After a day's work cleaning one hotel room after another, Maria Valdivia says she's often too fatigued to play with her three children once she gets home.
"It pains me to tell my kids I don't have time for them," said Valdivia, a housekeeper at the Hyatt Regency in Long Beach. "But sometimes I'm so tired and so achy that I'm just worn out."
Valdivia was among the hundreds of hotel workers and labor activists who took to the streets of Long Beach last week to launch a national campaign dubbed Hope for Housekeepers, designed to spotlight what union leaders call substandard working conditions at Hyatt hotels nationwide. It is also part of an ongoing organizing effort at the Hyatt, Hilton and other nonunion hotels in Long Beach and elsewhere.
Hyatt officials rejected union allegations that the hotel abuses its housekeepers and is hostile to organized labor.
"The safety of our employees is always at the forefront of our minds," said Jeff C. Pace, general manger at the 528-room Hyatt Regency Long Beach, which abuts the Convention Center and overlooks the harbor. "We are not anti-union. What we are is pro-employee."
The Hyatt chain has suffered a number of public relations blows lately, notably last month, when a firestorm of criticism ensued after Hyatt dismissed 98 nonunion housekeepers at three Boston-area hotels and replaced them with low-wage workers from a subcontractor. The governor of Massachusetts has threatened a boycott unless Hyatt rehires the workers.
Labor representatives voice the hope that the Hyatt Regency and other Long Beach hotels will become another success story in the aggressive recruitment of low-wage, mostly immigrant workers throughout Southern California.
Unite Here Local 11, known for its militant tactics and public relations savvy, has won contracts at hotels near Los Angeles International Airport, in Santa Monica and elsewhere in recent years.
But Long Beach's huge tourism industry remains largely nonunion, posing a challenge to a resurgent organized labor network. Labor leaders say the many public subsidies granted to the hospitality industry in Long Beach mandate more equitable treatment of hotel employees and other tourism workers.
"We will make Long Beach a union town," Maria Elena Durazo, head of the L.A. County Federation of Labor, said at the union rally last week.
