Thousands March in Solidarity with Fired Boston Hotel Workers

By Noelle Williams

Over the past two weeks, thousands of hotel workers have protested in more than a dozen cities around the country in solidarity with the “Hyatt 100,” housekeepers formerly employed by three Hyatt hotels in the Boston area. In September, Hyatt fired the 98 workers—all women except for one man—and replaced them with lower-paid housekeepers from an outsourcing agency.

In a letter to Hyatt CEO Mark Hoplamazian, Gov. Deval L. Patrick of Massachusetts called the firings “the worst nightmare of every worker in today’s weak economy” and urged state workers to boycott Hyatt hotels until the Hyatt 100 are reinstated.

Many of the Hyatt housekeepers had worked for the company for more than 10 years, some for more than 20. They were actually asked to train the new workers, under the false impression that the new staff would fill in on vacations and sick days. Instead, Hyatt fired the veteran staff, who were making $14 to $16 dollars an hour with benefits, and hired the newly trained workers, paying them minimum wage without health care benefits. The hotel chain subsequently offered the fired workers new jobs with the outsourcing agency, but would only match their former pay through 2010 and health care coverage through March 2010. Only six took the offer.

Luce Aquino, one of the Hyatt 100, says she voiced her frustration to her supervisor when she was asked to train two new workers. “Don’t worry about it,” she says he told her, promising she’d never have to train someone again. “Of course,” Aquino says in hindsight. “Because he was going to fire everyone.”

The company cited financial woes as the reason for the mass firings and called the cost-cutting measures “necessary.” But the workers aren’t convinced. In August, Hyatt announced plans to go public, and the company raised $950 million from its initial public offering in the first week of November.

Unite Here, a union that represents hotel workers in the U.S. and Canada, the majority of whom are women, organized protests across North America in solidarity with the fired workers, beginning with a march in Toronto. Protests extended to Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Indianapolis, San Antonio, San Diego, Philadelphia, Vancouver, B.C. and Santa Clara, Calif.

Yet the Hyatt shows no signs of budging. Its attitude mirrors a larger disregard for the work of housekeeping in general, says Annemarie Strassel of Unite Here, who describes housekeeper’s work as “largely invisible,” despite the job’s extreme physical demands. “[These women] really give their bodies to the work,” Strassel explains. “You’re lifting 20 or 30 one hundred pound mattresses a day, you’re on the ground, scrubbing floors. To do that and then just be tossed out one day and replaced by people you train…”

A forthcoming study in The American Journal of Industrial Medicine, reported in The New York Times, proves just how arduous hotel work is. The study found that female hotel workers in the U.S. have a 50 percent higher chance of injury than male hotel workers, due to the fact that they’re the vast majority of housekeepers, the most injury-prone hotel job. The study also found that housekeepers at the Hyatt chain had the highest injury rate of any of the 50 U.S. hotels examined in the report.

Most union contracts have specific language prohibiting hotels from subcontracting work, Strassel explained—but the Hyatt workers were not organized. “It’s fair to say that this could not have happened in a union hotel,” she said.

Aquino, like the rest of her former co-workers, is determined to have her job back. She adamantly told Ms, “That is what we are fighting for.”

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