Boycott Hyatt
UNITE-HERE has launched a campaign to boycott Hyatt Hotels. The primary reason is the very bad working conditions to which it subjects its housekeeping staff. Here’s 10 reasons why:
1. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Hyatt fired its entire housekeeping staff in Boston and replaced them with temp workers earning minimum wage.
2. Three days for a C-Section? Hyatt demanded a dishwasher in San Francisco come back to work three days after she had a C-section. When she refused, Hyatt tried to fire her.
3. Crushing Workloads. Some Hyatt housekeepers clean up to 30 rooms per eight-hour shift, requiring rushing that can lead to serious injuries and even permanent disability.
4. Even the federal government thinks there’s a problem. The federal government has issued a companywide letter to Hyatt, warning the company of hazards its housekeepers face on the job. It’s a first in the hotel industry.
5. And the experts agree. In a study published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine examining a total of 50 hotel properties from 5 different hotel companies, Hyatt housekeepers had the highest injury rate of all housekeepers studied when compared by hotel company.
6. Citations issued nationwide. OSHA or its state counterparts have issued 18 health and safety citations against Hyatt at 11 hotels and 3 citations against one of Hyatt’s housekeeping subcontractors with over $100,000 in proposed penalties.
7. Adding insult to injuries. In 2011, Hyatt took the lead in lobbying against legislation in California that would make housekeeping work safer.
8. You rally, you roast. Hyatt turned heat lamps on protesting workers during a brutal heat wave.
9. Unjust firings. Hyatt fired a housekeeper and her sister – who had 30 years of service combined – after one of them tore down digitally-altered photos of housekeepers in bikinis that were posted in the break room.
10. You want a job AND you want to get paid? Hyatt’s subcontracted workers in Indianapolis filed a lawsuit for not getting paid for all the hours they worked. Hyatt responded by firing the subcontractor, putting in jeopardy the jobs of people who bravely stepped forward in the lawsuit.
While many of the usual suspects like the AFL-CIO are on board, the boycott is also receiving heavy promotion from the NFL Players Association, which is a nice PR win. Cleve Jones has also done a ton of groundwork with the LGBT community to get them to see the workers’ struggle as not so distant from their own and to not stay in Hyatt properties.
UNITE-HERE is one of the best unions at organizing, using new media, and creating 21st century unionism. I’d really encourage all readers to join in the boycott. I’ll have more on this later.
Also, you can follow what’s going on with the #hyatthurts hashtag on Twitter.
….Here’s Hyatt worker Jim Lair Beard’s reasons for supporting the boycott.
It’s not like they can blame foreign competition for being hard on the staff.
When you visit Boston you don’t try to find a cheaper hotel in Canada.
Can we find a roster of their governing board?
Can we find a roster of their governing board?
Yes we can.
Well, this is a Boycott I can get behind! Especially since I’m not sure I’ve EVER stayed in a Hyatt hotel.
Being poor does make it easier!
On that note – is there a list of hotels that treat their employees reasonably well that I can look at when I’m planning vacations?
It’s nice to have a boycott list, but it would be better still to have a list of hotels whose employees are paid decently and treated like fellow human beings.
UNITE-HERE has a handy tool for finding union hotels.
Hm. I looked there and the metro areas I tried just showed “boycott these hotels” listed. Which was why I asked.
But I checked again and I guess that the areas where we go to visit family don’t actually have any good hotels, just bad ones to avoid. Checking around Detroit and New York shows some “Please Patronize” sites, so I guess that is the resource I want. Thanks.
I wonder how far up the boycott will go.
Obama would do well to keep a safe distance.
Interesting. I’m personally shocked Obama committed the unforgivable sin of not aligning his policies correctly with his donors.
It might go a long way with the Union movement if he came out and said he was avoiding Hyatt’s in a pro-Union stance…
… a man can dream, right?
P.S.: That would probably be a terrible political move. All the sudden all the corporations we run from him. Maybe if he’s raised enough money to last him through the campaign already.
I’m personally shocked Obama committed the unforgivable sin of not aligning his policies correctly with his donors.
Don’t be.
Conservatives got hosed with GWB in a lot of ways, too. TARP bailout, prescription drug benefit without finding a way to pay for it, etc. Lots of stuff to bitch about.
Shorter JenBob: I do not understand the concept of sarcasm.
Or anything else.
win
prescription drug benefit without finding a way to pay for it
That wasn’t just Bush. How did conservative hero Paul Ryan vote on that?
I spent years on the road when I was doing software consulting, and I avoided Hyatts if possible, not because of labor conditions, of which I was unaware, but because they charged four-star rates and provided two-star service.
It’s telling that one of the last hotels in town to have rooms available when everyone else was sold out was invariably the local Hyatt.
I’ve sort of wondered how they’ve managed to stay in business given that no one I know likes them. I suspect part of it is location. Hyatt’s hotels always seem to be in idiot-proof locations, like airports and major city centers. Apparently the other reason is they don’t pay the help.
