By Emil McLeod
As of September 1st, approximately 10,000 hotel workers went on strike across twenty-five monopoly hotels in nine major U.S. cities. This strike comes in the wake of a breakdown in contract negotiations between Unite Here, a union representing workers in the hospitality, gaming, food service, manufacturing, textile, distribution, laundry, transportation, and airport industries, and three monopoly hotel chains: Hyatt, Hilton, and Mariott. In discussing the reasons for the strike, workers cited three main reasons: low wages, a high and often increasing workload, and a reduction in hours.
Unite Here has declared that the strike is to last for only three days beginning on September 1st. Currently, most of the 10,000 workers have already returned to work as of September 4th. However, approximately 700 workers at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront are continuing to strike, defying the union bureaucracy’s attempt to limit the strike’s fighting capacity by imposing a strike deadline. The workers plan to continue their strike until there is a contract agreement.
Striking workers have maintained that the current wages they receive are not enough to provide for them and their families’ basic needs. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the hospitality industry is defined as encompassing businesses that provide food, lodging, entertainment, and customer service. Workers in these industries are averaging 25.3 hours per week, with average hourly earnings of $22.12 per hour and 58% of workers in hospitality being women. As with most industries dominated by women workers, poor conditions, overwork, and low wages are prevalent as a part of the double oppression that women face in capitalist society.
Like many other industries, the hospitality industry has kept in place many of the supposedly temporary measures instituted during Covid to discipline labor, in an attempt to offset falling profits caused by the ongoing economic depression—measures including understaffing, the temporary or permanent closing of auxiliary hotel amenities such as fitness centers, restaurants, and common workspaces, and the retention of guest opt-outs for room cleaning, forming the excuse for layoffs while increasing the work tempo of those workers who remain, who now have to clean more, and faster, compared to the past practices of daily cleaning. Permanent understaffing is a tactic utilized by capitalists across all industries in order to increase the speedup of work and lower the costs of variable capital. Workers on strike cite overwork as the primary cause of health concerns and workplace injuries.
Because of the limitation of the strike imposed on the workers by Unite Here, the monopoly hotels have been able to remain open, operating with a skeleton crew, further vindicating the demands of the striking workers regarding hours, wages, and staffing.
