Hyatt Hotel protests, Penny Pritzker, Obama and Chicago schools.

“I don’t know how they can treat people like that,’’ said Lucine Williams, who lost her job at the Hyatt Regency Boston. (Barry Chin/ Globe Staff)

A few weeks ago, the Hyatt Hotel chain laid off almost 100 of its house keeping staff at three Boston hotels, replacing them with outsourced non-union workers. The resulting protest has taken many by surprise.

On Friday Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick  called the Chicago-based chain’s chief executive, Mark Hoplamazian, to ask him to reconsider the decision to outsource that work.

Today, the union officials at the Boston Taxi Drivers Association said they faxed a letter to the Hyatt yesterday saying taxi drivers would boycott the Hyatt, refusing to service the hotels Boston locations, unless the housekeepers the chain fired last month were rehired.

The union represents 1,700 taxi drivers.

The Boston Globe:

Similarly, the Eastern Sociological Society, a group of sociology professionals and scholars, said it would withdraw its business unless the chain reconsidered its actions.

The moves by the groups are a response to Hyatt’s firing of 98 hotel workers — many 20-plus year employees of the corporation — earlier on Aug. 31, and replacing them with workers from a Georgia-based staffing company. In a front page story in the Globe on Sept. 17, the housekeepers claimed that they had to train their replacements and told that the staffing agency workers were only vacation replacements. The former staff housekeepers at the center of the Hyatt controversy — mostly minority women — made about $15 an hour or $26,000 a year.

Meanwhile  Patrick said Wednesday he has instructed state employees to stop doing business with Hyatt hotels until it rehires 100 housekeepers.

The Chicago schools-Obama connection to this story?

The Hyatt chain is owned by the Pritzker family. Among them is Penny Pritzker. Penny Pritzker was head of  Obama’s campaign fund raising orgnization. She is a leading force in the so-called Chicago Rennaissance 2010 scheme to close, and ironically, outsource and privatize Chicago’s public schools.

Today hundreds of union hospitality workers in Chicago were arrested and hundreds more protested in front of the swanky Park Hyatt across from the Water Tower.

See the local ABC story here.

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