At Holiday Inn : 28 Workers Put Jobs in Jeopardy to Protest Pact
Maria Aguilar, a laundry worker at the Burbank Holiday Inn, said that her hourly wage had been cut from $4.25 to $3.45. Isabel Fernandez, a maid, said she used to do “16 rooms in eight hours. Now we have to do 18.”
Friday afternoon they were gathered outside the hotel, having walked off their jobs along with 26 other laundry workers and maids. Members of the cleanup crew said they were protesting a contract between their union and the hotel that made their low-paid jobs even less rewarding.
Gloria Tartaglione, the leader of the group, said they left their jobs this week because of poor working conditions and the contract reached in the fall. It simultaneously lowered their wages and increased their work, she said.
The protest was risky for the housekeeping staff, most of them Latinas who speak little or no English. By the end of the week, they did not know if they would have jobs to return to.
They first assembled outside the hotel Wednesday morning, shortly after Tartaglione resigned as the hotel’s executive housekeeper. The women say they were fired as a result of their action.
Called Voluntary Resignations
Joseph Perry, who owns the 375-room hotel along with Holiday Inns in Glendale and Long Beach, said that by walking out the women voluntarily resigned under the terms of the employment agreement between the hotel and Local 531 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, to which the workers belong. “They struck Wednesday at 8:30 a.m., and they haven’t been back since,” he said. “They have a contract. It states in the contract, ‘No strike.’ They were advised by the union five times that they if they didn’t return to work Wednesday--the same day--that they would be considered a quit.”
To Tartaglione, however, the contract was a major cause of the workers’ disillusionment with their union. She said that the staff had never seen the document, in spite of workers’ requests to Perry and the local to obtain copies. Tartaglione, a manager and not a member of the union, said she quit after she was asked to transfer some of her staff to the Glendale Holiday Inn, where she said they would work reduced hours.
The former chief of housekeepers said Perry came to her last fall and asked her to have her staff sign membership cards from the local.
“Mr. Perry brought me union cards and said to me, if the employees don’t sign these cards today, saying they would join the union, they would be fired,” she said. “Even myself, to this point, I have never seen the contract.”
Sam Nuckolls, organizer for the local, agreed with Perry that the workers were in violation of their contract.
‘Nothing I Can Do’
“There’s nothing I can do for them until they go back to work,” Nuckolls said. He said the women “were at risk of being fired” as long as they stayed off their jobs. The protesters said four of the women had returned to work.
None of the protesting workers had contacted him since they walked out, Nuckolls said, blaming Tartaglione for the job action. “She’s just enticing 26 workers to lose their jobs,” he said.
Friday afternoon, eight of the housekeepers and laundry workers sat in the plush orange interior of Isabel Fernandez’s black Dodge van, parked on Angeleno Street near the hotel, and tried to decide what to do.
“The union doesn’t help us,” Fernandez of East Los Angeles said through a translator as her fellow workers warmed up, chatted and changed babies’ diapers.
“Things got worse for us after the union came. Our wages went down . . . We used to get a vacation, now we have to wait three years to get a vacation. What kind of union is this?”
Aguilar of Hollywood said she and the others had signed a petition asking Perry for a copy of the contract.
Want ‘Different Union’
“They want to be unionized but they want a different union,” said interpreter Miriam Santiago, a friend of one of the workers. According to Fernandez, the women would like to join the Teamsters.
Sixto Diaz of Glendale, who described himself as a former banquet steward at the hotel, said he had quit about a month ago after his wages had been reduced and the stewards were told they would not be able to keep their tips. He said he filed charges against the hotel with the National Labor Relations Board in Los Angeles when he discovered that a dollar per hour had been taken out of his final check.
“The majority of the people do not even speak the language,” Diaz said, “and so they cannot defend themselves.”
The women spoke of being forbidden to buy food in the restaurant, of having no dressing room, no facilities for heating food brought from home and having had one bathroom for about 40 workers.
Perry said the hotel was unaffected by the walkout.
“We’re getting the rooms done. Everything is going beautiful,” he said.
