A Union of Immigrants Wins Minneapolis Hotel Strike
by Peter Rachleff
Though they speak 17 languages, 1,500 Minneapolis hotel workers
spokd with one voice in late June. In a two-week strike against nine
major Minneapolis hotels, they spoke for liveable wage jobs, family
health benefits, and dignity in the workplace.
The strike by Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 17
inspired an outpouring of solidarity and they captured the imaginations
of the Twin Cities media and community. The success of their struggle
should inspire increased activism by immigrant workers, particularly in
the service sector.
Local 17's contract with the hotels had expired in April. While
extending the contract on a day-to-day basis, the union fjocussed on the
late June opening of the biggest convention ever to come to the Twin
Cities. That event would jpack the city's hotels with more than 50,000
members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Encouraged by a tight labor market
throughout the service sector, Local 17 felt that this convention would
put added pressure on both hotel management and the cities' political
leadership to reach a favorable settlement.
The union leadership carefully defined the issues: prosperous
employers who had received public support to build, expand, or remodel
their facilities; hard-working, underpaid workers, many of them
immigrants who had fled war, violence, and turmoil in their home
countries; the responsibility of those employers to provide living wages
and health benefits to these workers.
KEEPING THE STRIKE FRESH
Local 17 approached the conflict strategically, preparing their
membership, holding rallies, and organizing support. When they began to
strike, rather than shutting down all nine hotels at once, they struck
one, then another, then two, then no more for a couple of days, then
another. This enabled them to keep the strike "fresh" in the mass media,
in the top of the news, and it enabled them to use their striking
members and supporters strategically.
The logistics were daunting, with the need to picket hotels with
half a dozen or more entracnes covering enormous territory (from an
entire city block in downtwon Minneapolis to 30 acres of parking lots
and buildings at tone suburban hotel), for 24 hours a day, seven days a
week.
Of course, no amount of strategy could have worked had the union not
successfully involved its membership. While about half of the membership
is caucasian and African American, the key to the strike was the
industry's increasingly immigrant workforce.
Union staffers recruited translators for union meetings. Leaflets
were produced in Amharic, Oromo, Somali, Spanish, and French (for the
immigrant workers from Togo), among other languages. At the last union
meeting before the strike, simultaneous translation into seven languages
was provided.
Union staffers attended cultural events in different immigrant
communities, met with ethnic organization leaders, and sought to educate
all union members about the need to respect their fellow members'
diverse cultures. The union put together a 50-member bargaining
committee, which served as a core communications mechanism between the
staff and the membership, and which provided a guarantee to the
membership that the leadership would not seek a backroom deal with hotel
management at some eleventh hour.
DIRECT ACTION PRACTITIONERS
In important ways, Local 17 had been preparing for this strike for
the past decade. Its activists had earned a local reputation as
practitioners of direct action and civil disobedience.
They had also joined with progressive groups in struggles against
racism (leafletting the Super Bowl with the American Indian Movement,
for instance, to protest the use of racist nicknames by sports
franchieses), miltarism (Local 17 activists appeared on picked lines
against cluster bombs and land mines), and the WTO (in Seattle,
Washington, D.C., and local demonstrations).
At the same time, Local 17 leaders also maintained positive
relationships with the building trades and the labor establishment, as
well as Democratic politicians, from the mayor of Minneapolis and the
president of the city council to U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone.
Local 17's most important prelude to this strike came a year ago,
when it stood firmly and publicly beside either Latina immigrants who
were arrested by the INS and threatened with deportation in the
aftermath of organizing the Holiday Inn Express in downtown Mineapolis.
The union organized a rally of more than 600 people on three days
notice, reached out to the clergy and cultural organizations within the
Latino communities, and pushed politicians to intervene on the women's
behalf.
In the end, the hotel apologized, signed a first contract with the
union, and paid $72,000 in damages to the women. The INS and Justice
Department granted them a two-year waiver to stay in the U.S. and work
legally, while the politicians pledged to change the laws to enable the
women to stay permanently.
The Holiday Inn Express struggle cemented Local 17's image as
pro-immigrant and militant, helping to inspire the national AFL-CIO to
change its policy position on immigrant workers [at] last fall's
convention.
The real story of the strike was the participation of the immigrant
workers. Somali women, dressed in traditional garb including head wraps,
turned away Somali cab drivers and urged them to discourage their fares
from staying at struck hotels.
THE POINT OF PICKETING
These women grabbed the public eye when, on the first day of the
strike at the Minneapolis Hilton, they pushed a beverage cart sent out
by management back into the hotel lobby, shouting, "We don't want your
water. If you really care about usd, you'd pay us decent wages."
On another day, Tibetan picketers grabbed the headlines when they
sat down in the street in front of delivery trucks. They explained to
the Local 17 staffer on the scene, who had been called by frustrated
Minneapolis cops, that they thought the point of picketing was to stop
traffic. (Hard to ague with!)
Strikers taught each other songs, expressions, and dances, as the
Twin Cities media became fascinated with the expression of
multiculturalism on the city's main streets.
Another important jpart of the story involved the support accorded
the strikers. Even before the strike began, two intersecting networks
began meeting with Local 17 -- the Twin Cities Religion and Labor
Network and veteran activists from other unions and progressive
organizations and student and youth activists from the anti-sweatshop
and anti-WTO struggles.
A formal support committee was established, with half a dozen active
sub-committees that took responsibility for arranging speaking
engagements for strikers, raising money for food banks, providing daily
food and drink for picketers, recruiting additional translators and
interpreters, and arranging for singers, dancers, puppeteers, and other
performers to visit the picket lines. The importance of letting the
low-wage immigrant strikers know that they had support cannot be
underestimated.
On the eve of the AA convention, Local 17 and the hotel management
settled. Workers will get wage increases of 20-26 percent over five
years, family health benefits, a "respect and dignity" clause, a
"diversity holiday" of each worker's own choosing, additonal pay for
housekeepers who have to clean up vomit and other disgusting deposits by
guests, additional pay for workers who serve as translators between
management and other workers, and increased management contributions to
the penison fund.
Most importantly, the workers feel empowered. "Nothing will ever be
the same for those workers who picked up the picket signs," said Local
17 officer Jaye Rykunyk.
[Articles may be reproduced in any non-profit publication. Credit is
appreciated.]
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