Around 1,500 local hotel workers began a strike on Sunday, hoping to extract concessions from three Union Square hotels.
Unite Here Local 2, the union chapter representing the workers, says they've been in contract negotiations with the Grand Hyatt San Francisco Union Square, Hilton San Francisco Union Square and Westin St. Francis hotels for months, to no avail. Today's events come after a larger Labor Day walkout, and the expiry of the workers's contracts in mid-August. Negotiations between the larger union and the major hotel chains are also still mostly unresolved, meaning over 10,000 hotel workers across the country could be primed to walk off the job at any moment.
At issue are things like healthcare, staffing cuts that have resulted in higher individual workloads, fair pay, irregular hours stemming from hotels rendering certain guest services optional, healthcare, and pensions. The union claims that many workers are forced to work second or third jobs to make ends meet, despite the hotel industry as a whole apparently making $100 billion in gross profits for fiscal year 2022.
“Hotel workers aren’t giving up, because we’re fighting for our families,” said Gwen Mills, International President of Unite Here in a statement. “Hotels and hotel workers all suffered during the pandemic, but now the hotel industry is making record profits. These huge hotel corporations can afford to reverse COVID-era cuts and give us wages that are enough to live on, health care that’s affordable, and workloads that don’t break your body.”
The three hotels all told The San Francisco Chronicle that they plan on performing business as usual during the strike, and that they remain optimistic that negotiations will be fruitful for both sides.
This is the second strike in San Francisco to occur this week, after musicians for the San Francisco Symphony Chorus began a walkout that led to abrupt show cancellations.
The frequency and scale of strikes on the whole have seen a resurgence across the country since 2023, marking a stark reversal to previous trends in collective bargaining in the post-Ronald Reagan era, whose administration is now notorious for its intensely anti-labor, pro-business agenda. Researchers for New York City's university system, the City University of New York, attribute this rise in union activity to the combination of high inflation and growing income inequality since the 2020 pandemic, and believe that they ultimately lead to positive effects.
"Overall, we have such an imbalance of power and income right now, anything that shifts that balance in the direction of more equality is positive, both economically and socially for the country," said Joshua B. Freeman, an author and professor of history who has studied labor movements since the 1980s.
