Union, Hyatt Hotels Still at Odds : Labor: 600 employees have been working without a contract for 2 years in a dispute over work schedules.

“News bulletin!” a union staffer announced to two dozen Hyatt Regency housekeepers, bellboys and other workers as they prepared for their weekly Friday afternoon protest outside the downtown Los Angeles hotel.

The news--from the workers’ standpoint--was good: A Cincinnati college, responding to a union boycott campaign against the Regency and two other Los Angeles Hyatt hotels, had canceled a Regency conference reservation for 300 people.

And so another small victory was claimed in a long, nasty war.

For more than two years, 600 workers at the three Hyatts have been working without a contract as the 300,000-member Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union and the $2-billion Chicago-based Hyatt chain grapple over how much flexibility management should have in designing employee work schedules.

The battle is symptomatic of how American unions, their power fading, are having to expend unprecedented time and money to hang on to protective work rules that were once taken for granted in unionized workplaces.

Also at stake is the union’s goal of becoming a bastion for immigrant workers who increasingly dominate Los Angeles’ service industries.

Unions sell themselves to these workers by promising higher wages, employer-paid health insurance and job security. However, failure to win a favorable settlement with Hyatt would rob the hotel workers union of the credibility it needs as it attempts to expand its membership from downtown hotels into the largely non-union swath of hotels around Los Angeles International Airport.

Since 1989, dozens of liberal politicians, community groups and clergymen have joined the union’s fight for a Hyatt contract settlement, but with little apparent success.

What both sides described as a glimmer of progress occurred earlier this month when the union’s national president, Ed Hanley, and Hyatt President Darryl Hartley-Leonard met in Chicago and agreed that high-level subordinates would begin meeting in an attempt to reach a breakthrough. Previously, negotiations had been conducted between local Hyatt officials and representatives of the union’s 13,000-member Local 11.

At issue is whether Hyatt should be able to change employees’ schedules each week to adjust to the volume of hotel business, or whether the new contract should continue to require the hotel to stick to a preset schedule for each worker, with the hotel often paying overtime for extra days.

Local 11’s master contract with nearly 20 Los Angeles hotels requires preset schedules. Hyatt, which broke away from the master contract a decade ago, says it no longer wants to be bound by that work rule. The union says it cannot make the concession to Hyatt without undermining the progress it has made through the master agreement. The master contract says that if the union makes a concession to a party outside the agreement, it must grant the same concession to master-contract hotels.

The union has conducted demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience, and has passed out thousands of flyers contending that the scheduling flexibility sought by Hyatt could result in 10 consecutive days of work with no overtime pay. Hyatt officials acknowledge that possibility but say it would be a rarity.

“They want complete control, complete flexibility,” complained Maria Elena Durazo, Local 11’s president.

“The industry has changed dramatically and the union won’t see that,” said Cody Plott, a Hyatt regional vice president. He said scheduling flexibility is needed to respond more quickly to peak business periods. In the current system, Plott said, the hotel is forced to distribute work to a greater number of employees to avoid paying excessive overtime.

The inability to reach a compromise has cost union members hundreds of thousands of dollars in raises that they would have received if a new contract had been signed on time. The dispute also led to a cutoff of the workers’ Kaiser health insurance benefits last spring. Hyatt subsequently introduced a substitute plan that costs employees more per medical visit.

According to a complaint filed against Hyatt Regency by the National Labor Relations Board, numerous executives of the hotel violated federal labor laws by encouraging employees to decertify the union as their bargaining representative. It is an unfair labor practice for an employer to start a decertification effort. The complaint said that between January and March, Hyatt Regency officials promised better wages and working conditions if workers would abandon the union.

“We don’t feel like we’ve done anything that’s inappropriate,” Plott said.

In response to the company’s alleged activities, a group of angry Regency workers complained to hotel executives in late March. A week later, Hyatt unilaterally increased wages in the three hotels to match increases that had been granted to workers in hotels covered by the master contract. Wages range from $4.30 an hour for a beverage server to $9.57 an hour for a saucier.