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News :: Labor
Strike Yields Travel Advisories At Downtown Chicago Hotel	Current rating: 0
by Ricky Baldwin Email: baldwinricky (nospam) yahoo.com (unverified!) Phone: 217-328-3037 Address: 801 E California Ave, Urbana IL 61801	18 Sep 2003
A strike by hotel workers at the Congress Plaza Hotel has led to travel advisories posted by the major Internet booking sites. The hotel had refused to grant wage increases along with other downtown hotels and instead cut wages by sixty cents an hour.
If you�re planning a trip to Chicago any time soon, you may run across warnings about too-good-to-be-true rates at one hotel on Michigan Avenue overlooking Grant Park. Accommodations at the 580-room hotel are renting at winter prices � $99 a night, compared to twice that in a comparable downtown hotel � or rather, the rooms are not renting, for the most part. All because the hotel tried to squeeze sixty cents out of the folks that clean the rooms and cook the food. Hundreds of customers have turned away after they arrived and discovered a picket line in front of the hotel. Many more have walked out within the first hour after seeing the state of the hotel from the inside. Unknown and unknowable numbers have simply booked elsewhere when they heard the news. Big weddings and reunions, some worth as much as $35,000, are canceling left and right. The hotel is estimated to have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars this summer. And now three of the biggest Internet booking sites have posted travel advisories for the Congress Plaza Hotel, following a flood of customer complaints related to a summer-long strike by hotel employees. Inside the hotel During the strike the hotel has kept going with a skeleton crew of replacement workers from area temp agencies � a practice that will be illegal in the State of Illinois when a new law takes effect in January. After that, employers will have to round up their own scabs. But it isn�t just about defending unions. �There are several reasons the customers would be upset,� says Jennie Busch of Chicago Jobs with Justice (JWJ). �Obviously they have to make a decision about crossing a picket line, which is ideological. But also there are issues of service.� Busch, who works with Chicago JWJ�s Day Laborer Organizing Committee, says the hotel is essentially �hiring professional strikebreakers.� This practice, she says, prolongs the strike. And that�s not all. Community groups like the Chicago Coalition of the Homeless and ACORN are also concerned about the replacement workers, many of whom are very poor or even homeless. �It�s risky for the temps,� says Busch. Temp workers sent in to break a strike normally face the possibility of many kinds of abuses ranging from wage and hour violations to health and safety hazards. In this case, says Busch, �especially cleanliness issues.� Witness the customer complaints. �A room service tray sat outside our door for nearly two days with leftover food rotting.� �Not well maintained � escalators and elevators didn�t work. It looks like a hotel that is about to be shut down.� �A dirty, stinking hotel with no customer service.� These are all from customers who booked online this summer, unaware that the workers at the Congress Plaza Hotel have been on strike since June 15. There has not been a strike at a downtown Chicago hotel in decades. Out in the street The 130 workers belong to Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) Local 1, a member-run union that last year stood up to and beat a hotel management association representing 27 downtown Chicago hotels. Local 1 threatened to strike then, but the hotels blinked first and agreed to raise wages to $10.00 an hour. But when the union contract at the Congress expired, its out-of-town owner � a wealthy clothing importer named Albert Nasser, whose Gelmart Industries supplies Wal-Mart among others � refused to keep pace with these increases. In May management cut pay by seven percent to $8.21. The housekeepers, telephone operators, restaurant employees and others then voted, by a 90 percent margin, to strike until Nasser agreed to pay � even if it meant forcing him to sell or shut down the hotel. �It�s like when Moses went against Pharoah,� says Sharon Williams, a phone operator for eight years at the Congress. �Pharoah did everything he possibly could to them, and still they won. And just like Moses, the workers at the Congress hotel will be out one day longer than the boss.� Other strikers seem to feel the same. Pickets have been up almost without a break straight through heat-stroke season, in pouring rain, in winds that seemed on the verge of tearing up trees by the roots. The one exception was when the union briefly called off the midnight shift, but the strikers soon insisted that the picket line must be active round the clock. One day longer Large rallies in support of the strikers have also punctuated the struggle all summer. On July 12, hundreds of religious leaders and other supporters re-enacted the biblical tale of the fall of Jericho, marching with strikers around the entire hotel grounds seven times and finally blowing a trumpet. The walls did not come tumbling down. On August 9, the mostly-immigrant strikers joined with about 1,000 supporters in an �Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride� at a nearby theater. After that event, supporters marched back to the hotel and around the block again. Workers from the other 27 union hotels, the ones that got their deal last year, have been out in force to walk the line with the Congress strikers, as have supporters from other unions � Service Employees Industrial Union Local 1, UNITE! and others. Earlier in the summer there was a fair amount of media attention. Presidential candidates Carol Moseley-Braun, Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean have been out to speak with strikers. But by August the media had moved on to other topics. Then on Labor Day, unions and other community groups joined Local 1 in civil disobedience in front of the Congress. Hundreds turned out in a driving rain. Twenty linked arms and sat down in the middle of Michigan Avenue traffic and were arrested. Local TV, radio and newsprint were suddenly interested all over again. The strikers are hoping that the word will continue to spread and that the hotel�s drooping clientelle will sink even farther. �It really boosted the strike,� says HERE spokesperson Lars Negstad. Still, no one expects the strike to be over any time soon. And being out of a job is hard on the workers, but the union has been helping them find part-time work at other hotels to supplement their strike pay. �I�m not worried about it,� says Williams. �I know that this is right, and I put my trust in God. The workers walking the line are a strong force.�
See also: http://www.congresshotelstrike.info

Comments

Re: Strike Yields Travel Advisories At Downtown Chicago Hotel
by meghan meghan (nospam) ucimc.org (unverified)	Current rating: 0 19 Sep 2003
I think this story could use a little addendum about how to donate to the strike fund. ya never know, someone may be inspired to help em out a bit. (for the public i article, too).