Members of the UNITE HERE Local 26 hospitality union protest outside the Park Plaza hotel in Boston, MA on September 1, 2024. Jason Bergman/SipaUSA/AP

Around 10,000 hotel workers went on strike over Labor Day weekend, picketing for better pay and working conditions in 25 hotels across nine cities, including Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco, Seattle, and Honolulu. UNITE HERE, the county’s largest hospitality union had conducted several months of unsuccessful contract negotiations with leading hotel chains such as Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt before escalating the dispute. The strikes, which lasted between one and three days, took place over the last holiday weekend of the summer and involved housekeepers, front desk attendants, bellhops, restaurant staff, and other hotel workers.

At issue, union officials say, is that while the hospitality industry’s profits have recovered from the extreme downturn during the pandemic, it has maintained the service and staffing reductions from that period. As a result, workloads for employees have increased while pay has stagnated.

“Many [workers] can no longer afford to live in the cities that they welcome guests to, and painful workloads are breaking their bodies,” Gwen Mills, the international UNITE HERE president, said in a statement. “We won’t accept a ‘new normal’ where hotel companies profit by cutting their offerings to guests and abandoning their commitments to workers.”

The weekend strikes could herald more to come—potentially also in New Haven, Providence, and Oakland—if contract negotiations continue to be difficult to resolve. In press releases, UNITE HERE highlighted last summer’s rolling strikes that impacted 65 hotels in Los Angeles, during which the union conducted brief work stoppages........

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