Major hotels in SF face looming strike

The three largest hotels in San Francisco are facing what could be a massive and lengthy strike as members of Local 2 have voted to authorize a walkoff—and rallied today to send a message to management.

“We are very far apart,” Lizzy Tapia, Local 2 president, told me at the picket today.

Hundreds of workers marched today in front of the Westin St. Francis, one of the three major hotels that are in contract talks with the union. They’re working under an expired contract, and are asking for pay increases that at least keep up with the cost of living.

“People are fired up,” Tapia said.

“We want a fair contract that allows us to support our family in our daily life,” Bill Fung, who has worked at the Hyatt for 29 years, told me.

Fung said he used to have two other colleagues who helped clean carpets and support housekeepers. “Not it’s just me, with more than 2,000 rooms.”

The union is talking with Westin, Hyatt, and Hilton hotels, and the contract they reach with those three will influence contracts with other hotels in the city.

Tapia told me there’s a very good chance the workers will strike, causing serious problems for the big hotels, which are at this point running at 65 to 70 percent capacity.

This is still a union town, and while tourists were checking into the Westin today while the workers marched outside, there’s no way a strike won’t have serious financial impacts on the hotel industry—which these days isn’t so much a hotel industry as a real-estate industry. Westin is owned by Marriott, which is a massive multinational operation. Hilton is a publicly traded corporation owned largely by giant institutional investors. Hyatt is owned by the billionaire Pritzker family.

None of these outfits is financially struggling.

And yet, “the companies’ response is to move backward,” Tapia said. “They would have to come a very long way to avoid a strike.”