Thousands of hotel workers with Unite Here Local 2 took to downtown streets over the Labor Day weekend to call for increased wages, better conditions, and an end to pandemic-era staffing cuts.
“We have been without a contract since Aug. 15, when it expired, and they have not wanted to reach an agreement with the union,” said Sandra Marroquin, a housekeeper at the Palace Hotel. Marroquin, 36, said in Spanish that workers are feeling the pressure of a reduced labor force.
“Sometimes they give you more work, and nobody protests because they are afraid that from one day to the next they will fire you,” she said.
The strikes were part of protests held in San Francisco, San Jose, and San Diego, as well as Baltimore, Boston, Seattle, Honolulu, Kauai, and Greenwich, Conn. All told, 26 hotels were affected, with more than 10,000 workers marching, according to the union.
In San Francisco, workers marched at four downtown hotels — the Hilton Union Square, Palace Hotel, Westin St. Francis, and Grand Hyatt San Francisco — as well as the Grand Hyatt at SFO.
Norma Brambila, 55, has worked as a housekeeper at the Hilton Union Square for six years. Marching Sunday afternoon, she said the staffing cuts since the pandemic are obvious.
“The workforce has reduced, I would say, 50%; specifically, my shift — the p.m. shift,” she said, noting that whereas once there were a dozen housekeepers working overnight in the three towers of the city’s largest hotel, there are now five or six.
“We have to travel a lot, and the rooms, because they have been vacant, are dirty for several days,” she said. “Nobody’s cleaning them.”
Organizers said 2,000 to 2,500 workers were on the picket line over the weekend. Because they marched during their normal shift times, it was a 24-hour rotation. (During the midnight-6 a.m. shift, workers marched but didn’t chant.)
Juan Pablo Ramos, 48, has worked at the Westin St. Francis for 16 years. Like Brambila, he says employees have been stretched thin.
“The abuse is a little more marked [now], because they already switch us from one department to another, wanting us to cover, say, three or four areas so that we do the same work without the corresponding payment for the job they want us to do,” he said in Spanish.
The hotel industry’s trade organization, the American Hotel & Lodging Association, reports that hotels lost 680,000 employees during the pandemic and have hired 400,000. A trade-group survey found that two-thirds of hotels had staffing shortages as of January.
“I had a similar experience in the last strike, five years ago, and we achieved it,” Ramos said. “So I don’t see why we can’t make it this time. It happened right here five years ago.”
