Unite Here Union

Contract negotiations are seldom easy, but this could be a new low. Talks between Disney and one of the resort's biggest unions are stalled for an unlikely reason: The parties have spent two months trying to agree on a meeting place. Union leaders believe that rancor over a dispute about housing for workers in the Anaheim Resort District has spilled into talks between Walt Disney Co. and employees at three Disney hotels.

The Westin Los Angeles Airport hotel suspended 25 workers after they refused to remove buttons bearing the name of the union engaged in a bitter organizing campaign at the hotel, workers and union officials said. Hotel managers did not return a phone call seeking comment. The Westin and other nonunion hotels near LAX have been the targets of an organizing campaign by Unite Here, an international union representing hotel workers, for more than a year.

Amma, the renowned mystic known as the "hugging saint of India," arrived in Los Angeles over the weekend for five days of spiritual events, but the city's labor leaders are responding with the back of their hands. The problem is Amma's choice of venue for her events: the Hilton Los Angeles Airport hotel.

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.

In what may be the first action of its kind, California workplace safety regulators have charged that the duties performed by housekeepers at a hotel -- scrubbing, bed making, vacuuming -- violate the state's repetitive-motion rules. A citation issued late last month by the Division of Occupational Safety and Health identified eight infractions at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport hotel.

Los Angeles area hotel workers rallied with celebrities and politicians Thursday to set the stage for potentially contentious contract negotiations across the country later this year. The negotiations will be a test of the Unite Here union's aggressive strategy that got local contracts in Los Angeles and several other cities to expire this year. That gave the union leverage with national chains such as Hilton Hotels Corp. and Marriott International.

Managers at the Glendale Hilton threatened, interrogated and conducted surveillance of the hotel's workers during a union organizing drive there last fall, according to a complaint by the National Labor Relations Board. The complaint was issued last week by a regional office of the NLRB after a five-month investigation.

Unite Here, the hospitality industry's primary labor union, unveiled a new organization Wednesday that will warn meeting planners of potential contract disputes and help them find labor-friendly hotels. The program, called Informed Meetings Exchange, or Inmex, already has more than 100 subscribers representing about $200 million in annual hotel expenditures, union officials said. Members include the NAACP, Sierra Club and San Jose Convention & Visitors Bureau.

The Glendale Hilton has reached a settlement with the National Labor Relations Board over allegations that its managers threatened, interrogated and conducted surveillance of workers during a union organizing drive there last fall, hotel and union officials said Thursday.

Unite Here, a New York-based union representing 450,000 textile, hotel and restaurant workers, must pay $17.3 million for mailing postcards defaming Sutter Health hospitals, a California judge ruled. A Placer County judge ordered Unite Here to pay the damages to Sutter, a network of nonprofit hospitals in Northern California, for claiming that Sutter affiliates used linens improperly cleaned by contracted laundry services, Sutter said.