Workers Have the Godly on Their Side
Religious activists have adopted the cause of 240 union workers fired more than a year ago when their airport hotel was sold, staging vigils and preaching from the pulpit in a campaign that couldn’t come at a worse time for owners of the LAX Radisson.
In recent years, 60 interfaith groups have sprung up from Pennsylvania to Oregon to address labor issues, all affiliated with the Chicago-based National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice. The trend is particularly strong in Los Angeles, home of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, known as CLUE, which grew out of the labor-backed “Living Wage” campaign in the mid-1990s.
Veterans of that effort, which resulted in higher wages for many employees of city contractors, went on to support union campaigns involving low-wage workers in the private sector, from hotel housekeepers in Beverly Hills to airport security screeners and county home-care workers.
“The beauty of it is we never fail to get energized,” said the Rev. Richard Gillette, an Episcopal minister and former CLUE director. “At its best the labor movement is for dignity, respect and a living wage for all working people, and that’s something that people in the religious community can identify with.”
Clerics said the LAX Radisson has become a priority for the group because it symbolizes larger issues, including an erosion of wages, and jobs, in inner-city communities over the last decade.
Friday night, more than 100 religious leaders, some wearing vestments, waved picket signs, held candles and prayed with union activists and former workers outside the Radisson. The gathering included rabbis, Catholic priests, Muslim clerics and several busloads of urban Episcopal ministers, who were in town for an annual assembly.
While police directed traffic around the unusual scene, hotel managers watched from the lobby doors and a few guests peered out of windows. It was the largest in a series of monthly vigils held there since June.
Ashok Israni, chief executive of Pacifica Host Inc., the San Diego investment firm that owns and operates the hotel, would not comment on the campaign. The Radisson franchises its name to the hotel but is not involved in daily operations.
Israni’s attorney, Scott Wilson, noted that the hotel workers union failed to prove charges of discriminatory hiring practices filed with the National Labor Relations Board.
Wilson said the hotel, which is struggling to build clientele at a time when the travel industry remains in a deep slump, would rather the protesters go away. “Obviously, the owners don’t like this publicity,” Wilson said. But he added they had done nothing unlawful.
Hotel owners met with union representatives several times during the summer but failed to reach a compromise. Both sides said they are at an impasse.
CLUE took on the Radisson--formerly a Wyndham Hotel--soon after it was sold in the fall of 2000. The hotel had been one of only three union hotels near the airport, and was the only union lodging on the busy Century Boulevard corridor. That made it a strategic location for the hotel workers union.
As it changed hands, the entire work force--including 240 members of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 814--was fired. The building underwent substantial renovation before it reopened a year later.
As new employees were hired, they received handbooks that informed them, among other things, that the hotel preferred to remain non-union, Wilson confirmed.
Union and religious activists claim the hotel refused to hire former employees because they might be sympathetic to the union, although that was not sustained by the NLRB. Wilson said former employees were free to apply, along with all others, and that they were judged on their merits.
Lead union organizer Manuel Ramon said only 14 former unionized employees now work at the hotel, but Wilson put the number at 28. He noted that because business is slow, the hotel is not fully staffed.
The union, and the religious activists backing them, want the hotel to hire former employees first. “We have workers who worked there 20, sometimes 30 years,” Ramon said. “They’re still 10 to 15 years from retirement, but they’re in that age where it’s really difficult to get them placed.” Many have not found work since they were let go. A union contract settled shortly before the hotel was sold put wages for beginning housekeepers at nearly $10 per hour, plus fully paid family health benefits, Ramon said. He said the hotel now is paying the same workers $7.25, with a less generous insurance plan. Wilson said he could not confirm or deny the wage figures.
The activists also want hotel owners to recognize the union if a majority of employees sign pledge cards, rather than require them to go through a lengthy, and probably contentious, federally supervised election. But Wilson said the so-called card-check process is out of the question. “If [the union] wants to organize those employees, they know how to do it the old-fashioned way,” he said.
But with a contingent of religious leaders backing them, union organizers are trying to force the hotel to rehire the workers and remain neutral in an organizing campaign. Along with the vigils, religious leaders have brought former hotel employees to address their congregations and made frequent house calls to the unemployed, to keep them engaged in the fight.
“A lot of my parishioners knew people who were directly affected,” said the Rev. Anna Olson, associate rector at Holy Faith Episcopal Church in Inglewood. “This fight represents so many of the larger issues for that community. We’re saying this is a community where good jobs are the thing that is most needed, and they were taken away.”
Though there have been few tangible victories so far, the protesters maintain it’s only a matter of time before hotel owners give in. “How many years was Moses in the desert?” asked the Rev. Alexia Salvatierra, a Lutheran minister who directs CLUE. “You don’t expect it to be resolved in six months. These battles sometimes take many years.”
