Striking hotel workers fight BlackRock

Boston

For almost two months, UNITE HERE! Local 26 hotel workers have been striking to demand the living wages and expanded benefits that management has denied them for years. The strike wave began on Sept. l when over 1,000 Boston and Greenwich, Connecticut, hotel workers walked off the job. Rolling strikes in nine other cities — including Baltimore, Honolulu and San Francisco — have followed.

UNITE HERE! demands include: increased wages to offset rampant inflation, fair staffing schedules and an end to the staffing cuts made during the first wave of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Over 5,000 hotel workers have gone on strike across the U.S since September.

Workers who were on strike at Boston’s Omni Hotels ratified a new contract on Oct. 20 that includes wage hikes of $10 an hour over four years and other improvements.

Indefinite strikes at Boston Hilton Hotels continue, with 24/7 picket lines going strong outside the Park Plaza and Logan Airport properties.

Yuri Yep, a restaurant server at Omni Parker House said: “I’m on strike, because I work two jobs in order to provide for my family. I’m always rushing, and I don’t even have time to see my kids. I’m missing out on my own life. It’s ridiculous that I’m living this way when the hotel companies make record profits. They can afford what we’re asking for, and we’ll be out on strike until we win for all of our families.” (unitehere.org, Oct. 14)

At both the massive Oct. 6 Boston Coalition for Palestine march and Oct. 12 Indigenous Peoples Day action, demonstrators joined the Local 26 picket lines at the Hilton Park Plaza Hotel. These were tremendous shows of solidarity between hotel workers and Indigenous activists fighting against centuries of capitalist genocide and exploitation. (workers.org/2024/10/81456/); (workers.org/2024/10/81220/)

On Oct. 25, 500 UNITE HERE! members and their allies rallied at the Park Plaza. Addressing the crowd, Brian Doherty, General Agent for the Greater Boston Building Trades Unions, made clear the irreconcilable conflict between shareholders and the workers they exploit. At issue, Doherty stressed, was a fight over whether Hilton’s profits should go towards extra dividends for billionaire investors or towards living wages for employees.

Kevin Hanes, a leader of the strike, added: “We need to pay our rent and have just one job to take care of our families. In our union we fight for one standard in this city and we will fight till we get it.”

Carlos Arâmyo, president of UNITE HERE Local 26, declared, “We will fight for what we are worth, and we know how to win.”

Although the hotel industry recently reported $100 billion in profits, many hotel employees report working two or more jobs to offset rising costs of living. Pandemic staffing cuts have forced workers to take on extra tasks during their working hours with no additional compensation.

Following the speeches by union leaders, dozens of workers and demonstrators joined the picket line outside the Park Plaza entrance. Drumming, blaring horns and chants of “Make them pay!” kept crowd energy surging. The noise shook the air and carried to the Boston Common, several blocks away.

Interview with Ed Childs, UNITE HERE! Local 26

In an interview with Workers World, Ed Childs — a decades-long Local 26 leader and cook of the Harvard University Dining Services, now retired, and WWP activist — discussed the significance of the UNITE HERE! Local 26 strikes and the challenges they face.

Childs emphasized that since the last UNITE HERE! strike wave nearly five years ago, giant hotel chains like Hilton have been bought out by still bigger monopolists — “asset managers” who bundle together the capital of bourgeois institutions and households. Investment giants such as BlackRock are the largest shareholders of Hilton. (tinyurl.com/2u3jexhx)

Just over a century after  Vladimir Lenin wrote his classic study of imperialism, monopoly capital has entered an even more monstrous stage in its growth. In the 15 years following the 2008 financial crisis, asset managers have established themselves at the commanding heights of global capital — over and above even Wall Street powerhouse banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. Together, the three largest asset managers — BlackRock, Vanguard and Fidelity — hold nearly $25 trillion in assets. (tinyurl.com/mvwux7fv)

BlackRock, the dominant member of this troika, alone has over $10 trillion in assets. So vast are BlackRock’s holdings that Chairman Larry Fink recently boasted that investors would profit regardless of who wins the upcoming bourgeois elections. (tinyurl.com/mvkew6m)

Latest stage of imperialism

As Childs described, the shift in capitalist ownership has profound implications for the struggle of workers and oppressed peoples worldwide. Asset managers such as BlackRock can maximize profits only by superexploiting workers like the UNITE HERE! members on strike.

Childs said: “What these super-capitalists have done since the last strike is bought these hotels and manipulated it so that the workers laid off during COVID-19 are never brought back. They’re just squeezing profits out of the workers and at the same time raising the rates of the hotel. So, they’re squeezing with 20% less workers. They’re creating more injuries, more workplace accidents. People cannot last as long on the job. They are doing what Amazon popularized: Work the workers so intensely that they quit within three years. These supercapitalists squeezing profits out of hotels are trying to do that same tactic.”

By increasingly buying up rental housing stock, investors like BlackRock have also been driving up workers’ costs of living.

Childs stated: “You can’t afford rent, you can’t afford food, you can’t afford college. The thing about that is the supercapitalists like BlackRock have also bought up a huge amount of rental apartments, forcing the rent to go sky-high, way out of the reach of the workers.”

Renewed austerity has compounded the cost of living crisis for the working class, especially young workers. While it continues to slash Medicare and food stamp programs, the U.S government spends hundreds of billions of dollars propping up its client states like Ukraine and the Zionist Israeli regime, whose ongoing genocide of the Palestinians depends entirely on U.S weapons and funding.

Childs said: “Social-security, welfare, all the social programs in our community are devastated by the super-capitalists. The billions stolen from these programs instead go to pay for imperialism’s weapons — in Ukraine, in Palestine, against China. Who is among the biggest shareholders of Raytheon? Boeing? Elbit Systems? BlackRock and Vanguard!”

BlackRock and other investment giants have also financed pipeline and strip-mining projects that continue to devastate Indigenous lands and poison water supplies throughout the U.S and Canada, including Tar Sands extraction in Alberta, Canada, and mass deforestation in the Amazon Basin.

Yet, as Childs stressed, the central role of BlackRock and the other finance capitalists in imperialist and settler-colonial extraction has exposed the shared material interests of workers, Indigenous nations and all other oppressed and colonized peoples worldwide. Around the world, these movements are fighting the world capitalist system in its highest stage of imperialism, epitomized by BlackRock.

Childs stressed: “It’s BlackRock and the other super-capitalists that show how our struggles are connected. It brings everybody together into the hotel strike and vice versa. They’ve made it so easy for us to see we have the same enemy.”