A Wrap Up of Last Week's Labor Battles

By Jorge Casuso

In the ten years Edith Garcia had worked as a housekeeper at the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel, she had never met any of the top bosses. They always ignored her when she walked by, Garcia said, and her requests for a meeting always fell on deaf ears.

But last week, a ride in Santa Monica's City Hall elevator achieved what years of trying and a month of union protests, street theater and marches failed to accomplish. It brought the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel's top officials and its pro-union workers like Garcia face to face in the same room.

The Tuesday encounter began with the arrival of three Loews managers to a loud round of boos from more than 50 union supporters gathered at a rally on the steps of City Hall.

Charged by the speeches and the chanting, the crowd followed the hotel brass through the lobby towards the elevator, where a handful of workers and a union organizer squeezed in and began to ask questions: Why did the hotel hire "union busters" and additional security? Why won't management talk to the workers or let them freely organize?

The officials remained silent, the elevator doors opened on the second floor and the impromptu meeting came to a sudden end.

"They didn't know what to answer," Garcia said after the elevator ride. "They felt very uncomfortable. They got in the corner. They stayed quiet and looked at each other. They were scared. It made me feel good because we are the ones who are always afraid. We made them feel the way they make us feel at work. That was a victory."

Hotel officials had a very different take on the impromptu meeting. "I absolutely was not intimidated or threatened," said Alan Rose, the hotel's director of Community Relations, who was in the elevator with Skip Hartman, Loews' regional vice president, and Dick Seifert, who is in charge of labor and human relations for the corporation. "We could have gone through the back door instead of walking past the crowd. They didn't want to talk in a reasonable manner. We told them that if they wanted to talk to us, they can visit us in our office."

Despite the face to face meeting, a City Council resolution denouncing Loews' tactics and four days of protests that culminated in the arrest of two dozen union supporters last Thursday, the two sides remain deadlocked. The key issue: How to decide the fate of a union for the 375 employees at the 340-room luxury beachfront hotel just south of the Santa Monica pier.

Hotel officials - who took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times' local insert last week -- say they are willing to immediately hold an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In the ad titled "An Independence Day Letter," they noted that such elections are used successfully across the country and that they give workers the privacy of a ballot box to cast their votes.

"It is a secret ballot. There is no intimidation, no reprisal," Rose said. "They (the workers) make the choice. No one sees how you voted. It is a terrific process. It has worked across the country and there is no reason not to use it here."

"If our employees, through the NLRB process, vote to join the union," Rose told the council, "the management at Loews will comply fully with its legal obligation to bargain with the union in good faith for a fair contract. What we will not do is sit idly by and allow the union to trample on our employees' right to privacy and self-determination."

"The union has a right to protest, but the bottom line is our workers have the right to decide a union under a free election," said Jessica Berg, a spokeswoman for the hotel. "We're ready to have the election today. They feel they can't win, so they don't want an election."

The Hotel Employee and Restaurant Employees Union Local 18 counters that it wants an election, but only if it is a "card check" election that requires hotel management to remain silent on the issue. Union leaders contend that an NLRB election allows management to organize a campaign and that the results can be held up by years of appeals.

"In a card check election, they don't have control," said Kurt Petersen, the union's lead organizer. "In an NLRB election if they lose they can appeal. It's a dead-end path no matter which way we go and they know it."

Petersen called the NLRB elections a "faulty process. We could win an election and it could take years before it's certified. They know this. They know all the tricks. When the card check is signed, it's over. That's the end of it. The union is either recognized or not."

Emboldened by a major victory after a bitter 5-year battle to keep a foothold at the Miramar Fairmont and riding a wave of support for an unprecedented living wage measure being studied by the council, the union has taken its case to the streets. Last week, hundreds of union supporters marched through the Santa Monica and downtown Los Angeles, draped freeway overpasses with pro-union signs and staged street theater and a 50-car caravan, as the union stepped up the pressure to make Loews the city's second unionized hotel..

The campaign culminated last Thursday afternoon when nearly 250 union supporters marched past the Loews Hotel banging buckets and drums and stopped at the entrance to the Santa Monica Pier. There, they set up a table and put Loews management through a mock trial for trying to buy workers off with raises and hiring "union busters" to denigrate the union.

"The management say the union is a member of the Mafia and that the monthly fees are high," one Loews worker said in a mock testimony. "If you unionize, we'll take away your food and your parking."

After listening to the charges, the crowd chanted, "Guilty, guilty, guilty...."

