How workers took on L.A.’s hotel industry and won

When Unite Here Local 11 kicked off the largest hotel strike in modern U.S. history, even the union leadership wasn’t expecting it to go this far.

“We have a militancy in our membership now that I don't – it's unmatched. I've never seen anything like it,” co-president Kurt Petersen said. “I mean, I'm scared of the workers now.”

In July 2023, Unite Here Local 11, which represents 32,000 hospitality workers in Los Angeles and Orange counties, began a series of work stoppages after their contracts expired with 65 major hotels.

So far, they’ve won historic deals at all but seven of those 65 properties – including $10 wage hikes, higher pensions, and guaranteed staffing levels.

“We got everything,”  Unite Here Local 11 spokesperson Maria Hernandez said. “I think it's a testament to the workers’ commitment to fighting and pushing and not settling for anything less than what they deserve.”

The strikes began at the height of L.A.’s “hot labor summer,” when TV writers, actors, city workers, UPS drivers, and more hit the picket lines. But unlike the Hollywood strikes – which were bolstered by solidarity from other unions, hefty strike funds, and of course, a membership that’s used to being out of work for months at a time – Unite Here didn’t have the strength or resources to shut down the entire hospitality industry for months.

“One problem we have is that the employers have enormous resources and will always be able to outlast a striker who was out on strike indefinitely,” Petersen said. “Our members go out on strike, they will eventually lose their homes and lose their insurance.”

The solution they landed on was inspired by the civil rights movement – particularly the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, when student activists protested segregation by sitting at the lunch counters of downtown Nashville stores, forcing the staff to either serve them or close the counters down.

“They were able to keep the [store owners] off guard,” Petersen said. “They didn’t know when they were coming. They didn’t know when they were going to stop. And they just came in waves and waves.”

The sit-ins succeeded: after months of violent attacks, arrests, and behind-the-scenes negotiations, several store owners agreed to open their counters to Black patrons, making Nashville one of the first major southern cities to begin the desegregation of public facilities.

“So we landed on this idea, let's do strike waves. We will keep them off balance. They will not know when we're starting or stopping,” Petersen said.

Rather than striking at all 64 hotels at once, the union began a series of rolling walkouts, targeting one hotel at a time with brief, unannounced work stoppages.

Later that fall, the same tactic would be used by the United Auto Workers in their contract battle with Detroit’s Big Three auto manufacturers. UAW secured deals with GM, Ford, and Stellantis after six weeks of strikes at factories across the country.

But UAW was only negotiating with three companies at once. Unite Here was dealing with more than 60.

The strikes began on the early Sunday morning of July 2, 2023 – the height of Fourth of July weekend, when an anticipated 3 million travelers were expected to fly through LAX. Over the next three days, workers walked off the job at dozens of hotels.

In the beginning, 44 of the hotels were represented in negotiations by an entity called the Coordinated Bargaining Group. But after months of deadlocked negotiations, individual hotels began breaking off to broker deals on their own, and the alliance “pretty much quickly dissolved,” Hernandez said.

All the while, the union’s members remained undivided. Hernandez said hotel workers from L.A. would travel as far as Orange County to support other hotels’ employees on the picket line.

“That sort of solidarity I think has been huge,” she said. “You’re not talking about one big employer. It’s 60 different operators, owners, right, but these workers have all kind of made it one big fight, which has been beautiful to see.”

The battle wasn’t easy: in August, four picketers were attacked by a wedding guest during a rally at Hotel Maya in Long Beach. The same day, security officers at Santa Monica’s Fairmont Miramar tackled striking workers in the hotel’s driveway.

In January, workers outside the Hotel Figueroa in downtown L.A. say they were struck by metal ball bearings fired by an air rifle from across the street.

Over the course of the negotiations, Petersen said hundreds of workers were given written disciplinary warnings for striking, and dozens were fired.

“They do it to intimidate people, to scare people,” he said. “The hotel hopes everyone will stop. The good news for us is, no one stopped.”

The strikes even gained support from celebrities. After Unite Here called for a boycott of the Fairmont Miramar in response to the violence on the picket line, soccer superstar Lionel Messi and the Inter Miami team switched hotels for his game against LAFC in September.

The Major League Soccer Players Association released a statement applauding the decision and urging hotels to “reach fair contracts with their workers ASAP.”

When employees at the Laguna Cliffs Marriott in Dana Point went on strike on July 2, the hotel hired temp workers to replace them through the staffing app Instawork. When the temps arrived and saw the picket line outside, several walked off the job and joined the strike.

“Our members, in many cases, embraced them and organized them and said, we’re all in this together, and some of them walked out with us,” Petersen said. “And when they walked out with us, we said, ‘We’re going to walk back in with you.’”

Unite Here refused to settle a contract with the hotel until they offered regular union jobs to two cooks who’d joined the walkout. The union also found a new job for another temp worker who was fired from the Laguna Cliffs Marriott for striking.

The Laguna Cliffs Marriott is only one of at least six hotels that used staffing apps to replace striking workers. Petersen noted that Black workers were being hired through the apps at a “much higher percentage” than they normally are.

“Hotels have an unfortunate history of not hiring Black workers, and suddenly they would have 15 strikebreakers who were Black when they only had five regular workers who were Black,” Petersen said. “They couldn't find the Black workers when they needed regular workers, but all of a sudden, strikebreaking, here they are.”

