Labor & Employment Law

Protestors Demand Fair Deals at Hyatt Hotels

By James Parks

Hundreds of hotel workers and community allies protested in front of Hyatt’s first annual shareholder meeting last week in Chicago and in simultaneous demonstrations in Vancouver, Honolulu, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The protesters are outraged that despite increases in the hotel chain’s revenue and share prices, Hyatt is cutting  staff and squeezing workers with more work and lower pay. All this at a time that Hyatt’s majority stockholders, the Pritzker family, cashed out more than $900 million as part of Hyatt’s initial public offering last November.

Four hundred workers at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco are out on strike and the protests in Chicago come just days after hundreds of workers at the Hyatt Regency Chicago walked off the job to draw attention to the worsening working conditions at Chicago’s largest downtown hotel. In the San Francisco area, more than 9,000 workers, members of UNITE HERE! have been working without a contract since August 2009 at several Hyatts.

In Chicago, a delegation of nearly 100 religious leaders was turned away when they tried to confront Hyatt’s top decision makers at the shareholders meeting. But a former Hyatt housekeeper from Boston gained entrance to the meeting as a shareholder proxy and appealed to Hyatt’s owners and top executives directly.

Lucine Williams, a 21-year worker who took part in the Chicago rally and who was fired along with hundreds of other workers at the Boston Hyatt last year: 

For 21 years, I gave…everything I have to that hotel, and Hyatt kicked us to the curb. You profess to be such a great company, but look at how you treat your workers.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on June 14, 2010 (boomark / email).