Korean Firm Fires Staff in Hyatt Wilshire Takeover
For most of the 175 workers at the Hyatt Wilshire Hotel, 1991 ended with a thud.
Before dawn Tuesday, their jobs disappeared as a Korea-based hotel chain opening its first U.S. outlet assumed ownership and management of the 396-room Mid-Wilshire hotel and brought in a virtually new set of employees.
The practice, which is legal, is most often used by new management companies that want to cut labor costs by ridding themselves of a unionized work force such as that at the Hyatt Wilshire.
For the primarily Latino workers, however, the legality removed none of the maneuver’s sting, which became official at midnight Monday, when the Hyatt Wilshire became the Koreana Hotel.
Officials of the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees Union, Local 11, which had represented the Hyatt Wilshire workers, called for a boycott of the Koreana after efforts to negotiate with new management failed.
“Companies who attempt to do business in Los Angeles by slashing the working conditions, by lowering wages and benefits are not good for the city,” said hotel union organizer Somini Sengupta. “It’s important for Los Angeles to say that you can’t do business successfully in this town by going after workers’ standard of living.”
During the last two weeks, a coalition of 20 Los Angeles groups representing Korean-Americans and other minority groups and churches urged the Koreana to retain the entire Hyatt work force.
“Your actions could exacerbate already-existing racial tensions” against Korean-Americans in Los Angeles, a city “often split along racial lines,” the groups said in a letter to Young Sun Kim, the hotel’s director of operations. The letter was written before the union called for a boycott.
Another union staff member, speaking on condition of anonymity, said she attended an orientation session for Koreana workers Monday at which housekeepers were told they would be paid $5.20 per hour--$1.50 per hour less than housekeepers earned under the Hyatt union contract.
Jack Bermudez, Koreana’s director of human resources, declined to disclose the precise number of Hyatt Wilshire employees retained by Koreana or discuss wage scales paid to workers, beyond saying they were competitive.
He said that barely half of the Hyatt workers applied to continue working under Koreana and that it gave preference to Hyatt workers applying for jobs at the hotel.
“It was our commitment to hire the best staff . . . to advise the community at large that we were going to be interviewing. . . . I think we’ve done our part,” he said.
Sengupta said that more than 130 of the 175 Hyatt workers applied for employment and that the Koreana hired fewer than a dozen of them.
She said the union contacted Koreana after it learned of the sale of the hotel in late November, and with help from Hyatt persuaded Koreana to interview Hyatt workers at the hotel in mid-December. But the interviews were not held, she said, and when the union delivered job applications from the bulk of Hyatt workers to Koreana executives two days later, “We were told all the workers the hotel needed to hire had been hired.”
Spokesmen for the Hyatt Corp. were not available for comment.
The Chicago-based Hyatt organization sold the Hyatt Wilshire to Koreana Hotel Co. for about $25 million in cash, sources said. Only a few weeks before the sale, Local 11 settled a prolonged labor dispute with the Hyatt Wilshire and two other Los Angeles Hyatts.
The Hyatt Wilshire became the third Korean-owned hotel in Southern California. The others are the Doubletree Resort in Cathedral City near Palm Springs, and the Hilton Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
Southern California’s weak hotel market has been undergoing a brutal shakeout because of excess hotel rooms, the recession and a drop in travel, industry analysts say.
