Why Hotel Workers Are Striking: A Deep Dive with Union Leader Gwen Mills of Unite Here

Josiah: In this episode, I'm talking with Gwen Mills, president of Unite Here, one of the largest and most influential labor unions in the hospitality industry, about what's behind the hotel worker strikes taking place now in San Francisco and other cities across the US, what they're asking for, and why they think change can be made. Let's get into it. 
 
[Intro]

Gwen: My name is Gwen Mills. I'm the president of Unite Here, which is the union for hospitality workers in the United States and Canada. We have about 275,000 members that work in hotels, institutional food service, in the gaming industry, across both countries.

Josiah: Thanks for taking time to talk. I had the chance to speak with some workers on strike a few weeks ago and told their stories directly from them in a past episode I'll link to in the show notes if people want to hear that. I appreciate you coming on the show. Our goal here today is for you to share your perspective, what you're seeing, what's behind the strikes that we're seeing unfold, that are taking place across the country, and have a conversation about that, right? The goal is to kind of, with this show in general, is to raise awareness about what's going on in the hospitality industry. So I appreciate you taking the time to talk. I guess kind of with that being said, I wonder if you could share a little bit on a high level, what is behind these strikes? And then we'll, we'll get into probably details of it from there, but high level kind of what's behind the strikes that are taking place now.

Gwen: Sure, absolutely. I think one word that encapsulates the strikes is respect, that hotel workers fundamentally are on strike for respect. And I use that word because during COVID, everyone suffered, meaning the workers, the hotel industry, just all of us together. And we had worked together to sort of handle the impact on the hospitality industry during that time, not Seeking big raises or things like that. But now that the hotel industry is recovered and making record profits the workers haven't caught up in that and We think that guests are getting left behind as well so in like there's key issues that the are being driven in the strikes the wages the workloads and reversing some of these covert era staffing cuts which also tend to be service cuts, so I So we put that together under the banner of respect and the idea that, for the worker point of view, that one job should be enough. Meaning, we were talking about San Francisco, but Seattle, Honolulu, Boston, Baltimore, the cost of living has skyrocketed through this last period of time. And so many workers can't afford to live cities where they're welcoming guests every day. And we want to change that. And that's really what's motivating the strikes overall.

Josiah: Got it. So and before we went on air, we were talking offline about just the cost of living here, right? This is obviously in San Francisco. You know, this is an issue. It's an issue across the country. I so I'd love to go to the basics if we could, because I'm trying to learn as well just kind of how this this all works. We know San Francisco is expensive. And in my conversations with workers, I hear this as well, where it's very challenging to have a life and kind of support yourself on one job in hospitality. And you might have to be doing other things. I've heard this from executives, too, off the record, saying this is the case. How do you decide kind of what is appropriate pay? How do you think about that? How do you advocate for that and say, like, this isn't enough? We're aiming for this. How do you think about quantifying that?

Gwen: You know, I think as a union, we really are a democratic organization and we spend a lot of time listening to our members and their lived experience. Like it's a representational organization. So when we prepare for a contract campaign and sort of looking at what are the goals that we'd be trying to achieve in the next contract cycle, be that three years or four years or five years, the length of time in a contract can vary. We do a fairly detailed contract survey. So there's leaders in each hotel, in each workplace who are workers who go around and talk to their coworkers, sort of do a survey of what are the issues that you're facing at work. That often raises like workload issues or just ways that they want to have a voice in terms of how to make the work done at the hotel done well. But they also bring up issues about cost of living and so on and so forth. You know, I have found that our members really, they're not looking to game the hotel or get rich or anything like that. They're looking to come to work, like do a good job. So many of our members love guests, like they're people people, they love interacting with people. And so they want to be able to do that, but they don't want to be worried, are they going to be able to pay the rent at the end of the month or have to choose between things like healthcare or groceries or stuff. So I feel like that process actually ends up informing us like, where do we think things need to be? And what's interesting about this cycle is that in the past, there were certain super high rent markets like San Francisco, like New York, but really uniformly across the board, the way that inflation is running is almost every major city in the United States has just unprecedented rent increases. And so the workers across all the different cities actually have similar ambitions to be able to just come to work, work one job, and take care of their family.

