Nov 3: Peace Movement & Labor Unite to Shut Down Scab Hotels

The hotels are getting ready to hire permanent replacement workers. The temps they want to keep will get those jobs, and then they will hire others. The strikers will be out of a job, out of a contract, and out of luck. The hotels will have de-unionized. It's really too bad that SEIU pushed this hard. I'm not taking sides, just reporting what I read and hear.

the hotels will never get peace if they fire all the workers and replace them with scabs.

never.

Sure they will. IF they hire permanent replacements, that means that the unionized, former employees are OUT of a job. Not on strike, not locked out, but unempmloyed. And the hotels do NOT have to negotiate with the union at all. You may think that SEIU can afford to staff pickets at 14 hotels in this city forever, but they tried it on Marriott for years and years. Marriott eventually signed with the union, but times have changed. Fights get very old when no end is in sight. And, unfortunately, for the unemployed, their need to find a job and support their families will take precedence over picketing. Check your history.

leo writes:

"Check your history."

I did. And found out that in the 1980 hotel workers' strike, in a few incidents picketers expressed their class consciousness by beating the shit out of scabs. It's an age-old tradition. My grandparents and great-grandparents did it. We should be doing it again now too.

Leo, you might be basing your version of history on your high school civics textbook. Mine isn't; it's informed by the accounts of the working class people who lived through those histories, not by some academic apologist for capitalism. I reread about the Toledo Autolite strike in the spring of 1934--I know, I know, it's a long time ago, but you mentioned "history"--that led to a citywide general strike. What made that struggle successful was that the Lucas County Unemployed League joined the strikers on the picket lines. Despite court injunctions, the unemployed joined with striking workers in blockading plant gates, fighting hand to hand with the National Guard--later taking up firearms too--and helped make the strike and resulting general strike and overwhelming victory for the working class.

So no, leo, unemployed people are not always strikebreakers. Sometimes, after giving their solidarity on the picket lines they got working class solidarity in occupying relief offices and were able to immediately receive benifits, either in food, money or housing.

It's all about solidarity and fighting in unity as a class. That why we all should be out there fighting with the hotel workers--as well as acting in solidarity with homeless and unemployed folks so that they get their basic human needs met too.

gifford

During the depression of the 1930s, other jobless groups like the Unemployed Citizens League and Unemployed Councils were based on self-activity of the working class and were able to exert their power in things like preventing evictions and providing for people's basic subsistence needs. Informally organized groups also engaged in massive coal bootlegging and were able to steal around $45 million worth of coal alone in 1934.

Our movement today will be more powerful if we can do similar acts of solidarity in helping homeless and unemployed folks get their needs fulfilled. Newsome is cutting GA benefits, while the hotel managers are cutting wages and benefits. These struggles could be linked and the unemployed workers would no longer be potential scabs.

gifford

The 4,000 locked out workers are members of Local 2 of UNITE-HERE, which as the union's website states: "UNITE
formerly the Union of Needletrades, Textiles and Industrial Employees) and HERE (Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union) merged on July 8,2004 forming UNITE HERE. The union represents more than 440,000 active members and more than 400,000 retirees throughout North America."

See: http://www.unitehere.org/about/
The long history of one of the largest unions in San Francisco, founded in 1891, is also at the above website. The San Francisco culinary trades (the HERE section) were in separate craft unions (cooks were Local 44, for example) until 1970 or so, when they all consolidated as Local 2 of HERE.

SEIU (Service Employees Internatoinal Union) in this area organizes the county employees (SEIU 790 for San Francisco City & County) and hospital workers (SEIU 250). There are many other SEIU locals.

It is Local 2 of UNITE-HERE that is being locked out of 14 of the 60 hotels they have organized in San Francisco. We have hundreds of hotels here so there is much organizing to be done. HERE also organizes restaurants in San Francisco, but most San Francisco restaurants are non-union, and that should change too.

It was the 1934 General Strikes in San Francisco, Minneapolis and Toledo that not only made these cities union towns but also made possible the long over due 1935 Wagner Act, guaranteeing our right to join unions and the 1935 laws that established unemployment insurance and Social Security.

