Author Archives for Ann Kammerer

CBS News: Marriott Hotel Strike leads to Mass Employee Walkouts

CBS News: Marriott hotel strike leads to mass employee walkouts

October 9, 2018 2:59 pm Published by Leave a comment

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Thousands of hotel workers in eight U.S. cities say they’ll remain off the job until a new contract is reached with Marriott International. About 7,700 employees of the world’s largest hotel chain are now walking picket lines in Boston, Detroit, Oakland, San Diego, San Francisco and San Jose, as well as two cities in Hawaii.

Watch “Marriott hotel strike leads to mass employee walkouts” on CBS News’ Moneywatch https://www.cbsnews.com/news/marriott-hotel-strike-leads-to-mass-employee-walkouts/

CBS News: Marriott Hotel Strike leads to Mass Employee Walkouts

A striker smiles outside Marriott's Westin Book Cadillac in Detroit

Crain’s Detroit Business: Westin Book Cadillac Detroit hotel workers go on strike

October 7, 2018 10:04 am Published by Leave a comment

Read the full story by Annalise Frank in Crain’s Detroit Business

A striker smiles outside Marriott's Westin Book Cadillac in DetroitWorkers at the Westin Book Cadillac hotel in downtown Detroit went on strike early Sunday morning.

Housekeepers, servers, door attendants and cooks represented by Detroit-based hospitality union Unite Here Local 24 walked off the job and joined a picket line, with higher wages among their demands.

Union contracts with Local 24 expired June 30. Ninety-eight percent of the approximately 160 workers represented by the union at the Westin Book Cadillac Detroit voted in September to authorize a strike.

Click here to read “Westin Book Cadillac Detroit hotel workers go on strike” by Annalise Frank in Crain’s Detroit Business.

UNITE HERE Remembers and Honors those Lost on September 11

September 11, 2018 8:42 am Published by Leave a comment

commemOn the 17th anniversary of September 11, 2001, UNITE HERE remembers all those who lost their lives on that tragic day. We hold especially close the memory of our 43 sisters and brothers from UNITE HERE Local 100 who died while working at Windows on the World, a restaurant located at the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

In memory of our fallen brothers and sisters at Windows on the World:

  • Sophia Buruwa Addo
  • Shabbir Ahmed
  • Antonio J. Alvarez
  • Telmo Alvear
  • Manuel O. Asitimbay
  • Samuel Ayala
  • Ivhan Luis Carpio Bautista
  • Jesus Cabezas
  • Manuel Gregorio Chavez
  • Mohammed S. Chowdhury
  • Jose De Pena
  • Nancy Diaz
  • Henry Fernandez
  • Lucille Virgen Francis
  • Enrique A. Gomez
  • Jose B. Gomez
  • Wilder Gomez
  • Ysidro Hidalgo Tejada
  • John Holland
  • Francois Jean-Pierre
  • Eliezer Jimenez Jr.
  • Abdoulaye Kone
  • Victor Kwarkye
  • Jeffrey Latouche
  • Lebardo Lopez
  • Jan Maciejewski
  • Manuel Mejia
  • Antonio Melendez
  • Nana Akwasi Minkah
  • Martin Morales
  • Blanca Morocho
  • Jerome Nedd
  • Juan Nieves Jr.
  • Jose R. Nunez
  • Isidro Ottenwalder
  • Jesus Ovalles
  • Victor Paz Gutierrez
  • Alejo Perez
  • Moises Rivas
  • David B. Rodriguez Vargas
  • Gilbert Ruiz
  • Juan Salas
  • Abdoul Karim Traore

The families and coworkers of those mostly immigrant workers talk about their loss, their dreams, and their challenges in the movie “Windows.”