The demonstrators then sat at the intersection, as police diverted traffic to other streets. Rev. Sandi Richards, the pastor of the Church in Ocean Park, stepped forward in a flowing white robe and gave an invocation.

"Send forth your spirit and we shall bring forth hope and justice in our town," she said, her arms upraised.

As nearly 50 police officers in riot helmets surrounded the protestors, most of them dispersed, leaving two dozen holding hands in a circle chanting. The officers then began arresting the remaining protestors one by one, in some cases using plastic strips as handcuffs. The protestors - some of them smiling -- were taken to the city jail and released a few hours later.

"The battle for justice never stops and Santa Monica is now ground zero for the battle for worker justice," City Councilman Richard Bloom said at the start of the demonstration.

The union battle is being waged not only on the streets of this seaside town of 90,000, but also inside City Hall, where the union can count on the support of the City Council, most of whose members have joined in the demonstrations.

Last week, hours after the elevator ride, the council unanimously approved a resolution denouncing "union busting" and calling upon local businesses to "respect worker dignity, management neutrality and the right to choose union representation without intimidation." Although the resolution is more symbolic than practical, it was meant to send a message to hotel officials who were grilled by the council during their testimony.

"Santa Monica is a community where bullying the vulnerable is not acceptable to us," said Councilman Kevin McKeown, who sponsored the resolution. "We cannot allow those with power and privilege to ignore the community."

The resolution calls for businesses to use methods such as "third party card check petitions" to certify a union, rather than relying on elections conducted by the NLRB.

Company officials - who said they found out the resolution was on the agenda by accident -- were taken aback by the council's staunch stance.

"This is a sham," Rose said after the meeting. "This is the first time in my 35 year history (with Loews) where city government has come out and blatantly taken sides on an issue that's not appropriate to them. It's just blatantly unfair. They made up their minds before the meeting. They made us sound like we're union busters."

At the meeting, union leaders pointed to the protracted battle to decertify the city's only hotel union at the former Miramar Sheraton Hotel. The management, which hired a firm to campaign against the union, won a 1997 election 120 to 109. It took a union appeal to the NLRB before the results were overturned, and it took a worker fired for organizing four years to be reinstated. The bitter battle only ended when Maritz and Wolffe, which bought the hotel late last year, remained neutral in an April 2000 election that resulted in a 161 to 7 union victory.

"I will never put them (the workers) through that gauntlet of terror again," said Petersen, who was depicted as Hitler in an anti-union poster during the Miramar election campaign. "They (Loews) have already ruined the atmosphere for an election. They've given $4,000 raises to buy people off."

At the meeting last week, half a dozen Loews workers once again repeated some of the 23 charges of intimidation and threats the union has filed with the NLRB and complained about constant surveillance by beefed-up security.

They also denounced the hotel's hiring of Cruz and Associates, the consulting firm brought in by Miramar management during the height of the hotel's labor war. Charges filed by the union against the hotel during the Cruz-orchestrated campaign led to the NLRB's overturning of a initial vote.

"It's not right for the hotel to pay so much to confuse us," said Luis Marquez, who has worked at the Loews for four years. "I don't think that's fair. Please get those people out. Give us the freedom to organize."

Rose declined to comment on the hotel's response to the ongoing organizing drive but said that "not a single one of these allegations have been substantiated."

Loews workers who are trying to organize said the raises and meetings with Cruz and Associates have taken a toll on worker morale.

"For us it's bad," said Julio Aviles, who has been a housekeeper at the hotel for nine months. "Morale is low. The raises are making the workers complacent. Some workers say, 'We don't need a union. Why do we need it?'"

"It (the hotel's response) is dividing people," said Francisco Vasquez, a kitchen worker and a member of the organizing committee. "There are many against the union. The raises worked."

Blanca Esquivel, who works in the food and beverage department, said that "there's quite a few of us" who don't back the union. Esquivel said that union organizers visited her home numerous times to talk her into joining the organizing drive.

"This issue is more than a union issue," Esquivel said. "We don't need to have someone coming and telling us what we can or can't do. Instead of encouraging people to rally, they should encourage people to move up" by taking advantage of free English as a Second Language classes and tuition reimbursement offered by the hotel. "We don't need anyone to speak for us."

At the union hall parking lot after last Thursday's arrests, Petersen claimed a victory in the ongoing battle. He pointed to the $6,000 full-page ad in the Times titled "An Independence Day Letter" stating the hotel's position.

"We know that we're winning when the company is reacting, and that's a big reaction," Petersen said.

Petersen also noted that the demonstration and arrests had been covered by press from as far as Boston and London.