Josiah: I'm curious about the mechanics of that, because I'm just thinking for myself, if I'm working somewhere, if I was going to offer the chance to earn $20 an hour versus $40 an hour versus $100 or $500 an hour, I would always want more. How do you think about what is an appropriate amount to ask for, just knowing that as humans, we always want more money?

Gwen: Yeah, that's an excellent question. I think, one, there is a general market situation about what the sort of market is carrying. And you see it. This is a place where we actually are in alliance with the industry in some ways. When Amazon down the street or the supermarket or something are paying $25, Like, the hotels aren't able to attract and keep, you know, talented staff resources. And so that is part of how it works, right? There's a balance there in terms of, you know, whether you could attract people. Coming out of COVID, again, one of the reasons that that there are such a need to increase the wages in this economy is that the warehousing industry took off and you see a lot of higher wages in jobs like that than you do in the hotels. And so there was a catch-up that was needed to reset the hotel standards to other industries that sort of grew up during COVID and were higher.

Josiah: Interesting. So it's so you're kind of looking at like Amazon, for example, and saying Amazon's paying this. We need to be paid as much. Is that kind of.

Gwen: I'm just there's a lot of like any economic thing. There's a lot of factors that go into it, like people's needs for for rent and being able to afford things. But of course, you're looking at competitors and you know, where are people going to work because they look around and compare opportunities. Right. But one of the arguments that, you know, we also make is that our goal really is to have people be able to have a career, if you will, in the hospitality industry and be dedicated to the brands or the places that they work. And we do have many long-term employees, although it's getting harder to create new long-term employees. And this is a part of why the combined wage and benefit package is important, because, you know, hospitality is really about, like, welcoming people, taking care of people while they're traveling. It's a very people-oriented business. And as the brands have grown up around that, the industry has grown up around that. And so having people that really embody that, that love where they work, that want to welcome guests and create that feeling that you get when you're in the service industry, that's important. And one of the things we're calling out here in this post-COVID era is that During COVID, when people weren't traveling, it was possible to make like dramatic cuts to services. So things like automatic daily housekeeping doesn't happen anymore, how much the food and beverage outlets are open, whether there's room service, like all of these different types of things got cut. And you know, our But we think that it's a loop that's going to catch up with itself, right? That where that happens, people aren't going to continue to pay. you know, $300, $400 a night for a room if it's effectively like a glorified dorm room in some ways. And so, look, we want the hotel industry to be profitable. We're not saying that they, you know, we want it to be profitable. We want it to grow. We want people to travel. But we expect that if you take out the core labor piece and cut it too close to the bone, it's just you're not going to have the product that you're trying to sell in the long run. And so we're trying to reset that dynamic through this campaign.

Josiah: Well, I mean, hospitality, you kind of said it well, right? It's very human, right? And that's where it's different from, I think, like a dorm, like you described, right? It's a human-focused business and industry, and you have to take care of people, right? Because the people are the folks that are providing the hospitality, right? But it's interesting hearing you explain that, because I think Amazon, for example, I'm wondering, there's upsides and downsides to capitalism, but is this something that just the market corrects? Because if hospitality is human, then I'm just kind of thinking this through, but would the hotel companies or hotel owners, if, for example, Amazon's paying more and everyone moves from hospitality to Amazon, then they don't have people to work there, right? Can the market correct itself? Or where does intervention, is it needed? And what is the role that that plays?

