Over Labor Day weekend, more than 10,000 hospitality workers for three major hotel chains went on a three day strike. These workers are members of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees and Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union (UNITE-HERE), and they struck at 24 hotels in the Hyatt, Hilton and Marriot chains in nine separate cities, including Baltimore and San Francisco. Although a variety of hotel workers were on the picket line, the majority were housekeepers who do the room cleaning, the vast majority of whom are women of color.
While hotel workers and especially women cleaners have never been highly paid or respected in their work, their situation got worse with the pandemic, when more than a million were laid off nationwide and were then brought back to work only sporadically or at part-time hours. During the pandemic, hotels cut services like daily room cleanings and downsized the workforce and cut hours for those who remained, and have not brought staffing back up to pre-pandemic levels.
But in the past two years, as the hospitality industry has rebounded, the hotels are raking in the money. Their top management is doing particularly well: the CEO of Hilton brought home $26 million last year, the CEO of Marriot $55 million, and the CEO of Hyatt brought in $56 million. That’s not to mention the actual owners of these chains – like Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, whose family owns the Hyatt chain – who are billionaires. These folks are doing great, in large part because they’re now spending less on their workers.
Despite great prosperity for the owners and their top executives, many of their employees have lost full- time pay and sometimes their already meager health coverage. Some employees in the same hotel chain actually make more or less than their fellow workers in other cities. Hilton employees in Baltimore, for example, earn about $10 per hour less than their Hilton counterparts in nearby Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia. In many cases, fewer workers actually means more work for those still working. They say that like most low-wage workers, they are struggling just to make ends meet. The workers deserve better and are right to be mad and right to go out on strike.
But will brief and partial strikes get them what they need? A three-day strike really only amounts to a short-term protest. If their bosses know the strike will end after a few days whether or not they give workers any improvements, what incentive do they have to give workers anything? If the strike doesn’t shut down the operations of an entire hotel chain, then money is still rolling in and the losses from those struck locations can be contained. And in some locals like Baltimore, their unions are only demanding raises to $20 per hour, which would still be below their counterparts in nearby cities. And why were only 10,000 workers brought out on strike? Each hotel chain employs far more than that in the U.S. alone. And UNITE-HERE has about 250,000 members in North America. Yet they only led about 10,000 into a strike, and a limited one at that! Why not bring out all 250,000 members and fight to win?
With tactics like partial membership strikes and three-day strikes, unions and workers may occasionally show some symbolic fight, but they will never win the things they really need. When workers in the same union don’t all stop work and picket in a strike situation, it is hard or maybe impossible to make even small gains.
If we really want to win any gains, or make even more significant changes, we will need to do more than partial and limited strikes. A real strike would mean all union members participating in a strike, with the goal being to win the major demands outright. It would mean being prepared to strike for weeks, perhaps longer. And it would mean bringing in the larger working class in support, so that individual unions, even big ones, wouldn’t be isolated from the larger class of which they are a part.
Only when workers and their unions begin to organize larger and more committed fights will working people be able to defeat their bosses and win some real gains. Then and only then will real change be on the table.
