Hotel's owners dig in for labor fight - The reclusive Hsus, who operate the Hilton Los Angeles Airport, take a strong, quiet stand against union efforts to organize employees.
On some days, Christine Hsu scarcely sees the city whose political and labor leadership her family has up in arms. Instead, she stays inside the Hilton Los Angeles Airport, the hotel her father bought, the hotel his company still owns, the hotel where she and her brother live for weeks at a time, 15 floors above Century Boulevard.
The Hilton, with more than 1,200 rooms, is the second-largest hotel in Los Angeles County. Over the last year, it has become the primary battleground for one of the city's loudest disputes: a union organizing campaign of a dozen airport-area hotels.
The effort by the union, Unite Here, has spawned other fights, including the city's attempt to extend so-called living wage protections to hotel workers and a boycott of the Hilton supported by eight members of Congress, seven City Council members and a presidential candidate.
Last month, union protesters criticized the famous "hugging saint," a mystic from India named Amma, for violating the boycott by holding a spiritual retreat at the hotel.
Although the clash has been described as a contest between labor and business, or poor immigrant hotel workers versus corporate hotel owners, the central players are the Hsus.
Union officials claim the Hsus are the most hostile of airport-area hotel owners to labor's efforts to organize. And, like the immigrant workers the union seeks to represent, the Hsus are from overseas.
Hilton does not own the property. The Hsus hire Hilton to provide management and the corporate name.
The family is at once well-known and reclusive, isolated from Southern California and connected to prominent athletic and charitable organizations.
Patriarch Henry Hsu (pronounced "shoe") is 94 and lives in Taiwan, where he has been a major sports, business and political figure, but he maintains church ties to Los Angeles and is listed in public records as chairman of Universal Fortuna Investment Inc., the hotel's parent company.
His son, David, is Fortuna's president and spends weeks at a time in the hotel, employees say. Henry Hsu's daughter Christine also lives there and supervises the finances.
"It certainly is a family business. Christine actually lives in the hotel," said lawyer Edward Zaelke, who represented the Hsus in their 1992 purchase of the hotel. "They are salt-of-the-earth people."
Acquaintances say the Hsus also share key traits: stubbornness and a history of pursuing fights for years without giving ground.
