No IEA RA at the Hyatt Regency.
Hyatt owner Penny Pritzker.
I posted yesterday that the union representing the workers at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare was asking for a boycott. I’m running as a delegate, but will not attend if the meeting is held at that hotel.
Union contracts covering Hyatt O’Hare workers and approximately 8,000 other Chicago-area hotel workers expired on August 31, 2009. On July 29, 2010, hundreds of Hyatt O’Hare workers, who are members of UNITE HERE Local 450, and UNITE HERE Local 1 members at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, Park Hyatt, Hyatt McCormick Place, voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike, with 92% voting in favor of striking. The vote represents a major escalation of a citywide labor dispute among Chicago’s downtown hotels and with Hyatt in particular, which has become the target of labor demonstrations across North America in recent weeks.
“Life has been hard for me and my family, ever since Hyatt laid off my husband in the laundry,” says Carmen Sandoval, a UNITE HERE Local 450 member and room attendant of 30 years at the Hyatt O’Hare outside Chicago, where union contracts expired over a year ago. “Now they have us working harder and faster with fewer people, and people are getting injured. I have to take Tylenol everyday just to get through my shift. I am on strike because I’m tired of billionaires profiting from our pain.”
Hotel workers have endured months of chronic understaffing and excessive injury rates. Now Hyatt wants to take more away and lock workers into recession contracts even as the economy rebounds. While many hotel workers live in poverty, the Pritzker Family cashed out over $900 million in their sale of Hyatt shares in November 2009. The most prominent member of the Pritzker Family is Penny Pritzker, the former national finance for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, who now serves on the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB).
Frankly, I have no doubts that the leadership of the IEA would never ask members to cross a picket line to attend a union convention at a hotel where union workers are on strike.
And I have heard from those who know things that the IEA leadership is looking for a back up meeting space.
I think it is somewhat sad that our leadership has said nothing publically. A public statement of our intention to move to a more labor friendly meeting place now would be a strong statement to Hyatt management.
But in the mean time I would encourage IEA members and potential RA delegates to contact both the Hyatt management, Unite Here and the IEA leadership to express support for Hyatt workers.
