Build rank and file strike committees
For a nationwide hotel walkout!
By
Kevin Martinez
25 October 2018
More than 7,700 workers are currently on strike at 23 Marriott International hotels in Detroit, Boston, Oakland, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose and in Hawaii. Hundreds of other housekeepers, doormen, cooks and other hotel workers are continuing their six-week strike at the Cambria Chicago Magnificent Mile hotel, owned by Choice Hotels International.
The hotel strikes are part of a rising tide of working-class opposition over long-stagnating wages, the erosion of health and pensions benefits and increasingly dangerous and overburdened workloads. Nearly 40,000 patient care workers are currently on strike at University of California medical centers across the state. Beginning with the wave of teacher strikes earlier this year, the number of major walkouts has tripled since 2017 and there are struggles brewing at UPS and in the steel and auto industry.
All workers are facing the same battle. Ten years after the bailout of the Wall Street banks and a year after Trump’s corporate tax cuts, the super-rich are making more money. Their giant fortunes have come at the expense of the working class. Real wages have fallen for more than a decade and a worker today is making about the same as a worker did in 1978, 40 years ago!
Hotel workers, like all workers, are fighting for a livable wage in order to pay for the rising cost of housing, healthcare, transportation, education and other basic necessities. The workforce, which includes large numbers of immigrant and single mother workers, is being exploited more than ever with relentless speedup, job overloading and harassment.
Marriott is the largest and most profitable…