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| Website | www.hotelworkersrising.org |
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Hotel Workers Rising is long-term organizing campaign, created by UNITE HERE in 2006, aimed at organizing and mobilizing hotel workers to win improvements in the workplace. Demands include higher wages, better benefits, safer workloads, and the right to unionize freely.
Workers in the hotel industry are mainly women of color and immigrant women. [1] [2] Often these women describe feeling "invisible"—expected to clean relentlessly without presenting a human face to hotel guests. [3] According to the workers, this status is connected to extremely poor working conditions and unreasonable expectations.
Many hotel workers are non-union, and the campaign has accused many hotels and hotel companies of intimidation and union busting. [3]
The Hotel Workers Rising campaign has garnered the support of individuals and community organizations outside of the labor movement. John Edwards and Danny Glover have both appeared at various events endorsing the goals of the campaign. For its recent Hyatt Hurts campaign, Hotel Workers Rising has formed alliances with many different groups, including the National Organization for Women, MoveOn.org, and the National Football Players Association. [3]
UNITE HERE has allied with LGBT rights activists creating the "Sleep With the Right People" slogan and collaborating on projects of mutual interest. The groups orchestrated a successful joint campaign (which involved a "Kiss-In" as well as a boycott) [4] against the San Diego Grand Hyatt, whose owner Doug Manchester was a major supporter of California Proposition 8. [5] (GOProud, a conservative gay organization, criticized the "gay left" for its "slavish loyalty to big labor".) [6]
The campaign has focused particularly on Hyatt hotels, and added its support to longstanding boycotts against Hyatt hotels internationally.[ citation needed ]
Hotel Workers Rising has intensified its focus on HEI Hotels & Resorts, a major hotel manager. Pressure in 2012 caused a number of universities—including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Brown—to divest from the company. [7]
Workers have been protesting at an Embassy Suites hotel in Irvine, CA, owned by MassMutual, which has not allowed them unionize. In September 2012, the hotel's administrators (Cornerstone Real Estate Advisers) replaced HEI with Hostmark as the management company; workers went on strike to protest the bad conditions which, in their view, remained in place regardless of the company in charge. [8] [9]
The United Farm Workers of America, or more commonly just United Farm Workers (UFW), is a labor union for farmworkers in the United States. It originated from the merger of two workers' rights organizations, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) led by organizer Larry Itliong, and the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta. They became allied and transformed from workers' rights organizations into a union as a result of a series of strikes in 1965, when the most Filipino farmworkers of the AWOC in Delano, California, initiated a grape strike, and the NFWA went on strike in support. As a result of the commonality in goals and methods, the NFWA and the AWOC formed the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee on August 22, 1966. This organization was accepted into the AFL-CIO in 1972 and changed its name to the United Farm Workers Union.
UNITE HERE is a labor union in the United States and Canada with roughly 300,000 active members. The union's members work predominantly in the hotel, food service, laundry, warehouse, and casino gaming industries. The union was formed in 2004 by the merger of Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE) and Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE).
The Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) is a labor union representing migrant farm workers in the Midwestern United States and North Carolina.
Justice for Janitors (JfJ) is a social movement organization that fights for the rights of janitors across the US and Canada. It was started on June 15, 1990 in response to the low wages and minimal health-care coverage that janitors received. Justice for Janitors includes more than 225,000 janitors in at least 29 cities in the United States and at least four cities in Canada. Members fight for better wages, better conditions, improved health-care, and full-time opportunities.
The Federation of Hospital And University Employees is a coalition of labor unions in New Haven, Connecticut, United States, which represents thousands of workers at Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital. The federation currently includes recognized unions UNITE HERE Locals 34 and 35, which represent university food service, maintenance, and custodial workers, and clerical and technical workers, respectively. UNITE HERE has also, for the last fifteen years, supported the organizing efforts of graduate student teachers and researchers in the Graduate Employees and Students Organization. Finally, the Federation also includes the 150 dietary workers at Yale-New Haven Hospital who are members of Local 1199NE of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Since 1998, this union has conducted an organizing campaign of about 1,800 other blue-collar service workers at the hospital. On March 22, 2006, the union and hospital agreed to an agreement governing the conduct of both parties in a neutral election process by which hospital employees will be able to vote on whether to unionize.
The Delano grape strike was a labor strike organized by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), a predominantly Filipino and AFL-CIO-sponsored labor organization, against table grape growers in Delano, California to fight against the exploitation of farm workers. The strike began on September 8, 1965, and one week later, the predominantly Mexican National Farmworkers Association (NFWA) joined the cause. In August 1966, the AWOC and the NFWA merged to create the United Farm Workers (UFW) Organizing Committee.
A comprehensive campaign is labor union organizing or a collective bargaining campaign with a heavy focus on research, the use of community coalition-building, publicity and public pressure, political and regulatory pressure, and economic and legal pressure in addition to traditional organizing tactics.
The Hyatt 100 are a group of housekeepers fired from three Boston-area Hyatt hotels on August 31, 2009. The layoffs drew widespread condemnation from politicians, businesses, and other groups.
