Will vital hotels union be next to strike?
Will vital hotels union be next to strike?
BY CHUCK BENNETT
amNEW YORK STAFF WRITER
Strike talk is in the air again. This time, it's not mass transit that's at stake, but the city's vital hotel industry.
The New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council, an umbrella group representing 28,000 workers in six unions, is threatening to walk out this summer. And with 41 million visitors to the city spending more than $21 billion last year, any disruption to hotel services would be a big blow to the economy.
"This is the most important contract negotiation in history for a variety of reasons: protecting pensions, resisting givebacks and preventing management from willful and repeated abuses of the contract," said John Turchiano, a trades council spokesman.
The union's five-year contract with 150 hotels and motels in the city expires July 1.
Vijay Dandapani, chairman of the Hotel Association of New York City, which represents the management of more than 200 hotels, acknowledged tough negotiations ahead.
"We don't know what will come to pass or whether there will be a strike or not," he said.
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7 comments:
While I think it's great that the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council are preparing to being able to wage a city-wide strike of the entire industry; I'm not sure that the hotel industry is "vital" like say mass-transit is to New York City.
Thats an interesting point. P-CRAC would tend to agree with you in most geographic areas. However, in places like NYC where the tourist revenue is so important...
Just because an industry produces a lot of revenue and profit does not make it vital. The oil industry is vital, the gold mining is not. Communication workers are strategic, movie projectionists are not.
Take New York again... after a couple of days on strike Fox News is claiming "Capitalism is held hostage!" and the state and city government are threatening huge fines and imprisonment. By comparison, the Hotel workers struck for 27 days in 1985.
Just because an industry produces a lot of revenue and profit does not make it vital. The oil industry is vital, the gold mining is not.
You haven't been paying much attention to capitalism, have you? Banking isn't "vital" either, but look what happened when it shit the couch in 1929.
Was there a strike by bank tellers in 1929 that I'm missing?
Banking is obviously central to how capitalism manages the entire economy; though in a revolutionary situation we should only be interested in banks if we need to expropriate the gold so we can buy guns from the dutch to kill fascists.
Why is it so difficult for people to grasp the transition of worker power in post-industrial societies?
Was there a strike by bank tellers in 1929 that I'm missing?
NO, BUT, the circuits of capital were otherwise unable to reproduce themselves in this non-productive sector, which had tangible effects on the whole sytem. My argument being that what is "vital" to people isn't what's "vital" to the capitalist system--and disruption in "non-vital" sectors does have a real effect.
I do agree that hotel strikes have a much slower impact, as most aspects of production are more indirectly linked to hotelry than they are to transit.
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