Two-week strike targets 4 San Francisco hotels
By Lisa Leff
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO — Cooks, housekeepers, bellboys and other workers at four San Francisco hotels began a noisy two-week strike yesterday, an action that could spread to other venues and discourage visitors just when the city's tourism industry has started to rebound.
Paul Sakuma • Associated Press
Leaders of the labor union that represents about 8,000 workers at 60 San Francisco hotels and motels called the targeted strike to protest stalled negotiations with management of 14 large hotels in the city.
Hotel guests tow their own luggage through a picket line of striking hotel workers outside the Mark Hopkins Inter-Continental Hotel in San Francisco. A two-week strike began yesterday.
The four hotels subject to the strike — the Argent Hotel, Hilton San Francisco, Crowne Plaza Union Square and Mark Hopkins Inter-Continental — employ about 1,400 union members.
Another 2,600 workers at the remaining 10 hotels are likely to be locked out from their jobs starting tomorrow, said union president Mike Casey.
"People go out on strike out of respect. They have been abused, they have been mistreated and they have been taken for granted. They want respect," Casey said at a news conference where eight members of the city's Board of Supervisors said they supported the strike.
Talks between Local 2 and the San Francisco Multi-Employer Group broke down Sept. 15 over the union's demand for a two-year contract that would expire when hotel workers in other major cities, including New York, Chicago and Boston, are set to renegotiate their labor pacts.
Meanwhile, hotel workers in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., who also have been working without contracts have authorized their unions to call strikes, but so far San Francisco is the only city in which the ongoing labor disputes have reached that step.
Local 2 maintains it needs to bargain together with other unions in 2006 to be able to stand up to the corporations that increasingly are taking ownership of hotels.
But the employers' group wants a five-year contract instead of a shortened agreement that might end up getting tied to the labor and economic conditions elsewhere.
"Nobody wants to turn around in 18 months and renegotiate," said Cornell Fowler, a SFMEG spokesman. "This is about stability, for the hotels and the workers."
Other sticking points include proposed increases in the amount workers pay for health insurance and what the union describes as the unfairly heavy workloads hotel support staffs have shouldered since the Sept. 11 attacks led to a downturn in travel and industry layoffs.
The strike comes at a time when the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau reports that travelers seem to be coming back to the city after the devastating double-hit local tourism took after the collapse of the dot-com industry and Sept. 11.