I’ve been to a number of conventions where either the only place to stay, or the only place offering the convention rate, was a Hyatt.
I recently helped organize a convention (about 1000 participants) and our committee set fair labor practices and environmental responsibility as guiding principles from the start. Then we told vendors “we are choosing to spend our money with you because…” and we told our participants about it as well. We had great interactions with all of our vendors and felt good about our process. It is not that hard and it does not cost more money to do the right thing but somebody has to choose to pay attention.
there ya go!
and i admit to being guilty of this myself. from now on i won’t be.
In addition to the worker safety issues, I can see how a schedule like this could lead to “less than stellar” service issues.
I’ve stayed at a Hyatt exactly twice in my life – each time on work-related travel. Both times I was “impressed” by how poor the service and room quality was. I thought it was bad luck on my part, but apparently it’s corporate policy.
Remember after the Dominique Strauss-Kahn arrest, how lots of people were saying stuff like how this kind of thing could be avoided by making sure housekeepers work in pairs? There were even a few insinuations that the housekeeper’s presence in his suite was suspicious in itself.
Work in pairs. Yeah, right. Everyone knows that it’s
cheapermore cost-effective to work yourpeonspeople to death and then just get fresh ones.It’s like Matt Taibbi said about Romney’s world view:His vision of humanity is just a million tons of meat floating around in a sea of base calculations.
Taibbi, Rolling Tone 7-13-12
Plus, I see that one of the top Hyatt management staff lives in my area and has done many philanthropic things – genuinely and for real. Dude, start in your own
househotel.Note: As you may have guessed, it’s actually Stone not Tone, and the quote marks should go around
Gosh, I love edit functions.
I’ve stayed at many Hyatts over the years and never noticed a difference between the services offered there and the services at the competition – Marriott, Hilton, etc. . And never noticed a difference in price.
The NYT had an article today about striking Caterpillar workers, whose company awarded the CEO a 60% pay raise on account of stellar profits, but is demanding a six-year wage freeze and increased employee contributions to health care benefits.
U-S-A! U-S-A!
how else do you think they can afford that 60% increase in his pay? i must say, i am surprised at least one of these greedy twats hasn’t been stoned to death by the “help” yet.
Why do you hate the
richjob creatorsstruggling small businessmanThis article really sickened me. There is absolutely no justification for Caterpillar do demand these concessions even in bad times. When Caterpillar is enjoying record profits its outrageous. The literal justification is that we need to pay our executives more and you earn above market rate anyway.
Why pay a livable wage when the beloved free market allows for less? What bastards. And it tells you a lot about the political climate we are in that their spokesman makes little effort to hide the ugly truth
It’s tough to see a way around this. No matter what Unions do, they’re the bad guy in the media. How can you possibly justify a pay freeze in RECORD PROFITS!!! And people think that corporations will take care of them. Even during the good years they’re busy slashing wages.
It’s really good to see such a broad coalition coming together on this. There tends to be a lot of talk about what unions can do differently – here we have a chance to see what we can do to help a union that is going on offense.
I worked at the Indianapolis Hyatt when it opened in ’77. The housekeepers did 16 rooms a day back then and that was a lot.
Dear Guest of Hyatt Hotels:
How do you feel about the fact that we only allow our employees fifteen minutes to clean your room?
This, a million times over. If you want to get things changed, you need to get customers riled up that they’re not getting the service they pay for and should expect.
I saw the Hyatt in Austin turn the sprinklers on the former employees who were protesting their firings on the sidewalk. Truly a horrible company.
THIRTY ROOMS A DAY?
Holy cats. When I was in university, I was able to work my way through by working part-time and summers at a large hotel in the same city. I worked as a maid, cleaning rooms. We were expected to get through 13 to 14 in a shift, and the top women, who’d all been there twenty years or more, regularly got through 18 or so by just being awesomely efficient. They were amazing to watch, all (at that hotel) long-time Italian first-generation immigrants.
Thirty is…unimaginable. Those women – and they’re overwhelmingly women – are being worked to death, at that rate, without exaggeration.
[...] See! I’m not alone in my Hyatt boycott…And these are even better reasons than my personal one. Like this:LikeBe the first to like this. [...]
The HyattHurts website has some small print on the bottom listing Hyatts that are exempt from the boycott (apparently because they have collective bargaining agreements).
I am fairly annoyed, because after forwarding this information to my union-sympathizing colleagues, who are attending a professional meeting at a Hyatt next month, it turned out that particular Hyatt is on the list of exemptions.
I find it baffling to call for a boycott of a nationwide chain while saying some prominent locations are exempt (and particularly making the exemptions so obscure).
I feel like activities like this need to be used to pressure candidates more often. The problem I see is well highlighted in this case – a major supporter of the Democrats is a major enemy of Labor.
This is a pretty big divide. If Labor can outspend the Hyatt family and all their friends, there might be a competition. But I doubt they are willing or able to do that.
Also, I’m skeptical of how much managerial control Penny really has of the whole conglomerate she owns.
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