Local 2 members take action in San Francisco on Labor Day 2018

Huffington Post: Thousands Of Marriott Workers To Vote On Multi-City Strike

September 5, 2018 4:30 pm Published by Leave a comment

Unions in nine cities will be holding strike authorization votes that could lead to work stoppages at the world’s largest hotel chain

Read the whole story at Huffington Post. 
Local 2 members take action in San Francisco on Labor Day 2018

One of the Hawaii workers who plans to vote in favor of striking is Jason Maxwell, a 45-year-old bartender at the Waikiki Beach Marriott Resort & Spa who works a second hotel job to keep up with the high cost of living in Honolulu. As a member of his local union’s organizing committee, Maxwell said he has seen little progress in contract talks.

“That’s the only leverage we have to push this company to give workers what they really deserve,” Maxwell said, referring to the strike threat. “We know these properties do well because of the workers, especially here in Hawaii. The [same] guests come back year after year. They know our names, and we remember their drinks. It’s our labor that’s creating the wealth.”

Story by Dave Jamieson. Read it now at Huffington Post.

United Airlines catering workers pose at the Denver Airport

Bloomberg Businessweek: United Airlines Loses Challenge to Union Drive

August 23, 2018 2:42 pm Published by Leave a comment

Read the whole article by Josh Eidelson in Bloomberg Businessweek by clicking here.

In her ruling Wednesday, NMB General Counsel Mary Johnson wrote that after interviewing employees, the agency’s investigators had determined that “there is no evidence that employees did not understand that Unite Here was a union and was not a representative of United. Almost universally, employees either signed a card out of a desire to support the organization’s campaign, or they declined to sign a card without feeling pressured.” She rejected, however, the union’s request to let it be certified via a count of union cards, rather than secret ballot. The union had based its request on a claim of alleged company misconduct.

Labor United to Free Our Children August 15, 2018

Labor United to Free Our Children

August 12, 2018 1:43 am Published by Leave a comment

Labor United to Free Our Children August 15, 2018

On August 15, hundreds of UNITE HERE members will join thousands of other union members and faith and community allies for a demonstration to call for an end to family separation and detention.

Liberty & Justice For All: Labor United to Free Our Children will be the largest labor-led demonstration on immigration in the nation.

Wednesday, August 15, 2018
4 PM
Penn’s Landing, Philadelphia

The labor movement is committed to liberty and justice for all, regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or income. All working people have the right to be safe and live with dignity.

Click here for more information and to RSVP on Facebook.

United Airlines catering workers at Trenton Poor People's Campaign action

50 Years Ago: King, Memphis, and the Poor People’s Campaign

June 19, 2018 5:07 pm Published by Leave a comment

United Airlines catering workers at Trenton Poor People's Campaign action

Inspired by the 1968 Memphis movement and the Poor People’s campaign, a broad coalition of labor, civil rights, immigrant rights, and faith-based organizations has organized a new Poor People’s campaign and issued “A Call for Moral Revival.”

Read more from BeyondChron.org on the role of union workers in the original Poor People’s Campaign and its renewal today, written by UNITE HERE Local 2850 staff member Marty Bennett.

Huffington Post: The Las Vegas Union That Learned to Beat The House

June 12, 2018 10:05 am Published by Leave a comment

“The union’s success is a ray of hope for unions elsewhere, as state and federal policies become more hostile to organized labor. Previously the domain of the South and West, right-to-work laws have spread rapidly in recent years, even to Midwestern union bastions like Michigan and Wisconsin. They are now on the books in 28 states. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is poised to decide a potential landmark case in Janus v. AFSCME Council 31, which could make the entire U.S. public sector right-to-work and deliver a severe blow to public employee unions.

If unions hope to endure in such an inhospitable climate, they will have to look a lot more like the Culinary.”

Read the full story.

Want To Carry On Martin Luther King Jr.’s Work? Join A Union.

April 9, 2018 11:31 am Published by Leave a comment

via Huffington Post–Fifty years ago this week, Martin Luther King Jr. went to Memphis, Tennessee, to march with the city’s striking black sanitation workers. Wages were bad, and conditions were so unsafe that workers were seriously injured or even killed while using the trash compactors of their trucks. The city of Memphis, their employer, refused to do better; city officials refused to act to improve their wages or safety. So they took matters into their own hands and went on strike, demanding basic dignity and civil rights on the job.

