Union isolates locked-out San Francisco hotel workers

The San Francisco Multiple Employers Group (SFMEG), representing the major hotels in the city, locked out its employees at the four hotels that were struck plus an additional 2,900 workers at ten other hotels. Throughout the strike and lockout, the hotels have continued to operate with strikebreakers.

The actions of the union leadership are a stark demonstration of the bureaucracy’s cowardice and inability to defend, much less advance, the interests of the membership. The union limited the initial strike to two weeks. When the hotels retaliated with a general lockout, the union not only refused to expand the strike, it meekly ordered striking workers back to work at the end of the two-week period.

The hotels, predictably, refused to take the striking workers back, and UNITE HERE responded by doing nothing. Since then, it has worked to isolate and demoralize the workers.

The union knew months in advance that a strike and lockout were likely, but the leadership failed to build up an adequate strike fund, limiting strike pay to the paltry sum of $200 a week for 20 hours of picketing. No substantial sums have been forthcoming from the AFL-CIO, and no mass appeals have been made to workers in other industries to support the hotel workers.

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The union bureaucracy has been a willing participant in the speed-up of San Francisco’s hotel workers. Local 2 officials have joined the hotel industry in the so-called San Francisco Hotels Partnership, which develops ways of increasing worker productivity and reducing labor turnover by resolving labor management conflicts.

The union’s isolation of the hotel workers, and its support for the Democratic establishment that continues to subsidize the hotels, are not accidental mistakes. They point to a deliberate policy of softening up hotel workers and demoralizing them in preparation for a contract with massive givebacks in health benefits, a token wage increase, and new attacks on working conditions.

San Francisco’s hotel workers should draw the lessons of the recent supermarket strike in Southern California, in which grocery employees were left standing on the picket lines for months, their struggle isolated by the union bureaucracy, only to be sent back to work under a contract that gutted their health benefits.

Significant support for the UNITE HERE membership exists in San Francisco. Workers and students from across the Bay Area have joined picket lines and attended labor rallies in support of the hotel workers. However, a betrayal and defeat can be averted only by breaking with the union bureaucracy and waging a struggle for the industrial mobilization of the working class throughout the Bay Area to halt the union-busting, combined with the fight for a new political strategy—a break from the Democrats and the building of an independent party of the working class based on socialist policies.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/hotl-n20.shtml