Union Negotiating Strategy Pays Off in SoCal Hotel Deals

The recent spate of tentative contract agreements between Southern California hotels and their unionized workers appeared to materialize out of the ether. After months with little progress reported, several deals were struck in succession, including the announcement of agreements with 10 hotels in a single day and another four soon thereafter, which brought the total to 24 in all.

With workers at nearly 40 other hotels still seeking deals they can agree to, the larger picture is not complete. But what is becoming apparent is that the union’s negotiating strategy, willingness to call out hotels and their parent companies by name, and tactic of selective strikes have begun to click.
 

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And in at least one respect, the hotel workers and their negotiators share something with the Hollywood actors and writers who walked alongside them many times over the course of 2023. As all those union members are coming to understand, most industries hate seeing their dirty laundry aired in public.

Doing exactly that worked for the Hollywood strikers, especially when it came to swinging public support their way. As a sub-strategy for the hotel workers, it appears to be having a similar effect — and sometimes the two worlds intersect almost perfectly.

It was only days before the announcement of the Golden Globes award nominees last month that the venerable Beverly Hilton hotel, longtime site of the ceremony, reached a deal with UNITE HERE Local 11, the union representing many of the hotel’s employees. That was no coincidence.

The Golden Globes are just now returning to prominence after years of controversy and the eventual sale of the show’s assets to a for-profit group that includes Dick Clark Productions. Under no circumstance was the new crew interested in seeing striking hotel workers picketing its first nominating ceremony, much less the Jan. 7 awards show itself — and the workers dialed up the pressure further by urging actors and writers, almost all of whom are also union members, not to cross those picket lines.

Thus, the Hilton broke a logjam, becoming the first hotel in Beverly Hills to strike a deal with UNITE HERE. Quickly thereafter, both the Beverly Wilshire and Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, two other preferred destinations for Hollywood awards shows and galas, reached agreements as well. (Disclosure: UNITE HERE is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

That activity appears to have marked a tipping point, and it matters because of the scale of this issue. Since July, the union has been seeking new contracts for nearly 15,000 workers at more than 60 hotels across the greater Los Angeles area. About 40 of those hotels began the process collectively, represented by the Coordinated Bargaining Group (CBG).

In the wake of the Beverly Hills hotels coming to terms, UNITE HERE has struck deals at a host of other properties, including nine Marriott-owned hotels and another Hilton. Union representatives say several of those hotels had originally been part of the CBG before branching off and striking their own deals.

No terms have been announced for any of the agreements, as all of them await final approval by the union’s affected members. When negotiations began, Unite Here sought an immediate 5% pay raise and 3% bumps in each of the next three years, along with enhanced worker protections and more humane workloads.

Even with the agreements, deals with dozens of other hotels remain outstanding. But the Hollywood experience is an instructive one, underscoring the value for workers in making their cases public and, when needed, calling out the corporations that control most of the industry on the other side of the table.

Both the Writers Guild of America and the actors union SAG-AFTRA made it a point — often on social media — to note the lavish compensation packages enjoyed by studio heads and parent company CEOs. They also loudly and publicly denounced the studios’ reported strategy to starve out the writers by basically refusing to negotiate until those workers started running out of money. Partly as a result, public support was solidly on the side of the actors and writers.

“I would go on my Facebook page almost every day [during the Hollywood strikes], and at least once or twice a day I’d come across somebody posting the salaries of the guys who own the studios — Netflix and Disney and all those places,” said labor expert Peter Dreier, a professor at Occidental College. “And they named names.”

The hotel workers too have repeatedly noted that they’re fighting massive corporate power as they negotiate with behemoths like Marriott and Hilton. Some of the hotels involved are owned outright by the companies, while others operate under the corporate brand but are run by equity investment firms like Advent International and Blackstone.

For months, the union has rolled out a series of short-term strikes that have kept the hotels guessing which properties will be affected. Labor experts say that’s one way to offset the collective power of so many hotels when they negotiate as, essentially, a bloc.

But some of those grinding negotiations took a turn once Hollywood found itself in the middle of the conversation. Neither the entertainment industry nor the name-brand hotels that have long benefitted from an association with it wanted to see themselves on video being picketed — and in making sure it didn’t happen, they may have chipped away at their own bloc. It’s a lesson the hotel workers’ negotiators have taken to heart.

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