U.S. Accuses Hotel of Awarding Unfair Raises

The National Labor Relations Board has accused Santa Monica’s only unionized hotel of unfairly giving hefty raises to two anti-union employees, and wants management to compensate 228 other union workers with back wages that could total hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The complaint against the Miramar Sheraton hotel--which is still locked in a decertification dispute with the union--will be decided by a federal administrative law judge later this year.

At issue are raises of $2.50 to $3.50 an hour that the hotel granted incrementally to two cashiers between 1995 and 1997. One cashier met regularly with management to discuss which employees were pro- and anti-union, according to testimony heard by the board.

By giving such large pay increases to workers who were trying to persuade union members to support decertification, the hotel illegally created “preference in terms and conditions of employment,” the complaint said.

Organizers for Local 814 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, the bargaining unit that has represented Miramar employees for decades, estimate that the remedy sought by the labor board could cost management as much as $1.8 million--about $8,000 per worker.

The hotel’s attorney, Joseph Herman, would not speculate on the eventual compensation, saying: “It will never occur.”

Union organizers quickly proclaimed victory.

“The sky is kind of falling on the Miramar Sheraton,” said Kurt Petersen, lead organizer for Local 814. “They’ve spent an enormous amount of money fighting the union and it’s not working.”

Minimum pay for cashiers at the hotel in 1997 was $8.38 per hour. According to union records, the two employees named in the complaint received raises that brought them to $12.50 and $11.50 an hour.

Herman said he did not believe that managers had been discriminatory in awarding salaries to the two cashiers, and expressed confidence that the charges would be dropped after the scheduled November hearing. He called the complaint “one other way of trying to delay the inevitable, which is the employees decertifying the union.”

The labor board is still reviewing a vote by employees last October in which they narrowly approved decertifying Local 814 as their bargaining agent. Meanwhile, the union remains the employees’ representative.

The union contends that before the decertification vote, hotel management engaged in a concerted campaign to intimidate hotel workers who were known to support the union, enlisted supervisors to keep pro-union employees from talking to others, and promised preferable job transfers to those who would oppose the union.

During a hearing on the charges last month, former Miramar room service manager Ulysses Black testified that one cashier who met regularly with management came to him asking how big a raise she should ask for. The complaint said the cashier received a raise of $3.50 an hour over the course of a year.

Gail Escobar, a server in the Miramar dining room and member of the union organizing committee, said some employees were upset when they learned of their co-workers’ raises.

“[They] felt that it was due to the fact that these two employees were willing to conduct a very aggressive anti-union campaign on behalf of management,” she said. “I think that they were bitter.”

Petersen said Black’s testimony and the complaint would bolster the union’s ability to organize workers.

Black, who lost his job of seven years in February, has filed a complaint with the labor board contending that he was fired because he refused to participate in activities that he felt were “illegal and immoral,” such as preventing pro-union employees from conversing.

Black said management fired him for failing to meet his deadline for filing required paperwork after a six-week vacation to his native Australia, which was extended by five weeks when his father died.