Hotel Workers Strike on Labor Day
Over 10,000 hotel workers in nine cities went on a coordinated strike over the 2024 Labor Day weekend. The striking workers voted to authorize their union, UNITE HERE, to conduct a strike as negotiations stalled and contracts with hotel giants Hilton, Hyatt, and Marriott expired. While workers in Boston, Greenwich (CT), Honolulu, Kauai, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Baltimore returned to work after the holiday weekend, workers with Local 30 at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront in San Diego, CA are staying on strike indefinitely.
Hotels and resorts took a huge hit from the COVID-19 pandemic as tourism all but halted overnight and many business trips were put on hold or were conducted over the internet. As a result, 98% of Unite Here’s rank-and-file were laid off in 2020. Now, the hotel and restaurant business has returned to or even exceeded pre-COVID levels but the staffing level has lagged behind. Hotel workers are now expected to complete the same workload as that once took multiple workers to do. But they have not received a commensurate increase in pay or benefits. "The changes we've seen coming out of the pandemic, particularly related to workload and staffing cuts, are cuts that our hotel operators and owners have attempted to make permanent," said Cade Watanabe, member of Local 5 in Hawai’i. One necessary element of capitalism is its reliance on economic crisis. Because capitalists are always chasing profits, production has a tendency to increase over time. This leads to excess demand and an eventual market crash. But such crashes benefit the largest capitalists as they are able to buy small bankrupt firms and force workers desperate for jobs to work harder for less pay. Therefore, the surplus value (“profits”) that capitalists appropriate from workers increases after a crisis. In the case of COVID 19, it was not overproduction which caused the crisis, but the mismanagement of a pandemic by the capitalist ruling class. Regardless of the cause, capitalists were still able to turn the crisis into a tremendous opportunity for profit – at the expense of the working class.
William Brown, 25, of Local 26 touched on how workers are paying the price for their exploitation: "A lot of people have been going out on workers comp because their bodies are hurting."
Workers’ wages are not only low with respect to the amount of work that’s expected of them, they’re also low with respect to the overall economy in general. "What we get paid is basically check-to-check living," says Brown.
The workers’ demands highlight that a greater share of wealth for the capitalists necessarily means a greater share of misery for those who create that wealth - the workers themselves. Workers are laboring longer and harder for far less money, increasing the amount that capitalists can steal.
More and more workers are becoming acutely aware of the true nature of this parasitic relationship. “It’s sad that it has come to this and that it takes us going on strike for our employers to respect the work we put in to make them record breaking profits,” says Kenziro Kloulubak of Local 5.
Hotel owners make money by extracting rents from their patrons and under-compensating their workers for the labor they conduct to maintain the hotel and its associated facilities. Although hotel workers do not directly create surplus value, they play a role in the process of exchange that facilitates the realization of surplus value. When hotel workers withhold their labor and strike, tourists are less able to patronize other local businesses; businesspeople can’t carry out tasks vital to their employers. Profits cannot be realized without the circulation of capital, which is why withholding labor is such a powerful weapon for the working class.