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Hospitality Workers Flash Anger

March sweeps through big Vancouver hotel.

Tom Sandborn 12 Sep 2007TheTyee.ca

Tom Sandborn is a regular contributor to The Tyee with a focus on labour and health policy issues.

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Workers outside Hyatt manager's office. Photo: T. Sandborn.

A rowdy, energetic crowd of over a hundred unionized hotel workers streamed up the stairs into the luxury lobby of the Hyatt Regency in Vancouver Tuesday afternoon, chanting slogans, demanding an immediate meeting with the hotel's new general manager Steve McNally and shouting, "Shame! Shame!" when told he was not available. Bemused tourists looked on as the workers, members of Unite Here, marched across soft, deep carpets and past the gleaming wood of the hotel's front desk to the manager's office.

Their spokeswoman, Beth Marshall, a 21-year veteran server with the multinational Hyatt chain, told the office staff who answered her knock on the manager's door they were there to deliver a message to management on the eve of three days of scheduled talks between her union and four major downtown hotels: The Hyatt, the Bayshore, Four Seasons and the Renaissance Vancouver. At all four hotels, unionized workers have been without a contract since the end of June. On August 29 workers at all four hotels voted, 85 per cent, to authorize strike action if these negotiations aren't productive, union spokespeople told The Tyee. At the Hyatt, the pro-strike vote was 95 per cent.

"We have a message for the general manager," Marshall said. "We've been without a decent contract for a long time. So far, management hasn't put anything on the table. Tell the manager and we want to see a decent offer from the company. We are serious here."

Down in the bowels

It all started in the part of the hotel guests never see. On Tuesday, in the basement staff room, there was excitement among women and men who make beds, serve drinks, carry luggage, check in guests and clean hallways for the multinational that owns the Hyatt.

"I've worked here for 21 years," Marshall said just before the workers met to strategize, "and my wages have only gone up four dollars an hour in that whole time. Twenty years ago my rent was one quarter of my monthly wages. Now the cost of my rent is more than half my monthly wages. This makes living in Vancouver increasingly impossible. We are fighting for our futures and the future of jobs in our city."

Off in a corner, someone started pounding on a table, and a young south Asian man in a scarlet UNITE HERE VANCOUVER WORKERS RISING t-shirt started a chant that filled the room. "What are we fighting for? Respect! Who's got the power? We've got the power! What kind of power? Union power!"

The crowd poured out of the cafeteria, up the stairs and into the part of the hotel that guests and management inhabit. After being turned away from the manager's office, they marched out in high spirits, chanting, singing and occasionally lifting a defiant fist in the air.

Offer pending says management

On the sidewalk outside the hotel, Randall Cooper, a member of the union executive said management's refusal to meet with the workers that afternoon was "shameful."

"We've been in negotiations for several months now," he said. "It's time for the Hyatt and the other big hotels to stop giving lame excuses and negotiate seriously."

In a phone message left for The Tyee on the evening of the 11th, Hyatt spokesman Rolf Osterwalder said:

"We have negotiations scheduled tomorrow. The employers will be presenting an offer."

However, Mr. Osterwalder's message did not reply to a request left for him earlier for comment on the September 11 demonstration in the Hyatt lobby.

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