Transcript

Chapter 15: On The Job Video: Unite Here: Labor Unions

>> Our union goes back to the late 1800s. The primary group of workers that we represent is in the hospitality industry, restaurants, hotels, food service, gaming, so we are in one of those sectors of the economy that is still growing and has growth. I compare that to the industrial sector which is where many of the unions came of age here in Chicago. You can see the remnants of that with the plants that have closed over the years, the steel mills and the auto mills. Our sector still has a lot of vitality to it. You can't offshore the hospitality industry the same way that you can plants and manufacturing. My name is Henry Tamarin. I'm President of the Local 1 Unite Here and an executive Vice President of Unite Here International Union. What I think are our issues I don't think are that different from that of other unions which is to effectively represent their workers, their members on the job and that includes things like wages and benefits and very importantly working conditions. There are two fundamental areas where you end up working with corporations. One is in a collective bargaining situation where you bargain over wages, hours and working conditions. Disagreements in that area and Chicago currently is an example, we have not had a contract in our hotels for over a year at this point. We've had workers have walked off of the job. We've had some limited duration strikes. We've had a lot of push and pull.

>> Here in Chicago in 2002 housekeepers made about $8.83 an hour and now a housekeeper makes about 14 something an hour. They would like to take us all back to that and they see this recent recession has everyone being scared enough that they can take the opportunity to do that.

>> Hi. I'm Susan Tynan and I'm a member of Unite Here Local 1 Chicago. As a shop steward what I do is I enforce the contract in my hotel so my fellow co-workers if they're having issues, if they feel that the contract is being violated I'm the person that they go to. I go with them to managers, to Human Resources to settle whatever problems that there might be. What I see from management and from the corporation is that their goal is always to increase their profit regardless of what happens to us. Currently we're negotiating a contract that we hope will last four years. The whole idea of the negotiating table, I see it more as a metaphor. They've given us their proposal. We've given them our proposal and really we think that we're asking for a reasonable proposal and what we're fighting for is to keep the health benefits that we have and also to get raises similar to what we've gotten in previous contracts and also we want some language about sub-contracting so that our work cannot be sub-contracted out and also successorship so that let's say our company sells out our particular hotel whoever buys it we would have rights to those jobs.

>> They don't make money on their own. They make money off of the labor that we give so the whole concept of where the money comes from it starts with us.

>> What I do know is that my particular company it's owned by billionaires and they have a lot of money. It's a multi-billion dollar international company so no, I don't see their point when they're talking about we don't have any money when I know that they're expanding. All I have to do is look on their hotel website frankly and I see how many new properties have opened. They can afford it.

>> Like in my restaurant they used to post, before we started questioning them, they used to post the daily average how much they make every day and we used to ask them like, okay, this store makes $22,000 a day, a day and I'm like what are we getting out of it? I make $500 a week at the most. My name is Bobby Bonds. I work at HMS hotel in Chicago at Macaroni Grill. I am a shop steward for Local 1. I've been active in the union for six years. Like right now the specialized cook they want to start a certain people in and don't want to give people the chance to advance and these are people that have been with the company six, seven years and they want to chance to move up. Everybody don't want to stay at $8 and the company fights so hard to keep people at a low wage and keep a turnover ratio. They don't want to make it a good paying job because if they become good paying jobs people would stay at these jobs and turn into better jobs. You're spending 12 hours of your day just to satisfy the company and they're not satisfying you.

>> One of the struggles that we're having right now in the hospitality industry is that the workers care far more about the standards of service in this day and age than many of their employers do. They're trying to get people to do more work and they're trying to get it done with less staff but the other conflict that arises is that they're lowering the standards of service for the guests. Our members do not like that. Our members grew up whether they've been in the business for two years or ten providing guest service and it is a big source of conflict for them to see their employers lower the standard. So what we bring is a degree of professionalism. It's not always wanted or needed. I think if employers have their way even the good employers deep in their hearts they'd rather we didn't exist. You can find a relationship where a union has to perhaps be less aggressive where you've developed a good relationship but you only get to a good relationship where the workers are organized and where the employer is reminded on a regular basis that they need to respect the workers. In the food service industry there are several big companies that dominate that field. One of them is called Compass. They're a company based in Great Britain actually. We have lots of members with them throughout North America and I would say that we have a good relationship with them. Does it mean we agree all the time? The answer is no it doesn't but they have a constructive view of--the issue is not whether or not you agree. The issue is how do you resolve your disagreements because you're inevitably going to have disagreements? There are fundamental disagreements. We want our people to get paid more. They'd rather have our people paid less. There are individual problems that arise on the job but they do have an attitude that workers and unions have a right to exist and I would say that that's a company that typifies that. The big challenge for our union and the rest of the labor movement is and continues to be organizing more non-union workers to create greater density of unionization and with that greater density we'll be able to do a more effective job on representing all workers in the industries that we deal with. Right now if the employers have as they do the option where we meet them unchallenged to go non-union that makes it more difficult for all workers.

PLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS IN COMPLETE SENTENCES BASED ON THE INFORMATION PROVIDED ABOVE

1. Why do the members of Unite Here feel that unions are necessary?

2. The text gives several reasons for the decline of U.S. union membership. Do you think Unite Here will get smaller in upcoming years, or is it likely that the union will grow?

3. Each of the people shown in this video has a complaint about the workplace. Would it be possible to resolve these issues without the help of a union? What should managers do if they do not want unions to form? How are the complaints resolved when a union exists?