On strike on the Sunset Strip

September 14, 2011

LOS ANGELES--The Sunset Strip running between Hollywood and Beverly Hills is a high-profile destination for the city's rich and famous. This week, it will be a little noisy, too.

Workers at the Hyatt Andaz in West Hollywood have gone on strike. The Hyatt Andaz is a sleek, modern hotel that underwent millions of dollars of renovations in 2008. It is cradled in a span of luxury residences on Sunset Boulevard, and its rooms fetch a minimum of $325 a night.

In the midst of this opulence, hotel workers represented by UNITE HERE Local 11 have been without a contract for more than two years. Speedups are notorious in the hotel industry, and the breakneck work pace accounts for the high rate of injury for Hyatt housekeepers required to clean as many as 30 rooms a day.

This is just one of the reasons that some 3,000 workers at Hyatt hotels in four U.S. cities--Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Honolulu--went on strike September 8 in a planned one-week walkout to challenge what the UNITE HERE union calls "the worst employer in the hotel industry."

Others issues at stake are the union's push for contract provisions allowing members to participate in strikes and boycotts over workplace conditions, as well as management's attempt to remove language that allows for card-check representation at newly acquired or constructed hotels/

The strike has pickets that are active 24 hours a day for the week, plus several large rallies.

This action is taking place in an atmosphere of rising levels of class anger and growing support for struggle, including the recent strike at Verizon on the East Coast and a contract battle by grocery workers at West Coast supermarket chains Vons, Albertsons and Ralphs.

Additionally, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) will be conducting strikes against Kaiser Permanente between September 21 and 23. The 4,000 NUHW caregivers at Kaiser will be joined with a sympathy strike by 17,000 registered nurses of the California Nurses Association on September 22.

Community support and solidarity are essential for labor victories. We need to support the union fight at Hyatt and all the other battles to show that workers across Los Angeles stand together.

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