A Union of Immigrants Wins Minneapolis Hotel Strike
by Peter Rachleff
Though they speak 17 languages, 1,500 Minneapolis hotel workers spokd with one voice in late June. In a two-week strike against nine major Minneapolis hotels, they spoke for liveable wage jobs, family health benefits, and dignity in the workplace.
The strike by Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 17 inspired an outpouring of solidarity and they captured the imaginations of the Twin Cities media and community. The success of their struggle should inspire increased activism by immigrant workers, particularly in the service sector.
Local 17's contract with the hotels had expired in April. While extending the contract on a day-to-day basis, the union fjocussed on the late June opening of the biggest convention ever to come to the Twin Cities. That event would jpack the city's hotels with more than 50,000 members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Encouraged by a tight labor market throughout the service sector, Local 17 felt that this convention would put added pressure on both hotel management and the cities' political leadership to reach a favorable settlement.
The union leadership carefully defined the issues: prosperous employers who had received public support to build, expand, or remodel their facilities; hard-working, underpaid workers, many of them immigrants who had fled war, violence, and turmoil in their home countries; the responsibility of those employers to provide living wages and health benefits to these workers.
KEEPING THE STRIKE FRESH
Local 17 approached the conflict strategically, preparing their membership, holding rallies, and organizing support. When they began to strike, rather than shutting down all nine hotels at once, they struck one, then another, then two, then no more for a couple of days, then another. This enabled them to keep the strike "fresh" in the mass media, in the top of the news, and it enabled them to use their striking members and supporters strategically.
The logistics were daunting, with the need to picket hotels with half a dozen or more entracnes covering enormous territory (from an entire city block in downtwon Minneapolis to 30 acres of parking lots and buildings at tone suburban hotel), for 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Of course, no amount of strategy could have worked had the union not successfully involved its membership. While about half of the membership is caucasian and African American, the key to the strike was the industry's increasingly immigrant workforce.
Union staffers recruited translators for union meetings. Leaflets were produced in Amharic, Oromo, Somali, Spanish, and French (for the immigrant workers from Togo), among other languages. At the last union meeting before the strike, simultaneous translation into seven languages was provided.
Union staffers attended cultural events in different immigrant communities, met with ethnic organization leaders, and sought to educate all union members about the need to respect their fellow members' diverse cultures. The union put together a 50-member bargaining committee, which served as a core communications mechanism between the staff and the membership, and which provided a guarantee to the membership that the leadership would not seek a backroom deal with hotel management at some eleventh hour.
DIRECT ACTION PRACTITIONERS
In important ways, Local 17 had been preparing for this strike for the past decade. Its activists had earned a local reputation as practitioners of direct action and civil disobedience.
They had also joined with progressive groups in struggles against racism (leafletting the Super Bowl with the American Indian Movement, for instance, to protest the use of racist nicknames by sports franchieses), miltarism (Local 17 activists appeared on picked lines against cluster bombs and land mines), and the WTO (in Seattle, Washington, D.C., and local demonstrations).
At the same time, Local 17 leaders also maintained positive relationships with the building trades and the labor establishment, as well as Democratic politicians, from the mayor of Minneapolis and the president of the city council to U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone.
Local 17's most important prelude to this strike came a year ago, when it stood firmly and publicly beside either Latina immigrants who were arrested by the INS and threatened with deportation in the aftermath of organizing the Holiday Inn Express in downtown Mineapolis. The union organized a rally of more than 600 people on three days notice, reached out to the clergy and cultural organizations within the Latino communities, and pushed politicians to intervene on the women's behalf.
In the end, the hotel apologized, signed a first contract with the union, and paid $72,000 in damages to the women. The INS and Justice Department granted them a two-year waiver to stay in the U.S. and work legally, while the politicians pledged to change the laws to enable the women to stay permanently.
The Holiday Inn Express struggle cemented Local 17's image as pro-immigrant and militant, helping to inspire the national AFL-CIO to change its policy position on immigrant workers [at] last fall's convention.
The real story of the strike was the participation of the immigrant workers. Somali women, dressed in traditional garb including head wraps, turned away Somali cab drivers and urged them to discourage their fares from staying at struck hotels.
THE POINT OF PICKETING
These women grabbed the public eye when, on the first day of the strike at the Minneapolis Hilton, they pushed a beverage cart sent out by management back into the hotel lobby, shouting, "We don't want your water. If you really care about usd, you'd pay us decent wages."
On another day, Tibetan picketers grabbed the headlines when they sat down in the street in front of delivery trucks. They explained to the Local 17 staffer on the scene, who had been called by frustrated Minneapolis cops, that they thought the point of picketing was to stop traffic. (Hard to ague with!)
Strikers taught each other songs, expressions, and dances, as the Twin Cities media became fascinated with the expression of multiculturalism on the city's main streets.
Another important jpart of the story involved the support accorded the strikers. Even before the strike began, two intersecting networks began meeting with Local 17 -- the Twin Cities Religion and Labor Network and veteran activists from other unions and progressive organizations and student and youth activists from the anti-sweatshop and anti-WTO struggles.
A formal support committee was established, with half a dozen active sub-committees that took responsibility for arranging speaking engagements for strikers, raising money for food banks, providing daily food and drink for picketers, recruiting additional translators and interpreters, and arranging for singers, dancers, puppeteers, and other performers to visit the picket lines. The importance of letting the low-wage immigrant strikers know that they had support cannot be underestimated.
On the eve of the AA convention, Local 17 and the hotel management settled. Workers will get wage increases of 20-26 percent over five years, family health benefits, a "respect and dignity" clause, a "diversity holiday" of each worker's own choosing, additonal pay for housekeepers who have to clean up vomit and other disgusting deposits by guests, additional pay for workers who serve as translators between management and other workers, and increased management contributions to the penison fund.
Most importantly, the workers feel empowered. "Nothing will ever be the same for those workers who picked up the picket signs," said Local 17 officer Jaye Rykunyk.
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