COLUMN LEFT/ ERIC MANN : Video Age Reaches Union Bargaining : Hotel workers touch L.A.'s image-conscious sore spot with 'City on the Edge,' a tape to discourage visitors.

By ERIC MANN

June 26, 1992 12 AM PT

<i> Eric Mann, a former auto worker, is director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles. The center's Urban Strategies Group report, "Reconstructing Los Angeles From the Bottom Up," will be published in August. </i>

“City on the Edge,” a video produced by Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 11, has produced an uproar because the union mailed hundreds of copies to convention planners around the country. The video’s message is that the low-wage, union-busting tactics of hotel employers are contributing to a socially polarized city. The outraged, if predictable, response by the employers and Mayor Bradley’s office only confirms the main point of the video: that L.A.’s business and government elite has little concern for low-wage workers, and is instead fixated on image and the bottom line.

The union’s video is an artful tactic to solve a real-life problem. The powerful management interests representing the Los Angeles Hotel Employers Assn. (including the Westin Bonaventure, Biltmore, Los Angeles Hilton, Sheraton Town House and Century Plaza) have stonewalled the union in negotiations, allowed their contract to expire on April 15, demanded a two-year wage freeze from their workers (the majority of whom are Latino and Asian, many of them women, who labor for less than $7 an hour), demanded that employees pay more for medical coverage, and refused union proposals to provide job security for workers if the hotels are sold. This is a far from academic demand; when the Hyatt Wilshire was sold and became the Wilshire Koreana, the new management immediately fired all 125 union employees.

I have talked with dozens of these hotel and restaurant workers, and have heard heart-wrenching stories of how they try to feed their families on wages of less than $7 an hour, are forced to clean far more rooms a day than their bodies can stand, are threatened with being fired for their union activism, and are kept awake all night with insomnia as the pressure at work becomes unbearable.

Management’s strategy is to force down the costs of business, meaning the human beings who clean the floors, carry the bags, serve the drinks, park the cars--and to break their union.

Whether through a strike or a boycott or a public-information campaign (or a combination of all three), if labor cannot in some way threaten management’s profits (which in the short term also entails the risk of reducing the workers’ already tenuous subsistence), it has no chance to win self-respect, organizational growth and a better life for its beleaguered members.

It is only in these fiercely anti-union times that ridiculous arguments about “biting the hand that feeds you” surface, often from a hostile media. If our society cannot understand that it is the labor of working people who, both literally and figuratively, feed the profits of the corporations, then we have truly turned economics on its head. In this instance, the union’s only effective counter-strategy has to be to hurt, or threaten to hurt, management profits and, yes, in a hotel, restaurant and tourist industry, management’s image.

In the union’s video, industry officials talk of a public-relations campaign to give Los Angeles a new image: “It’s fun, it’s safe, and it’s clean” is the theme. But for almost 500,000 Angelenos who work an entire year for less than $10,000, not to mention those without any job or any home, Los Angeles is not fun, safe or clean.

In this sense, “City on the Edge” is a great contribution, because it goes beyond the specific demands of the union to challenge Peter Ueberroth and the Rebuild L.A. Committee, Mayor Bradley and any wannabe mayoral candidate. Like the filmed images of the Rodney King beating, the union’s video tells a gripping story that demands profound changes in how our society does business.

Tourism is one industry that can’t relocate, so it is a perfect candidate for local government intervention to support a high-wage economy as part of a true rebuilding-L.A. strategy. So far, the mayor’s office has chosen to condemn the union’s videotape, and talks about using $1.5 million in federal funds to make another attempt at a public-relations cover-up of the city’s problems. Instead, the city’s political and business leaders should consider persuading the hotel employers that wages of $9 an hour, full medical benefits and an end to harassment and abuse of workers might be one concrete step forward to repair the city’s image as documented in “Greed on the Edge.”