Striking hotel workers in San Francisco ask major healthcare conference attendees to stay away
Striking hotel workers in San Francisco
SAN FRANCISCO - Striking San Francisco hotel workers are attempting to discourage people from attending a major healthcare conference in January.
Housekeepers, cooks, dishwashers, servers, bartenders and other members of the union, Unite Here Local 2, are reaching out to attendees of the invitation-only J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference to be held Jan. 13-16 at the Westin St. Francis Hotel.
The conference is billed as a global symposium that includes health and technology industry leaders and members of the investment community. Union spokesperson Ted Waechter said 10,000 people took part in the conference last year.
He said the union first reached out to J.P. Morgan in late September asking them to cancel.
"But we are now reaching out to attendees telling them, you should not come," he said. "We are sharing that, in many cases, the hotels don't want attendees to know about all of the services that are not covered or what kind of experience they will have in a hotel on strike."
Striking hotel workers representing housekeepers, cooks, bartenders, servers, doormen, bellhops and more block streets by near Union Square in San Francisco, Calif on Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024. A total of 84 demonstrators were arrested, cited and rele
In a statement, the union said they are warning participants that the event cannot be held successfully in San Francisco. The statement added that pharmaceutical and other health care executives and investors who would normally attend the conference are responsible for inflated health care costs that have contributed to the labor dispute.
J.P Morgan declined to comment, according to an email from company spokesperson Peter Kelley. Marriott International, which owns the Westin St. Francis, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Unite Here Local 2 represents about 15,000 hotel, airport and food service workers in San Francisco and San Mateo counties. About 2,500 hotel workers are striking at the Grand Hyatt San Francisco, Hilton San Francisco Union Square, Palace Hotel, San Francisco Marriott Union Square, San Francisco Marriott Marquis, and Westin St. Francis, which is the primary conference venue owned by Marriott.
"I can't believe anyone who works in health care would try to cross our picket line when we are fighting to keep our insurance," Ester Yuliani, a buffet attendant at the Westin St. Francis, said in the union statement. "Marriott's proposals are so extreme that they are trying to phase out our union health care, but I'm not going to let that happen."
The workers are asking for affordable health care, better pay, and a reversal of COVID-19 pandemic-era job cuts and the restoration of staffing minimums to resolve being overworked.
In 2018, 7,700 Marriott workers went on strike nationally, including at seven hotels in San Francisco. They obtained wage increases, better health care and protections against sexual harassment, including panic buttons for housekeepers. This year over 10,000 hotel workers have gone on strike in eleven cities across the U.S. since Labor Day. San Francisco is the only city where workers remain on strike.
"They have always wanted to be able to reduce labor costs in San Francisco," Waechter said of the hotels. "We've gone on strike against them many times in the past and won. I think they thought this was their year to really get aggressive and permanently reduce their labor costs."
He said the hotels started with a proposal that would eliminate the union health care plan, and now are proposing phasing out the healthcare insurance over time.
"We have one of the strongest standards for hotel jobs in the entire country," he said. "And they thought this was their moment. So that is our analysis, because they did not propose anything like phasing out union health care in any of the other cities.
According to the Westin Saint Francis, the conference is still scheduled to go forward. +Waechter said the hotels hire temporary workers and redeploy managers to fill in the gaps of regular workers.
"They can't possibly hold this conference successfully in San Francisco when the hotels accounting for 27.5% of all the full-service hotel rooms in the city are on strike," he said.