Labor & Employment Law

Hotel Workers Tell Bank: ?We Saved Your Jobs, Now You Save Ours?

By James Parks

Taxpayers bailed out Bank of America to the tune of $45 billion. Now, it?s time for the Big Bank to return the favor by saving the jobs of more than 1,500 hotel workers.

The Columbia-Sussex hotel chain’s $1.1 billion loan from Bank of America is in potential trouble. If the company is forced into default, the workers would be out on the streets.

Karl Taylor, a member of UNITE HERE! Local 7, who has worked at the Sheraton Baltimore City Center for 11 years, says

It?s been a rough few years with all the cuts from Columbia Sussex, but now I just hope Bank of America saves my job.

Late this afternoon, hundreds of Columbia-Sussex employees and supporters braved the rain to rally outside a Bank of America branch in Washington, D.C., to back Taylor and his co-workers. Standing by the BOA building, which is in the shadows of  the U.S. Treasury Department, they told the bankers whose jobs they rescued with their taxes to ?Save Our Jobs.? They want Bank of America to protect their jobs regardless of how their employers? debt is ultimately worked out.

?What our country needs and what the community needs is jobs,? AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker told the crowd.

Wall Street must fix this economic crisis by helping to create the jobs they destroyed. Now Bank of America has a real opportunity to save the jobs of Columbia Sussex hotel workers.  We call on them to do the right thing?and give the working families who helped to bail them out?a fighting chance.

In recent years, workers at the Sheraton Baltimore City Center?one of the 14 hotels that Columbia Sussex purchased with the loan?have been hit with layoffs, benefit reductions, pay freezes and work speed-ups.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on August 18, 2010 (boomark / email).