Gwen: Yeah, I think it's a bit of both. Certainly in the couple of years immediately following the worst of the pandemic in 2021 and 2022, the industry was having a hard time finding enough housekeepers. There was like a shortage of housekeepers and stuff like that. And there was a lot of talk that we had about it. And we worked together where we could with the industry to through our training centers that are jointly funded by labor and management, through job fairs, like trying to bring people back. But I have to say that as we then started in this contract cycle, which really started a couple of years ago, some of the larger cities, Chicago, LA, had fights and negotiations. As the wages caught up and sort of came out of COVID and we were effective in those campaigns, the staffing shortages went away. So what that says to me is that staffing shortage isn't about whether people want or don't want to work in the hospitality industry or that there's something changing in the nature of work. It's are we offering or is the industry offering a package that's attractive, that people can afford to work in and get their health care and that type of thing. So I think that that's what's happening there. Again, our take, and for folks that are listening there, room rates are at record highs, and there's $100 billion in gross operating profit in 2022. And you can feel that, and we're asking for some of that to be plowed back into the operations of the hotels, like primarily in labor, but in other ways as well. So it's wonderful that that kind of profit is happening. It's just about how much of that is reinvested into the enterprise itself, including primarily the labor from our point of view. Because I don't know if we're going to get into this, but the ownership operating model within hotels and within the industry is changing. And so I think you often now have owners who are much further removed from the actual work of creating a hospitality product than you once had before. And so, again, we're trying to keep that mandate to just make money from drifting so far that it undermines the quality of the hospitality industry offerings.

Josiah: Makes sense. And I want to circle back to that because I'm very interested in that piece. And I think one of the things I love about this show is the goal here is to share all points of view so that we can kind of learn and grow together. But we also have listeners across the spectrum, right? So we have frontline workers in hospitality, people who are just beginning their careers, people who have worked in the industry for 50 years on the frontlines. We have owners, investors, you have everybody. And so this is a real chance to kind of for us all to learn together here. At the beginning of the conversation, you were talking about the structure of your organization. I wonder if we could spend just a few moments talking about what you think might be misconceptions or people don't understand about your organization and the work that you do, because I also want people to understand kind of where you're fitting in the ecosystem. And then I want to circle back to what you just mentioned of the dynamics changing in operators and owners.

Gwen: Yeah, there's a lot of different ways to take that question. I think fundamentally, I would return to the maybe the sort of representational part of what it means to be in a union, right? And, you know, if you take any given hotel, you know, let's just say it's a hotel with, you know, 200 or 300 workers, like people often think of unions as there's these stereotypes about unions, right? Or whatever.

Josiah: What are those?

Gwen: Yeah, well, you know, that you have these, like, that unions, like, protect workers who don't do a good job or something like that, right? And, like, the reality of a union and an effective union is if you're trying to create an organization that gives the workers at a hotel a seat at the table, you create a committee of workers. What that means is you identify people in each of the departments, in housekeeping, in the bar, in the front desk, at the bell stand. There are people who naturally lead their other co-workers and who people turn to for advice. They're generally like really excellent and phenomenal workers, right? Like people that have been there a long time. And that group of people comes together across the different departments. Like I said, they get interacting with their co-workers, they get a sense of what's important to them, and so on and so forth. That group of people represents the entire workforce at the bargaining table. Right. And so that process of collective bargaining is a way where the workers voices can get, you know, entered into the dialogue about how the property is run. And so there's all the issues that we're talking about, like the hard wages, like what are we paid, what's the benefits, all of that. But there's a ton of work that also goes on between the union leadership in the hotel and the management about how to run the hotel, about how to have efficient work processes that are genuinely efficient. Like just take something like housekeeping, right? Efficiencies often get described as how can we have the fewest number of people and save the most money. But in a way that makes the work very difficult to do, very hard on workers' bodies, like hotel housekeepers are on like as much pain medication as construction workers. It is a hard, hard job. And, but when we're also at the table in that discussion talking about, okay, how can you design the distribution of rooms on any given day? How can you order equipment that's easier to move around? How can you have less harsh chemicals? All of that like really matters. And this is for us also where the automatic daily room cleaning comes in that if you're not cleaning the rooms on a regular basis, they get much dirtier and they get harder to clean and so in a normal course of a housekeeper's day they're cleaning a mixture of people have checked out and so it's a thorough clean and people who are staying over and it's a lighter more regular clean. If suddenly you're not doing those stay over cleanings all you're doing is checkouts all of the time And perhaps the room hasn't been cleaned for three, four days. So everything that piles up, you know, as you can imagine, and they're dirtier, you need more chemicals, like that makes it a very difficult workload situation. So part of what we're talking about at the table are things like that.

Josiah: If we could, Gwen, I'd love to spend just a few more minutes talking about what workers are experiencing day to day that some hotel managers might not see. And I want to do that because the best managers that I know actually are very attentive and they are spending a lot of time talking with people. Unfortunately, that is not universal, right? So there are some ones that do not do that. And I think I would love to hear you. You talked about kind of some of the things housekeepers are going through. It could be with housekeeping, could be in another area. What might bad hotel managers be overlooking or not seeing right now?

