Hotel Workers Rising in Sacramento

The UNITE HERE Local 49 “Hotel Workers Rising” campaign, to gain better union contracts for hotel employees in Sacramento, has been escalating this fall. In support, a coalition of local clergy, community leaders, elected officials and even some small businessmen have been sending delegations to meet with the management of the Sheraton Grand Hotel to urge better health care and working conditions for their employees.

The Stonewall Democratic Club sponsored a community support event, featuring Cleve Jones, national founder of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Jones is spearheading a national campaign called “Sleep With the Right People” http://www.sleepwiththerightpeople.org.

The Sheraton Grand is the largest and newest of the five union hotels in Sacramento. Negotiations have been underway for several months. Workers have been doing informational leafleting outside the hotel.
At a Sacramento community meeting in August, hotel workers described the physical drudgery and speed-up that they endure. Christine Troughton, a cook at the Sheraton Grand, told of lifting heavy pots and 50-pound sacks of onions or potatoes. She needs surgery and therapy for her shoulders, but can’t afford it,
so she takes Tylenol or Motrin to keep going. “I have to get my paycheck to pay my bills, so I keep
working through the pain,” Troughton said.

Eva Tuaga, who has a sick husband, has worked for 16 years as a hotel maid, earning $8.50 an hour. She pays $156 every two weeks for health insurance. In an 8-hour shift she is required to clean 16 messy rooms, including making two luxury beds with heavy mattresses, thick covers and several pillows in each room. “Many people clock out at the end of the day and then go back to finish their
rooms on their own time,” Tuaga told the audience.

UNITE HERE labor contracts, expiring across the US this year, provide a key opportunity to raise workers’ living standards.

In San Francisco, UNITE HERE Local 2 has just won a contract struggle with 13 of the city’s largest hotel
corporations. In addition to gains in health care, wages, pensions and workload protections, the five-year contract gives workers the right to remain union when a hotel changes hands. In Chicago, hotel workers have ratified a new contract with the Hilton Hotels, raising wages nearly 21 percent and cutting workloads.
In both cities, the unions will now call on other major hotels to sign similar agreements.

Half of the recent increase in US service jobs is in hotel maintenance, in hotels owned by large national and
international companies. Most hotel workers are women and people of color, and many are immigrants.

The hotel workers’ struggle requires them to confront international companies on a national level.

Vivian Rothstein, deputy director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, spoke at the Sacramento
community meeting in August. “All of us need an economic and social justice movement,” Rothstein said.

Through the process of confronting poverty, clergy and communities can strengthen their own organizations, while helping to rebuild the labor movement, she added.

“The “Hotel Workers Rising” campaign is fundamentally about raising the working poor out of poverty,” said
Sherry Chiesa, UNITE HERE international vice president. “What the auto workers union did in the private sector in the last century is what we have to do for the service sector now,” she said.

Seeking higher wages and lower workloads “Many people clock out at the end of the day and then go back to finish their rooms on their own time.” Eva Tuaga, hotel maid at the Sheraton Grand.

Gail Ryall is a long-time labor activist, and a delegate to the Sacramento Central Labor Council from the California Capital Chapter of the Coalition of Labor Union Women. For more information about the “Hotel Workers Rising” campaign in Sacramento, contact UNITE HERE Local 49 at (916) 564-4949 or Josh Eidelson at jeidelson [at] unitehere.org

This article is reprinted with permission from November/December edition of Because People Matter, a local alternative magazine. Visit http://www.bpmnews.org for more local news.