L.A. Hotels Request a Labor Mediator

Nine major Los Angeles hotels, facing a determined union and a protracted contract fight, suggested Tuesday that a federal mediator step in.

The move came as the dispute appeared likely to spread to San Francisco, where hotel labor contracts expire Saturday, and Washington, where they run out in mid-September.

“Given there are two other cities about to enter the mix, the stakes become a lot higher,” said Matt Wakefield, an attorney for the Los Angeles Hotel Employers’ Council, which represents the nine upscale hotels.

In a letter to the union, the council asked that Peter J. Hurtgen, director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, be brought in as a mediator. Hurtgen was involved in talks to end the long-running supermarket strike early this year.

“I don’t think either side wants to go too far with this,” Wakefield said. “If there’s a way to avoid a multi-city strike, I think the parties should do everything they can to avoid it.”

Officials with the union, called Unite Here since the merger last month of a garment workers union with a union of hotel employees, said they were skeptical of the proposal for a mediator because the hotels had refused to negotiate on many union issues, including housekeeper workloads and tip compensation for banquet servers. The union also said a local representative of the federal service had sat in on negotiations from the start, although not in the capacity of mediator.

“Mediation can only work when both sides are serious,” said Maria Elena Durazo, president of Unite Here Local 11. “I have to ask, what are they looking for here? Do they want a serious discussion or is this just to position themselves, so they can say to the members that they tried everything?”

Durazo said that a list of outstanding issues was given to the hotel council Monday and that she wouldn’t agree to the request until those issues were addressed. Both parties must agree to the mediation before the agency will intervene.

The two sides are at loggerheads over the length of a contract, with the union calling for a two-year deal and the hotels insisting on five years. The Los Angeles hotel contract expired June 1.

The union wants a two-year pact to gain national bargaining clout by lining up contracts in 10 U.S. cities to expire simultaneously in 2006. That could open the door to a national strike.

Unite Here already has contracts expiring in 2006 in Boston, New York and Chicago. But in Los Angeles, hotel managers have balked, refusing to consider a contract expiring in 2006.

Last month, union members voted to reject the hotels’ offer of a five-year contract. Since then, there has been one bargaining session, which both sides described as unproductive.

With negotiations stuck, each side has tried to gain leverage. Last month, the hotels -- which include such landmarks as the Westin Bonaventure, Westin Century Plaza and Millennium Biltmore -- stopped deducting union dues from paychecks. They also began charging workers $10 a week for health insurance -- and offered to stop doing so under a five-year contract.

The union, in turn, has staged a series of rallies and demonstrations inside and outside hotels. The largest demonstration so far is planned for downtown Los Angeles this Friday afternoon, with union leaders predicting arrests and traffic headaches.

Union leaders also have filed a series of charges with the National Labor Relations Board, claiming hotels have illegally fired, suspended and intimidated union supporters.

Any mediator would be hard-pressed to bring the parties together in the dispute at this point, said Mark Theodore, a management-side attorney with law firm Proskauer Rose.

“The mediator has zero authority to compel any agreement on any issue,” Theodore said. “But from a public relations standpoint, it helps with whatever comes next. A lot of these things come down to how you position yourself in the public’s eye, especially if you’re going to survive the ensuing labor dispute. In this case, the hotels will be able to say, ... ‘We tried to do everything we could to avert a strike.’ ”