Gwen: Yeah. And I agree with you. There are a number of people that really do like invest and know what's happening. And then I think there are others that are, for whatever reason, not doing that. So let me just take an example. It might be helpful from the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Waikiki. Right. So it's a huge resort destination. You know, it's like the largest Hilton in the world. And people fly to Hawaii and they've been on long, long flights and they get to the hotel, they get to the front desk, and then because the hotel They've closed their luggage center, for example. What that means is people come and check in if their room's not ready or whatever. There's not regular staffing, like this got cut during COVID at the luggage center. So then guests are asking to put, you know, if you travel to Hawaii for two weeks, your big suitcase. These like big suitcases and the bellman, whose job it is to like bring the luggage up to the room, they earn less money because they're paid a lower wage because they're tipped. So when they bring luggage up to the room, the guest often tips them. If they're running around trying to find places to stow and store all of this luggage for people who aren't ready to check in, or for people who are checking out but whose flight is not till later, One, it's not really their job to be doing that, but two, they're then missing out on being able to take the guests who are ready up to their room and earn their tips. And so the decision to close an amenity and just not staff that doesn't just have an impact on the workers that may have been working in that luggage center, but then it has a cascading effect on the ability for the bellman to actually earn, you know, decent tips, right, and their wage is designed in relationship to those tips, and just have luggage all over the place. Like, I myself, you know, went and, you know, got stuck in this situation. Like, I know about it. And being able to sit down and talk with the workers and actually say to the hotel, look, like having this place open for just one or two people there, like that would ease, make it better for your guests. It's a better guest experience and it will cost some money, but the chaos that gets created when everyone's running around trying to figure out where to put this luggage, it slows down the efficiency of the front desk and all the other operations. Things like that, very practical. The workers have really good ideas about what should happen there and design it in a way that people can continue to do their jobs and earn what they are expecting to earn and how the wage tip thing is designed in the contract.

Josiah: Got it. So thanks for going through that. I do want to come back to what you had mentioned about the different people you're asking to make changes, but I want to stay with this topic just a moment longer because I want our listeners to understand your position. I heard wages being a factor here, efficiency, what does the day-to-day work look like? Are there other key changes that you're advocating for as part of this campaign?

Gwen: I really would say the wages, the workloads, and just reversing these COVID era staffing and service cuts, I think we've covered most of that.

Josiah: OK, so let's go back to what you mentioned. You said the environment's changing. I guess, who are you asking to make these changes? Who's the folks that you want to be listening to this?

Gwen: Well, I think ultimately it's the hotel owners that are making the decisions about where to spend money in the properties, right? And the management companies, we negotiate with the management companies, but ultimately the owners have to approve the overall cost of the contract. And increasingly, the owners are exercising more and more control over these types of negotiations and are in it more. And there's different types of owners. You know, there's real estate investment trusts. There's private equity owners. you know, there are still some precious few owners that are, you know, in a family business or directly invested in the hotel. But so you have a set of investors that are super removed, that are just looking at the bottom line and looking at labor costs, like simply to determine what sort of quarterly earnings are going to be Be distributed to the to the shareholders who aren't really thinking about these operations at all So I think we're saying to them like You know if you treat hotels Like something that you can just extract all the profit out of right and not invest in the certainly the infrastructure but the people in Hospitality are like the biggest part of the infrastructure of a hotel. They're not just the largest cost line, they are, but that's because they're what makes the place go, right? So we're saying that it's a smart investment for the long run to actually invest in people in this way and to keep the standards of the hotels high for guests and others.

Josiah: Got it. So I think you may have answered my question a little bit. As I've been preparing for this conversation, I've been thinking about it from different perspectives. I think it's easy to hate a detached investor that appears to be just looking at the bottom line. I guess to steelman that argument, though, I guess many of these institutional investors or private equity investors are stewarding money from like teachers or firefighters. So it's essentially they're making decisions. Do I put money here to fund the retirements of these teachers or firefighters versus there? That isn't always the case, but that's part of the picture. How would you respond to that?

