Marriot Hotel Workers Strike Spreads to Hawaii - 9 Oct 2018

 

Marriott hotel workers strike spreads to Hawaii

9 October 2018

More than 2,700 hotel workers in Honolulu and Maui walked off the job on Monday, joining Marriott workers who began striking last week in the San Francisco area. Nationwide, 7,700 workers from 23 hotels are now on strike in eight cities. Strikes are ongoing in Boston, San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, San Diego and Detroit.

Workers picketed five Marriott hotels in Hawaii: Sheraton Waikiki, Royal Hawaiian, Sheraton Princess Kaiulani, Westin Moana Surfrider and Sheraton Maui. About 95 percent of the 3,500 workers in Local 5 authorized a strike last month. However, workers at Waikiki Beach Marriott and the Sheraton Kauai, who voted to strike, were still working on Monday morning.

The owners of the Hawaiian hotels, Kyo-ya Hotels & Resorts, issued a statement the same morning stating the company has “implemented contingency plans” to continue operating the five hotels on strike while adding “there have been some adjustments to staffing levels and services being offered at our properties.”

The strike in Hawaii comes after months of negotiations over job security, improved wages and work overloads. Workers also want a say in how new technological changes can improve working conditions rather than lead to the elimination of jobs.

Jenny Johnson, a dinner cook at Sheraton Waikiki for the last seven years, told Hawaii News Now, “We’re asking for one job to be enough,” adding, “We want a fair contract so that our members can work and afford to put food on their table and still be able to sit down and enjoy their dinner with their families.”

In a news release, the president of UNITE, Donald Taylor, declared that “UNITE-HERE union members are going to change the lives of all workers in our industry.”  Hotel workers in Chicago have been scraping by with $300 to $400 a week in strike pay. Hotel workers in Detroit, who began their strike Sunday morning, are not currently receiving strike pay.

Taylor and the top executives at UNITE-HERE receive six-figure annual salaries, with Taylor alone making $315,000, more than ten times what hotel workers make on average. Union workers also have to pay almost $700 a year in dues.

Now that workers in Hawaii have joined the growing national hotel strike, it is critical that workers break from the isolation and appeal to trade union workers and others to honor picket lines and refuse to work or deliver anything to the struck hotels.

Nothing can be won through isolated, individual strikes.  Making lots of noise at the front of the hotel while deliveries are quietly made to the back and side doors is not an effective strike tactic.  Taking pickets from one hotel and combining them with pickets at another hotel to make a large raucous crowd may build a little spirit, but hotels that are on strike should have pickets at every entrance and exit.  Strike leaders seem to think that creating loud publicity is the way to win strikes.

http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/39017093/thousands-of-hawaii-hotel-workers-protest-for-better-wages/