Californians Against Hate (CAH) is an American non-profit organization public-benefit corporation which works as a political watchdog organization. It was founded in 2008 to draw attention to the major donors to qualify and pass California’s Proposition 8. As the organization has grown, Californians Against Hate has evolved into leading boycotts of companies whose owners gave large contributions to Proposition 8. They have also filed complaints with two state ethics commissions that have led to investigations of the LDS Church in California and the National Organization for Marriage in Maine. Californians Against Hate has repeatedly called for a Congressional Investigation of the National Organization for Marriage due to its late and non reporting of its federal 990 income tax returns.
Fred S. Karger is an American political consultant, gay rights activist and watchdog, and former actor. His unsuccessful candidacy for the Republican nomination for the 2012 US presidential election made him the first openly gay presidential candidate in a major political party in American history. He has not held elected or public office. Karger has worked on nine presidential campaigns and served as a senior consultant to the campaigns of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Gerald Ford. Karger was a partner at the Dolphin Group, a California campaign consulting firm. He retired after 27 years and has since worked as an activist on gay rights causes, from unsuccessfully attempting to protect the gay bar The Boom to using his organization Californians Against Hate to investigate The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the National Organization for Marriage's campaigns to repeal the state's same-sex marriage law.
The Martin Luther King. Jr. County Labor Council, AFL-CIO, (MLKCLC) is the central body of labor organizations in King County, Washington. The MLKCLC is affiliated with the national AFL-CIO, the central labor organization in the United States, which represents more than 13 million working people. Over 125 organizations are affiliated with the MLKCLC, and more than 75,000 working men and women belong to Council-affiliated organizations. Not only does the MLKCLC support labor organizations, but it acts as a voice for the interests and needs of the working people in King County, WA.
Occupy Harvard was a student demonstration at Harvard University identifying itself with the global Occupy Movement. It sought to create a forum for discussing economic inequality at Harvard, in the United States, and throughout the world. It criticized Harvard's influence on global economic policy and its involvement with the American financial sector. It also supported wage campaigns by Harvard workers and a divestment demand initiated by Hotel Workers Rising.
The Carbon County Strikes took place in Carbon County, Utah from 1903–1904. The strikes primarily consisted of Slavic and Italian immigrant mine workers who partnered with the United Mine Workers of America strikes in Colorado to protest the dangerous working conditions of the Utah coal mines. The Carbon County strikes were considered the most important labor confrontation in the United States at the time. The Utah Fuel Company strongly opposed initiatives to unionize coal workers in Utah and were the primary opposition to the UMWA at the time. The Carbon County Strikes would ultimately fail in its attempt to unionize the coal workers of Utah simply because it "did not have enough support, either internally or externally, to win against a powerful and influential company that effectively played on radical, anti-foreign sentiments in defending its position" but it demonstrated a significant nationwide effort in strengthening unionization in the west.
The 1919 Streetcar Strike of Los Angeles was the most violent revolt against the open-shop policies of the Pacific Electric Railway Company in Los Angeles. Labor organizers had fought for over a decade to increase wages, decrease work hours, and legalize unions for streetcar workers of the Los Angeles basin. After having been denied unionization rights and changes in work policies by the National War Labor Board, streetcar workers broke out in massive protest before being subdued by local armed police force.
The Tech Workers Coalition is a labor rights group seeking to organize the tech industry.
Emma Kinema is a former game developer and an American labor organizer working as Senior Campaign Lead for the Communications Workers of America (CWA) CODE-CWA initiative to organize tech, game, and digital worker unions in the US and Canada.
Some warehouse workers of Amazon, the largest American e-commerce retailer, have organized for workplace improvements in light of the company's scrutinized labor practices and stance against unions. While some Amazon warehouses are unionized in Europe, none are unionized in the United States. Worker actions have included work stoppages and have won concessions including increased pay, safety precautions, and time off.
A tech union is a trade union for tech workers typically employed in high tech or information, community, technology services sectors. Due to the evolving nature of technology and work, different government agencies have conflicting definitions for who is a tech worker. Most definitions include computer scientists, people working in IT, telecommunications, media and video gaming. Broader definitions include all workers required for a tech company to operate, including on-site service staff, contractors, and platform economy workers.
The Campaign to Organize Digital Employees or CODE-CWA is a project launched by the Communications Workers of America to unionize tech and video game workers in January 2020. It sprung out of conversations with Game Workers Unite (GWU) and employed at least two full time staff, including GWU co-founder Emma Kinema and veteran SEIU organizer Wes McEnany.
The Coors strike and boycott refers to a series of boycotts and strike action against the Coors Brewing Company, based in Golden, Colorado, United States. Initially local, the boycott started in the late 1960s and continued through the 1970s, coinciding with a labor strike at the company's brewery in 1977. The strike ended the following year in failure for the union, which Coors forced to dissolve. The boycott, however, lasted until the mid-1980s, when it was more or less ended.