Union Expecting ‘Offer’ From Disneyland Hotel

The union representing 1,200 Disneyland Hotel workers involved in long and sometimes bitter contract negotiations said Thursday that management has promised to make an offer this morning that may end the 7 1/2-month-old dispute.

But the hotel’s negotiator, Ric Morris, said the hotel would only clarify “the bottom line of what the hotel is prepared to accept.”

He added, however, that “it is a package that we believe the union can get its membership to ratify in order to end the dispute.”

The employees--mostly maids, cooks, bus boys, bartenders and waiters--have been working without a contract since Feb. 28. During the on-again, off-again negotiations, their union, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, Local 681, has called for a boycott of the hotel and has picketed the hotel, the homes of two of its executives and the home of Bonita Granville Wrather, the chairman of the board of Wrather Corp., which owns the hotel.

The union also planned to picket the board of trustees meeting of the American Film Institute in Los Angeles Thursday because Wrather also is its board chairman. Steven A. Beyer, a union administrative assistant, said the picketing was called off “as a show of good faith” after the hotel informed the union of its new offer.

“That’s not quite the truth,” Morris said. He said he telephoned the union to tell them of the hotel’s latest “package” and warned “that if they continued with their plans to picket the American Film Institute for the purpose of embarrassing our owners . . . there’s nothing for us to talk about.”

“It wasn’t designed to embarrass her,” Beyer said. “It was designed to reach out to her fellow (film institute) board members.”

The negotiators for both sides have been meeting informally “during the last two or three weeks,” Beyer said.

“What’s happened is we’ve come very close (during those meetings). . . . They called to say they’d make an offer that they think will fly.”

Morris said the word offer was inaccurate. “It’s not an offer. I would typify it as a package, a general concept. . . . I think in totality it says the same thing (as previous offers by the hotel) but provides the union an opportunity to present it (to its members) in a more positive vein.”