Liberation and Labor Day

I was the first of 45 demonstrators to be arrested for civil disobedience a few weeks ago in Los Angeles.

All of us were sitting in the middle of a normally busy intersection in the city's financial district, surrounded by several thousand cheering hotel workers and their allies, and by scores of police officers, batons at the ready.

A few minutes before, we had watched Victoria Vergara, a hotel housekeeper who came here from Mexico, frenetically make up 25 beds, just as she does in the course of a day's work, except the beds were in the street, arranged in a circle like the spokes of a wheel.

Victoria put on display, for everyone to see, the hidden labor that sustains L.A.'s lucrative tourism industry. She brought the world of her work into the bright light of a summer afternoon.

And that light illuminated a singular truth about our country: we are a nation dependent on services provided by immigrants, women, and people of color. Yet their employers refuse to accord them the respect, the dignity and the reward they deserve. I call this "plantation capitalism."

Service sector work today is increasingly the province of a caste, of men and women deemed unworthy of basic human rights.

It matters not how hard they work nor how valiantly they strive: they are condemned, as are their children and their children's children, to forever toil in the wilderness.

The promise that defined life in America for so many generations and that gave this nation a true "middle class" does not extend to them: work hard, play by the rules, and you will get ahead.

But Labor Day is not the time for lamentation over what was or even what is. Let us be inspired, instead, by those who have a vision of what can be and, moreover, are pursuing their vision with strategy and passion.

Hotel workers are being arrested in the streets of Los Angeles. They are marching in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. and many other cities in North America. What do they want?

You may not yet be aware of it, but a powerful idea has gripped the minds of tens of thousands of these "outcast" service workers, and it will not let them rest.

They believe their labor should and can lead to a better life, and they intend to make that happen. After all, Jesus of Nazareth said, "The laborer deserves his wages."

In the last century, the "outcast" workers in low-paid, dead end manufacturing jobs organized unions. They turned those jobs into the foundation of America's middle class.

Today, hotel workers are organizing to redefine the nature of their jobs and open up their opportunities.

Many of them work for the same companies, the giant hotel chains like Hilton, Hyatt, Starwood and Marriott. These corporate empires are the result of mergers and acquisitions, of the enormous capital infusions in tourism that have taken place over the last two decades.

Unfortunately, the consolidation of the hospitality industry has not been matched – until now – by the consolidation of the hotel workers.

Organized in local or regional unions, hotel workers have been isolated Davids, fighting for their lives against Goliaths only too happy to keep them divided and conquered.

The consequences of such an imbalance of power were evident in the recent grocery workers' struggle in southern California.

So long as the national supermarket chains could contain the damage to their revenues and image locally, while continuing to do business as usual everywhere else, they had the upper hand – and they used it brutally to strip away wages and benefits that had for many years defined the decent quality of grocery workers' jobs.

The hotel workers, organized by the union UNITE HERE, have decided to redress the imbalance of power between themselves and the companies whose fortunes are built on their labor.