On Their Feet for a Better Living

Roughly 20 employees gathered in the parking lot of a restaurant on Central Avenue in Glendale, where they were warned about the possibility of police intervention, then began marching toward the Hilton hotel and the office of their boss.

Some were afraid, some were emboldened, some were a little of each.

Juan Mendoza, a waiter who makes minimum wage plus tips after 13 years and pays about $200 a month for medical benefits, walked ahead of Leticia Ceballos. After 11 years in various housekeeping jobs, she makes $8 an hour. The nonunion clock-punchers believe they’d have a better deal with union representation, so despite fear of retribution, they were ready to speak up.

The employees entered the high-rise Hilton through the back door and snaked through a service area to the executive offices of the four-star hotel. With them in solidarity was Ana Cortes, a Beverly Hilton housekeeper who said she makes $3 an hour more than her Glendale colleagues for comparable work and gets free medical benefits from her unionized hotel.

Before long, several security guards showed up, along with a gentleman in a gray suit.

“Who are you?” asked Kurt Petersen, a union organizer for Team United.

Gary Lemma, the hotel’s assistant general manager, threw the question back at Petersen. Petersen told him the employees had decided to call for a union election, and they wanted a commitment from the company that it would remain neutral instead of trying to scare workers away from voting for representation. The workers were concerned about what they said were previous attempts by management to discourage unionization.

“We want the same benefits they have at the Beverly Hilton,” said Ceballos, one of several employees who spoke up about pay and benefits or complained that supervisors have discouraged union organizing. Many of the employees prefaced their remarks by telling Lemma that they liked him, and this was nothing personal.

“Are you going to remain neutral?” Petersen asked.

Lemma said the hotel respects the right of employees -- whom he referred to as team members and as family -- to join a union. He implied that management would be neutral but stopped short of guarantees, saying he hoped employees would make “the right choice” in deciding whether to sign a union petition.

“When you say you are neutral, that makes me happy,” said the Rev. Alexia Salvatierra, who had come with the workers as a representative of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice. “But having meetings like those we have heard have already happened, where the company that signs these employees’ paychecks tells them that the union is bad -- that is not being neutral.”

Pressed by Petersen on neutrality, Lemma was somewhat vague. He went on to suggest that the confrontation by employees constituted a “subversive action” on their part.

And he wasn’t happy about it. “You know,” Lemma said, “this, to me, is an ambush.”

On the way out, Petersen said the group was headed up to the lobby to demonstrate, but then confessed he was joking.

“Don’t bluff me,” Lemma said soberly.

And so began yet another battle between labor and management in Greater Los Angeles, a small but symbolic confrontation that touches on class mobility, the immigrant workforce, affordable housing, children left alone while parents work two jobs, healthcare, the social safety net and economic vitality, to hit just the highlights.

“We’ve got to change this industry,” Petersen said outside the hotel. “The city will not improve until tourism becomes a job where people can make a living.”

After the meeting, I met with Lemma, who said pay and benefits at the Glendale Hilton are comparable to those at Hiltons in Burbank and Pasadena, the latter of which is unionized. It’s unrealistic, he said, to compare the Glendale Hilton with major hotels in Beverly Hills or downtown Los Angeles.

That’s true in the sense that Hiltons, Hyatts and the like are often only managed, rather than owned, by those chains. So each property runs its own show, and often, the bigger and more lucrative the market, the better the deal for employees.

But by Glendale City Councilman Frank Quintero’s standards, the Glendale Hilton does a bang-up business precisely because of its location, in guest rooms as well as banquet facilities. When he heard about the wage and benefits package, Quintero decided he’d march into the Hilton with the employees to ask that they be treated with dignity.

“I don’t think it’s a fair and equitable situation,” he said.

Lemma doesn’t see it that way. He insisted that with two weeks’ vacation, free parking and free use of the hotel fitness facility, among other perks, the majority of the Glendale Hilton’s “team members” were content enough to vote down the union.

I informed him Team United had shown me signatures in support of a union election that they said represented 70% of the employees, or roughly 120 out of 175. Lemma doubted it and said the employees have no guarantee of improving their deal if they go union, but they’ll be on the hook for monthly dues. He’s right, and unions are anything but perfect, sometimes costing members dearly in badly managed strikes or boycotts. But Glendale Hilton workers wouldn’t have invited Cortes to join their march if they didn’t envy her union deal at the Beverly Hilton.

A day after the confrontation, the workers’ hopes that management would remain neutral faded into oblivion with a letter to employees suggesting the union had made false promises.

“Dear Valued Team Member,” the letter began.

“We don’t think we need a Union at our Hotel and don’t believe that a union would be in your best interest.... We will be meeting with all of our team members to discuss the demonstration, the way the Union snuck into our building, and to provide you with the facts about unions.”

Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University, has spent the last 15 years studying employer campaigns against unions.

The Hilton’s letter to its employees was perfectly legal. But Bronfenbrenner said: “An overwhelming number of employers aggressively oppose organizing efforts and use everything legal and illegal to intimidate, threaten and coerce workers to vote against the union.”

She added that “the hotel industry has got very wealthy people running it who make enormous profits and have largely immigrant workforces that are paid very low wages and who are treated poorly by supervisors and often by customers.”

Union hotels, she said, are entirely different.

“Union hotels have good jobs where you can send your kids to college, have regular hours and a home life.... In Las Vegas, if you work in a hotel, that’s a high-class job. Hotel work in Las Vegas is like auto work in Detroit. It made the middle class.”

I’ll keep you posted on what happens in Glendale.

Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at latimes.com/lopez.