Grand Hyatt Watch: Round One goes to ‘Housekeepers’

[Omaha Steve]

http://sacurrent.com/blog/queblog.asp?perm=70265


Gabe: going up? Unite Here is back on the job in San Anto.

Greg Harman
[e-mail]

Employees at the Grand Hyatt San Antonio will soon find a new notice posted on backroom walls of the downtown hotel, thanks to a settlement between the hotel, the U.S. National Labor Relations Board, and the ambitious service-industry union Unite Here.

To give you a taste of the substance of the two-page flyer, it opens:

FEDERAL LAW GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO
Form, join or assist a union;
Choose representatives to bargain with us on your behalf,
Act together with other employees for your benefit and protection;
Choose not to engage in any of these protected activities.

WE WILL NOT do anything to Interfere with those rights.


That last line may represent a change in behavior for the company, which current and former employees in San Antonio and elsewhere accuse of using intimidation tactics, including firings and threats of surveillance, to keep staff from organizing for collective bargaining power.

Unite Here union member Gabriel Morales, a UTSA student of political science and philosophy who was fired by the Hyatt last September, received a $5,385 check and invitation to return to work as an in-room dining server as part of that settlement. Monday was his first day back on the job. Fellow union member and Hyatt pastry chef Greg Fox even baked him a cake (right).

Another employee who chose not to return to work bagged a $12,500 check from the Hyatt. Both payments were for back pay, according to National Labor Relations Board documents.

The NLRB took up Unite Here’s case by filing a complaint against the hotel in January, alleging union intimidation, interrogations, and threats of surveillance. But before the March 22 court date arrived, in which Grand Hyatt officials were to stand before the NLRB’s administrative law judge, company officials blinked, and the three parties went to work on a settlement.



FULL story at link.

[SocialistLez]

1. Interesting

I really wish Wal-Mart workers would try to unionize.

I know Canadian Wal-Mart workers tried and the Supreme Court there fu**ed them over.

There was a store in Searcy, AR that tried to form a union and Sam Walton threatened to close the store and fired all the workers who would tried to start the union.

[lib2DaBone]

2. Hedge Funds, asset strippers like G.H.W. Bush and the Carlysle Corporation..

.. have taken over control of most of the hotel chains in the U.S.

Their goal? Pay the least possible wages to the workers and charge the highest room rates to the public. Trickle-down rigged-Republican capitalism at its best. (there is no such thing as a "level" playing field.)

These places are hell-holes to work in...I know.. I have worked in them..

I hope these workers get EVERY thing they have fought for, and more...