 More than 130 people arrested at Labor Day rally supporting UNITE HERE members in San Francisco, Sept. 6, 2004. Photo: Bill Hackwell |
Two major union struggles are heating up in California, and workers have been taking to the streets to defend their wages, rights and health care. In mid-September, hotel workers and grocery workers voted to authorize strikes to push their demands for affordable health care coverage.
The workers are ready to fight. On Labor Day, over 1,000 hotel workers and their supporters held a boisterous rally in front of the Westin St. Francis Hotel, halting traffic in San Francisco’s busy Union Square. The rally lasted more than two hours with over 130 civil disobedience arrests, including city Supervisor Tom Ammiano, labor leader Walter Johnson and others.
UNITE HERE Local 2 represents around 8,000 San Francisco hotel workers currently fighting for a new contract. The workers are mainly immigrants: 30 percent are Latino and 30 percent are Asian. They are cooks, bartenders, food servers, bussers and dishwashers, with the greatest number being hotel room cleaners, almost all of whom are women.
The union has been negotiating with 14 of San Francisco’s swankiest hotels since the contract covering 50 percent of Lo cal 2’s members expired Aug. 14.
On Sept. 14, over 97 percent of Local 2’s members voted to authorize a strike if negotiations continued to falter. On Sept. 15, the contract for workers at 30 smaller San Francisco hotels expired.
Health care is a key issue for the San Francisco hotel workers. The bosses are trying to cut medical and dental benefits and drop hundreds of workers, retirees and their families from coverage.
“Our membership is not paid much, but we do have good benefits that we’ve fought hard for over the years,” Local 2 media spokesperson Valerie Lapin told Socialism and Liberation. “The proposals by the bosses would leave us two choices: either cut our medical benefits, or our members will have to pay much more for their health care. The bosses are also proposing increasing eligibility requirements that would mean 1,000 of our members would lose their health plan.”
For many of these low-wage workers, loss of health benefits could endanger their very survival.
A national struggle
The California workers are not alone. Like their sisters and brothers in San Francisco, hotel workers in Washington, DC and Los Angeles are also facing down greedy hotel bosses. The hotel contract for around 3,800 UNITE HERE members in Washington, DC expired on Sept. 15. And tough negotiations have long been underway in Los Angeles, where a contract for almost 3,000 workers at nine hotels expired June 1.
On Aug. 13, militant solidarity rallies were held in Los Angeles, where 2,000 marched, and San Francisco, where 2,500 turned out. The determination of the workers has been strong and unwavering.
Over 94 percent of the hotel workers in Washington, DC and 83 percent of Local 11’s members in Los Angeles voted to authorize a strike on Sept. 13.
In addition to health care, the unions are struggling for better wages and pensions, reduction of workloads, recruitment of more African American workers, and an end to subcontracting.
It is the first national struggle by the newly formed UNITE HERE union. The textile workers union UNITE and the hotel and restaurant workers union HERE merged on July 8 creating a more powerful union with 440,000 workers and 400,000 retirees.
Another main goal of the negotiations in each city is to achieve two-year contracts that would expire in 2006. UNITE HERE seeks to align the expiration date of the contracts in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington, DC with other major cities like Boston, Chicago and New York, so that contract negotiations would occur at the same time for 73,000 workers in 2006.
The unions believe national alignment of contract expiration dates would give them greater leverage to negotiate on a national level with the hotels.
The unions have been holding fast to the two-year plan as needed leverage against the increasingly concentrated transnational hotel industry. According to a Local 2 fact sheet, Hilton, Hyatt, Intercontinental, Marriott or Starwood manages more than 60 percent of the upscale hotels in San Francisco.
“The employers want to keep us divided and separate and unable to coordinate with each other,” Local 2 President Mike Casey told Socialism and Liberation. “But they didn’t ask us permission every time they decided to merge, and we don’t need their permission to work together and become as unified as we can.”
On Sept. 11, the contract for 30,000 Northern California grocery workers expired. The United Food and Commercial Workers union is preparing for another major battle with the notorious “Big Three” grocery chains, Safeway, Albertsons and Kroger. Both the workers and the bosses see health care as the key issue.
 Hotel workers have wide support in their struggle for healthcare and other benefits. Photo: Bill Hackwell |
Lessons of southern California’s grocery strike
The experience of 59,000 UFCW grocery workers in southern California earlier this year looms large over the northern California labor struggle.
Workers in seven UFCW locals waged a heroic four and one-half month strike/lock out against the big grocery bosses at great sacrifice. Thousands of union members and progressives across the nation understood this battle as central to the struggle to maintain health care for all U.S. workers.
