An Inhospitable Business

Janja Subasic, a 38-year old immigrant from Bosnia, cleans rooms for $8.83 an hour at the Sheraton Chicago, where a single room can cost nearly $400 a night. She pays $85 a month for health insurance for her children. If Subasic did the same job in New York, she would earn $18.15 an hour and have free family health insurance. "We don't have nothing," she says. "We don't have personal days. We need more vacation. We need more money. We are ready for strike."

It may take a strike for 7,000 Chicago-area hotel workers to make such gains when their contract expires at the end of August. For more than a year, the union has been working hard to organize its members and community supporters for a strike, if a spirited threat alone doesn't persuade employers to cough up what Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) Local 1 President Henry Tamarin calls the "giant, giant money" needed to bring the Chicago contract closer to national standards.

The current negotiations are the culmination of more than two years of work that began in December 1999, when Local 1 was put into trusteeship because of local leaders' gross mismanagement. But it also reflects HERE's effort to adopt a national and even international strategy, as global corporate giants consolidate the union's core industries:hotels, gaming and food preparation.

With by far the weakest big city contract in what may be the second most lucrative hotel market in the country, "The negotiations in Chicago are fundamental to the future of the union," says HERE President John Wilhelm, who held the union's executive board meeting in Chicago in July to underscore the need for national support. "We have a local that had not only become weak but had become corrupt," he says. "From the point of view of restoring the faith of our members in the union, but also for making progress from the international point of view, it's fundamentally important to put Chicago hotel workers on a competitive plane."

The Chicago local has been following a strategy HERE developed over the years in several key cities, such as San Francisco and Las Vegas, but it also draws on labor traditions of grass-roots mobilization and tactics currently used by other effective unions. In the HERE model, the union systematically establishes workplace committees and nurtures rank-and-file leaders to educate and mobilize members for collective actions, ranging from wearing union buttons to protests on the job. The union also builds support from community groups, religious institutions and politicians in advance of confrontations with employers. And it deploys its savvy research staff to find employers' vulnerable pressure points.

In other words, HERE is trying to demonstrate that hotel managers are confronting the power of not just one local but the entire international union. Last fall local union leaders from around the country joined Boston's local in opening contract negotiations. Eventually, the union hopes to have contracts expire in the same year around the country, but that seems a remote goal.

In Chicago, HERE is supporting Local 1 financially: paying salaries of many staff, pledging $100 a week in strike pay and loaning the local enough to pay an additional $100 a week. In addition, beyond organizing solidarity demonstrations at hotels around the country, the union could "work to rule" in other cities, that is, pressure management by inflexibly following contractual rules. "We might take a look at whether we're fully enforcing the contract in every city," says Wilhelm. "We can do a lot of things like that. We're in the process of experimentation."

This past year has been rough for the hotel industry; the effects of a national economic downturn were worsened by travel disruption after the September 11 attacks. Despite this, by demonstrating to employers that the union was ready to wage a bruising battle, HERE has been able in recent months to score victories without strikes in key cities.