Why are thousands of hotel workers going on strike?

Hotel workers at 25 hotels across the United States are on strike for better wages and increased staffing. The strikes are affecting hotels in various cities, including Baltimore, Honolulu, Kauai, San Diego, Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose, Boston, and Greenwich, Connecticut,.
According to CNN, approximately 10,200 hotel workers went on strike on Sunday, but 840 returned to work on Tuesday. Workers at the Hilton Inner Harbor in Baltimore joined the strike on Tuesday morning, with 200 employees walking out on the job.
The striking workers are employed by major hotel chains, including Hyatt, Marriott and Hilton. Unite Here, which represents the workers, warned hotel guests of strike activity and have provided suggestions for alternate hotels and details on which hotels would be affected.
Guests at hotels affected by the strikes are met with later check-in times, fewer available services and having to walk through picket-lines to enter and exit their hotels, The Washington Post reported. Individual hotels are working to minimize effects on guests, though the impact is obvious.
Unite Here said in a statement that strikes will last two to three days. Additional strikes have been approved in Oakland, California, New Haven, Connecticut, and Providence, Rhode Island.
The striking workers seek better compensation, increased staffing, fair workloads and reversal of COVID-era staff cuts.
In the Unite Here statement, the group’s international president, Gwen Mills, said, “Ten thousand hotel workers across the U.S. are on strike because the hotel industry has gotten off track. During COVID-19, everyone suffered, but now the hotel industry is making record profits while workers and guests are left behind.”
“We won’t accept a ‘new normal’ where hotel companies profit by cutting their offerings to guests and abandoning their commitments to workers,” Mills said.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, hotels cut staffing and some regular guest services, like daily housekeeping and room service. While hotels have rebounded from the pandemic, many services haven’t been restored and hotels still operate with reduced staff, increasing the workloads of remaining workers.
As cost of living has increased, these workers have not seen matched increases in their wages and many struggle to live in the cities in which they work.
Christian Carbajal, a market attendant who has worked for 15 years at the Hilton Bayfront in San Diego, joined the strike over the weekend, and told Unite Here, “I used to work in room service, but after COVID, they closed my department. … Guests complain to me that they can no longer get a steak delivered up to the room, and the tips aren’t what they used to be.”
“I’m making less than I used to, and now two families share my house because we can’t afford the rent anymore,” Carbajal continued. “The hotels should respect our work and our guests.”
Another worker, Elena Duran, has been a server at Marriott’s Palace Hotel, a Luxury Collection Hotel, in San Francisco for 33 years.
“Since COVID, they’re expecting us to give five-star service with three-star staff. A couple weeks ago, we were at 98% occupancy, but they only put three servers when we used to be a team of four or five,” Duran said. “It’s too much pressure on us to go faster and faster instead of calling in more people to work.”
While leaving work to strike is an intense process, strikers are dedicated to securing their demands and a better work life.
“Going on strike is hard, but not nearly as hard as trying to get by on what we are getting paid. We told the bosses in our negotiations how much we are struggling right now but they didn’t care. We are on strike to make them pay,” Jerome Roberts, a dishwasher at the Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor, told CNN.
According to Unite Here, room rates are at their highest, staffing decreased 13% from 2019 to 2022, and the industry grossed over $100 billion in profit.
Unite Here strikes happen, historically, during busy times like the Fourth of July and Labor Day weekends. The aim is to put pressure on the companies, prove their value, and demonstrate the necessity of meeting their demands.
The group has found success previously in striking activities, with one strike in Los Angeles and a 47-day strike in Detroit that yielded record contracts for hotel workers that included wage hikes and fairer workloads, the group said in the statement.
As the current strike gets bigger, the hotel chains will face more pressure to meet the hotel workers’ demands.
“Our colleagues are the heart of our business, and Hyatt has a long history of cooperation with the unions that represent our employees, including Unite Here,” Michael D’Angelo, head of labor relations at Hyatt said, per Travel + Leisure. “We are disappointed that Unite Here has chosen to strike while Hyatt remains willing to continue bargaining in good faith.”
Representatives from Hilton and Marriott have not commented at this time.
Despite Hyatt’s public willingness to bargain “in good faith,” a spokesperson for Unite Here, Tiffany Ten Eyck, told NPR that the union and hotel chains “remain very far apart on the issues that matter most to hotel workers.”