The German workingclass, under the reactionary Bismarck in the 1870s, won not only unemployment insurance and Social Security, but also national healthcare, which the United States still does not have. While the European workingclass has more centuries of struggle, which has made possible national healthcare in the entire industrialized world except the US, it has been on the political agenda for so long that it is inexcusable to have no national healthcare system.

Every labor dispute for the past 10-20 years has been over healthcare yet no serious effort is made in Congress to pass a national healthcare bill, guaranteeing free medical and dental care to everyone who demands it, all paid for with our income tax, because both the Democrats and Republicans put guns before butter as they are capitalist parties. Thus, it is the war budget that makes impossible national healthcare and any advances for the workingclass.

Neither the labor movement nor the peace movemen can advance without a stronger labor movement. Our peace movement of the 1950s and 1960s succeeded on the basis of the relative prosperity made possible by the labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s.

Now, as labor's anthem, Solidarity Forever, states, "we stand outcast and starving amidst the wonders we have made, but the union makes us strong!"

A rebirth of the labor movement will make possible peace and prosperity, guaranteeing a national healthcare system and much more.

I have also heard stories in my family of what it took to organize labor unions in the 1930s. People sat in the doorways of businesses they were organizing to prevent scabs from entering. Unemployment was rampant in the 1930s yet only a minority were scabs. The lowest of the low are scabs and cops.

There are few scabs and few guests at these scab hotels. The cancellations are increasing, including the latest being the American Anthropological Association. Whether a group is pro-labor or not, they do not want to be staying in a hotel where there is a labor dispute. At the very least, the group is liable for any problems their members may experience.

It will not take much to shut down the scab hotels. If that does not bring the national corporations now running these hotels to sign the union contract, a citywide general strike of just one day should do it.

The unity of the peace and labor movements is necessary and imminent. The organizations of both work together on most issues and we need each other now more than ever.

These are both the worst of times and the best of times. We are now in a labor era and that means fundamental change will occur. We owe it to the young people who must have a future to do everything we can to build a labor movement and put an end to war. We tried in the 20th century; we are going to do it right in the 21st century.

We must win and we can win. Join Local 2's picketline now!
Solidarity forever!

Join the picketlines on Nov. 3rd by coming out earlier for the Healthcare Not Warfare action. Meet at 9 a.m. at Justin Herman Plaza, march past a number of hotels for picket support and eventually converge on the Federal Building at 12 noon.

You can site the 1930s and the 1980s all you want. You can issue threats to "scabs" that they will be beaten. That's a bad move. Have you seen the security in these hotels? International corporations have plenty of money to hire very nasty "security" types. Anyway, theatening to commit felonies is no way to settle this. Your looking back at the past is no guide for this or any future actions. The country is very different whether you like it or not. Unions are 8% of non govt labor and getting smaller. There are plenty of unemployed or underemployed people out there now making $8.50 an hour who would take these jobs in a second. Why would they pass up a chance to make $15 an hr ($600 a week, with even crappy benefits. It's better than they have now. You can carry on all you want about "class struggle" and "labor solidarity" and all the other cliches, but those jobs will still be replaced with non union, permanent workers. I'm not taking sides. I am not anti-labor. But I can see the way the country is going and it's not going to be looking good for unions, especially in a second Bush administration when he's through with the NLRB.

leo, it's not about unions. It's about human dignity. If you take another working person's job--especially during a labor dispute like a strike or lockout--you are a lowly little SCAB. It was true at the birth of capitalism almost 2 centuries ago and it will be true until we otherthrow capitalism, however long that takes.

leo, obviously either you don't give a fuck or your a troll/provocateur on this website. Let me make this clear, nothing is too severe or felonious for a scab. There was time when striking was illegal and workers did it anyway. If I catch you scabbing on my sisters and brothers who are locked out--with your lame fantasies about making the big bucks of $16 an hour, instead of $8.50--you won't be around to regret your role in driving that whopping $16 down to nothing. Driving down wages is the end result of being a scab.

If you really did steal another person's job, felonious acts on your person would be too nice. If it wasn't me, lots of other would be happy to assist your visit to the hospital.
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gifford