In October, the Four Points by Sheraton, Holiday Inn LAX, and Le Meridien Delfina Santa Monica hired unhoused migrants from Skid Row as strikebreakers.

Hernandez said some of the workers weren’t told how much they’d be paid, and some were paid with personal checks rather than through a company payroll. Others told the L.A. Times that they’d faced heavy workloads and long hours with no breaks.

After speaking to the workers, union representatives reached out to L.A. County District Attorney George Gascón, who launched an investigation into whether the hotels were committing wage theft or violating child labor laws.

According to Petersen, the fervor driving the strike can be traced back to the pandemic.

“Companies have exploited the pandemic, and our industry was like many, fewer workers doing more work,” he said. “Folks were laid off, had nothing, and then they came back and the boss wants them to work harder for less.”

After a dip in travel during the pandemic (and massive bailouts from federal COVID-19 relief funds), hotels reported record-breaking profits in 2023. Yet many hotels stuck to bare-bones staffing levels, and wages failed to keep up with inflation and skyrocketing housing costs.

A survey by Unite Here Local 11 found that more than half of their members had moved out of L.A. or were planning to move because of housing costs. Some workers have to commute two to three hours each way to the luxury properties where they work.

California has the largest market share of tourism in the nation, with statewide travel spending reaching an all-time high of $150.4 billion in 2023. But the workers who keep the industry running felt they weren’t being valued – and with the World Cup, Super Bowl, and Olympics all heading to L.A. in the next several years, there was no better time to fight for a fair slice of the pie.

Petersen said the union’s members “completely bought into the strategy and what we’re doing,” especially after seeing the strikes bear fruit at the first few hotels that reached tentative deals.

In early December – just a month before the hotel was slated to host the Golden Globes – the Beverly Hilton became the first hotel in Beverly Hills to reach a deal with Unite Here. A week later, 10 more hotels struck deals with the union in a single day.

By March, the union had ratified contracts with 34 hotels across Southern California.

Unite Here secured nearly all of its initial demands, including a $10 raise over the life of the contract, continued healthcare benefits, and pre-pandemic staffing guarantees, ensuring that workloads will return to the same level as 2019. Several hotels also formally agreed to apologize to workers who were injured on the picket lines.

There are still seven properties without deals at the time of this publication, including the Hotel Figueroa, the L.A. Grand Hotel, and the W Hollywood. But Petersen feels a resolution is on the horizon.

“Once you get a critical mass, which we have, it's inevitable that they will all fall eventually,” he said.

At a picket outside the W Hollywood on April 29, Carlos Jimenez, who’s worked at the hotel for 14 years, expressed frustration at how long the contract fight is taking. Jimenez and his coworkers have gone out on strike four times since last summer. He blamed the delay on the hotel management’s intransigence, saying the company “looks down on workers.”

“We hope that this strike will be the last one we have to do, but if we need to keep fighting, we’re ready to go,” he said.

Unite Here’s success comes at a time of heightened labor organizing in the service industry. According to Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker, accommodation and food services workers were responsible for 33.4% of all work stoppages in the country in 2023 – more than any other industry.

This is despite the fact that only 2.1% of accommodation and food services workers are union members – less than any industry except finance.

Food service jobs are notoriously difficult to unionize, due to high turnover and the difficulty of negotiating with franchisees. Even when unions get off the ground, global conglomerates don’t always play fair — see: the NLRB’s 100+ labor law violation complaints against Starbucks.).

But Veronica Gonzalez with Starbucks Workers United pointed to social media as a key organizing tool that’s helping turn the tide.

“I think had it not been for social media, Starbucks would have probably been able to stomp out the union effort in Buffalo,” she said. “The reason why it got so far is because social media makes the world feel a lot smaller, and we understand that through our shared struggles, we're connected.”

Gonzalez, who works at a Starbucks in Northeast L.A., said she wasn’t aware that workers at other stores had unionized until she saw posts from the union on Instagram. After learning more about the effort and recognizing the chain’s union-busting tactics at her own store, she realized that forming a union was “ridiculously necessary.”

“I would have never seen even half of the picture if not for social media,” Gonzalez said. “I just genuinely feel that this is really meaningful for the working class, especially those that work in food service. I think we're really challenging something that, you know, most people wouldn't have challenged.”

In Aug. 2022, Gonzalez’s store became the 13th Starbucks location in California to unionize. Much like the hotel workers, they’re bargaining for increased staffing, better pay, benefits, and improved working conditions.

As the labor battle heats up in the restaurant industry, Petersen said Unite Here’s strike wave strategy could work in the food service industry, where it would be “very difficult to find workers” without notice during a work stoppage.

“I think the other thing that [our members] have tapped into, and the thing with the writers and the actors, everything, is people are angry, right? People can see the pandemic, the housing crisis here, the inequality growing,” Petersen said. “So our hope is that this translates for us into more organizing into places that are without the union.”

According to the Economic Policy Institute, although enthusiasm for unions is at a near-record high and the number of successful union elections is on the rise, the overall percentage of workers represented by unions is still on the decline due to decades of anti-union legislation.

But Unite Here’s success proves that workers can still win if they stand together.

Editor's note: since the time of publication, Unite Here Local 11 has reached agreements with the remaining hotels.

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