by David Duhalde and Paul Garver
On a blistering cold Tuesday noon, nearly 100 workers and allies gathered outside of the Cambridge Hyatt on the shore of the Charles River. The picketers represented the core of a united democratic opposition in the USA, including half a dozen DSA members, hard hats from the activist Carpenters Local 40, drum-beating leaders of faith and their parishioners, Jobs with Justice student interns, elected labor leaders and a Cambridge city councilor, and–most importantly –many Hyatt workers. Despite its current dispute with UNITE-HERE, an elected SEIU official came to show solidarity as well.
On August 31 Hyatt fired the entire housekeeping departments of itsthree Boston area Regency Hotels, replacing them with temporary workers through a subcontractor. Many of the fired housekeepers had worked at the hotels for over 20 years. Replacement workers report that they are being paid the state minimum wage of $8 an hour (about half of what the Hyatt employees made), with no health insurance and a larger workload. Some workers at the three hotels had been directed in previous months to train the subcontractor’s employees. When these workers asked their supervisors whether they were going to be replaced by subcontractors, the supervisors denied that this would happen.
Hyatt made over $1.3 billion in profit between 2004 and 2008. According to documents filed with the SEC as of early August, the company had over $1.2 billion in cash and cash equivalents.
The Hyatt 100 have been running an aggressive boycott campaign that has so far convinced over $2 million in business to move from the three Boston Hyatts. None of the Hyatt workers collaborating with UNITE-HERE had a collective bargaining representation with the union. In this case organized labor is dedicating itself to struggle for the rights of both its members and of non-union workers–not just by winning elections and contracts, but by standing against injustice against the working class. If Scott Brown’s victory has put nails in EFCA’s coffin, then it’s more vital than ever for unions to begin acting more like a social movement and less like a bureaucracy. When workers (blue collar and not) see unions winning battles in the interest of all, the popularity of organizing can and will return. But unions, like UNITE-HERE, need allies in the streets to put pressure on corporate crooks like Hyatt in order for this strategy to succeed. It’s up to all of us.
Picketing Boston DSA member David Knuttunen is not a member of the traditional working class, but belongs to the Boston Association of Structural Engineers (BASE), which is essentially a small-business association of engineering firms. David points out that small engineering firms and other small businesses are suffering as finance capital, which caused the current crisis, escapes from its consequences by shifting the costs onto other economic actors.
David Duhalde believes that the generality of the crisis itself creates opportunities for building broad political alliances against the depredations of the likes of the Bank of America and Hyatt Regency, and that all reflective citizens should work with organized labor and social movements like Jobs with Justice in building resistance.
Filed under: Busting the union busters, Economy, Employee Free Choice Act, Low wage workers, Organizing, Politics, Solidarity, Strikes and work action, Uncategorized Tagged: | Democratic Socialists of America, DSA, Employee Free Choice Act, Hyatt, SEIU, Unite Here
The authors rendered the anecdotes I shared with them a bit too telegraphically, IMHO. At A recent BASE meeting, an engineer was telling of a recent conversation with a real estate developer (read “money guy”), in which the developer told him that engineering firms “should not expect to see” the size of fees they had been receiving before the economic meltdown. “Those fees are never coming back again,” he was told. This means engineering firms must either do less (inconsistent with a regulatory climate that is constantly requiring us to take on more legal responsibility), or firms must learn to “outsource” work to India (employing fewer domestic engineers), or engineering salaries must be reduced. In another anecdote, a client and I recently met in a local coffee shop, in which the chatty proprieter was telling us about how slow business had been, how other friends of his, also small business proprieters, were hurting, too, and how “those figures don’t show up in the unemployment” – i.e., he realized clearly that the “official” unemployment statistics were WAY too low as a reflection of how badly the economy is really doing.
The message that I take from this is that big capital, particularly finance capital, is in a drive to proletarianize even those portions of the middle class they have historically made their allies – and the newly proletarianized are becoming aware of it! This provides opportunity to the labor movement (and for socialists), if we are wise enough to take advantage of it, and reach out to the whole community for support for our demands.
David Kn.