Hotel Accepts Union, Will Rehire Workers : Labor: Koreana Co. reaches agreement with former employees of Wilshire Plaza Hotel hours before a hearing.

The South Korean owners of a Mid-Wilshire hotel have agreed to recognize an employees’ union and rehire some workers fired when the firm bought the hotel last December, officials announced Thursday.

The agreement between the Koreana Co.’s Wilshire Plaza Hotel and the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees Union, Local 11, was reached earlier this week, just hours before the dispute was scheduled to be heard by an administrative law judge in Los Angeles.

Christopher Burrows, an attorney representing the hotel, said Thursday there “were no winners or losers” in the settlement.

On the other hand, Local 11’s president, Maria Elena Durazo, said the union “got everything we wanted--union recognition, a union contract and the right for the employees to return to work.”

Neither side was willing to say how the dispute was resolved, but the company and the union said City Councilmen Michael Woo, Mike Hernandez and Mark Ridley-Thomas had helped initiate the talks that led to the agreement.

The dispute centered on Koreana’s decision last year to fire most of the 175 union employees of what had been the Hyatt Wilshire Hotel and replace them.

The practice has often been used by new management companies that want to cut labor costs by ridding themselves of a unionized work force.

Most of the 150 fired employees were Latinos. In early January, a coalition of 20 groups representing Korean-Americans and other minorities wrote a letter to Young Sun Kim, the hotel’s new director, warning that his company’s actions “could exacerbate already existing racial tensions” in the city.

In August, the National Labor Relations Board accused Koreana of violating U.S. labor laws, saying the hotel company had “deliberately and selectively refused to hire former employees of the Hyatt Wilshire . . . in order to avoid its obligation to recognize the union as the exclusive collective bargaining representative.”

The federal board also charged that the hotel’s new employees had assaulted a union representative during attempts to distribute leaflets and promised a former employee that “he would be hired if he would agree not to participate in picketing.”

Company officials denied the NLRB charges, saying they represented only the union’s side of the argument.

In their joint statement Thursday announcing the agreement, the union and the hotel company stressed the importance of ending any divisiveness.

“Koreana’s choice of reconciliation over confrontation is a positive step for all of Los Angeles,” Durazo said.

“We feel it is in everyone’s best interest to . . . move forward in harmony,” Kim said.

Under the agreement, Koreana agrees to recognize the union as the exclusive representative for collective bargaining; adopt the contract that the union has signed with other local hotels covering medical and dental benefits, pension plans and grievance procedures, and adjust employees’ wages to levels comparable to those at the other hotels.

In addition, Koreana agrees to rehire 11 of the fired employees by Dec. 1 and place all the others on a preferential list for recall when there are job openings. Employees who are not rehired before Dec. 1 will share in up to $300,000 in unemployment compensation provided by the hotel.