complaint about subcontracting is that it's deteriorating the level of pay and benefits for hotel workers," Gill said.
In a statement yesterday, Team Clean employees said they were told four months ago by union representatives that Local 5 would support Team Clean and the company's subcontracting obligations. Now Gill has "vowed to have Team Clean and all of its employees thrown out of the hotel industry," the statement said. No employees' names were listed in the statement.
Gill and other Hawai'i union leaders have long opposed hotels' practice of subcontracting work formerly done by union hotel employees. Among his other concerns, Gill says subcontracted employees generally are less well paid and have fewer benefits than hotel workers.
Parkin said wages and benefits for union hotel workers in jobs comparable to those of his employees are "substantially different," with hotel workers generally making more and having better benefits.
Nevertheless, he said, the jobs that Team Clean provides are "very, very important," especially to people coming off welfare and getting back into the work force. "It's a particular niche of employment," he said.
Yesterday afternoon about 30 Team Clean employees and supporters walked an informational picket line in front of Local 5's Waikiki headquarters. Tee Naone, 39, a Team Clean kitchen supervisor at the Sheraton Moana Surfrider, said she was there because "we're fighting for our jobs."
Naone was skeptical of Gill's statement that employees like her would be the first considered for their jobs if the work now done by Team Clean is returned to the hotel. "They're not going to give us a job just like that," she said. "The people who worked for them for 20 years are not going to step down just for us. Seniority would be a problem."