Although the striking and locked out workers were able to stave off the massive health care cuts and union-busting sought by the grocery chains, the bosses achieved a two-tier wage and benefit system. This amounted to major cuts in pay and benefits for new hires and less union security. In addition, after decades of paying no premiums, workers now have to make co-payments for health care, and their wages are frozen for the duration of the contract.
The UFCW leaders had organized successful strikes in the past. But they did not fully anticipate the vicious, anti-union strategy of the “Big Three.” Each grocery chain is a Fortune 500 company, with more the $35 billion in annual revenue. (1) The bosses were willing to take profit losses of nearly $2 billion in order to force long-term concessions on the workers. (San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 2, 2004.)
Less than one month into the strike, the UFCW removed picket lines from Ralphs (owned by Kroger) and focused its attention on Vons and Pavilions (both owned by Safeway) and Albertsons. But the grocery chains agreed to share profits from any store not targeted by the union—a kind of corporate solidarity agreement. So after Ralphs was patronized by customers who did not want to cross picket lines, Kroger gave $116 million to Safeway and Albert sons to help them weather the strike. (LA Times, Apr. 20, 2004)
The end result was a harsh blow to the UFCW workers and the labor movement as a whole. Labor needed a victory in southern California to reverse the bosses’ nationwide trend of cutting benefits and passing off medical care premiums to the workers.
To prevent another setback for labor, UFCW locals in the San Francisco area have been preparing since last spring for the upcoming fight. Eight Bay Area locals formed the “Bay Area Coalition” to combine their strength and collaborate in negotiations. (2) The BAC has been actively gathering community support for a potential strike for several months.
Health care is the issue
Health care is the pressing issue in today’s labor struggles. Employers are aggressively at tempting to cut health costs, retirement ben e fits, and wages. Health care was the principal issue in at least 50 percent of the strikes in California in 2003. (3)
Forty-five million people lack health insurance in the U.S. Even more have inadequate coverage. Half are employed workers, and over 80 percent have families. (4) Those without health insurance are disproportionately people of color. In California, 32 percent of Latinos and 17 percent of African Americans are uninsured, according to the website of Families USA.
The number of workers covered by employer health plans is rapidly declining. In the last three years employers cut health care benefits for five million jobs.
Health care costs are rising to record levels. Premiums for family coverage have in creased 59 percent in the past four years. Bosses claim they must cut wages and benefits to counter the skyrocketing health care costs and to stay competitive with non-union giants like Target and Wal-Mart.
Analysts commonly refer to a number of factors to explain the drastic increases in health care costs: improved technology, costs associated with emergency room treatment for the uninsured, in creasing consumer demand for prescription drugs and more. But few point out the enormous profits of the health care industry.
Health care monopolies like UnitedHealth Group, Aetna, and Anthem/Wellpoint enjoy major profits while hospitals and clinics are closing and workers are dying because they have no health care.
Pharmaceutical giants are also running away with record profits. The top seven pharmaceutical companies made more profits this year than the top seven auto companies, the top seven oil companies, the top seven airline companies, and the top seven media companies. (5)
In the U.S., the number of low-wage service sector jobs has grown exponentially as higher paid manufacturing jobs have declined in the past 25 years. For all workers, but especially the large sector of low-wage workers, the struggle to protect health care is imperative.
“We see our struggle as an example of what unions need to do. It embodies what workers are facing everywhere where global corporate strategies are causing further corporatization and wars,” said Local 2 President Casey. “We need to globalize our own movement to level the playing field. There is a major mismatch of power globally that has to be rebalanced, and the only way to do that is to work together and strengthen our solidarity.”
The fights carried out by workers in unions like UNITE HERE and UFCW will be watched closely by millions of workers, in and out of unions. Building solidarity with these struggles—not only solidarity from the labor movement, but from the anti-war and other progressive movements—will be an important step in broadening the class struggle, and especially the struggle for health care.
Visit www.socialismandliberation.org for updates on these critical labor struggles as they unfold.
Notes
1. The revenue of the “Big Three” grocery chains is higher than corporations like Microsoft, PepsiCo, and McDonalds, according to the Feb. 27, 2004 LA Times.
2. The BAC is made up of UFCW union locals 101, 120, 1179, 373R, 428, 648, 839 and 870.
3. Ken Jacobs, “The California Health Care Crisis: Impact on Labor Relations.” UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education Report, 2003.
4. Dr. Carol Zabin, Dr. Arindrajit Dube, and Ken Jacobs. “Hidden Public Costs of Low-wage Jobs in California.” UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education Study, May 2004.
5. http://bernie.house.gov/prescriptions/profits.asp
