Most striking hotel workers are back on the job, but the strike continues in San Diego

By Chris Isidore, CNN

New York (CNN) — Most of the 10,000 hotel workers who went on strike during the busy Labor Day weekend have returned to work Wednesday, but one group of 700 union members in San Diego will stay on strike for the foreseeable future.

Those workers, employed at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront, will remain on strike until there is a contract agreement, their union, Unite Here, says.

The Hilton San Diego Bayfront will remain open during the strike, just as all of the hotels that were targeted by the work action remained open during the weekend, spokespeople for the hotel chains told CNN ahead of the walkouts. Guests had to deal with noisy picket lines and reduced service from skeleton crews working in the hotels, which included Hilton, Hyatt and Marriott properties.

The union and members say that in many cases workers are now being paid less than before the pandemic due to reduced hours and tips, even as travel demand returns and profits in the hotel sector soar.

“During Covid, everyone suffered, but now the hotel industry is making record profits while workers and guests are left behind,” said Gwen Mills, the union’s international president, in a statement Wednesday. “Workers aren’t making enough to support their families, and many can no longer afford to live in the cities that they welcome guests to. We won’t accept a ‘new normal’ where hotel companies profit by cutting their offerings to guests and abandoning their commitments to workers.”

The union wants services such as daily room cleaning restored. The union says lack of daily room cleaning not only inconveniences guests but makes housekeeping jobs more difficult since each room requires more work to clean when they have gone days without being serviced. It also reduces the number of housekeeping jobs by 39%, according to the union.

The affected hotel companies all say they remain committed to reaching fair deals with the union, and that they are doing what they can to make sure guests are not inconvenienced by the strike.

The strike, which affected as many as 25 hotels in nine US cities over Labor Day weekend, was planned as a limited duration walk-out. Unite Here has used that strategy in previous strikes, including one at 65 hotels in Los Angeles and Orange counties, California, that started on July 4 weekend last year. The union later staged a series of rolling strikes at different properties in subsequent months, often tied to busy travel periods, such as when Taylor Swift came to Los Angeles for several concerts.

Even with the work action, it took the union until this year to reach what it says are record contracts with most of the Southern California hotels that were impacted.

The union has not ruled out using the same rolling strikes strategy this time, or expanding the strike to other locations. Union members at a total of 65 hotels nationwide had authorized astrike going into this past weekend.

The limited duration strikes are a relatively new strategy for US unions, but they’re common in some other countries, notably in Europe. The strategy is intended to help workers keep as many days of pay as possible during a contract negotiation. Beyond the hotel workers, limited duration strikes have been used to win labor deals for school employees in Los Angeles, health care workers at Kaiser Permanente, janitors, nursing home employees and other workers in Minnesota who went on strike together in March.

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