Gwen: Yeah, certainly there's investments that are coming from union pension funds into the hotels. And I think, you know, when we look, you know, when you look at it from that point of view, right, the human capital management that's sort of what they call it at the investor side there. You look at the ways that this not investing in the people in a regular and systematic way then has consequences that undermine the quality of that investment. I mean, just going back to the Hilton Hawaiian Village right now for a moment, like the, you know, the real estate investment trust park that's invested there, you know, had to report, like, you know, reductions in their quarterly earnings call recently because we're on strike, like, and these things break down. You're on strike. So that costs money. And in the different ways, the short staffing and these types of things, we believe ultimately makes the hotel like less popular in the long run. And so if you're an institutional investor, You want to invest in a product that's going to perform quarter after quarter, year after year. And some of these, you know, when the pension funds get invested in these real estate funds, they're multi-year investments. So if you're cutting too close up front, you're going to undermine the quality on the back end. So we just think it's all tied together like that.

Josiah: Before we go, I'd love to, I guess, kind of close with a call to action for our listeners and also just like, what is the path forward? I've heard different things. I believe there's kind of been this offer to somehow link, you know, kind of wages to profits or kind of thinking about investments in some of these cities. I don't know if you want to touch on that, but, you know, where do we go from here? Like, what is the path forward?

Gwen: As I said at the beginning, our members work in an industry, have jobs in an industry. We want that industry to be successful. That is part of what being in a union means. It means also being supportive of the industry growing. And so that means we also understand when the industry is in a hard time. whole issue about the strike is because we were willing to forego raises and big improvements during COVID because we understood the industry was on its heels. Now, mostly, in most markets, the industry has recovered and is booming. Actually, people are traveling and it's like higher amounts of travel and tourism. That's not true in San Francisco, and we know that. It's not a secret that San Francisco has been going through hard times, as we were talking about at the beginning. But, you know, the boom and bust of San Francisco has happened before that, and hotel workers have been through downturns, and we've all come through it. Our perspective is that Hyatt and Hilton and Marriott, they're making the recovery harder, like they've shuttered restaurants that bring foot traffic downtown, they've cut bellmen and doormen who serve as eyes on the streets, and generally staffing is down to skeleton crews. And so we think the hotels are playing a part in holding back. the recovery in San Francisco. While the workers, meanwhile, they're on strike, they're proposing proactive measures to aid in closing this, you know, doom loop, as it gets called out there. And in our conversations, we've heard that the hotel companies think they just can't give us meaningful wage increases over the next four years because they're concerned that the business won't recover. So we thought out of the box and we're proposing something that is based on the belief that if we work together with the industry, we can move towards a full recovery that would be good for workers and good for the industry. So we've made a proposal in which we would forego most guaranteed raises for the next period of time and make compensation conditional on the hotel's future profits. So, you know, if the hotel's profits grow, as we believe they will, our members will get to share in those profits. But if they don't, we would lose out too. And it's the first time that our affiliate there, Local 2, has ever made this kind of proposal. And it's certainly a risk for us But we're betting on San Francisco because we believe in this city. And our members that live here and love San Francisco are willing to do this. And we're calling on the hotels and really those multinational corporations who have billions of dollars in assets to actually invest in San Francisco's future and help us together to turn it around. So that's a unique situation here in San Francisco. but is one of the paths forward that we believe.

Josiah: I like that alignment of interest. And I think you've kind of shared different points in our conversation where there can be that alignment. I think to the earlier point that you made, the ecosystem's evolving. I don't know if it's always the Hiltons or the Hyatts of the world. It might be sometimes the owners behind those companies. But I think that's the point of us having this conversation, right? It's going to talk about what's going on. And depending on the hotel, right, everyone's going to be a little bit different. But I think hopefully through this conversation, people have a bit of a sense of what it is like to be a worker at a hotel now, kind of some of the efforts that you are doing. So thank you for taking the time to talk through this. And where would you point our listeners to learn more, who want to learn more about you and your work in this campaign?

Gwen: So generally, to get information about the campaign, we're at www.unitehere.org. And for guests and travelers, again, www.fairhotels.org.