For Picket Lines Nobody Dares Cross!

Victory to Chicago Hotel Strike!

SEPTEMBER 18—The following leaflet was issued by the Chicago Spartacist League during the first week of the strike and is being distributed at hotel workers picket lines and rallies. As we go to press, the strike continues into the second week.

On September 7, thousands of workers represented by UNITE HERE Local 1 walked off the job at 25 hotels across downtown Chicago, with union members at another hotel joining them four days later. The hotel workers, including housekeepers, doormen, cooks and servers, are fighting especially for year-round health benefits, now outrageously denied to them by the filthy rich hotel owners. Lively and loud pickets are up around the clock. The determination of the strikers is captured by one popular chant: “Who is going to win? Local 1!” A victory by the hotel workers would be a shot in the arm for all city labor.

These glitzy hotels, which cater to the privileged and are rolling in record profits, have nothing but contempt for the overwhelmingly black, Latino, immigrant and female workforce. While on the job, Local 1 members are pushed to the physical limits under hellish conditions. Then, many workers are laid off and stripped of health care coverage when business slows during the winter. Adding insult to injury, management sabotages their attempts to obtain unemployment insurance. Kept at the beck and call of the hotel bosses, they struggle to put food on the table and to receive vital health care.

As if throwing workers off the job in the dead of winter weren’t enough, the hotels go right back to imposing forced overtime and speedup on them as soon as the tourist-heavy summer months approach. One “guest services” worker told Workers Vanguard that she can even be “forced in” to work on her days off, and not showing up to the job is grounds for a write-up. Seeking to intensify the already backbreaking pace of the work, management wants to increase the number of rooms to be cleaned per shift from 16 to 18. This situation cries out for union control of hiring and staffing levels. Down with mandatory overtime and speedup!

Other Chicago trade unionists, from construction workers to teachers, have rightly won year-round health benefits despite not working for long stretches of time. Their labor is what keeps this city going. Hotel workers deserve nothing less. They are now locked in a strike battle with employers out to squeeze them for more profit. Itching to clobber the union, the hotel bosses prepared in advance to break any strike, including by recruiting scabs from out of state and through temp agencies.

Even so, the strike has made an impact, as tens of thousands of visitors pour into Chicago for a huge technology convention. Inside the hotels, towels are piling up, rooms are going uncleaned and lines are long. But the hotels remain open, with the temps, unorganized workers and management performing the jobs of striking workers. In addition, Local 1 members at four hotels with expired contracts are not out on strike. To win decisively, the strike must be extended and all the hotels shut down tight. The way to do that is to build picket lines that nobody dares try to cross! The union also represents workers at other hotels still under contract. Unity in struggle would be facilitated by having one shared contract expiration for all hotel workers. Strike all the hotels! One out, all out!

It is high time to win one for labor. Importantly, members of other unions who work inside the hotels are honoring the picket lines and staying off the job. These include painters, electricians, engineers and elevator operators. If nothing moved in or out of the hotels, they would quickly become unlivable, as would happen if sanitation workers left the trash to rot. Striking workers told WV that Teamster drivers have refused to make deliveries to struck hotels. This is the kind of labor solidarity that is desperately needed!

Many non-union workers, such as valets and front-desk staff, are reporting to work despite the strike. Picket lines mean don’t cross! Local 1 should appeal to these workers to join the picket lines and enroll in the union, pledging to defend them against company reprisals. Unless they are brought out of the hotels and into the union, they will continue to be used as scabs and finks for management. A victorious strike could encourage organizing more widely in the hotel industry. Front of the house, back of the house—all workers in the union, all workers on the picket lines!

Local 1 could build such pickets by mobilizing its entire membership as well as by appealing for solidarity from the rest of the unions in the hotel industry and throughout the city. There is every reason for other workers to fight alongside the striking Local 1 members, who represent a cross section of working-class Chicago with connections to those in the city’s most powerful unions, like transit. On the other side, the profit-gouging hotel bosses are backed to the hilt by the viciously anti-labor city administration.

To be clear, security guards are not workers but hired company thugs. Tasked with protecting the property of the bosses, they are private auxiliaries to the Chicago police, who are watching the pickets for any worker who “gets out of line.” The cops “serve and protect” capitalist profit and terrorize black and Latino neighborhoods. Neither security guards nor cops have any business in the labor movement.

Workers have only ever won gains on the picket lines and through other class-struggle means, so it is a searing indictment of the union officialdom that it has for decades chained labor to the capitalist Democratic Party. This is a dead end! No less than the Republicans, the Democrats are a party of the bosses that will not hesitate to savage workers and their organizations. Even now, the Illinois AFL-CIO tops and other union bureaucrats are endorsing the billionaire Democratic gubernatorial candidate, J.B. Pritzker, whose family owns the Hyatt hotel chain. The Pritzkers have a long history of grossly abusing their workers, from suppressing wages to enforcing debilitating speedup.

J.B.’s sister, Penny, was Secretary of Commerce in the Obama administration, which postured as “friends of labor.” The reality was the exact opposite. Following a massive effort by the union tops to put him into the White House, Barack Obama spearheaded the gutting of the United Auto Workers while bailing out the auto companies as well as the banks. He proceeded to wage a war against teachers unions, impose a two-year wage freeze on federal employees and ban multiple strikes by rail workers.

The Local 1 leadership is no stranger to pushing Democrats, as shown by its “Rahm Love” ad campaign for Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2015. This effusive endorsement was issued after the now outgoing mayor’s repeated efforts to gut the Chicago Teachers Union and as he was actively covering up the cop killing of black youth Laquan McDonald. Early in the strike, Democrat Lori Lightfoot, one of Emanuel’s would-be successors, showed up at a Local 1 picket to garner votes in her bid to become the next enforcer of class and racial oppression in Segregation City. Break with the Democrats!

Given the large immigrant component of Local 1, it is a good thing that hotel management is prohibited under the contract from inquiring about immigration status. All working people have an interest in defending the rights of immigrant workers. Not only is every deportation a dagger aimed at the heart of the organized labor movement, but the same forces gunning for immigrants also are taking aim at black people and the working class as a whole. A fighting labor movement would organize actions to demand: Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! No deportations!

What is needed is a new, class-struggle union leadership to mobilize the social power of the working class independently of and in opposition to the bosses and their political representatives, including the Democrats. Such a union leadership would be committed to building a multiracial revolutionary workers party that fights for a workers government. This party would champion black freedom, women’s rights and the cause of all the oppressed with the aim of putting an end to capitalist wage slavery once and for all.

The hotel workers strike has caught the attention of working people across Chicago. After years of defeats at the hands of the bosses, a solid strike could help galvanize trade unionists in the city and beyond. Victory to the hotel workers strike!

12 September 2018