"Step Up For Justice" Campaign Turns Up Pressure on Loews

By Jorge Casuso

Hotel workers and their supporters kicked off the first day of a four-day "Step Up For Justice" campaign Monday by draping banners from freeway overpasses, staging street theater and marching to the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel, the target of an escalating unionizing effort.

The day's actions concluded with speeches -- accented by pounding drums -- denouncing the hotel's owners, who workers claim are using strong-arm tactics to squash their unionizing efforts.

"Loews' owners may not know that it's a basic freedom that workers have to organize a union," Councilman Paul Rosenstein told the crowd of nearly 200. "Loews is doing everything possible to undermine those rights - fool people, intimidate them, harass them.

"This is the beginning of a big week in Santa Monica," said Rosenstein, who is a union electrician. "It will take all of us working together to bring freedom and democracy and basic dignity and respect to the people at the hotel."

The campaign comes one month after Loews workers publicly kicked of a union organizing effort. Since then, the hotel has hired a consulting firm that is holding mandatory worker meetings and has beefed up security.

Earlier this month, a housekeeper and a union organizer filed a police report claiming that a hotel security guard had threatened their lives. The report was included among the charges presented to the National Labor Relations Board. The charges included threatening workers with retaliation and arrest for backing the union.

"The company has hired internal security," said Fabian Gonzalez, one of the workers who is organizing the union. What they're doing is totally unfair. They watch us. If we don't organize, we'll be here one day and gone the next."

Kurt Petersen, an organizer for the local Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, vowed to keep up the pressure in an effort to avoid a repeat of the bitter five-year battle to unionize the Miramar Hotel.

"We don't want another five-year fight like we had at the Miramar and we don't think Santa Monica does either," Petersen said. "The Loews could end this tomorrow.

"They are making a big mistake to do what they're doing," he said. "It's a big miscalculation and there's still time to do the right thing. We think there's a crisis here and the community should know about it."

Following is a schedule of Tuesday's actions:

8 a.m. - March in Santa Monica beginning at Local 814, 525 Colorado Avenue, and ending at Loews Hotel, 1700 Ocean Avenue. Marchers will push beds, carry vacuum cleaners and dusters and other tools of the hotel service trade. There will be street theater at intersections and at Loews.

Noon: Starting at 7th and Figueroa in Downtown Los Angeles, demonstrators will visit downtown plaza areas and engage in "sick ins" to dramatize employers' failure to provide free family health insurance.

5 p.m.: Car caravan from Local 814 in Santa Monica to City Hall.