In the final years of his life, King shifted his work to focus on improving work and pay conditions for people regardless of the color of their skin. Half a century after he was assassinated in Memphis following his march with those sanitation workers, the fight for civil rights continues to intersect with the struggle for workers’ rights.

Organizing a union is still one of the most powerful ways for workers of color to win respect at work. I know this because I am organizing a union, and it’s for the same reason the workers in Memphis did: I Am A Man.

I work full time for United Airlines in catering operations at Newark Liberty International Airport. I’m a driver, which means that I drive lift trucks to cater United’s planes. I also unload and dispose of international waste. My co-workers in United’s catering kitchens in Newark, Houston, Denver, Honolulu and Cleveland are overwhelmingly people of color and immigrants, and we do a very important job for United. If we don’t cater the planes, they can’t take off ― but we’ve been left behind. Unlike pilots, flight attendants and ramp workers, catering workers are the only frontline United employees who don’t have a union, but we’re working hard to change that. We know we deserve the equality, safety and respect of a union job.

I grew up in Elizabeth and Plainfield, New Jersey, which are outside of Newark in the New York City metro area — one of the most expensive in the country. United doesn’t pay enough for me and my co-workers to keep up with the cost of living ― some United catering workers earn as little as $10 per hour ― and we have to make hard choices because of that. I live with my mother in a small Elizabeth apartment where the rent is almost half of my monthly pay. When you add that to my other basic expenses, I don’t have much left. I work for an airline that reported $2.1 billion in profits in 2017, and I can’t save. I can’t pay for education. I want to further my options in life, but the low pay I earn at the airport makes that impossible.

Before you ask why I don’t simply find a job that pays more, let me tell you: In my community, there aren’t many options for work outside of the local mall and Newark airport. United is my best option, and it needs to be better. And I’m not alone: There are many young black workers in United’s catering kitchens, and we’re organizing for the security of having a good career — not the low-wage, dead-end jobs that exist now.

By organizing a union, workers of color have a chance to change the lopsided power dynamics in both our company and our country. Today, the higher up you get on the corporate food chain, the fewer people of color you see. But we’re taking the power back and putting it into the people’s hands. That’s how we’ll uplift and empower our communities, and make the space for the youth mentorship programs, better after-school programs and arts programs that we need. It starts with recognizing our value, paying us accordingly and respecting our family time. And, we know it works.

Across the hospitality industry in jobs traditionally held by workers of color, we’ve seen how unionizing has advanced basic human rights. Through collective bargaining, workers have won anti-discrimination language in their contracts, secured groundbreaking health benefits for workers living with HIV and AIDS and enshrined cutting-edge protections against sexual harassment at work. Union housekeepers in several states, including Illinois and California, have won wages of more than twice the national median pay, turning low-wage jobs into real careers. And just a few weeks ago we learned that in New York and New Jersey, airport workers like me are on our way to securing the $19 per hour minimum wage that we’ve been fighting for.

Too often, King’s legacy is twisted to be safe and marketable, but his work was anything but that. Working to advance civil rights in America has never been “safe.” When I was young, I watched footage of dogs attacking people, and of police getting away with brutalizing those taking action for civil rights. I wondered then how they could get away with it, but as I got older I realized that, in many ways, not much had changed. There’s still police brutality. Workers can still be stuck at the bottom, disrespected. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to fight for change. Civil rights and workers’ rights continue to be bound together.

As a kid, I was intrigued by King and Malcolm X. I wanted to learn everything I could about them. I watched movies about why they marched, and now this is my opportunity to do something in King’s footsteps. That’s why I was in Memphis on April 4, along with over 2,000 UNITE HERE union members, to celebrate King’s life and his legacy of solidarity with workers. I was proud to march this week. I’m even more proud to walk the walk at home, as I fight for a union ― for myself, for my co-workers and for my community.

Lindell Lawrence works as a catering operations driver for United Airlines at Newark Liberty International Airport. He lives in Elizabeth, New Jersey.